HEPHZIBAH 
■WfciifclrqHEtL HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS 'Books 
3Dt\ H>. JDetr iftitc&elL 
<?> 
foods'. 
HUGH WYNNE. 
THE ADVENTURES OF FRANCOIS. 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
IN WAR TIME. 
ROLAND BLAKE. 
FAR IN THE FOREST. 
CHARACTERISTICS. 
WHEN ALL THE WOODS ARE GREEN. 
A MADEIRA PARTY. 
DOCTOR AND PATIENT. 
WEAR AND TEAR —HINTS FOR THE 
OVERWORKED. 
Poems. 
COLLECTED POEMS. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS; 
THEE AND YOU; 
AND 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
BY 
S. WEIR MITCHELL, M. D. 
AUTHOR OF 
“ IN WAR TIME,” “ ROLAND BLAKE,” “ FAR IN THE FOREST,” 
“CHARACTERISTICS,” “ HUGH WYNNE,” ETC. 
NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 
1899 Copyright, 1880, by 
J. B. Lippincott & Co. CONTENTS. 
PAGB 
Hephzibah Guinness 5 
Thee and You . . 97 
A Draft on the Bank of Spain 171 HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
CHAPTER I. 
On the fifteenth day of October, in the year 1807, 
a young man about the age of twenty walked slowly 
down Front Street in the quiet city of Philadelphia. 
The place was strange to him, and with the careless 
curiosity of youth he glanced about and enjoyed alike 
the freshness of the evening hour and the novelty of 
the scene. 
To the lad—for he was hardly more—the air was 
delicious, because only the day before he had first set 
foot on shore after a wearisome ocean-voyage. All 
the afternoon a torrent of rain had fallen, but as he 
paused and looked westward at the corner of Cedar 
Street, the lessening rain, of which he had taken 
little heed, ceased of a sudden, and below the dun 
masses of swiftly-changing clouds the western sky 
became all aglow with yellow light, which set a rain- 
bow over the broad Delaware and touched with gold 
the large drops of the ceasing shower. 
The young man stood a moment gazing at the 
changeful sky, and then with a pleasant sense of 6 
HE PHZ IB AII GUINNESS. 
sober contrast let his eyes wander over the broken 
roof-lines and broad gables of Front Street, noting 
how sombre the wetted brick houses became, and 
how black the shingled roofs with their patches of 
tufted green moss and smoother lichen. Then as he 
looked he saw, a few paces down the street, two 
superb buttonwoods from which the leaves were flit- 
ting fast, and his quick eye caught the mottled love- 
liness of their white and gray and green boles. 
Drawn by the unusual tints of these stately trunks, 
he turned southward, and walking towards them, 
stopped abruptly before the quaint house above which 
they spread their broad and gnarled branches. 
The dwelling, of red and black glazed bricks, was 
what we still call a double house, having two win- 
dows on each side of a door, over which projected 
a peaked pent-house nearly hidden by scarlet masses 
of Virginia creeper, which also clung about the 
windows and the roof, and almost hid the chimneys. 
The house stood back from the street, and in front 
of it were two square grass-plots set round with 
low box borders. A paling fence, freshly white- 
washed, bounded the little garden, and all about 
the house and its surroundings was an air of tran- 
quil, easy comfort and well-bred dignity. 
Along the whole line of Front Street—which was 
then the fashionable place of residence—the house- 
fronts were broken by white doorways with Doric 
pillars of wood, such as you may see to-day in cer- 
tain city streets as you turn aside from the busy Strand 
in London. There were also many low Dutch stoops 
or porches, some roofed over and some uncovered, HEPIIZIBAH GUINNESS. 
7 
but there were few mansions as large and important 
as the house we have described. 
As the rain ceased old men with their long pipes 
came out on the porches, and women’s heads peeped 
from open windows to exchange bits of gossip, while 
up and down the pavements, as if this evening chat 
were an every-day thing, men of all classes wandered 
to take the air so soon as the fierce afternoon storm 
had spent its force. 
As the young stranger moved along among sparse 
groups of gentlemen and others, he was struck with 
the variety of costume. The middle-aged and old ad- 
hered to the knee-breeches and buckles, the younger 
wore pantaloons of tight-fitting stocking-net, with 
shoes and silk stockings, or sometimes high boots 
with polished tops adorned with silk tassels. It was 
a pretty, picturesque street-scene, with its variety of 
puce-colored or dark velvet coats and ample cravats 
under scroll-brimmed beaver hats. 
The sailor of 1807 dressed like the sailor of to-day, 
and the lad’s figure would have seemed no more 
strange now than it did then. But a certain pride of 
carriage, broad shoulders set off by a loose jacket, 
and clothes tight on narrow hips, drew appreciative 
looks as he passed; and the eye which wandered 
upward must have dwelt pleased, I fancy, on the 
brown, handsome face, with its strong lines of fore- 
head and a mouth of great sweetness above a some- 
what over-large chin. 
As the young man drew near to the buttonwoods 
a notable-looking person came with slow and thought- 
laden steps from the south. This gentleman was a 8 
HEP HZ IB AH GUINNESS. 
man of six feet two or three inches, and of so large 
and manly a build that his great height was not ob- 
servable. His face was largely modelled like his 
figure, and apart from his dress he looked better 
fitted to have ridden at the head of a regiment than 
to have dwelt amidst the quietness of early Phil- 
adelphia. The younger man saw, with the eye of 
one wont to take note of men’s thews and sinews, 
the gigantic grace of the figure before him, and his 
curious glances slipped from the low, scroll-brimmed 
gray beaver hat to the straight-cut coat with its cloth 
buttons, and at last rested with approval on the plain 
shoes, devoid of buckle, and the ample gray calves 
above them. 
As the drab giant turned to enter the gate of the 
house the young man followed him with his gaze, 
and a gleam of pleasure crossed his face as another 
of the persons in our little drama came into view. 
For as he looked the upper half of the house-door, 
on which was a heavy brass knocker, opened, and 
a woman of about thirty-five years, leaning on the 
upper edge of the lower half of the door, became 
suddenly aware of the tall Quaker coming up the 
walk. Resting her arms on the ledge, she looked 
out over the little space, and called aloud, quite 
briskly, “ Marguerite! Marguerite !” Instantly from 
between the house and the garden-wall to the south 
of it came, as at the call of the prompter, yet another 
of our actors; and it was for her the young sailor 
stood still, like a dog on point. 
The girl he saw was possibly sixteen years old, 
and was dressed in the plainest of Friends’ attire, but HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
9 
as young people of that sect were rarely clad in those 
days, in a simple but costly gray silk gown, with the 
traditional folds of fine muslin about the throat, a 
plain silk kerchief pinned back on the shoulders, and 
a transparent cap closely drawn about the face. Un- 
der this cap was wicked splendor of hair, which might 
have been red, and had vicious ways of curling out 
here and there from the bondage of the cap, as il to 
see what the profane world was like. Within the 
sober boundaries of her Quaker head-gear was a face 
which prophetic nature meant should be of a stately 
beauty in years to come, but which just now was 
simply gracious with changing color and the tender 
loveliness which looks out on the world from the 
threshold of maturity. 
At this moment a woman of middle age, in the 
most severe and accurate of Quaker dress, crossed 
the street, and catching the little garden-gate as it 
swung to behind the man, went in just after him. 
The resolute shelter of the Friends’ bonnet hid the 
woman’s face from all save those towards whom she 
turned it, or the young sailor might have seen it 
lower and grow hard; for as she went along the path 
of red gravel the young girl danced merrily up to 
the door at the call of the lady who stood within it. 
In her bosom the child had set a bunch of late moss 
roses, and over her cap and across her breast and 
around her waist had twined a string of the dark-red 
berries from which spring the scant calices of the 
sweetbrier and wild rose. 
The woman in the doorway was fashionably clad 
in a short-waisted dark velvet dress, with tight-fitting HEPHZIBAII GUINNESS. 
sleeves ending at the upper forearm in a fall of rich 
lace. She wore her abundant black hair coiled on the 
back of her head, with little half curls on the fore- 
head. The face below them was dark, sombre, and 
handsome, with an expression of sadness which rarely 
failed to impress painfully those who saw her for the 
first time. She smiled gravely and quietly as she 
saw the growing look of annoyance on the face of 
the Quakeress and the half-awed, half-amused ex- 
pression on that of her young niece as she too caught 
a glance of reprobation. 
“ Good-evening, Mr. Guinness,” she said. Most 
women of her class, who had been Friends, would 
have called the new-comer by his first name. This 
woman, who had been bred a Quaker, but had early 
left their ranks for those of the Episcopal Church, 
set her face somewhat against Quaker manners, and 
in quitting their Society had totally left behind her 
all their ways and usages. 
A sense of joy lit up the large features of the 
Friend as he answered, “Thou art well, I trust? and 
were I thee I would have my picture made as thou 
art now, in the frame of the doorway, with the door 
at the end of the entry open behind thee to make a 
square of gold out of the western sky. It was art- 
fully devised, Elizabeth. As a Friend I am shocked 
at thee.” 
At this playful speech—during which he had taken 
her hand in greeting—Miss Howard’s face took a 
half-amused, half-annoyed expression, which Arthur 
Guinness quickly comprehended as he heard a short 
cough behind him, and dropping Elizabeth’s hand HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
11 
turned to see his sister Hephzibah, who was regard- 
ing with set, stern visage the scared child beside them. 
Caught in the brilliant autumn jewelries she had 
gathered from the garden-wall, the girl, who knew 
well the hard face now turned upon her, at first 
caught up her treasures and was moved to fly, but 
on a sudden checked herself, and pausing drew up 
her pretty figure with a certain pride, and faced the 
enemy with a look half determined, half amused. 
The stately aunt in the doorway fluttered her fan 
to and fro, and said, smiling, “Good-evening, Heph- 
zibah. What is it ails you ?” 
“ Nothing ails me,” replied the Quakeress: “ the 
ailment is here. It is the disease of the world’s van- 
ities in this childand turning to the girl she went 
on: “I had hoped that thou hadst learned to talk 
less and to laugh less; and, knowing well thy father’s 
wishes, thou wouldst do better to avoid such gew- 
gaws as these corals, which I suppose my friend 
Elizabeth hath unwisely tempted thee with.” 
The girl made a stern effort to check her mirth at 
her guardian’s mistake, but Nature was too much 
mistress of this blithe playmate of hers, who sud- 
denly broke into a riot of laughter, saying between 
her bursts of mirth, “ Oh, but thou wilt pardon me, 
and thou knowest I never can help it Oh, thou 
knowest! and oh dear !” and so saying fled in despair 
to hide her irreverent mirth. 
The Quakeress’s face grew darker as she turned to 
Elizabeth. “ Are these thy lessons ?” she said. 
“ Good gracious !” said Miss Howard. “ How ut- 
terly absurd ! How could you make so droll a mis- HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
12 
take? Those were not corals of the sea, but the 
jewels of our garden.” 
“ It little matters,” replied Hephzibah. “ Thou art 
of our people no longer, and Friends’ ways are not 
thy ways, and thou couldst not help but hurt us, even 
if thou wouldst not.” 
“ And most surely I would not, as you ought to 
know by this time. Friends’ ways gre not my ways ; 
and yet I have obeyed my good brother as to this 
child most straitly, even when—yes, even when I 
have thought it wrong to make so uncheerful a life 
for her, knowing well—oh, my God !—how sad and 
lonely it is to be through all the years to come.” 
She said these words as she stood, still holding the 
open door and staring past the woman she addressed, 
as if she saw the long vista of time and the dark 
procession of those years of gloom. 
Arthur looked wistfully into her eyes as he passed 
her and went into the house; and his sister, with a 
glance of annoyance, said sharply, “ I have other 
work to doand turning left them. 
No word of all this came to the ears of the young 
sailor, but what he saw was as it were a pantomime. 
The girl with her rebel laughter; the stately Eliza- 
beth Howard, whose air and dress and bearing 
brought some unbidden moisture to his eyes; the 
Quakeress; the stern, half-laughing giant in drab, 
—all helped to make up for him a little drama within 
the white palings. 
“ Comme c'est dr ole! ” he murmured. “ QiCelle 
est belle la Marguerite /” and so saying turned and 
went lazily southward down Front Street, as if HEPHZIBAII GUINNESS. 
13 
looking for some one whose coming he expected. 
Musing over the chances which had left him land- 
less, homeless, and moneyless, the young French- 
man strode along gayly, still keeping a lookout for 
his friend. As he passed Christian Street and the 
houses grew scarce, he saw coming towards him 
the person whom he sought. The new-comer was 
a man of middle age, dressed somewhat carefully 
in rather worn black clothes with patched black 
silk stockings, and low shoes with silver buckles. 
The style of costume, especially the rounded low 
beaver hat with the rim scrolled upwards in triple 
rolls, marked the owner for an emigrant abbe,— 
a figure and character which had become familiar 
enough in Philadelphia, where the French Revo- 
lution had stranded numberless unhappy waifs of 
all classes. 
The abbe was a pleasant-looking man of rather 
delicate features and build, but somewhat ruddy for 
so slight a person. A certain erectness of carriage 
was possibly the inheritance by middle life of a youth 
spent in camps, and around the mouth some traitor 
lines bespoke love of ease and good living, and gave 
reason to guess why he had found it pleasant to 
abandon his regiment for the charming convent 
which looked downward over Divonne upon the 
distant Lake of Geneva, and across miles of walnut- 
groves and tangled vineyards which clothe the slopes 
of the purple Jura. 
“ Good-evening,” said the younger man: “you are 
the welcome.” 
The abbe laughed. “ If you will speak English,” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
he said, in accents which but slightly betrayed his 
birth, as indeed they did rarely save in moments of 
excitement—“ if you will speak English, say, ‘ You 
are welcome.’ ” 
“ Ah, but it is that I find it difficult,” returned the 
sailor; “ and how strange is all the land we have 
here!” 
“All lands seem strange to the young,” said the 
abbe, “ but to me none are strange; and all are much 
the same, because no climate disagrees with all wines 
or with cards, and at forty one is a little philosophe. 
It seems a tranquil town, and what they call com- 
fortable.” 
“ At the least,” answered the other, “ we shall find 
here a safe home, and, as I trust, something to keep 
to us the morsel of bread, until better times arrive 
to our dear France. I have given my letters, and I 
have hope to get me a place in the bureau of this 
Monsieur Guinness. It will seem strange at first.” 
“ Not less than to me to teach these young misses 
to talk the tongue of France,” said the abbe. 
“ I have seen one this evening,” returned the sailor, 
“ which I should find pleasing to teach.” 
“Ah, you find them pretty?” said the abbe. “ Bet- 
ter, chcr baron, to forget the beau sexe: we are not of 
Versailles to-day.” 
“You should remember, in turn,” answered his 
nephew, “ that I am here only M. de Vismes ; we are 
barons no longer.” 
“You have reason, Henri,” said the elder man. 
“ It is like those little comedies we used to play at 
the Trianon. And, via foil here I saw but yesterday HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
15 
M. le Comte de St. Pierre teaching to dance, as I saw 
him once in that charming little play How one’s 
memory fails ! What was it, Henri ? But no mat- 
ter ; all life is to act. Ah, I think that has been said 
before. How stupid to say what already has been 
said ! But alas for our grandchildren ! it will be for 
them impossible to say something new.” 
“ What difference ?” laughed the younger man. 
“ There are things which to say and to hear shall be 
pleasant always and the lad kept silence, thinking 
of the little nothings his mother had said to him, a 
child, when, hand in hand, they wandered beside the 
braided streamlets of Divonne. 
Meanwhile the abbe chatted of camp and court, 
until at last, as they strolled along, lonely men, past 
the open windows and crowded steps,—for the even- 
ing was warm,—the younger exclaimed, “ Here, some 
place, I ought to find the house of Monsieur Guin- 
ness, which I was to see to-night. Is it already too 
soon ?” 
“ Ah, not, I think; but we may wait yet a little, 
and return again.” 
“And this is it,” said the younger, pausing. 
The house was a plain brick dwelling, with the 
usual wooden Doric pillars, painted white. 
Marking the place, the two Frenchmen strolled 
away up Front Street, to return somewhat later in 
the evening. They fell into silence as they walked, 
and the elder man amused himself with a vague kind 
of wonder at the caract'ere serieux and tout a fait 
Anglais of his nephew, little dreaming that the young 
man was in like fashion marvelling that through 16 
HEPIIZIBAH GUINNESS. 
camp and court and cloister, and sad prisons and in 
awful nearness of death on the scaffold, his uncle 
should have kept his gay, careless, sceptical nature, 
his capacity to find some trivial pleasure in all things. 
He could not understand how a man who had been 
so close to death in many shapes should yet have 
brought away with him no shadow of its sombre 
fellowship, and should have learned only to disbe- 
lieve and to doubt. He himself, beneath the natural 
childlike joyousness of his race which made hard- 
ships light, concealed for use in darker hours a firm 
will and a sober steadiness of moral balance, which 
perhaps came to him from his English mother, and 
dowered him with a manhood planned for upright, 
honorable pursuit of noble purposes,—a sweet, grave, 
earnest nature, with the even sunny temper of a 
sunny day. 
CHAPTER II. 
Into the parlor of the house they had just passed 
came a few minutes later a tall, gaunt, angular 
woman, whose stiff and bony outlines were made 
mercilessly evident by a closely-fitting drab dress 
with tight plain sleeves and the studiously simple 
muslin worn only by rigid Friends. Her face was 
colorless like her dress; her hair, almost a perfect 
white, was worn flat under her cap; her features 
were large and not lacking in a certain nobleness of 
outline, but strangely wanting in any expression save HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
17 
that of severe and steady self-control. The room 
was square, and plainly panelled in white-painted 
pine; the furniture throughout of rigid, upright ma- 
hogany, with black hair-cloth seats to the chairs. 
On a claw-toed table double silver candelabra with 
wax candles would have but dimly lighted the room 
had it not been for the ruddy glow of a hickory- 
wood fire which flashed across large, brightly-pol- 
ished andirons and a brass fender cut into delicate 
open-work. The walls were white; the floor was 
without carpet, and sanded in curious figures. 
Miss Hephzibah Guinness paused as she entered 
the room and looked critically about her. Then she 
snuffed the candles and rang a small silver bell 
which stood on the table. Presently appeared a 
little black maid, clad much like her mistress, but 
in rather less accurate fashion. Mistress Hephzibah 
pointed sternly to a corner of the room where an 
active spider had spread his net. 
The little maid examined it curiously: “ Done 
made it sence dis mornin’.” 
“And this also?” said the lady, indicating a place 
on the floor where the carefully-made figures traced 
by sifting the sand out of a colander were incom- 
plete. “ Thou shouldst have been as careful as the 
spider. Consider his work,—how neat, Dorcas.” 
“ Couldn’t consider dat, missus, ef I had a-sp’iled 
him wid de brush.” 
The face of the mistress showed no signs of 
amusement at this ready retort. “ Brush away 
the web,” she said, “ and keep thy thoughts to thy- 
self.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
The little maid bestirred herself briskly under the 
grave eye of her mistress, and presently the knocker 
was heard. 
“ Thy master is out,” said Hephzibah, “ but I will 
see any one who may call.” 
In a moment or two the maid came back. “Two 
gentlemen to see the master,” said the girl. 
“ And thou hast left them to stand in the entry! 
Bid them come in at once.” 
A moment later the Abbe de Vismes and his 
nephew entered the room. The younger man cast a 
glance of amused curiosity at the apartment and at 
its sombre occupant, who advanced to meet them. 
The abbe bowed profoundly, without showing a trace 
of the amazement he felt at this novel interior and 
the tall and serious figure before him. “ Allow me,” 
he said, “ to present myself: I am the Abbe de 
Vismes, and this is my nephew, Monsieur de Vismes. 
We have an appointment with Monsieur Guinness. 
Have I the great pleasure to see his wife ?” 
“ I am his sister,” said Hephzibah, shortly. As he 
named himself a shudder passed over her, and she 
steadied herself by seizing the back of a chair as 
she thought, “ Alas! is the bitter bread coming back 
on the waters?” Then she recovered her control 
with an effort, and added, aloud, “ My brother is not 
married. Wilt thou take seats, friends ?” 
“Ah,” exclaimed the baron to himself, “what a 
droll country! Elle le tutoie. It must be a fashion 
of Quakre.” 
“ I should well have known you for the sister,” 
said the abbe : “ the likeness is plain to see and this HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
was true. He had seen the brother, and was struck 
now with the resemblance of features and the unlike- 
ness of expression. 
“ It hath been spoken of by many,” she said, re- 
plying to his remark. “ My brother will be in by 
and by. You must be, I think, of the unhappy ones 
who have been cast on our shores by the sad warfare 
in France ?” 
“ We are indeed unfortunate emigres,” returned 
the abbe, “ who have brought letters from friends of 
your brother.” 
“ From France ?” she exclaimed, hastily. 
“ No; ah, no,” he answered; “ from England.” 
“ And,” she said, with a sense of relief, “ and—• 
and you do not know any one here ?” 
“ We have that ill-fortune,” he returned,“buthope 
soon to make friends. As yet it is all most strange 
to us, and as poverty is a dear tailor, I might ask 
that we be excused to present ourselves in a dress so 
unfit. My nephew came a sailor, and the dress he 
has not yet found time to alter.” 
The woman’s changeless face turned toward the 
lad and met his ready smile, and she had in her 
heart a new pang, because she bethought her, “ Had 
I been a wife and mother, the son I might have had 
would have been like this lad smiling at me to-day.” 
But the answer she made was like many answers,— 
the thought least near to her heart: “ The young 
man’s apparel is well for his way of life, and hath 
the- value of fitness. But perhaps thou dost not 
know that we of the Society of Friends observe a 
certain plainness of dress ourselves, and are for this 20 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
reason but little apt to criticise the dress which is 
plain because of wear or poverty?” 
“ Without doubt, then,” laughed the abbe, glanc- 
ing down at his shining breeches and well-darned 
hose, “ I should pass well the trial. They are all 
grown to a pleasant likeness of tint by reason that 
they have shared like trials of sun and rain, 
and, mon Dien! they are as well worn as my con- 
science.” 
Hephzibah turned upon him with a real sense of 
shock, and as one wont in meeting to obey the im- 
pulse of speech when it grew strong, she said, “ I 
understand not thy language,—indeed, almost none 
of it,—but yet enough to know thou hast spoken 
lightly of the great Maker and unwisely of the friend 
we call conscience. Do I rightly suppose thee to be 
a minister among thy people ?” 
The lad ceased smiling as he saw her graver face, 
and the abbe, profoundly puzzled at the sermon his 
slight text had brought out, and yet seeing he had 
made a false step, said, “ Alas! I have been so long 
away from my flock that I am forgetting the simple 
tongue of the shepherd.” 
The woman did not see the amused twinkle in the 
eye of this gay shepherd of the joyous Trianon, 
and missed too the sudden glance of amazement in 
the face of the nephew. She was engaged, as always, 
in an abrupt, suspicious study of her own motives in 
speaking, and would have wished to be silent a while. 
But there was need to speak, and therefore she said, 
“ I am an unfit vessel for the bearing of reproach to 
another, but thy words startled me, and the thought HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
21 
I was thinking spoke itself. Thou wilt consider 
kindly my saying.” 
The abbe was somewhat bewildered at the English 
used, but he said, “ The fair sex hath its privileges to 
speak what it will, madame: it is ours to obey.” 
Hephzibah disliked the gay answer, and turning to 
the young sailor said, “ Thou hast come to shore in 
our pleasant October weather. Has it its like in 
France ?” 
“ Ah me!” he answered, “ they gather the vintage 
these days on the slopes of the Jura, and the sun is 
less warm than ours, and Pardon, I like it here.” 
He paused, with a choking in his throat as he re- 
membered the yellowing walnut groves and the gray 
chateau of Dex and the distant sapphire lake. 
Hephzibah’s face softened anew. “ It is hard,” she 
said, “ to leave friends and home, but this is perhaps 
a way, among many, to soften the hearts which are 
grown hard. And He has many ways to touch us 
—many ways,” she added musingly, for she was 
thinking of what a soul-quake had shaken her own 
being at the sound of a name unheard for years. 
“Ah, madame,” he said, “my heart is not hard, 
and the world seemed so sweet to me once, when all 
those that I loved did live.” 
“ But perchance they died that thou mightst more 
truly live,” said Hephzibah, in calm technical tones. 
“ Then I would be dead rather,” said young De 
Vismes fiercely, puzzled and hurt. 
“Ah me!” said the abbe. “You have well said, 
madame. When that we are gone past many troubles 
it is that we learn to live. Let us make haste to en- 22 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
joy the sun and the wine and the pleasant things, as 
the wise Solomon has bidden us.” 
“ But that is so little of life!” said his nephew, sadly. 
“ And I fear,” added Hephzibah, sternly, “ that we 
are as them that speak to one another in strange 
tongues, not understanding. But here comes my 
brother.” 
As she spoke Arthur Guinness entered the room, 
wearing his hat after the fashion of Friends. “ These,” 
said his sister, “ be friends which have come to thee, 
Arthur, with letters from thy correspondents in Eng- 
land.” 
“ They are welcome,” said he. “ I am glad to see 
thee again; and this must be the nephew of whom 
thou hast spoken, and whose letters I have had.” 
“ Yes,” said the abbe,—“ my nephew the Baron de 
Vismes.” 
Arthur Guinness took the lad’s hand, smiling, and 
saying, “ Well, if he is to be one of my young men, 
it will be best that he lay aside his title, and his name 
is Yes, I remember in my letter,—it is Henry. 
He shall be for us plain Henry, after the manner of 
Friends.” 
Then his sister excused herself and went out, 
leaving them to discuss the lad’s future. As she 
climbed the stairs her limbs became weak, and, her 
features relaxing, her face too grew weary. “ What 
have I done,” she said, “ wherein I took not counsel 
with the Spirit? These are thoughts which bring 
madness : I will not harbor them. It must have been 
done wisely.” So she stood a moment before the 
tall old Wagstafife clock which faced her at the head HE PHZ IB A H GUINNESS. 
23 
of the stairs ticking solemnly. Then she gathered 
up her strength, saying, “ Yet a little while, a little 
while! Why dost thou mock me with the memory 
of a doubtful hour?” and then went on to her cham- 
ber in silence. Twice as she moved along the dark, 
cold entry, hearing the busy ticking close behind her, 
—twice she turned resolutely, with a feeling as if 
the tall old coffin-like clerk of Time were pursuing 
her steps. 
As she closed the door of her chamber she heard 
with a shiver the ample ringing tones of her brother’s 
voice. It was for her just then a sound of horror. 
Why, she did not pause to ask herself: perhaps be- 
cause its wholesome pleasantness was in too sharp 
contrast with her new misery,—perhaps because it 
brought before her, in the possible form of a severe 
judge, the man she loved and honored, and also feared 
the most. Theirs were richly-contrasted natures,— 
each a compound of what Nature and a creed had 
made; for earnestly-believing people are themselves 
and a creed, or a creed and themselves,—and she was 
a creed and herself,—and he was himself above all 
and a creed. 
Arthur Guinness was saying cheerily, “ Will you 
come up to my study? We smoke no pipes in my 
sister’s room, because it pleases her not, and 
Well, in my room here it will be no offence to the 
tender-minded among Friends who may chance to 
come, and who like not such vanities.” 
“ We shall have pleasure to smoke with you,” said 
the abbe, following him. 
At the head of the first flight of stairs Arthur  HEPIIZIBAH GUINNESS. 
24 
Guinness passed with his guests into a room in the 
second story of what all Philadelphians know as the 
“back buildings,”—an arrangement which in later 
years caused a witty New Yorker to say that Phila- 
delphians built their houses like frying-pans, and lived 
in the handles. 
The room was sanded, like the parlor, but was 
filled with books, and on the table were pipes with 
long reed stems, a tobacco-pot, and two handsome 
silver tankards with arms engraved upon them. 
Above the fire was a genealogical tree of the Guin- 
ness family, for, like many Friends even to this day, 
Arthur Guinness took a certain half-concealed pride 
in an honorable descent from ancient Kentish stock, 
and valued himself more than he cared to state on 
his store of heavy plate. 
The abbe’s eye took in with approval the sober 
luxury and air of culture as they sat down to their 
pipes, while their host went on to say, “ Well, then, 
it shall be so arranged: the lad comes to my count- 
ing-house; and if thou art still of the same mind on 
Third day—which is to-morrow—I will go with thee 
to Elizabeth Howard, who, I doubt not, will be 
pleased to have thee instruct her niece in the tongue 
of France. I see no need myself that a child of 
Friends should learn these foreign tongues, but as 
her guardian I have been somewhat careful not to 
insist too much on my own views.” 
“ I shall find it a pleasant task, no doubt,” said the 
abbe; “and might I ask that you will also do my 
nephew the honor to present him to Miss Howard, 
or such other of your friends as may make it pleasant HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
25 
for the lad ? I fear he may find it triste in this new 
land.” 
Arthur Guinness hesitated: “Yes, yes, by and by. 
But thou wilt pardon me if I ask that I be excused 
from presenting him where there are only women. 
Friend Elizabeth hath some strong notions as to the 
bringing up of the child, and she does not wish that 
she should have acquaintances among young men. 
It is a fancy, but ” 
“ Nay, but pardon me,” said the abbe. “ I meant 
not to ask anything unusual, and no doubt in time 
he will find friends.” 
“ Yes, yes,” said Guinness. “Women have their 
ways,—women have their ways ; but I was not sorry 
to mention this, because thou wilt be sure to like 
her, and what more natural than some time to ask 
leave to take with thee my young friend here ? She 
would without doubt say no, and I may spare thee 
annoyance.” 
The abbe thought this frank speech strange enough, 
and young De Vismes, who listened quietly, felt an 
odd sense of disappointment; but both made haste 
to turn the chat aside, and under a cloud of smoke 
they talked the evening away pleasantly enough. 
As they parted at the door Arthur said, laughingly, 
“ Thou wilt pardon, I am sure, what I have said of 
my friend Elizabeth Howard. She hath but this one 
strangeness, and in all else thou wilt find her a woman 
of noble ways and a great fulness of fresh and pleas- 
ant life.” 
The abbe made a courteous reply, and the two 
strangers went away somewhat easier in mind. 26 
1IEPIIZIBAH GUINNESS. 
CHAPTER III. 
On the morning of the following day, Miss—or, 
as it was the usage then to say of middle-aged, un- 
married women, Mistress—Elizabeth Howard sat at 
the window of her house near the corner of Front 
and Shippen Streets. The day was one of those soft, 
still October gifts when the sun seems warm again, 
and the winds stir not, and leaves cease to fall, and 
the changing year appears to relent and linger, and 
the southward-flitting robin loiters, cheated for a day. 
The woman sat quietly in the open window, a stately 
and, to the least observant, a remarkable-looking 
person. She was in early middle life, possibly thirty- 
five. The outline of her face was of the Roman type, 
delicate in the detail of the light proud nostril, and 
bold and noble in the general contour of feature. 
The mouth was a little large, but clearly cut, the 
chin full and decided. Over a forehead rather high, 
and more strongly moulded than is common in 
women, clustered plentiful black hair, curled short 
in the fashion then oddly called Brutus. A skin of 
smooth dark rich nectarine bloom made soft the lines 
of this face, which in repose was at times somewhat 
stern. The more acute observer would have been 
struck with the sombre, thoughtful air of command 
and power in the brow, the mysterious sweetness of 
the dark-gray eyes, and the contradictory lines of 
mirth and humor about the mouth. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
Nature had here formed a remarkable character, 
and circumstance had given it a strange part to play- 
in the drama of life. 
In the garden in front of her and below the window, 
a charming contrast, sat her niece Marguerite, not 
less a contrast in her plainest of Friends’ dress than 
in the blonde beauty of her young and fast-ripening 
form. 
Presently the large blue eyes ceased wandering 
from the book on her lap to the mottled buttonwood 
bole or the forms of passing wayfarers seen between 
the snowdrop-bushes. “ I promised my guardian to 
read it,” she said; and the blue eyes turned up to 
meet the friendly gaze above her. “ But I do not 
like the man in the book. Thee could not read it: 
thee would never have liked Friend Fox.” 
“A nice Quaker you are!” said her aunt, laughing. 
“ Say thou, thou, or you will never learn to speak in 
meeting.” 
“I never want to,” cried the girl, pouting. “I like 
bright things,—red things, blue things. I was never 
meant to be a Quaker. Why may I not go to 
Christ Church with thee, and wear gay clothes like 
the trees, aunty? They had no Fox. I wonder 
Master Penn did not run away when he saw the red 
hickories and the yellow maples. I will not read 
it;” and so saying she threw the book on the grass, 
and throwing a kiss to her aunt began to pluck the 
bright autumn flowers at her feet. 
“The way was set for you by another will than 
mine,” said her aunt. “ Be content to walk in it, 
Marguerite. Perhaps it is better as it is.” 28 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ Perhaps,” said the girl,—“yes, perhaps; but when 
I am twenty-one there will be no 1 perhaps.’ ” 
“You will always respect the wish of your dead 
father,” said Miss Howard. 
The girl looked grave, the elder woman troubled. 
“ Is Marguerite a Friend’s name ?” said her niece, 
pausing and facing her. 
“No,” returned her aunt. “You know well, my 
dear, that your mother was a Frenchwoman, and 
that you bear her name.” 
“ And was she of our Society, aunt ?” said the girl. 
“ I wish I could have seen her.” 
“ I wish you could,” said the elder woman, ignoring 
the question. “Ah, I must hasten to ask Hephzibah 
to make you a better Quaker. I am a poor teacher, 
I think. I should begin by dyeing those big blue 
eyes gray, and painting those red cheeks white, as 
Hephzibah did her brass clock last year;” and the 
two laughed merrily at the remembrance. 
“ I did not tell you,” said the elder, “ that I had a 
note this morning telling me that we are to have the 
honor to-day of a visit from a committee of Friends. 
It cannot be for me, and I suppose it is about some 
of your madcap pranks.” 
“ Oh, not for me, surely!” said the girl, a little 
scared. “ That must be Hephzibah Guinness’s doings. 
I hate her!” 
“ Hush!” said her aunt, smiling. “ Here she comes. 
Get thee gone, little scamp!” 
“ Of a verity, the Spirit persuadeth me to depart,” 
said the girl under her breath; and hastily gathering 
her flowers in her lap she fled around the corner of HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
the house, dropping asters, Queen Margarets, and 
autumn leaves here and there as she went. 
Her aunt rose from her seat and went across the 
room to the entry to open the door. “ My task is 
too hard,” she said,—“ too hard. The past is so 
black, and the future so dark; and, ah me! I am so 
made that to-day is sunny always. How can life be 
pleasant to me? I wonder at myself. Come in, 
Hephzibah and so saying she took the hand of the 
new-comer, and the two entered the parlor. 
It was a room of another kind from that which 
Hephzibah had left, and under her Quaker bonnet 
the thin, gaunt face darkened grimly as she looked 
about her. She had been there a hundred times 
before, but to-day, as always, it shocked her that 
any one should think needful the luxury and color 
with which Elizabeth Howard delighted to surround 
herself. The two women were as much apart as 
their creeds or their social surroundings; and as I 
see them now in that far-away time, in the wainscoted 
parlor, they are to me sharp and vivid pictures. In 
a high-backed chair of exquisitely carved dark ma- 
hogany sat the handsome, richly-clad lady, one 
shapely foot on the shining brass fender which 
fenced in a lazy wood-fire. A large feather fan 
guarded her face from the blaze, and, when she 
pleased, from the keen gaze of Hephzibah Guinness, 
whose stiff gray pent-house bonnet did her a like 
service at times, since the least turn of the head 
served to hide her face from view. 
These two women were made by Nature to dislike 
and respect one another, and sometimes the dislike  HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
30 
was uppermost, and sometimes the respect. The 
chances of life had thrown them together, since 
Marguerite Howard was the ward of Arthur Guin- 
ness and his sister, and destined by her father’s will 
to be educated in the ways of Friends. The 
male guardian had come by degrees to concede to 
his sister all such minor details as concerned the 
girl’s dress and manners. And to this strange and 
implacable overseeing on the part of the Quakeress, 
Elizabeth Howard also had yielded after many in- 
ward and some outward struggles. She knew that 
to be a Friend was for years, at least, the child’s 
fate, and once having submitted as to the main ques- 
tion, she felt that rebellion in lesser matters was un- 
wise, and also unfair to the memory of the brother 
who had thus ordered his child’s life. At times 
Miss Howard rebelled, but chiefly because she did 
not dislike a skirmish with Hephzibah Guinness, and 
because her sense of humor was so ungovernably 
strong as to break out despite her better judgment 
when things done or ordered by the Quaker guardians 
struck her as amusing. 
On the other hand, Hephzibah was a little afraid 
of Miss Howard’s merciless capacity for ridicule, but 
was quite as ready as she to cross swords in defence 
of her own views, which, owing to her narrow, well- 
fenced-in life, she had come to regard with the entire 
respect which some people entertain for their own 
opinions. Indeed, could Hephzibah Guinness have 
blotted out one doubtful act of her life, it is probable 
that she would have regarded herself with the most 
absolute approbation. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
31 
Elizabeth Howard was not to-day in the best of 
humors, owing chiefly to the curt note which told her 
of the visit of a committee of Friends,—an incident 
of which she had already some previous and not very 
agreeable remembrances. She began in Friends’ lan- 
guage, which she used but rarely, and never to 
Arthur Guinness, for whom she was surely and always 
her noble natural self. “ Wilt thou not take off thy 
bonnet, Hephzibah?” she said: “the room is warm.” 
“No,” answered Hephzibah, absently; “I am not 
warm.” 
Then the bonnet itself struck Miss Howard sud- 
denly in an absurd point of view, as everything good 
or bad did at some time. “ How convenient,” she 
added, “thy bonnet must have been to thee in thy 
younger days 1” 
“ Why ?” said Hephzibah, shortly. 
“ Well, my dear, no man could see you were look- 
ing at him; and it’s such a nice hiding-place: a fan 
is a trifle to it.” 
“ I had other and wiser occupation in my youth,” 
said Hephzibah, “ than to observe young men. But 
I have noticed that nothing is too serious to escape 
thy tendency to ridicule.” 
“ Bless me!” returned Miss Howard : “ is a Quaker 
bonnet a kind of saint’s halo? I see nothing serious 
in it except your face, Hephzibah, which is serious 
enough.” 
“ How is Margaret?” said Hephzibah, abruptly. 
“ As usual,” said the other, feeling with a sense of 
comfort that her rapier had gone home. “ Will you 
see her ?” 32 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ No,” said the Quakeress. “ I would speak with 
thee of a matter about one of my friends, if only 
thou canst put away thy mirth for a time and con- 
sider gravely the thing I would say.” 
“ Now, my dear,” laughed Miss Howard, “ I shall 
be as serenely judicious as the clerk of Fourth Street 
meeting. But have you not known me well enough 
and long enough to be sure that if I do not get my 
every-day supply of laughter I must die ?” 
“ Thou speakest lightly of dying,” returned Heph- 
zibah. 
“ And why not ?” said the other. “ I do not know 
the thing on earth so grim or grave that some time 
it has not a mirthful look. Some people cry and 
love and cry and pray. I believe there are people 
who can smile at their prayers and yet pray as well. 
Let us live our lives honestly. I should laugh at a 
jest if I were dying,—ay, and fear not that God 
would frown. What is it I can do for you, Heph- 
zibah ?” 
The Quakeress hesitated a moment, but Miss How- 
ard’s last phrase was spoken kindly and gently. “ I 
have a—a friend,” said Hephzibah, halting a little at 
the unusual task of equivocation. “ I have a friend 
to whom came many years ago a chance to turn the 
whole life of a young person from the vanity of 
worldly ways and the teachings of a hireling minis- 
try by hiding—no, by not telling—something which 
she knew. The concealment hurt no one, and saved 
a life from the vain ways of the world.” 
“ Well ?” said Elizabeth, in utter amazement at 
the nature of the statement set before her. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“I think well,” went on Hephzibah, “of thy judg- 
ment, even when warped by the errors of the world. 
Wouldst thou not have done the like ?” 
“I?” said Elizabeth, proudly,— “I? You may 
well ask me what I think of it,—of such a thing; 
but to ask me if I would do it! How can you cheat 
a soul into righteousness ? This comes of a creed 
which can never see beyond its own gray horizon. 
How could you dare to ask me such a question?” 
And so saying the woman rose and stood by the fire, 
looking down on the moveless visage of Hephzibah. 
She was a woman with a sense of honor found rarely 
enough among men, and this thing stirred her as an 
insult disturbs a man. 
Meanwhile, Hephzibah repented somewhat her 
design to fortify her resolution by the idea of what 
another woman whom she respected might think of 
her action. “ I think,” she said, “ thou hast perhaps 
misunderstood me.” 
“ I hope so,” said Miss Howard. 
Hephzibah went on: “ But the thing was a trifle, 
and a soul may have been saved from the world.” 
“From the world? nonsense!” cried Elizabeth, 
indignantly,—“ for the Society of Friends. I was 
wrong to speak of your creed: it is good enough. 
But people interpret creeds oddly; and your friend 
who could have formed such an idea, and kept up 
such a low cheat, must have looked at the creed of 
Fox and Barclay as one looks at a noble landscape 
through a faulty window-glass.” 
“ I did not mean to do thee a hurt,” said Hephzibah, 
quietly. “ Things appear differently to different peo- 
33 HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
34 
pie. I never supposed the matter could have seemed 
so monstrous to thee.” 
“ Well,” said Miss Howard, “ I want you distinctly 
to understand me: it is not a case in which I should 
like to be misunderstood. What amazes me most 
about it is that you should ever have had enough 
doubt on the matter to make it worth while to talk 
to me about it.” 
“ I did,” said Hephzibah, firmly, “ but it is as well 
to drop it now. Where is Margaret ?” 
“ Marguerite is in the garden,” said Miss Howard, 
coldly. “ I will call her.” 
“ Before thou goest,” said Hephzibah, “ I would 
say that I think no worse of myself to have asked 
thee a question.” 
“ It seems to me, Hephzibah,” returned Miss How- 
ard, “ that we are about to go over the same ground 
again.” 
“Well, I have in no wise changed my opinion,” 
continued the Quakeress, “and, as thou knowest, I 
am not wont to change.” 
“ No,” said Miss Howard, smoothing her dress,— 
“ no; but why you should not now and then, for 
variety, I do not see.” 
“ Because,” said Hephzibah, sitting very erect in 
her chair, and speaking with so expressionless a vis- 
age that it became a wonderful thing how the mouth 
had lost acquaintance with the other features and 
ceased to receive their assistance,—“ because I am 
always right.” 
Miss Howard broke into the most merry of smiles. 
Her face was as wonderful in its power of change as HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
35 
was Hephzibah’s in its frozen stillness. “ Oh, Heph- 
zibah, what a delightful woman you are !” she said. 
“ I shall think of you all day for this.” And over her 
mobile face flew gleams as it were of sarcastic expres- 
sion and little storms of mirthful, half-controlled 
laughter. Then she paused a moment as she crossed 
the room, and turning said, “ But if you are always 
right, Hephzibah Guinness, why not decide the ques- 
tion yourself for your friend? A Quaker pope who 
is infallible should not ask help of the ungodly.” 
Hephzibah said, quietly, “ With help of the Spirit 
we cannot err, but I am not always sure. I do 
not think we should be always sure that we have 
spiritual guiding. I meant that we are right when 
we try to be right. There is the right of holiness 
and men’s right. But I should have known that it 
was not well to carry my burden to one whose 
feet go along ways of ease and luxury, and have 
never had to choose which of two thorny ways to 
tread.” 
Hephzibah looked up as she spoke, and was 
shocked at the ghastliness of the face before her, 
which but a moment ago was alive with mirth. But 
the soul of a queen lay behind it, and a stern effort 
of will put down the unusual revolt in the woman’s 
features. The doubts which arose in the heart of the 
Quakeress and broke into speech had power to call 
up for the other woman thoughts, remembrances, 
and difficult decisions which rushed upon her at once 
like an army of remembered evils, but were mastered 
again of a sudden, almost before Hephzibah had 
time to wonder. 36 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
Miss Howard wished to say nothing or to put the 
thing aside, but even for her strong will Nature was 
too powerful, and leaning across a chair-back, which 
she clutched with both hands, she said, “ The past is 
its own. Bury it, bury it, Hephzibah Guinness, and 
as you value your chance to enter this house, never, 
never again speak to me of what I may have felt or 
done or suffered. It is a liberty, madam,—a liberty 
which I allow to no one.” 
“ But thou knowest ” broke in Hephzibah. 
“ Enough!” returned Miss Howard, relieved and 
steadied by her passion of words, as emotion is al- 
ways relieved by its outward expression. “ Let us 
say no more of it. I have made a fool of myself, I 
dare say, and you must only remember what I meant, 
and not how I said it. For that I am sorry, because 
—well, because this is my own house. I will call 
Marguerite,” but as she turned the girl she sought 
came dancing into the room, and at first, not seeing 
Hephzibah, who was hidden by her aunt’s form, 
caught up her gown and with infinite demurenes's 
and grace made a low, sweeping courtesy, exclaiming, 
“ You see I have not forgotten it, Aunt Bess ? Isn’t 
that the way they do it in the minuet ? So,—not too 
fast Oh!” And she caught sight of Heph- 
zibah, whom she both disliked and feared, and at 
once became erect and quiet. 
The Quakeress looked at her sternly, while Miss 
Howard, passing the girl, said, “ I leave you with 
Marguerite, Hephzibah: I shall come back in a few 
minutes.” 
As she went by her niece the girl plucked at her HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
37 
dress furtively, and said in a whisper, “ Thee will not 
go, Aunt Bess ?” 
“ Chut, child !” murmured her aunt, bending down 
to kiss her, “ she will not eat you ; and if she did, 
you would surely disagree with her.” 
As Miss Howard left the room she reflected, “ If 
I stay I shall only quarrel again with that woman. 
Better to go. Poor Marguerite !” 
Meanwhile, the child stood in front of Hephzibah, 
a figure of guilty terror: children in those days stood 
before their elders until invited to sit down. Heph- 
zibah was somewhat near-sighted, and this Marguerite 
knew. “ Wouldst thou kindly excuse me a moment ?” 
she said : “ I will soon be back again.” 
“ Come here,” replied Hephzibah, curtly, “ and sit 
down.” 
Marguerite was holding behind her, in vain hope 
to hide it, a long skirt of gorgeous brocade which 
she had borrowed from her aunt’s wardrobe for her 
little bit of masquerade. As she sat down Hephzibah 
caught sight of the unlucky gown. “ And shall this 
child, after all, go from us ?” she said. Then, turn- 
ing to the culprit, she went on, not unkindly: “A 
concern hath been borne in upon my mind, child, 
that taou shouldst be preserved in the meek life of 
truth. There are those who esteem lightly our testi- 
mony to plainness in attire. What is this that I see ?” 
And she took up the edge of the broidered dress. 
“ Why dost thou so offend against the discipline ?” 
Marguerite had much of her aunt’s force of char- 
acter, and by this time had recovered her composure. 
“ Is it wicked ?” she said. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“It will lead thee to no steadfast haven,” said 
Hephzibah, “and the judgments of youth are vain 
judgments.” 
“ But is it wicked?” she persisted, with set lips. 
“ It is not for thee to question the example of thy 
elders.” 
“ Then Aunt Bess is wicked,” said Marguerite, 
sturdily. 
“ She is hedged about with the snares of the world,” 
said Hephzibah, sternly, “ and hath counselled thee 
unwisely.” 
“ I will not hear her so spoken of,” answered 
Marguerite, flushing half with anger, half in shame, 
at this her first open outbreak. “ She is the best 
woman God ever made: I wish I were like her.” 
Hephzibah disregarded the answer: “ Dost thou 
read the Word ? What portion art thou now read- 
ing?” 
“ Revelations,” said the girl, shyly. 
“ And what hast thou gathered of good from 
them ?” returned Hephzibah. 
The child’s face lit up : “ I was made to think ” 
and she paused, not having meant to speak out her 
thoughts. 
“ Nay, child,” said Hephzibah, “ say thy speech out: 
I may come to understand thee better.” 
“ I—I thought what would Penn and Fox say 
when they saw the gold pavements and the crystal 
walls and the color and beauty of the Master’s 
house ?” 
“ Surely the Great Enemy hath tempted thee,” said 
Hephzibah. “ Go to thy room and seek to be more HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
wisely guided. Nay, wait,” she added: “ thou shouldst 
be punished.” And she detained her by the wicked 
skirt as two men in the plainest dress of Friends en- 
tered the room and looked with amazement at the 
child’s attire and her filling eyes. “ Friends, you are 
come in good season,” said Hephzibah, addressing 
them. 
At the time of which we speak there had arisen 
among Friends what were then termed “ great 
searchings of heart” concerning the preservation 
of discipline in the matter of dress and furniture. 
Mirrors were taken down; brass clocks received a 
coat of drab paint; in one case two aged Friends, on 
paying a visit to a rather lax member of the Society, 
were shocked to find on her floor the rare luxury 
of a dark carpet with red spots, over which they 
stepped, lifting their gowns and picking their way in 
grim reprobation. This is said to have so much 
annoyed their hostess that when they left she bore 
her testimony by carefully inking out all the offend- 
ing spots of red. 
The two Friends whose entry we have noted were 
overseers appointed by Meeting to examine into and 
correct breaches of discipline, and, regarding Mar- 
guerite as in a specially dangerous state, had called 
to remonstrate with her aunt concerning some points 
as to which rumor had reached them. Although 
living with her aunt, she was known to be really the 
ward of Arthur and Hephzibah Guinness, and to be 
in all spiritual matters within their control. 
As they entered, Miss Howard, returning, met them 
with her stateliest courtesy. “ I received a letter to-  HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
40 
day,” she said, “ about my niece: what is there we 
can do to aid you ?” 
“ They are come in good time,” said Hephzibah, 
pointing to the poor girl’s dress. 
“ Oh, my poor little woman !” returned Elizabeth, 
taking the child by the waist and holding her close 
to her. “ This was but a child’s frolic. I beg no 
more be said of it.” 
“ It is of no great moment,” answered the older of 
the men, “ but we shall bid her to consider that she 
transgress not in future as to plainness of dress, and 
also of demeanor.” 
Elizabeth Howard flushed a little, but made no 
answer. She never ceased to fear that the child 
whom she so tenderly loved would be taken from 
her, as would surely have been the case had Hephzi- 
bah been able to convince her brother that this was 
either wise or right. 
“ What further can I do ?” said Miss Howard. “ I 
shall endeavor hereafter to see that she walks more 
straitly in the way you desire her to go.” 
“ It is all,” said the elder of the two. “ We thank 
thee, friend Elizabeth Howard, for thy courtesy and 
temperateness, and will be going.” 
But Hephzibah felt moved to speak, and said, has- 
tily, “ As the child’s guardian I would think it well 
that you asked leave of her aunt to see that her 
chamber conform somewhat more than it now doth 
to the plainness of Friends’ dwellings. Because she 
is permitted to live with Elizabeth Howard, there is 
the more reason to ask that the child depart not from 
the teaching and simplicity of Friends.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ I do not permit strangers to wander through my 
house,” said Miss Howard. “ This has gone far 
enough. My temper is not unnaturally good, and I 
beg that it be not tried beyond what it may bear.” 
“ What is this ?” said Arthur Guinness, coming at 
this moment into the parlor, his good-humored, 
handsome face lifted by his tall form above the 
group. 
“ A star-chamber inquiry,” said Miss Howard, with 
some heat. 
Now the guardian had been much tried of late by 
the over-zealous, who thought him derelict in leav- 
ing his ward with her worldly aunt, and he wished to 
appease all concerned and to keep the peace. 
The elder overseer explained the case, to the inter- 
nal amusement of Arthur, who said, after a pause, “ I 
agree with Miss Howard, but possibly she will oblige 
me by allowing thee to see the room where Margue- 
rite hath her lessons.” 
Arthur Guinness had much weight with Miss 
Howard, and his mixture of grave sweetness and 
strong sense of duty, coupled with a keen and ready 
humor, all appealed to her pleasantly. “ Well, yes,” 
she said: “ that is really the child’s home in this 
house, as far as she has one apart, for she sleeps in 
my own chamber. Come, and you shall see for 
yourselves, and what you do not like shall be 
amended.” 
Upon this she turned, and, followed by the over- 
seers, Hephzibah, and Arthur, led them up-stairs into 
a little sitting-room. It was so plainly furnished 
with books and a simple table and chairs that she 42 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
felt herself triumphantly secure. Unluckily, between 
the windows hung a large round convex mirror sur- 
mounted by a gilded eagle and adorned after the 
French fashion with chains and elaborate projecting 
scroll-work. The two overseers paused before it. 
“ Thou wouldst do well, friend Arthur, to remove 
this vain temptation,” said the younger. 
“ Friend Howard will no doubt thus oblige us,” 
said Arthur, with a gleam of amusement in his face. 
“But,” said Miss Howard, “it is the child’s. It 
belonged to her father, and I gave it to her.” 
“ If it be thus,” answered the older Friend, “ it 
were seemly that we dealt with it as many Friends 
have of late submitted to have done with superfluous 
ornament.” 
“As you will,” said Miss Howard, while Margue- 
rite watched the group in profound curiosity. 
Upon this the Friend produced from under the flap 
of his strait coat a long saw, and advanced upon the 
unfortunate mirror. 
“ What will he do ?” said the child, alarmed for 
her small property. 
“ We shall but remove some of these needless 
ornaments,” he said. 
Elizabeth smiled. “ Will you pardon me ?” she 
said, taking the saw from his hand. “ I am converted 
to your ways of thinking, and it seems to me that 
the handle of this useful tool has also a needless 
curving of vain scroll-work which cannot add to its 
usefulness. I shall be back in a moment.” And so 
saying she walked out of the room, leaving the 
Friends to make what comments they pleased. In HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS 
a few moments she came back, saying, “ Thou seest 
I have, with the help of my man John and his wood- 
saw, despoiled the tool of its vain ornaments.” In 
fact, she had had the handle sawn off. 
Arthur Guinness looked at the useless tool and 
the blank faces of the overseers and the austere 
visage of his sister. 
“ It is not of much use, friend Elizabeth, in its 
present state. It seems to me,” added the overseer, 
“ we have in this matter been trifled with. The child 
should, we think, be removed.” 
Miss Howard broke in. “ Enough of this!” she 
said. “ I told you my temper was short. You touch 
nothing in my house, come what may. I have done 
my best, with better help from One I name not lightly, 
to keep this child in wise and wholesome ways. I 
will be ruled by you no longer. As to these trifles, 
which I think valueless or worse ” 
“ Then we had as well go,” said Hephzibah. 
“You have spoken the first words of wisdom I 
have heard to-day,” said her hostess. And so with 
few words all excepting Guinness departed, appar- 
ently, save Hephzibah, without the least show of 
feeling or ill temper. 
As they left the street-door the older man said, 
quietly, “ Thou wilt do well to reflect;” and this was 
all. 
“ I have reflected,” said Miss Howard. “ Good- 
morning.” 
43 44 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
CHAPTER IV. 
Arthur Guinness awaited Miss Howard’s return 
in the parlor, walking to and fro under the half-dozen 
portraits by Copley and Stuart, and in and out, as a 
meditative man might do, among the nests of Chinese 
tea-poys, the carved chairs, and India cabinets. The 
walls were covered with small crimson squares of 
wall-paper, then just introduced, and the Quaker’s 
foot fell noiselessly on the rich brown and yellow and 
red of a Turkey carpet. Arthur looked about him 
at the gay bits of china, and the masses of sombre 
color relieved by the brasses of the fire-dogs and 
fender and the flickering glow of the hickory back- 
log. Somehow it came to him, as it had done before, 
that it was pleasant, and that something in its well- 
attuned harmony made him comfortable and soothed 
him after the irritations through which he had just 
passed. He was of a speculative turn of mind, and 
was reflecting what a colorless world would be like, 
and how it would influence men. Then he paused 
to wonder what had become of Elizabeth, little 
dreaming that for the past five minutes she had been 
standing in the entry with her hand on the door, hes 
itating as she rarely hesitated. At last she steadied 
herself, and entered the room. Her decision once 
made, her natural sense of the humor of the scene 
she had gone through returned with full force, and 
as she came forward and shook hands with Arthur HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
45 
Guinness she was laughing with the keenest relish 
of the elders’ defeat. 
“ That was a rout,” she said. 
“ Some victories are worse than defeats,” returned 
Gufriness. 
Miss Howard’s face fell. “ You will never give up 
to them ?” she said. “ You will never take her from 
me ? Promise me you will not.” 
“ Thou art safe as to that,” he said; “ but where- 
fore make my task somewhat harder than it need be? 
Thou knowest that I must sympathize with my own 
people. It would have been easy for thee to yield 
in a matter so small.” 
“ I could not,” she said; “ and if I know that you 
must sympathize with the folly of such extremes, I 
know also that you do not go such lengths willingly; 
and it is enough for me to feel sure that you will not 
part the child from me.” 
“ But reflect a moment,” he said. “ If perchance 
I were to die,—as might be,—where, then, wouldst 
thou be in this matter ? My sister would not hesitate 
a moment.” 
Elizabeth looked kindly up at his stalwart strength 
and smiled. “ If you died life would be little to me,” 
she said. 
“ And yet,” he went on, coloring with pleasure, 
“ thou wouldst still have duties, and most of all to 
this child.” 
“ I do not think I should care then for anything. 
No, I do not mean that: you know what I mean.” 
“ Yes,” he said. “ I do, and I do not. When years 
ago thou earnest here from Carolina to meet the or- 46 
HEPHZIBAII GUINNESS. 
phan of thy only brother, sent from France to join 
thee, thou didst find me and my sister, whom lie had 
formerly known here, left guardians of the little one 
under thy brother’s will. He, like myself, was a 
Friend: thou hadst left us to take the creed of thy 
mother. But I need not remind thee of all this 
afresh.” 
“ No. It is still a wonder to me,” she said. “ It 
has been one long struggle to do right in the face 
of endless embarrassments. I may have failed ” 
“ Thou hast never failed to do what seemed to 
thee right,” he returned, “ and wilt not ever fail. But 
through all these long years I have loved thee as men 
rarely love. Nay, thou wilt not hinder me: let me 
speak. I love thee still. Time went on, and I came 
to know that while thou didst also love me ” 
“ I never said so,” she cried. 
“ But thou dost, thou dost, Elizabeth ! Thou wilt 
not say it, but thou wilt not say it is not so.” 
She was silent, and the dark look of sombre sad- 
ness grew, as it often did, upon her face, so that it 
seemed strange that such a face could ever smile. 
“Thou art silent,” he said. “Year after year I 
have asked thee to say what barrier stands between 
us.” 
“ But you could not: you are a Friend. It is for- 
bidden to you to choose where you will.” 
A great passion, half restrained for years, broke 
loose and took fierce possession of him. “ I have 
taken wiser counsel than thine or mine,” he said. 
“ No man’s will or wish should come between us. 
Speak, Elizabeth ! Are they of Divine setting, the HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
47 
bounds thou wilt not break ? Is it a sin to love me ? 
Nay, that cannot be, for thou dost love me. Oh, my 
darling', speak to me! Who will more honestly 
counsel thee than I ? who will more surely set him- 
self aside to hear and help thee ?” 
Miss Howard dropped into a chair and burst into 
tears, covering her face with her hands, and shaken 
to the heart’s core by the awful earnestness of the 
man and the terror of indecision which stole upon 
her lonely life. 
“ Wilt thou not speak ?” he said. 
“ Nay, wait,” she pleaded. 
“ I have waited long,” he answered. 
Then she lifted her head and saw the desolation of 
anxiety, of grief and pity in the brave face she had 
learned to love so well. “ I cannot bear this,” she 
went on. “ I will speak though I die.” 
“ But I cannot so hurt thee,” he returned. 
“ No, I must speak now, for now as well as any 
day it may be told. Listen, and listen well, for never 
again shall I speak to you of this. It is my life I 
must tell you,—my life.” 
Then the two were still a moment while she reso- 
lutely regained the mastery over herself. 
“ I could tell you a long story,” she said : “ I will 
tell you a short one. I can tell it in one brief death- 
bed scene,—my father’s. I shall never forget it. We 
were within hearing of the guns at the siege of 
Charleston, and my father was dying, and my mother 
away, and I was a lonely child; and I can see the 
room and the curtained bed, and the negroes about 
the door, and I only near,—I only of all who loved 48 
I1EPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
him. Then I recall the old black nurse saying, 
* Honey, de massa want you;’ and I was pushed 
forward to the bed. And I remember the curtained 
gloom, and the thin and wasted face within. And 
then I remember this, my father saying, ‘ Step back, 
aunty,’—you know how we call old negresses aunty, 
—‘ I want to talk to the child, and my time grows 
short.’ 
“ After this I saw his great gray eyes looking sus- 
piciously about until he made sure no one was near 
to hear; and when he was sure he said, ‘ Save thy 
brother, my child, there is no one but thee alive of 
all my race; and if I could see thy mother now, I 
would spare thee this, but I cannot. Therefore, thou 
who art a child must be as a grown woman, and re- 
member what I tell thee, and speak of it to none 
unless thou must. I want thee to promise me that 
thou wilt never marry, because, my child, thou comest 
of an unhappy race. But when thou art older thou 
wilt look in a book which is in my desk, and which 
thy mother will give thee, and then thou wilt see 
what I mean, and thou wilt know why I say all this. 
And now I may not speak to thee longer; and I 
want thee to say only this, that thou wilt look in the 
book, and if I seem to thee to be right and just, thou 
wilt do as I say.’ Then he spoke no more for a 
moment, until at last he said, ‘ Kiss me;’ and after 
this my old black nurse lifted me up on to the high 
bed, and I kissed him and wondered why his breath 
was cold and why he did not take me in his arms; 
and then, although I cried, they took me away. This 
is all. And will you wait a moment ?” IIEP HZ IB AH GUINNESS. 
49 
Saying this, she rose and walked steadily out of 
the room, while Arthur Guinness sat with arms 
crossed on his breast, awaiting her return. In a few 
moments she came back, and with a face like that 
of a judge delivering sentence of death she came 
towards Arthur, who rose to meet her, and said, “ My 
friend, this is it: read it, and you will think with me. 
Read it, and you will never more ask me to marry. 
And now that it is done, how much easier it seems 
than I thought it! Perhaps, Arthur, because the 
burden is shifted on to other shoulders.” 
Arthur smiled : “ When dost thou want this book 
again ? May I look at it now ?” 
“No, no, not now,” she replied, shuddering. “You 
must read it away from here. I—I—do not want to 
see your face when you read it.” 
“ Well, well, Elizabeth,” he said, cheerily, “ I shall 
do as thou sayest; but it must fee bad, indeed, to be 
as awful as thou seemest to think it.” 
“ It is awful,” she answered. “ When you have 
done with it, leave it here for me if I am out,—in the 
drawer of this table. Good-by, Arthur.” 
“ Farewell, Elizabeth.” 
As he left the house, Arthur Guinness looked 
curiously a moment at the faded little memorandum- 
book tied about with ribbon, and putting it in his 
breast-pocket went away down Front Street to his 
own home. Seeking his study in the back building, 
he laid the book on his table, and leisurely filling 
and lighting a pipe, let the bowl rest on his knee 
and thought a moment. He was more shaken and 
troubled than he cared to admit, even to himself, and 50 
HEPHZ1BAH GUINNESS. 
was calmly waiting until he should feel himself once 
more fully master of his own emotions. Then he 
opened the book, and this was what he found: 
“ My dear and only daughter, Elizabeth,— 
Save thy brother, thou art the last of a race which 
has known so much more of sorrow than of joy 
that I beg of thee solemnly to consider what I have 
here written, that if it seem good to thee thou 
mayest come to see the matter as I see it, and to 
fulfil my wish, so that by never marrying our family 
misery may fall upon no others, and may end with 
us. Henry Howard. 
“March 10, 1777.” 
Then came a number of entries: 
“ Richard Howard, of the Larches, Denbighshire, 
died Sept. 3, 1699, by his own hand. 
“ Of his brothers, John and Nicholas likewise thus 
perished. 
“ Margaret Wortley, set. 30, daughter of Rd. 
Howard, died insane. 
“ The grandsons of Rd. Howard were thy uncles ; 
and of them none are left, they dying mostly of 
self-murder in like manner, but happily in foreign 
parts, so that the way of it is not known at home. 
“ And now are left only thou and thy brother, who, 
thinking on this matter with me, will die without 
issue. 
“ And so may we all find peace!” 
Arthur Guinness let his pipe fall on the floor, and HEP HZ IB AH GUINNESS. 
51 
turning to the table sat motionless, his chin on his 
hands, staring, as it were, with sad eyes into the 
future. He saw dim, changeful pictures of pros- 
perous days to come, of a happy wife, of sons and 
daughters about his knees. Then he saw them grown 
up, and shuddering rose and walked to and fro in 
the room, until at last, feeling some fierce craving 
for larger movement, he took his hat and leaving 
the house strode hurriedly away towards the Schuyl- 
kill. To the day of his death he never forgot those 
hours of dumb agony. But long before night fell 
the strong habits of duty and faithful allegiance to 
common sense had brought him to the same de- 
cision which had guided and darkened the life of 
Elizabeth. 
His walk took him along the willowy margin of 
the river, and at last across the floating bridge at 
Gray’s Ferry, and so up to the high ground which 
lay back of Woodlands. At first there was in all 
his heart a sea of tameless passion, pent up for years, 
and only set free a moment, to be ordered at the 
next into quiet by a voice to him as potent as that 
which stilled the raging waters of Galilee. Then 
came for a whil$, or at intervals, that strange sense 
of being morally numbed which is like the loss of 
feeling mercifully bestowed on the physical system 
by the blow of the lion’s paw. At last, out of the 
confusion order began to come, and painful capacity 
to study in detail his own sensations, and to look, 
though but unsteadily, at the need for decision. 
Then also he began to take note of outside things, 
and to see with curious intensity natural objects, 52 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
from memories of which would come forth in after- 
days all the large horror of the sorrow to which 
they had become linked by Nature’s mysterious 
bonds of association. Thus he noted, whether he 
would or not, the miserly little squirrels, and the 
rustling autumn woods thick with leafy funerals, 
through which the lated robin flew in haste. 
But, as I have said, at length, when he got back 
his power to reason and to be guided by the laws 
of action which long habit had made strong, there 
stayed with him, above all, a sense of pity for Eliza- 
beth so vast and intense that to feel it was simply 
pain, and yet pain which ennobled and made strong. 
He felt that were she herself willing he could not 
now marry her; and out of a strange sense of duty 
to children yet unborn, and never to live, came at 
last peace and calm decision. Then he felt that he 
must see Elizabeth at once, and let her know how 
just he held her judgment to be. 
In his trouble the hours had fled, and it was in the 
late afternoon that he reached his home. 
Hephzibah met him in the entry. “ Where hast 
thou been ?” she said, looking in alarm and amaze- 
ment at his mud-stained shoes and pale face. “ Thou 
hast forgotten thy dinner, and the French minister 
has been here with whom thou wast going to Eliza- 
beth Howard’s.” 
“ No matter,” he replied, passing her. “ I do not 
wish for dinner: I am going out again when I have 
changed my shoes.” 
‘‘Thou hast had some worry,” said Hephzibah. “I 
do think it concerns that worldly woman.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
53 
“Peace!” he returned: “thou knowest not what 
thou sayest. Nay, ask me nothing. If I have a 
sorrow, it is for no human ear.” 
“Hast thou asked her in marriage?” persisted 
Hephzibah, with a deep sense of gladness, “ and has 
she refused thee ?” 
“ I said, peace,” he returned. “ The matter concerns 
thee not; and speak no ill of her, as thou lovest me.” 
“If it be as I say, thou hast been wisely dealt 
with, Arthur Guinness,” she replied. A sense of 
triumph rang out in her tones despite herself, for 
this marriage was of all things that which she feared 
the most. 
But Arthur went away up-stairs as she spoke, say- 
ing bitterly, “ Ah, Hephzibah, in the field of the 
Master thou hast gleaned only thistles, and thy 
tongue is as the tongue of Job’s friends. Never 
again speak in this wise to me. I am hurt and 
sore : let me alone.” 
An hour later Arthur Guinness walked quietly 
into the parlor of Miss Howard and awaited her 
coming. Presently she came into the room smiling 
and took him by both hands, and said, “ Sit down. 
I kept you waiting, as I was dressing, because I am 
going to a party to-night. And how thou must dis- 
approve of my splendor!” And she made him a sweep- 
ing courtesy, and settling the folds of her heavy silk 
dress, sat down by the fire. 
He looked up in wonder at her pleasant face. 
“ How canst thou smile?” he said. 
“ How can I ?” she said. “Some people are good, 
and their goodness helps them over the rough places;  HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
and some have common sense, and that gets them 
through: now, I am not very good, and not very 
sensible, but I must have had a fairy godmother 
called Mirth, and when things are blackest I am per- 
versely moved to smile; and that does so iron out 
the wrinkles.” 
“ Oh, my darling!” he said. 
“Please don’t, or I shall cry,” exclaimed Elizabeth: 
“ I am often near it when I smile. You men never 
know how close they are together, laughter and tears. 
There! let us talk sensibly.” 
“ I have put thy book in the drawer,” he said; 
“ and it is all over, and thou art right,—utterly, en- 
tirely right,—and—and—I shall never trouble thee 
more. Farewell!” 
“Good-by?” she exclaimed, looking at his quiv- 
ering mouth. “ Not at all. Stay a little, just a little. 
I knew you would agree with me,—you always do,— 
because, as Hephzibah wisely remarks of herself, I 
am always right. It won’t hurt you to know that I 
feel how much of sweetness went out of life when I 
found that you loved me, and that I must never think 
to sit at your fireside as a wife. But it was a de- 
cision of years ago, and I made it and unmade it. 
Yes, I did, for I am weak when you are by. But at 
last we have both made it, and I thought I should 
want to die as I told you; but I do not,—not while 
you live, and not while,—now don’t look so sad,— 
not while there is anything on earth as amusing as 
the overseers and Hephzibah.” 
“ What a droll woman thou art, my Elizabeth!” 
he said. 
54 HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
55 
“ Only a natural woman,” she replied. “ Do you 
regret what we have done ?” 
“ No,” he said, firmly. “ I do regret the thing, not 
the decision upon it. I have only to look at the 
other side to be able to smile a little with thee.” 
“ Then it is over,” she said, “ and we will get 
what we can out of life, with good help, Arthur, and 
set aside the past. Shall it be so ?” 
“ It shall be as thou hast said,” he returned. “ And 
what else is it, Elizabeth ?” for she stood up before 
him flushed and handsome. 
“ Only once,” she said, “ I must tell you how I 
love and honor and reverence you,—how gladly I 
would have trusted my life to you. I must show 
you once, as only a woman can, how I love you.” 
And leaning over him as he sat she kissed him. 
Arthur buried his face in his hands. “ I thank 
thee.” And the woman, crimson to the hair, turned 
and fled from the room. 56 
HEP HZ I BAH GUINNESS. 
CHAPTER V. 
On the next morning Miss Howard received a 
note from Arthur, in which he said in a few words 
that he was going away for a fortnight, thinking it 
well that he should not see her face for a time. He 
went on to explain that it was not unlikely, owing to 
some commercial affairs, that he should before long 
have to go to Europe; and he added that he had 
meant to bring the abbe to see her, as he seemed a 
proper person to give to her niece the French lessons 
she wished her to take, but that the gentleman would 
call upon her at once. 
Late in the afternoon of the next day the Abbe de 
Vismes walked slowly down Front Street, saluting 
as he passed them three or four of the French nobles 
who had drifted into this quiet haven out of the 
storms of European warfare. The abbe, to whom 
all lands were alike, provided the wines were good 
and the fare agreeable, had begun to make himself 
characteristically at home in the tranquil old town. 
As he passed Walnut Street he lifted his hat to the 
Marquis de Talons, and the pair exchanged pinches 
of snuff and walked on together among the groups 
of homeward-bound artisans and merchants. 
“ I am giving lessons in the dance,” said the mar- 
quis, “but the times grow better, and before long we 
shall drink our Bordeaux again at home. What is HE P HZ IB A H GUINNESS. 
57 
it that you do to put the bread in your mouth, 
abbe ?” 
“ The trade which is best,” said the abbe, “ is to 
turn Quakre, but I am grown too old to change; 
and, moreover, they drink not the wine of Madeira, 
which I find to be comforting and not dear.” 
“ Thou hast reason,” said the marquis, “ but thy 
trade ?” 
“ Ah !” returned the abbe, “ my trade ! That re- 
minds me, and the place is here. I go to teach a 
young demoiselle the tongue of France.” 
“ And is she as lovely as are the rest ?” returned 
the marquis. 
“ Ah ! I know not,” said the abbe, “ but my nephew, 
who has but seen her, raves of her as the young will 
do; and, as I said, this is the place. An revoir, 
marquis.” And so saying he went into the little gar- 
den, and was presently chatting with Miss Howard. 
The parlor, with its pretty feminine belongings 
and pictures and china and well-rubbed tables and 
chairs, took the abbe by surprise, and the stately 
woman who greeted him with a curtsy which took 
up half the room no less delighted him. “ Ah !” he 
said, “ madame, I am enchanted to be again in a room 
with pictures and color, and, you will pardon me, 
with a woman who would have done honor to our 
court.” 
‘‘You flatter me,” said Miss Howard, smiling. 
“You have taken a leaf out of the book of your 
gallant countryman, De Lauzun.” 
“ But madame will consider that I have lived here 
only among the doves which are called Quakres.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ Such as Miss Hephzibah Guinness,” returned 
Miss Howard. “Well! well! I can weigh your 
pretty speeches now. But you have not seen my 
niece.” 
“And when better than now?” he said; upon 
which the pupil was promptly summoned. 
« “ This,” said Elizabeth, “ is my niece, Miss How- 
ard. And this, Marguerite, is the gentleman, the 
Abbe de Vismes, who will do you the honor to teach 
you French.” 
“ She does not yet speak that tongue ?” he said. 
“ No,” replied Miss Howard. 
“ Then I may say, madame, comme die est gracieuse, 
cette fille /” 
The girl laughed. “ Ah, sir, though I do not 
know French,” she said, “ I think you said some- 
thing pleasant of me. It was thee, Aunt Bess, who 
said that a woman would understand a man if he 
said pretty things of her in Hebrew.” 
“ And to be spirituelle seems to be of the family,” 
said the abbe. “ But you said her name was Mar- 
guerite, I think.” 
“Yes,” said Miss Howard, “her mother’s name. 
Her mother was French.” 
“Ah! and of what family?” inquired the abbe. 
“ We never knew her,” said Elizabeth, briefly: 
“ she died in France. Shall our lessons begin to- 
morrow ?” 
And after more chat and many compliments it 
was so agreed, and the abbe went away, doubly 
happy that he had a pupil and that she was beautiful 
to look upon. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
The cool October days came and went, and the 
colder November mornings stripped off the last 
mournful leaves, while the French emigres settled 
down to their work,—the abbe to his lessons, which 
began to be sufficient, the young baron to his novel 
labor in the Quaker merchant’s counting-house. By 
degrees the exiled youth grew to like the quiet town 
with its splendid breadth of river boundaries, and to 
find friends among the rich and refined families to 
whom his name, and still more his frank and easy 
manners, gave him ready access. But above all 
other pleasures were the morning and evening walks 
to and from his place of business, for these led him 
past the garden and the buttonwoods, and the only 
house which was not open to him. Daily he lingered 
there, sometimes catching a glimpse of the blooming 
face he had learned to like so well, and sometimes 
seeing only the place which had come to be so 
pleasant for him. 
By degrees, Marguerite in turn began to notice 
the handsome stranger who lingered as he went by, 
and looked happy when he caught her eye as she 
glanced up from her autumn garden-work of trim- 
ming the rose-bushes and preparing her plants for 
the winter. On this young and guileless heart no 
strong impressions had yet been made, and perhaps 
the very means which her aunt so sedulously em- 
ployed to keep her free from all companionship with 
the other sex had but prepared her to feel deeply the 
first homage which a man should lay at her feet. 
At length one morning she looked up from her 
book and said, quietly, “ Aunt Bess, why dost thou 6o 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
not ask the abbe to bring the poor young man who 
is his nephew to see us? I see him go by here 
almost every day, and I think he would like to come 
in. I would if I were he.” 
Miss Howard turned towards her with a startled 
look. “ Why,” said she, “ do you concern yourself 
with the young man ? I dare say he has friends 
enough.” 
“ But, aunt, he looks as if he would be nice to 
talk to, and he must have seen many things I should 
like to hear. And besides, aunt, why do no young 
men come here, and only Mr. Guinness and Heph- 
zibah and—and—old people ?” 
“ You will know some day,” said Elizabeth. “ Other 
young women may have friends who are young men, 
but you cannot, and you must not ask me why until 
the day comes that I may tell you why. Now you 
must trust me that what I ask is wise and right. Go 
back to your book again, my dear.” 
‘‘Yes, Aunt Bess,” she replied; and the truant 
locks fell over the volume, but their owner’s thoughts 
strayed afar and made little castles for her in the 
land of Spain, such as young hearts are wont to 
build. 
The morning after was cold and clear, and, early 
afoot, Marguerite was busy at her last tasks in the 
little garden, sweeping the leaves into corners and 
trimming the box borders. Presently, as she stood 
by the fence and threw over some dead branches, 
she was aware of a blush that told of her conscious- 
ness of the close neighborhood of the young baron. 
In her confusion she threw over with the lapful of I1EPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
61 
trimmed stems her garden scissors and one of her 
gloves. 
The young man touched his hat smilingly, and 
gathering up the articles in question laid one hand 
on the fence and leapt lightly over into the garden. 
“ Mademoiselle will pardon me,” he said. “ These 
are her scissors. And we cannot be quite altogether 
stranger the one to the other.” 
“ Oh, but you should not come in,” cried the girl, 
naively: “ my aunt will not like it. And my glove, 
too, if you please.” 
“Mon Dieu/” said the baron. “When it is that 
we enter the land of faery we go not away without a 
souvenir. Mademoiselle will two times pardon me.” 
And so saying, with his pleasant face glowing with 
mischief and evident admiration, he bowed to her, 
and kissing the glove thrust it in his bosom, and 
again leaping the fence, lifted his hat and went calmly 
away down Front Street, leaving her amused, amazed, 
and a little frightened. Then with quick female in- 
stinct she glanced a moment at the windows and cast 
a furtive look after the lithe, handsome figure which 
had disturbed her maiden heart 
The incident was a great one in her quiet life, but 
she said nothing of it to her aunt. Why, she could 
hardly have told herself, for in all things she was as 
frank as one could have wished so young a thing to 
be. Then the days fled by anew until midwinter 
brought an event which was destined to disturb all 
concerned in this story. 
According as he had said, Arthur Guinness found, 
not now to his dislike, that affairs of moment made 62 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
it needful that he should go to Europe. The chance 
to sail at once offered itself while he was absent in 
New York, and there was not time to allow of the 
four days’ journey to Philadelphia and back again, if 
he would not lose an opportunity which might not 
recur for a month. Not sorry to put a little time 
between himself and Elizabeth, he seized the oppor- 
tunity, and went away without seeing her again. 
Then a letter came, and another, and after that he had 
found his way to the Continent, and Miss Howard 
heard no more. 
CHAPTER VI. 
Meanwhile, an open winter of frequent sunshine 
ended in February with a week of intensely cold, 
clear, vivid days. On the late afternoon of one of 
these Hephzibah Guinness stood in her front parlor 
ready, in drab cloak and woollen stockings drawn 
over her shoes, to face the out-door cold. As she 
passed out into the entry, the knocker of the street- 
door sounded, and she herself opening the door was 
aware of young De Vismes, his face in a pleasant 
glow with the keen frostiness of the winter air. 
“ There is,” he said, “ madame, a packet which 
arrives from France, and there are letters which I 
am to carry to you; and behold them. It makes 
evil weather to-day.” 
Hephzibah took the letters, a large bundle, but 
did not ask the young man to enter. She had an HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
63 
odd dislike to foreigners and a half-confessed belief 
that they could all speak English well enough if they 
chose. “ I am about to go out,” she said, “ so that 
I may not ask thee in.” 
“ I wish you a good-evening,” he returned, and 
left her. 
The Quakeress went back into the house and 
hastily tore open the envelope. There was a long 
package within addressed to her. This also she 
opened, and within it found a large roll of folded 
pages, yellow and stained as if written years before. 
On the back it was addressed to the Abbe Gaston 
de Vismes. 
“At last!” she said, “at last! Why must I decide 
anew? What I did was best for her. Yes, it was 
best; and now it is all to be thought over again, as 
if once in a life were not enough !” Then she looked 
at the other letters. There was one, a heavy one, for 
Miss Howard. “ That at least may wait,” said Heph- 
zibah. Lastly, she fell upon a letter to herself from 
her brother. This she eagerly opened, and read with 
a haste as eager. It ran in this wise: 
“ Dear Hephzibah,—After many perils and grave 
occasions by sea and land, I have prosperously ended 
the affairs for which I came to Europe. Some busi- 
ness of a brother-merchant hath led me to the town 
of Nantes, where it hath been my fortune to be 
brought into relations with an ancient dealer, who, 
on hearing my name, and learning whence I came, 
inquired of me concerning a child sent to Philadel- 
phia years ago on the death of its father, one William 64 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
Howard. Thou wilt be amazed to know that the 
child is our ward, Marguerite, and that she was the 
daughter of a lady of the class of nobles called De 
Vismes, to whom William Howard was married; 
and, what is yet more strange, I am told that letters 
which William Howard confided to this merchant 
were sent over to my care by the packet which came 
after the one which fetched our ward. These may 
have come while I was gone to Carolina to bring 
Elizabeth, but they seem to have been lost, although 
I do remember me plainly of the coming in of the 
packet, which was the George Arnauld. 
“ I send thee here the original papers, of which 
those lost were only copies, and with them a long 
and curious statement, with which I fear thou wilt 
not be well pleased. Thou wilt find that William 
speaks especially of a letter of instruction and of 
his will, which latter we did receive, and that he 
desires that in place of the child being bred in the 
ways of our Society, as he was at first minded 
and wrote, she should be left wholly to the ward- 
ship of our good friend Elizabeth. I pray thee 
at once to read the strange story William relates, 
and also his final letter, and then to give them to 
Elizabeth. 
“Thou wilt learn that the child is now rich in this 
world’s goods. I shall linger but long enough to 
secure to her this ample estate, and to place it in 
safety, and shall then return with all the haste I may 
to our own land. 
“ Thy always loving brother, 
“ Arthur.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
65 
Hephzibah set her lips sternly, and turned without 
a word to the longer paper, which she read and re- 
read eagerly. It ran thus : 
“To my Beloved Friend, Arthur Guinness, 
Merchant,—Thou knowest that after the child Mar- 
guerite was sent to thee, I did also despatch to thee 
my will and a certain letter in which I desired Heph- 
zibah and thee to be guardians of the little maid. I 
did also provide for her bringing up in the ways of 
our Society, and for her living with my sister Eliza- 
beth. But having been afflicted since the child went 
away to thee with bitter and, it is to be feared, mortal 
illness, I am come to think that I shall do more wisely 
to leave her in ward of my sister, Elizabeth Howard, 
so to raise her as may seem best to her, she being, 
although not of our Society, a woman seriously 
minded, despite some light ways of speech and vain 
jesting. 
“ Having thus provided by a letter of which a copy 
hath been sent to thee, I have it still on my mind to 
relate to thee the story of the child’s parentage. If 
it had pleased Providence that I should have lived 
to care for her, I believe I should still have let her 
be looked upon as my child ; but as it now seems 
unlike that I shall live to go home, I esteem it best 
to inform thee fully as to the fact that she is in no 
manner of my blood. 
“ Thou knowest that while I dwelt in England I 
felt a concern as to them that were afflicted in France. 
On this account I crossed over into that unhappy 
country, and journeyed hither and thither bearing 
“Geneva, May io, 1794. 66 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
testimony. Twice I was cast into bonds, and twice 
in danger of my life; but because of my being an 
American and of our Society, I was each time set at 
ease, and now of late have been left to do as I am 
guided. At last I came in the Eleventh month, 
which they call Frimaire, to the city of Nantes, on 
the river Loire, where, having a letter to one Pierre 
Porlat, some time a preacher of the Society of Prot- 
estants, he did kindly receive me into his house. A 
great gloom was come on all because of the cruelty 
of one Carrier, who hath put many to sudden death 
by drowning without even a form of trial. 
“ We comforted each the other with cheerful talk, 
and at last he confided to me that he had concealed in 
a vacant house next to his a young woman, a widow, 
and her little child, the husband, a Marquis la Roche, 
having been lately put to death. I was able to help 
these poor people by carrying to them food, especially 
at night, when we would sit in the darkness, a light 
being imprudent, and talk of many things, and of 
some good for speech and reflection to such as are 
in trouble. The young woman was of great beauty 
of person, and also of a singular calm sweetness, 
such as greatly moved my pity. 
“ At last on the evening of the fifteenth day of the 
Eleventh month, I came in from comforting some of 
the many who were in despair, and found Pierre 
Porlat and the woman La Roche set about by a guard 
of fierce-looking men. The poor thing had her little 
frightened child in her arms. I turned and followed 
them towards the prison. When we came near to 
the place, which is a low building called the Entrepot, HE PHZIB AII GUINNESS. 
67 
close to the water, we met eighty or more men and 
women tied in pairs and being driven like poor 
sheep—only these knew their fate—on to a boat 
to be sunk in the river. When they were counted 
the man Carrier said two were missing, and seeing 
the woman La Roche and Pierre, he said, ‘ Let these 
be added to make the count correct,’ and threaten- 
ing them with his sword, pushed them towards the 
river. Then the poor mother in her agony cried to 
me to take the child, and I went near her to do so, 
much moved, as thou mayst suppose. Then the man 
Carrier said, ‘ Who is this ?’ and one of the captains, 
named Lamberty, answered that I was a Quakre, as 
they say, and an American, and therefore a foe to 
aristocrats ; upon which the man Carrier laughed and 
said, ‘ What carest thou for the citoyenne ? Is she 
thy mistress ?’ Then I was filled with shame for her, 
and with great pity, so that I scarce could speak, and 
—may I be forgiven!—I replied, ‘ The woman is my 
wife.’ Then they all laughed and said, ‘ Let the 
Quakre have his wife, and make haste;’ and on this 
the woman and her child were set free. But they 
bade us stay and see the poor creatures drowned 
which were left. My friend Pierre cried out, ‘ The 
good God guide thee!’ And after this I thrust the 
woman behind me, that she might not see this misery, 
and so stood in prayer while this great cruelty was 
suffered. Then I took her arm, and, carrying the 
child, went away into the town, fearfully searching 
my heart to see if the thing I had done was well. 
“ I lay awake all that night, and the next day I 
said to Edulienne,—which was her name,—‘ I have 68 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
saved thy life with a lie, and thou art yet in peril. 
What I have done sorely troubles me.’ Then she 
answered sweetly that I was a true gentleman, and 
that she would not be so saved, but would go and 
give herself up. But I answered that what I did I 
was moved to do, and that now the only true thing 
to do, both to salve my own conscience and to save 
her life, was to make her really my wife. On this 
she burst into tears, and could talk no more, but next 
day came to me and said it should be as I wished. 
And so, not to weary thee, we were married secretly 
by a brother of poor Porlat in the presence of his 
wife and daughter, all in tears. 
“ But my little woman scarce spoke afterwards, 
and pined away and died before spring, like one 
stricken,—perhaps of remembering her marquis; and, 
after all, I know not yet if that I did were well. But 
coming to Bordeaux, I found a master of a ship I 
knew, and gave him charge to carry the little one to 
thee; and this was in Fifth month of the year 1794. 
“ This paper will be left in charge of Eugene Per- 
riere, of Nantes, merchant, who will see that it reaches 
thee in case of my death, with a copy of my instruc- 
tions to my sister as to the governing of the child’s 
life. 
“ Thy true friend, 
“ William Howard ” 
When Hephzibah had finished she rose, and folding 
the papers, went up-stairs to her brother’s room and 
laid them in his desk, which she shut. “ Let them 
rest there,” she said, “while I think it over. Eliza- HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
beth may wait: there is no haste. They seem to have 
been long on the way, and he may follow them soon. 
There seems nothing but to give over the child to 
the world; and I can see the face of that proud 
woman when she hears it. Must all my years of 
anxiousness go for nothing?” 
After this she walked to and fro in the room, as 
her brother had done when a blow as great, but far 
different, had fallen upon him. Years before, in a 
moment of too exalted trust in the wisdom of her 
own views as to how another’s life should be ordered, 
she had destroyed the letter in which William How- 
ard had wisely stated his altered opinions as to the 
education and religious training of the girl they had 
all believed to be his own. There are in every 
Church those who, if they held the reins of authority, 
would use them to force into their own ways of 
thinking all who chance to differ from them in belief; 
and of this peculiar mould was Hephzibah Guinness. 
Now the house she had builded with some fear and 
anxiety, but with no great doubt, was crumbling, and, 
as often happens, doubt began to grow as the prob- 
ability of failure arose and increased ; for it was plain 
enough to her that the one conscience she dreaded 
outside of her own—that of her brother—would be 
certain not to sympathize in the means by which she 
had secured, as she believed, the eternal safety of 
Marguerite. Night fell as she walked to and fro 
in the mazes of terror, doubt, and rudely-shaken 
convictions. At last, with a shock, came to her the 
idea that perhaps Arthur had written also directly to 
Elizabeth Howard; and at once, unable to bear the HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
suspense through one night, she went down-stairs 
and out of the house. As she walked along the 
deserted streets, more and more clearly arose before 
her the spectre of Arthur’s anger and reproach; but 
not for a moment was it plain to her that it would be 
righteous anger or just reproach. Yet it would be 
in some wise a falling off from her of the one thing 
in her life which was always sweet and fresh, and 
grew with a wholesome ripeness as years went on. 
Then, too, as she stood in the little garden, search- 
ing herself implacably to find if that which she had 
done was well, of a sudden the question took a new 
form, and pausing she asked herself if Arthur had 
himself done this thing, how it would have seemed 
to her sitting in judgment. Somehow, she could 
not carry out this idea. She stood in the night air, 
and tried to make for herself a picture, as it were, 
of Arthur burning the letter; but the figure she 
summoned up seemed to face her pale-visaged and 
grave, and would not act its part in the drama. With 
this a strange anger came over her, as if at the dear 
friend who was fated not to understand her; and then 
at last, with the despotism of a strong nature, she 
brought up her dominant instinct to put down these 
doubts, and saying aloud, “ Thou knowest, Righteous 
Judge, if I have served Thee or not,—Thee, and 
Thee only,” she knocked, and in a moment or two 
passed from her sombre thoughts into the life and 
gayety of Miss Howard’s parlor. 
The scene that presented itself to Hephzibah when 
she entered the parlor was not fitted to soothe or 
comfort her. At the table the abbe was showing HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
Miss Howard a new game of cards, which her niece 
was also learning unasked. 
“ No news of Mr. Guinness ?” said Miss Howard. 
“ I have heard nothing,” said Hephzibah, with a 
pang at the equivocation ; and then reflecting that 
young De Vismes might have mentioned the letters, 
she added, “ A package from him came to-day.” 
“ Well, Aunt Bess,” said Marguerite, “ he must 
come home soon now.” 
Hephzibah was in a state of irritation which made 
any excuse for its display a good one. “ Why dost 
thou call Elizabeth Howard, Aunt Bess?” she said. 
“ The habit is unseemly.” 
The abbe looked surprised. He came of a world 
which took life easily. 
“ I like it,” said Elizabeth, briefly: “ it is my wish. 
Suppose we put aside our little questions of discipline 
till we are alone.” 
“ All hours are good for a good purpose,” returned 
Hephzibah. “ Does the child learn also to use these 
tools of the Great Enemy?” she added, pointing to 
the cards. 
Miss Howard’s sense of humor broke out, as was 
her way. “ Poor old Satan !” she said: “ how much 
we put upon him! He might sue the whole world 
for slander.” 
“ He has done so much worse in my France,” 
sighed the abbe, “ that we may pardon him these 
morsels of paper.” 
“The wrath of the Great Judge hath visited thy 
unhappy land,” exclaimed Hephzibah, in measured 
and tranquil tones. “ Evil hath come of evil,— 
71 HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
72 
punishment of wrong-doing. He hath purged the 
threshing-floor: He ” 
“ Madame,” said the abbe, some little remnant of 
nature stirring in him, “ my mother died on the 
guillotine: you should of kindness fear to speak thus 
to one of my race. More than the wicked died,— 
women who were sweet and pure died; priests better 
than me; some who were young, and had not even 
lied ever in their lives. Ah, if we older ones were to 
die thus, we could without doubt find a reason to 
call it punishment.” 
Some remembrance arose and smote Hephzibah; 
but there must have been a cross of the Puritan in 
her breed, for these words came in answer: “ Why He 
visiteth the sins of one generation on another is His 
alone to know; but we have none sinned so little that 
we may not accept punishment, and find a cause in 
us somewhere. Yet I did not mean to hurt thee.” 
The abbe rose and bowed silently, and there was a 
moment of awkward pause, when Marguerite said, 
“ Oh, aunt, it must be time we went.” 
“ Where ?” said Hephzibah. 
“ We are going on to the ice to see the skating, 
and the coasting at High Street on the hill down 
to the river, and the bonfires, and ” And she 
paused, thinking what else or who else might be on 
the ice. 
“Will you go with us, Hephzibah?” said Miss 
Howard, civilly but coldly. “ I have promised Mar- 
guerite, as we shall be in the country far away from 
here next year, and perhaps she may never have 
another chance.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“You mean to leave us ?” said Hephzibah. “Is 
not this a new plan ? And Margaret ? Is she to 
go ? Dost thou think of taking her.” 
“ Of course,” said Elizabeth. “ I go because of 
her.” 
“ And my brother ? doth he approve ?” 
“ He does,” said Elizabeth. “ Any more questions, 
my dear ?” 
“ No,” replied Hephzibah, “ but I thought thou 
wouldst ” 
“ Don’t think for other people, Hephzibah: it 
makes half the mischief in the world.” 
“ It is my duty,” said Hephzibah, “ to think for this 
child.” 
“ Do not you think also,” said Elizabeth, whisper- 
ing in a quick aside, “that the abbe may come to 
believe we have more religion than manners?” 
“ That matters little,” returned Hephzibah. “ I 
will say no more to thee now. Farewell.” 
“Madame goes not on the ice?” said the abbe; 
and then, unable to resist, demurely added, “ It would 
not make colder madame.” 
“ I do not understand,” said the literal Hephzibah, 
“ why it should not make me cold.” 
“ I did say colder,” said the abbe, while Elizabeth 
shook her fan at him, to his delight. 
“ I shall see thee soon,” said Hephzibah, and so 
left them. 74 
HEP HZ IB AH GUINNESS. 
CHAPTER VII. 
It was a gay and merry scene on which the little 
party looked as they stood in their winter wraps at 
the top of the hill which sloped downward abruptly 
from Front Street to the river. The broad highway 
was covered with beaten snow, and at the river’s 
brink a wide planking of wooden boards extended 
from the edge of the wharf down on to the solid ice 
of the stream. On either side bonfires were blazing, 
and lit with flashing glow the hipped roofs and red 
brick gables at the corners of Front and Water 
Streets. On the deep ice of the solid river, far over 
towards Windmill Island, fires were also seen, and 
around these swift-flitting figures on skates went to 
and fro, dimly seen for a moment and then lost in 
the darkness which lay upon all distant objects. 
At the line of Front Street a crowd of the better 
class of people was gathered, intently watching the 
scene. Boys, men, and girls on long sleds were 
gliding every minute from the top of the hill. At 
first slowly, with noise and shouts of laughter, they 
started away: then the pace quickened and they flew 
past the fires on the hill-slope of the street, now seen, 
now lost, now seen again, until with a cry they 
gained the ice of the river and darted with delicious 
speed across the black, smooth plane of the silent 
Delaware. 
It was the first time Marguerite had set foot on a HEP HZ IB All GUINNESS. 
75 
frozen river, and she had an odd sense of awe and in- 
security. Then the wildness of the picture began to 
tell upon her quick and sensitive nature, to the abbe’s 
amusement and pleasure, for he had become strangely 
fond of the charming little Quaker lady. 
Here and there on the ice were bonfires, from which 
in every direction fell broad flaring shafts of rosy 
light broken by the long shadows of the skaters as 
they flew around the blaze. Many of the coasters 
also carried pine-knot torches, and as they dashed 
by the little party with cry and laugh the lights 
flared, and then sped away over the ice until they 
became but as red stars in the distance. 
At last the girl urged that they should go over t<? 
Windmill Island, where hundreds of people were 
seen by the light of a vast fire engaged in barbecuing 
an ox. Here they lingered a while, and then the 
abbe, having learned that the ice was firm and safe, pro- 
posed that they should venture over a little towards 
the Jersey shore. Accordingly, they crossed the 
narrow islet, and walked some two hundred yards 
out on the farther ice. Here were no fires, but a dark 
quiet, with but a few score skaters who preferred the 
tranquil loneliness of the broader channel. 
“How solemn it is, aunt!” said the girl as the 
black night grew about them over the dark ice, 
while, noticed only by Marguerite, a swift form on 
skates flew around them, now near, now far, in grace- 
ful curves. 
Lured by the beauty of the faint moonlight on 
the ice and by the charm of the less-occupied parts 
of the frozen stream, they had gone some distance 76 
HE PHZ IB A II GUINNESS. 
farther, when the abbe said abruptly, “ What is 
that?” 
A loud cracking sound came from the ice some 
distance below them. In this direction the river was 
partly open, and the gleam of the moonlight was 
visible on the clear water among the cakes of floating 
ice. As they stood to listen ten or twelve skaters 
clustered about them. Then there was another and 
a louder sound. 
“ The ice must be breaking up with the ebb tide,” 
said Miss Howard, startled. “ Come, let us get back 
to the island.” 
“ Ah, yes, we shall do well to make haste,” said 
the abbe, as the sounds, great and small, came quick 
and sharp through the keen, clear, frosty stillness. 
At this moment the group scattered as if a bomb- 
shell had fallen among them. The skaters flew to 
right and left as a loud noise like a pistol-shot rang 
almost beneath their feet, while a crack ran along the 
ice, dimly seen as the cleft suddenly widened. The 
abbe and Miss Howard sprang back, and the latter, 
looking wildly around, cried out, “ Marguerite! where 
are you ? Marguerite !” 
The girl in her curiosity at these mysterious sounds 
had ventured away a score of yards farther towards 
the open water. “ Here, here, Aunt Bess!” she 
answered, running towards her aunt. 
• “ Oh, my God !” cried Miss Howard. “ My child! 
my child!” for the ebbing tide had broadened the 
cleft swiftly, so that as they stayed by the edge it had 
grown in a few moments to a space some five or six 
feet broad. HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
"Jump! jump over!” screamed Elizabeth. “We 
will catch you.” 
At this moment several persons came forward, and 
a tall young man on skates cried out in a voice of 
command, “ For the love of the saints, do not move ! 
It is now too late. Wait!” In an instant he was 
away, flitting back into the darkness. Then, when a 
hundred feet off, he turned short, and crying aloud, 
“ Gare! gare !—I would say, ‘ Take care !’—place! 
place!” he skated with desperate energy straight 
towards the group, and, hardly pausing, gathered 
himself up at the edge of the rift and with a leap 
bounded over the open space of water, and coming 
down on the far side rocked to and fro, recovered his 
balance, flew along with the wild impulse of his leap, 
and returning in one long curve was at the side of 
the frightened girl. The ice was fast floating away. 
“ It is I,” he cried. “ I will answer for her with 
my life. It is I, Henri de Vismes !” 
“ My nephew!” exclaimed the abbe. “ Be tran- 
quil : he will take care of her.” 
“ What shall we do ?” returned Miss Howard. 
“ Get ashore,” cried young De Vismes, “ before 
the ice breaks. Seek men, that they do bring us a 
boat.” 
“ Oh, my darling!” wailed Elizabeth. 
“ Have no fear,” exclaimed the young baron, now 
hardly seen. The ice, as they exchanged quick, 
agitated words of cheer and comfort and alarm, 
still moved farther and farther away. They could 
now scarcely hear the voices of Marguerite and De 
Vismes. The pair were no longer visible. 78 
HEPIIZIBAII GUINNESS. 
“ Come,” said the abbe. “ There is to us but the 
one thing to do.” And in silent horror Elizabeth 
followed him quickly over the ice to the shore of the 
island. 
Meanwhile, the fretting river worked its will, and 
with crush and cry and groan and shocks the broken 
floes separated from the main mass and floated off, 
now grinding together, now thrust apart. The ice- 
island on which the two young people stood was 
about half an acre in extent, and quite safe from 
being overwhelmed. The danger was chiefly, as the 
baron knew, from the intense winter cold, which 
happily was made less terrible by the absence of 
wind. 
The moment he was secure on the ice De Vismes 
said to Marguerite, “ Have not fear, little lady: you 
are safe. It is but to wait.” 
“ I am not afraid,” she answered, “ but I am sorry 
for aunt. And I thank you so very much : I do not 
think many men could have done that, and”—with a 
pause—“ I am sure many would not.” 
The young baron laughed gayly : “ It was nothing 
to do, and I could not have left you alone. I should 
have gone through the water that I might come to 
you. Is it not droll that we should know one another 
thus? Je me presente, mademoiselle. I am the baron 
Henri de Vismes.” 
“And I,” said his companion, “am Miss Marguerite 
Howard.” And she curtsied, laughing at the 
strangeness of the scene. 
Meanwhile, as they talked, the baron undid his 
skates, and then, noticing that the girl shuddered, he HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
said, “ It makes very cold here. If it were that we 
had a bonfire!” Then he took off his cloak. “ Put 
this around you,” he added. 
Marguerite insisted that she was warm enough. 
“You will freeze,” she exclaimed. 
“ I am happy,” he said, “ and they who are happj 
do not suffer.” 
“ Why are you happy ?” said Marguerite, shivering. 
“ I am sure I am not.” 
“ Because,” he said, quietly, “ I am with you.” 
She was silent, and, innocent as she was, some 
instinct restrained her tongue while the cloak was 
thrown around her and the clasp fastened by two 
strong hands, which shook as they touched her 
throat. 
“ Let us walk,” he exclaimed. “ It is safe that we 
keep moving.” 
In this manner two hours fled away. Marguerite, 
despite the cloak, was shaking with the growing cold 
of the night, and De Vismes was becoming chilled 
and anxious. She begged to sit down, but the young 
man urged her to motion, and, taking her hand and 
laughing, made her run to and fro on the ice. 
At last she said, “ I am strangely sleepy: let me 
rest.” 
“ To rest is to die,” said he, calmly; and again they 
moved about, both of them silent and filled with a 
dread of which they did not speak, while the ice 
floated down the river towards the Point House, and 
the lights and the bonfires grew dimmer and dimmer. 
After a long silence Marguerite exclaimed, “ I can- 
not walk now: my head swims, my feet must be 80 
HE PHZIBA II GUINNESS. 
frozen : I cannot feel them. Oh, I shall die!” And, 
so saying, she reeled, and but for the ready arms 
which caught her would have fallen on the ice. De 
Vismes laid her down, resting her head on his knee, 
and without a word stripped off his coat and waist- 
coat, and, glancing anxiously and sadly over the 
water, wrapped his clothes around her, put his cap 
under her head and began to rub her feet. Presently 
she revived a little under the influence of one of those 
strange waves of reanimation which surprise the 
watchers by death-beds when life is slowly failing. 
“ Where am I ?” she said. “ Who are you ?” 
“ I am Henri de Vismes,” he answered. “ We are 
on the ice alone. Pray God they do soon come to 
us, or we die of cold!” 
“ I remember now,” she said. “ You said we must 
walk: I cannot walk, but you are a man and are 
strong. Do you run on the ice, and perhaps you 
may live to tell Aunt Bess how I loved her. You 
see, I am quite warm: I have no pain now—no pain.” 
And her voice failed. 
De Vismes was kneeling beside her as she spoke. 
“ I shall not ever leave you,” he said, “ but soon I 
may not be able to speak. Therefore think not I 
shall go.” And he caught her close to him, and as 
her head lay on his shoulder he said, “ I did not 
mean to tell you until I had said it to your aunt, but 
now it does not make matter: I love thee. Canst 
hear me say I love thee ?” And he looked piteously 
down at the dimly-seen face beneath his, and then 
across the cruel waste of rocking ice-floes. 
She murmured something. HEPHZIBAII GUINNESS. 
81 
“What dost say, Marguerite?” And he drew her 
closer. 
“I thought—there would be some one—who would 
love me—some day,” she muttered. “ Aunt Bess 
thinks not. Ah, she did not know.” Then she was 
silent, and spoke no words in answer to his broken 
wail of love and pity. 
De Vismes sat still, feeling, as did Marguerite, the 
cold less and less, and growing confused in mind and 
more easy in body. He saw the dim outlines of the 
splendid sweep of the Jura Mountains, the turreted 
chateau, the warm summer sun on the walnut-groves. 
He dreamed of warmth as a man who starves dreams 
of banquets. Then he thought how many De Vismes 
had died in the saddle, at sea, by the axe, and that 
he, the only one left, was to perish of cold; and then 
of a sudden he rose up, staggering and still holding 
the girl, and cried aloud, “ Torches ! lights ! Wake 
up, wake up, Marguerite! wake ! Saved ! saved !” 
and reeling fell with her, while cries rang across the 
moonlit river and swift feet hastened from a boat 
along the ice. 
When the young baron awakened from the swoon 
which had almost been death he was lying in a chintz- 
curtained bed with high mahogany posts. As his 
head cleared he saw by the dim light Miss Howard 
seated near the fire. “ Mademoiselle!” he exclaimed. 
“ Mon Dien ! where am I ?” 
Miss Howard was at his side in a moment, and 
drew aside the curtains. “You are in my house,” 
she said, kindly. “Ask no questions now. You 
have been ill, very ill.” 82 
HEPHZIBAII G UINNESS. 
“ But,” he said, “ je m'en souviens. Ah, yes, the ice!” 
And he started up. “ And Marguerite, mademoi- 
selle ?” 
“ She is well,” said Miss Howard,—“ doing well.” 
“Ah!” he murmured, and, still feeble, fell back 
again. 
After this the days went by, and with them mem- 
ory returned, and he made out, as it were bit by bit, 
the scene on the ice, and learned that Marguerite 
had recovered even more rapidly than he. Then his 
uncle came to see him, and he began to get about 
his room, and to feel that he should no longer tax 
this generous hospitality. 
CHAPTER VIII. 
Meanwhile, in Elizabeth Howard’s bosom was 
raging a storm of emotions which taxed to the 
uttermost her unusual powers of self-control. For 
years she had sedulously, almost ridiculously, 
guarded Marguerite from contact with the other sex. 
She had told Arthur that she meant in the spring to 
remove to the country, and there to isolate her niece 
until she could fully make clear to her why she must 
never think of marriage, and why her life and fate 
must be different from those of a woman whom 
destiny had left free to love. With her their race 
must end. And now a pitiless accident had rudely 
broken the guard she had set about her niece; for HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
83 
in his ravings De Vismes had only too clearly told 
the story of his passionate first love. 
But perhaps he alone loved; and at last she saw 
that he too must be told their miserable history, and 
that Marguerite’s young life must also be darkened 
by this sombre knowledge. Miss Howard was not a 
person to abandon a purpose to which duty and a 
clear intelligence had guided her, and once resolved 
she waited only until De Vismes was well enough to 
bear an appeal to his honor and manliness. 
In pursuance of her views she so arranged it that 
when De Vismes and Marguerite first met after their 
illness it should be in her own presence. There was 
to be no chance for sudden love-passages arising out 
of natural gratitude; and she was half amused, half 
sad at the awkward greetings which passed between 
the two as she brought them together in her parlor. 
But love has eyes as well as lips, and rosy blazonry 
on cheeks that glow with too warm consciousness of 
unspoken thoughts. 
Just, however, as the scene was growing awkward, 
Hephzibah appeared, and after many questions asked 
and answered,—for the Quaker spinster was of a curi- 
ous cast of mind,—she turned with her usual abrupt- 
ness upon De Vismes, saying, “ Thou wilt be going 
to thy lodgings soon, I suppose ?” 
“Yes,” said the young man, coloring: “I have 
been too long an intruder here.” 
“ We owe you too much to think you anything 
but one of our own household,” said Elizabeth, while 
Marguerite looked up coyly thankful. 
“ Yet it is time that I went away,” said De Vismes, 84 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ but there will be no time that I shall regret to have 
been here. It will be that I go to-morrow.” 
“ Is there no news of Mr. Guinness ?” said Eliza- 
beth. 
“ None of late,” replied Hephzibah ; and so saying 
left them. 
The evening sped away pleasantly with cards and 
mirth, and the abbe told his little stories of the French 
court. At last, Marguerite having gone to bed and 
the abbe departed, De Vismes rose and said to Miss 
Howard, “ This will be my last good-night in your 
house. Bon soir, mademoiselle. I shall be grieved 
to leave you: I shall not ever forget.” 
“ Yes,” said Miss Howard, rising, “it will be your 
last good-night hereand she paused. “ Will you 
be seated a little while ? I have something to say 
to you.” 
* De Vismes looked suprised, but with ready polite- 
ness sat down again, saying, “ Is it that I can serve 
you in any way ?” 
“Yes,” said Elizabeth; “more than you guess, 
perhaps more than you will wish.” 
“ Mademoiselle does not yet know me,” said De 
Vismes. 
Elizabeth went on abruptly: “You are young and 
joyous, and life seems gladsome to you despite many 
sorrows.” 
“ Yes,” he said ; “ I have of late come to think of 
it as most sweet.” 
“ And therefore,” said she, sadly, “ I think it cruel, 
even if in the end it be kind, to speak as I must do. 
You love my niece.” HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ Ah, mademoiselle knows it! she has guessed it! 
How kind of her to save a young man the awkward 
task to speak, to say he loves!” 
“ No more,” said Miss Howard. “I know it; and 
you would have died for her ?” 
“ Died for her, if it might be, a thousand deaths,” 
said he. “ I ” 
“And if so,” broke in Elizabeth,—“ if that be true, 
would you give her up and go away if I show you 
that to marry her would be wrong—wrong to her, 
wrong to yourself—to your race, to your blood, to 
your children’s children ?” 
De Vismes grew pale: “ What is it mademoiselle 
would say ? If that she will come to love me, why 
is it we may not marry ? There is no shameful thing 
possible.” 
Miss Howard rose : the task was too hard for her. 
The frank, anxious young face followed her as she 
went and came. At last she paused: “ There is in 
her blood, in my blood, a taint: we are born to be 
insane, to take our own lives. We are of a doomed 
race. We may not love as others do. God has set 
a curse on us. We may not marry; we may not see 
our little ones grow up and bless us as other women 
do. They would come to curse us when they knew. 
They would ask, Why were we born to this misery ? 
Ah, it is a terrible thing that you have come to love 
Marguerite! But you will pardon me my abruptness: 
I meant to make it gentle, but how can I ?” 
De Vismes looked and felt bewildered. The sud- 
denness of the blow indeed overcame him. “ I will 
think of what you have said to me, mademoiselle: 86 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
I cannot now gather myself to think of it. I—I— 
never yet did hear of such a thing: I must have time 
to reflect.” 
“ Reflect!” said Elizabeth. “ No, no ; you must 
act, not reflect. You love her; that is a reason to 
act. You must go away, and come back no more. 
You must never see her again on earth. Then I 
shall know how to save her. Oh, for God’s sake, do 
not make it more hard for me! If you will not help 
me, I must tell her. How can I tell her?” 
“ But if she loves me,” cried he, in despair, “ how 
am I to go,—to go and leave her,—to see her no 
more,—to let her think of me,—a French gentleman, 
a noble,—as of a man who would say when as if 
about to die, ‘ I love thee,’ and then fly and make no 
sign ?” 
“ But I will tell her when you are gone,” said 
Elizabeth. “You shall lose nothing in my hands. 
Surely you can trust me. And then she does not 
love you: I am sure she cannot. It will be you 
only who will suffer, and I appeal to you as a 
gentleman to save her. I am sure she does not 
love you.” 
“ That may be,” he said, sorely shaken. 
“You ought not to hesitate,” said Miss Howard; 
“ you ought to go. Do not stay until you win her 
young heart, only that inevitable parting may break 
it. Why wait? You seem as though you would 
yield if you believed what I say. Ah, trust me, she 
does not love you.” 
“ If this be so, I will go,” said De Vismes, white 
as a sheet. “ I will go, because you are right; but HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
87 
if I thought she loved me, I would trust to the good 
God’s mercy and stay.” 
“ Oh, my heavens!” cried Elizabeth, in despair. 
“ She does not love you.” 
As she spoke, Marguerite glided swiftly into the 
room, crying out, “You have no right to speak for 
me, Aunt Bess. I—I came down because I had for- 
gotten to kiss you good-night, and I heard you. I— 
I Oh, Aunt Bess, I do love him! Is it wrong ?” 
“ Marguerite!” said De Vismes; and he caught 
her in his arms. 
“Oh, my children!” exclaimed Elizabeth. As she 
spoke the knocker sounded again and again. 
“ What is that?” said Miss Howard. “ It is late; 
what can it be ?” And the little commonplaces of life 
broke into their storm of fears and hopes and made 
a sudden quiet. 
“ I will go to see,” said De Vismes, “if you please. 
The maid must have gone to bed. They knock 
again.” 
“ Yes, oblige me by seeing who it is. They seem 
in haste,” said Elizabeth. 
De Vismes went into the entry and hastily opened 
the door. He fell back in amazement as Hephzibah, 
not recognizing him, went past him with no more 
notice than to say, “ Is thy mistress in the parlor ?” 
and then suddenly broke into the room. 
Elizabeth and Marguerite rose in amazement. 
Hephzibah stood still an instant in the doorway, 
her drab cloak dripping, her scant gray locks fallen 
about her face and neck, without bonnet or other 
headgear. 88 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ What is it ?” cried Miss Howard. 
Hephzibah seized her arm and leaned forward. 
“He is dead !” she said. “ Thou hast killed him.” 
“I? Who?” exclaimed Elizabeth. 
“Arthur, my Arthur, my brother Arthur ! Do not 
look at me so. Go down on thy knees and pray for 
forgiveness.” 
“ For Heaven’s love,” said Elizabeth, “ what is it, 
woman ? Did you say Arthur was dead ? Tell me 
about it. I—I never did trust you : this cannot 
be.” 
“ He is dead,” said Hephzibah,—“ drowned,—the 
ship lost,—the news just come. I loved no one like 
him. Why didst thou deny him the poor gift that 
would have kept him here ?” 
“ If,” said Elizabeth, “ my dear Arthur is gone to 
God, I am answerable to the dead alone. My love! 
my love!” And she sank into a chair in a passion 
of tears, while De Vismes and her niece ran to her 
side and silently stood by her as if to comfort and 
protect her. 
Hephzibah, white, trembling, with hands knitted 
in front of her, and with working fingers, remained 
alone and speechless, looking down upon the little 
group. At last she said, with a curious unnatural 
firmness, “ There are many things to talk of, Eliza- 
beth Howard.” 
Elizabeth looked up. “Are you of flesh and blood, 
woman ?” she cried. “ Go ! go away! I cannot talk 
with you to-night. Take her home, some one.” 
“ That were best,” said De Vismes. 
“ I should better do my Master’s errand were 1 to HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
89 
forget 6n His service the loved one I have lost,” 
returned Hephzibah. “To-day is His time. To- 
morrow,—to-morrow Who owns to-morrow ? 
Had I been more ready in the past to warn my 
brother of the snares of the worldlings, he might 
yet be alive.” 
“ Go !” said Miss Howard. And De Vismes took 
the Quakeress kindly but firmly by the arm, saying, 
“ Come; the time is not well for speech.” And they 
turned and left the room. 
“ Poor Aunt Bess !” cried Marguerite. “ If only I 
could do something for you !” 
“ Only One can do that, my child,” said Elizabeth. 
CHAPTER IX. 
The news of Arthur Guinness’s death fell with 
varied influence upon those who were near or dear 
to him. 
An awful temptation was by Fate put away from 
the path of Miss Howard. The man she loved was „ 
taken, and with him went, as she knew only too well, 
much of the little sunshine of her life. It was more 
like widowhood to her than such a loss would have 
been to a younger woman ; and it was characteristic 
of the woman and of her life that after the first sharp 
anguish she accepted her new sorrow as brave men 
accept sentence of death, and that with eyes more 90 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
than ever set on the future she took up the threads 
of duty anew, and went sweetly and pleasantly along 
the ways of life. 
To Hephzibah she was that enigma which a person 
with a strong overruling sense of humor must always 
be to one who knows no note in the wide gamut of 
mirth-making thoughts. That, as time went on, Miss 
Howard could smile,—nay, worse, laugh,—that the 
little events of daily life could still afford her amuse- 
ment, seemed to Hephzibah a constant insult to her 
brother’s memory. But some laugh through life,— 
laugh if they win or lose; and some cry if they 
always win; and Elizabeth would have gone with a 
smile to any fate which life could bring. The ex- 
asperation which this temperament wrought on 
Hephzibah had unhappily evil consequences, and 
perhaps was the overweight which turned the balance 
of her decisions. 
Her brother’s death left her possessed of the pa- 
pers which would give her steady control over the 
spiritual destinies of Marguerite, whose sole guard- 
ian she now became. She found it easy to assure 
herself that a fortune was bad for the girl,—that to 
fall under Elizabeth’s entire rule was yet more evil for 
the child. Then, too, Elizabeth, goaded to despair 
by her new assumptions as time went by, rose in 
revolt, as any noble nature must have done, until at 
last Hephzibah became more and more certain that 
nothing could be surer spiritual death for her ward 
than the fate which would be hers if the later 
wishes of William Howard became known. Come 
what might, a long while must elapse before it be- HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
came clear through other sources that the child was 
not destined to Quakerism. Letters were lost every 
week in those days, and war everywhere made it as 
likely as not that years would pass before the truth 
was made manifest. Therefore it was that the letters 
lay in Arthur Guinness’s desk safe enough, and that 
the months fled away and the spring came. 
Meanwhile, Marguerite went listlessly about her 
daily tasks, with a sense that much of the sweetness 
of her young life had gone from her; for, after one 
or two more interviews with her lover, she had been 
told by Miss Howard the dark story of her race, and 
had come at last, like De Vismes and Arthur Guin- 
ness, to acquiesce in the decree by which Elizabeth 
had forbidden for them as for herself the thought 
of love or marriage. 
It was the old, sad, beautiful tale of love con- 
V 
trolled by duty. But to see one another, to meet 
and to part with no utterance of their forbidden love, 
was fast becoming a task too grave for youthful hu- 
man hearts. The baron felt that it behooved him as 
a man to end the ever-renewed struggle by leaving 
the city. Therefore on an afternoon in the end of 
May there was a scene in Miss Howard’s home of 
bitter final parting, from which De Vismes tore him- 
self away with the sobs of Marguerite echoing in 
his ears. He went out through the paling fence, 
and moved westward along Shippen to Argyle 
Street, half consciously avoiding the ways where he 
could meet faces that he knew. Here he turned 
westward on his favorite walk towards the Neck, 
along Kingsessing Road, then lined with fields and 92 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
pasture-grounds, and presently felt a kindly arm on 
his own and heard his uncle say, “ Thou hast been 
hurt of a woman, my dear. Shall I be disagreeable 
to walk with thee ? I know that fortune went not 
well with thee, Henri, because we are poor and 
friendless. Were it not so, thy Quaker maid had 
not said nay to one of our house.” 
“ But, uncle,” said the baron, “ it is still as I told 
thee. There is more to put us one from the other 
than the want of love. It is not my secret, and I 
cannot tell thee.” 
“As thou pleasest,” said the abbe. “Women are 
alike all the world over: men may vary, but women 
never. Ah, if I could but endow thee with my ex- 
perience, thou mightst have good luck with the lady. 
And she is handsome too, and I am told will have a 
good dot. One acquires experience too late.” 
The baron was silent, as his mood fitted not with 
the abbe’s cynical ways, and they walked along qui- 
etly. By and by they came upon the Penrose Ferry 
Road, and the frogs began to croak their vespers 
and a faint haze rose up over the broad meadows of 
the Neck lands, while the setting sun, large, round, 
and crimson, hung on the far horizon’s verge across 
the Schuylkill. A windmill’s sails turned slowly on 
the left of the road, and the sound of the milking- 
pans and the lowing of cows crossed the flat pas- 
tures and ditches, and came pleasantly to the ears of 
the exiles as they paused to listen, soothed by the 
peaceful sweetness of the hour. Then a flock of 
sheep came along the road, and as they jostled one 
another the dust of the highway made a cloud of HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
rosy gold over and about them and the herdsman 
who walked behind in a check cloak and slouched 
hat. 
“ It is like our Normandy,” said the abbe. “ But, 
mon Dieu, what is this ?” for as he spoke they were 
aware of a tall, largely-made man coming towards 
them with quick steps. 
The baron darted forward: “ It is—is it ?—nay, it 
is you, Mr. Guinness! Where is it that you have 
come from ? We have thought you dead.” 
“ Ah, this is most happy,” cried the abbe. 
“ By the will of Providence,” said Arthur, “ it is 
indeed I,—a man saved after shipwreck and many 
perils. I landed at New Castle to-day, and made 
haste to drive home, but, my carriage breaking 
down, I am come these last few miles afoot. Are all 
well,—Elizabeth, Hephzibah, Marguerite?” 
“All,” said the baron; “and what joy will there 
be!” 
Then Arthur went on to tell his story, and at last 
it was agreed that the abbe should hasten in advance 
to tell Hephzibah, and that the baron should also 
warn Miss Howard, lest the women should be too 
much startled by this sudden return of Arthur. 
The abbe reached Miss Guinness’s hduse a half- 
hour after, and with what result we shall presently 
hear. When, still later, he entered Miss Howard’s 
home, he found the little group, half in tears, half in 
laughter, surrounding the dear friend who had so 
unexpectedly come back. Elizabeth was saying to 
the baron, “ It was good and thoughtful of you to 
come beforehand and tell me. I thank you.” And 94 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
then a small hand stole furtively into his, and he felt 
by its tender touch that he was still better thanked. 
“ But what ails thee, friend De Vismes ?” said 
Arthur; and all turned to look at the abbe, who was 
Hushed and excited. 
“ Oh, a thing most strange,” replied the abbe, “ and 
I must tell it.” 
“ Why not ?” said Miss Howard, looking up with 
hushed and joyful face. 
“And I must leave thee,” said Arthur. “It was 
on my way to pass here, and I could not go by with- 
out a word; but now I would seek Hephzibah.” 
“ She is not in her house,” said the abbe; “ and 
before you go I may ask that a thing be for me made 
clear.” 
“ And what ?” said Arthur. “ Tell us soon, for I 
may not tarry on my way home.” 
“ I did go,” said the abbe, “ with haste to tell 
mademoiselle the sister of your soon coming, but the 
small maid gave me assurance that she was not at 
home; and then I did think I would leave a word 
written to say all I had to say; and that I might 
write I was asked of the maid to go into the room 
of M. Guinness, where sometimes we have smoked. 
And when, the maid having opened the desk and left 
me, I ended the little note, I saw with amazement on 
a bundle of papers which had a look to be old the 
name of me, Gaston de Vismes, abbe. And as it 
seemed of my address, I did not attend long before 
I unfolded the sheets and read. What I read was to 
me as a dream, as a dream of the past, as a tale of 
the dead,—of my sister. I am troubled: I say, ‘ This HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS, 
is mine.’ I find in the leaves a letter of Miss How- 
ard: I bring it too, I bring all. You will make for 
me excuses. This paper is what the dead say. It 
disturbs me, I am shaken. Here is the letter for 
you, Mademoiselle Howard.” 
At this moment Hephzibah entered the room; 
she had come by an accident hither. She saw first 
in the abbe’s hands the papers she had concealed, 
and heard his last rapid, troubled sentences. 
“ Thou hast stolen my papers,” she said, coldly; 
and then of a sudden, as she advanced a step, she 
caught sight of Arthur, who ran forward as she 
spoke. 
“ Hephzibah ! sister !” he cried, “ I am come again. 
Our heavenly Father has heard thy prayers.” 
“Arthur!” she said, and for a brief moment, 
locked in his strong arms, she remembered only 
that this one loved heart yet beat. But then sud- 
denly there came upon her the horror and fear of 
the discovery which was about to spring upon her. 
She was not a woman to wait her fate or keep si- 
lence, hoping to escape. While the little group 
watched this solemn meeting of the brother and sis- 
ter she gathered herself up, calmly adjusted her gray 
bonnet, and said, “ Wilt thou come home with me, 
Arthur? I have much to say. These papers were 
in a cover addressed by thee to me: I will take them 
now.” And she moved towards the amazed abbe. 
“ Nay,” said Elizabeth, “ it seems that they belong 
to the abbe. And my own letter, it has a distant 
date. Why, woman, did you really dare to keep this 
from me ?” 96 
HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. 
“ What does this mean ?” said Arthur; and all eyes 
turned upon Hephzibah. 
“ Give me my papers,” she said. “ We should talk 
of them alone, Arthur.” 
“ But,” said the abbe, “ I have read them.” 
“ Thou hast read them ?” said Hephzibah, in meas- 
ured tones. 
“ Why not ?” exclaimed Arthur, puzzled. 
“ And they say that it was my sister, the Marquise 
de la Roche, which Mr. Howard did marry to save 
from death; and the child is my niece, and not his 
daughter.” 
“ Impossible !” said Elizabeth. “ What dream is 
this ?” And she seized the girl as if fearing to lose 
her, and added, “ But you kept these papers, Heph- 
zibah ? You thought Arthur dead: you meant to 
keep them always. Oh, woman! woman! how could 
you ? Arthur, I would not have told this : I did not 
know. I am sorry: I pity her.” 
“ Thou hast no need,” said Hephzibah. “ What I 
did was under a concern, but the way has not opened, 
and I am freed.” 
“ Oh, Hephzibah!” exclaimed Arthur, and sinking 
into a chair he covered his face. 
“ I am grieved only to have hurt thee, brother,” 
said Hephzibah. “ The girl is lost to Friends: the 
world hath her.” 
“ And,” cried the young De Vismes, “ she is of our 
own blood,—my cousin ! Ah, mon ame !" And he 
caught the bewildered girl in his arms, while Heph- 
zibah turned quietly and went out into the street. THEE AND YOU. 
Once on a time I was leaning over a book of the 
costumes of forty years before, when a little lady said 
to me, “ How ever could they have loved one another 
in such queer bonnets ?” And now that since then 
long years have sped away, and the little critic is, 
alas ! no longer young, haply her children, looking 
up at her picture, by Sully, in a turban and short waist, 
may have wondered to hear how, in such disguise, she 
too was fatal to many hearts, and set men by the ears, 
and was a toast at suppers in days when the waltz 
was coming in and the solemn grace of the minuet 
lingered in men’s manners. 
And so it is, that, calling up anew the soft Sep- 
tember mornings of which I would draw a picture 
before they fade away with me also, from men’s 
minds, it is the quaintness of dress which first comes 
back to me, and I find myself wondering that in 
nankeen breeches and swallow-tailed blue coats with 
buttons of brass once lived men who, despite gnarled- 
rimmed beavers and much wealth of many-folded 98 
THEE AND YOU. 
cravats, loved and were loved as well and earnestly 
as we. 
I had been brought up in the austere quiet of a 
small New England town, where life was sad and 
manners grave, and when about eighteen served for 
a while in the portion of our army then acting in the 
North. The life of adventure dissatisfied me with 
my too quiet home, and when the war ended, I was 
glad to accept the offer of an uncle in China to enter 
his business house. To prepare for this it was de- 
cided that I should spend six months with one of the 
great East India firms. For this purpose I came to 
Philadelphia, and by and by found myself a boarder 
in an up-town street, in a curious household ruled 
over by a lady of the better class of the people called 
Friends. 
For many days I was a lonely man among the 
eight or ten persons who came down, one by one, at 
early hours to our breakfast-table and ate somewhat 
silently and went their several ways. Mostly, we 
were clerks in the India houses which founded so 
many Philadelphia fortunes, but there were also two 
or three of whom we knew little, and who went and 
came as they liked. 
It was a quiet lodging-house, where, because of 
being on the outskirts and away from the fashion and 
stir of the better streets, those chiefly came who 
could pay but little, and among them some of the 
luckless ones who are always to be found in such 
groups,—stranded folks, who for the most part have 
lost hope in life. The quiet, pretty woman who 
kept the house was of an ancient Quaker stock which THEE AND YOU. 
had come over long ago in a sombre Quaker May- 
flower, and had by and by gone to decay, as the best 
of families will. When I first saw her and some of 
her boarders it was on a pleasant afternoon early in 
September, and I recall even now the simple and 
quiet picture of the little back parlor where I sat 
down among them as a new guest. I had been tran- 
quilly greeted, and had slipped away into a corner 
behind a table, whence I looked out with some curi- 
osity on the room and on the dwellers with whom 
my lot was to be cast for a long while to come. I 
was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but 
having had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of 
visage and full of that intense desire to know things 
and people that springs up quickly in those who haw* 
lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle 
of city life. 
The room I looked upon was strange, the people 
strange. On the floor was India matting, cool and 
white. A panel of painted white woodwork ran 
around an octagonal chamber, into which stole 
silently the evening twilight through open windows 
and across a long brick-walled garden-space full of 
roses and Virginia creepers and odorless wisterias. 
Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately 
female, dressed in gray silk, with a plain muslin cap 
about the face, and with long and rather slim arms 
tightly clad in silk. Her fingers played at hide-and- 
seek among some marvellous stitchery,—evidently a 
woman whose age had fallen heir to the deft ways of 
her youth. Over her against the wall hung a portrait 
of a girl of twenty, somewhat sober in dress, with IOO 
THEE AND YOU. 
what we should call a Martha Washington cap. It 
was a pleasant face, unstirred by any touch of fate, 
with calm blue eyes awaiting the future. 
The hostess saw, I fancied, my set gaze, and rising 
came toward me as if minded to put the new-comer 
at ease. “ Thee does not know our friends ?” she 
said. “ Let me make thee known to them.” 
I rose quickly and said, “ I shall be most glad.” 
We went over toward the dame between the win- 
dows. “ Grandmother,” she said, raising her voice, 
“ this is our new friend, Henry Shelburne, from New 
England.” 
As she spoke I saw the old lady stir, and after a 
moment she said, “ Has he a four-leaved clover?” 
“ That is what she always says. Thee will get 
used to it in time.” 
“ We all do,” said a voice at my elbow ; and turn- 
ing, I saw a man of about thirty years old, dressed 
in the plainest-cut Quaker clothes, but with the con- 
tradiction to every tenet of Fox written on his face, 
where a brow of gravity forever read the riot act to 
eyes that twinkled with ill-repressed mirth. When 
I came to know him well, and saw the preternatural 
calm of his too quiet lips, I used to imagine that 
unseen little demons of ready laughter were forever 
twitching at their corners. 
“ Grandmother is very old,” said my hostess. 
“ Awfully old,” said my male friend, whose name 
proved to be Richard Wholesome. 
“ Thee might think it sad to see one whose whole 
language has come to be just these words, but some- 
times she will be glad and say, ‘ Has thee a four- THEE AND YOU. 
leaved clover?’ and sometimes she will be ready to 
cry, and will say only the same words. But if thee 
were to say, ‘ Have a cup of coffee ?’ she would but 
answer, ‘ Has thee a four-leaved clover ?’ Does it 
not seem strange to thee, and sad ? We are used to 
it, as it might be,—quite used to it. And that above 
her is her picture as a girl.” 
“ Saves her a deal of talking,” said Mr. Wholesome, 
“ and thinking. Any words would serve her as well. 
Might have said, ‘ Topsail halyards,’ all the same.” 
“ Richard!” said Mistress White. Mistress Pris- 
cilla White was her name. 
“ Perchance thee would pardon me,” said Mr. 
Wholesome. 
“ I wonder,” said a third voice in the window, 
“ does the nice old dame know what color has the 
clover ? and does she remember fields of clover,—pink 
among the green ?” 
“ There is a story,” said Priscilla, “ that when my 
grandmother was yet a young woman, my grand- 
father on the day that he died,—his death being 
sudden,—fetched her from the field a four-leaved 
clover, and so the memory of it clings while little else 
is left.” 
“ Has thee a four-leaved clover ?” re-echoed the 
voice feebly from between the windows. 
The man who was curious as to the dame’s- re- 
membrances was a small stout person whose arms 
and legs did not seem to belong to him, and whose 
face was strangely gnarled, like the odd face a boy 
might carve on a hickory-nut, but was withal a visage 
pleasant and ruddy. THEE AND YOU. 
102 
“ That,” said Mistress White as she moved away, 
“ is Mr. Schmidt,—an old boarder with some odd 
ways of his own which we mostly forgive. A good 
man—if it were not for his pipe,” she added demurely, 
—“ altogether a good man.” 
“ With or without his pipe,” said Mr. Wholesome. 
“ Richard!” returned our hostess, with a half 
smile. 
“ Without his pipe,” he added; and the unseen 
demons twitched at the corners of his mouth anew. 
Altogether, these seemed to me droll people, they 
said so little, and, saving the small German, were so 
serenely grave. I suppose that first evening must 
have made a deep mark on my memory, for to this 
day I recall it with the clearness of a picture still 
before my eyes. Between the windows sat the old 
dame with hands quiet on her lap now that the twi- 
light had grown deeper,—a silent, gray Quaker 
sphinx, with only one remembrance out of all her 
seventy years of life. In the open window sat as in 
a frame the daughter, a woman of some twenty-five 
years, rosy yet as only a Quakeress can be when 
rebel nature flaunts on the soft cheek the colors its 
owner may not wear on her gray dress. The outline 
was of a face clearly cut and noble as if copied from 
a Greek gem,—a face filled with a look of constant 
patience too great perhaps for one woman’s share, 
with a certain weariness in it also, yet cheerful too, 
and even almost merry at times,—the face of one 
more thoughtful of others than of herself, and, despite 
toil and sordid cares, a gentlewoman, as was plain 
to see. The shaft of light from the window in THEE AND YOU. 
103 
which she sat broadened into the room, and faded to 
shadow in far corners among chairs with claw toes 
and shining mahogany tables,—the furniture of that 
day, with a certain flavor about it of elegance, reflect- 
ing the primness and solidness of the owners. I 
wonder if to-day our furniture represents us too in 
any wise ? At least it will not through the gener- 
ations to follow us : of that we may be sure. In the 
little garden, with red gravelled walks between rows 
of box, Mr. Schmidt walked to and fro, smoking his 
meerschaum,—a rare sight in those days, and almost 
enough to ensure your being known as odd. He 
walked about ten paces, and went and came on the 
same path, while on the wall above a large gray cat 
followed his motions to and fro, as if having some 
personal interest in his movements. Against an 
apricot tree leaned Mr. Wholesome, watching with 
gleams of amusement the cat and the man, and now 
and then filliping at the cat a bit of plaster which he 
pulled from the wall. Then she would start up alert, 
and the man’s face would get to be quizzically un- 
conscious ; after which the cat would settle down and 
the game begin anew. By and by I was struck with 
the broad shoulders and easy way in which Whole- 
some carried his head, and the idea came to me that 
he had more strength than was needed by a member 
of the Society of Friends, or than could well have 
been acquired with no greater exercise of the limbs 
than is sanctioned by its usages. In the garden were 
also three elderly men, all of them quiet and clerkly, 
who sat on and about the steps of the other window 
ard chatted of the India ships and cargoes, their talk TIIEE AND YOU. 
having a flavor of the spices of Borneo and of well- 
sunned madeira. These were servants of the 
great India houses when commerce had its nobles, 
and lines were sharply drawn in social life. 
I was early in bed, and rising betimes went down 
to breakfast, which was a brief meal, this being, as 
Mr. Wholesome said to me, the short end of the day. 
I should here explain that Mr. Wholesome was a 
junior partner in the house in which I was to learn 
the business before going to China. Thus he was 
the greatest person by far in our little household, 
although on this he did not presume, but seemed to 
me greatly moved toward jest and merriment, and 
to sway to and fro between gayety and sadness, or 
at the least gravity, but more toward the latter when 
Mistress White was near, she seeming always to be 
a checking conscience to his mirth. 
On this morning, as often after, he desired me to 
walk with him to our place of business, of which I 
was most glad, as I felt shy and lonely. Walking 
down Arch Street, I was amazed at its cleanliness, 
and surprised at the many trees and the unfamiliar 
figures in Quaker dresses walking leisurely. But 
what seemed to me most curious of all were the plain 
square meeting-houses of the Friends, looking like 
the toy houses of children. I was more painfully 
impressed by the appearance of the graves, one so 
like another, without mark or number, or anything 
in the disposition of them to indicate the strength 
of those ties of kinship and affection which death 
had severed. Yet I grew to like this quiet highway, 
and when years after I was in Amsterdam the resem- THEE AND YOU. 
blance of its streets to those of the Friends here at 
home overcame me with a crowd of swift-rushing 
memories. As I walked down of a morning to. my 
work, I often stopped as I crossed Fifth Street to 
admire the arch of lindens that barred the view to 
the westward, or to gaze at the inscription on the 
Apprentices’ Library, still plain to see, telling that 
the building was erected in the eighth year of the 
Empire. 
One morning Wholesome and I found open the 
iron grating of Christ Church graveyard, and passing 
through its wall of red and black glazed brick, he 
turned sharply to the right, and coming to a corner 
bade me look down where, under a gray plain slab 
of worn stone, rests the body of the greatest man, as 
I have ever thought, whom we have been able to 
claim as ours. Now a bit of the wall is gone, and 
through a railing the busy or idle or curious, as they 
go by, may look in and see the spot without entering. 
- Sometimes, too, we came home together, Whole- 
some and I, and then I found he liked to wander and 
zigzag, not going very far along a street, and showing 
fondness for lanes and byways. Often he would turn 
with me a moment into the gateway of the Univer- 
sity Grammar School on Fourth Street, south of 
Arch, and had, I thought, great pleasure in seeing 
the rough play of the lads. Or often, as we came 
home at noon, he liked to turn into Paradise Alley, 
out of Market Street, and did this, indeed, so often 
that I came to wonder at it, and the more because in 
an open space between this alley and Commerce 
Street was the spot where almost every day the 106 
THEE AND YOU. 
grammar-school boys settled their disputes in the 
way more common then than now. When first we 
chanced on one of these encounters, I was surprised 
to see Mr. Wholesome look about him as if to be 
sure that no one else was near, and then begin to 
watch the combat with a strange interest. Indeed, 
on one occasion he utterly astonished me by taking 
by the hand a small boy who had been worsted and 
leading him with us, as if he knew the lad, which 
may well have been. But presently he said, “ Reu- 
ben thee said was thy name?” “ Yes, sir,” said the 
lad. “ Well,” said Mr. Wholesome,—after buying 
him a large and very brown horse gingerbread, two 
doughnuts, and a small pie,—“ when you think it 
worth while to hit a fellow, never slap his face, be- 
cause then he will strike you hard with his fist, which 
hurts, Reuben. Now, mind: next thee strikes first 
with the fist, my lad, and hard, too.” If I had seen 
our good Bishop White playing at taws, I could not 
have been more overcome, and I dare say my face 
may have shown it, for, glancing at me, he said de- 
murely, “ Thee has seen in thy lifetime how hard it 
is to get rid of what thee liked in thy days of boy- 
hood.” After which he added no more in the way 
of explanation, but walked along with swift strides 
and a dark and troubled face, silent and thoughtful. 
I observed many times after this that the habits and 
manners of Friends sat uneasily on Mr. Wholesome, 
and that when excited he was quite sure to give up 
for a time his habitual use of Friends’ language, and 
to let slip now and then phrases or words which were 
in common use among what Mistress Priscilla called THEE AND YOU. 
107 
world’s people. It was a good while before I came 
to understand the source of these peculiar traits. 
Sometimes in the early morning I walked to my 
place of business with Mr. Schmidt, who was a man 
so altogether unlike those about him that I found in 
him a new and varied interest. He was a German, 
and spoke English with a certain quaintness and 
with the purity of speech of one who has learned the 
tongue from books rather than from men. I found 
after a while that this guess of mine was a good one, 
and that, having been bred an artist, he had been put 
in prison for some political offence, and had in two 
years of loneliness learned English from our older 
authors. When at last he was set free he took his 
little property and came away with a bitter heart to 
our freer land, where, with what he had and with the 
lessons he gave in drawing, he was well able to live 
the life he liked in quiet ease and comfort. He was 
a kindly man in his ways, and in his talk gently 
cynical; so that, although you might be quite sure 
as to what he would do, you were never as safe as to 
what he would say; wherefore to know him a little 
was to dislike him, but to know him well was to love 
him. There was a liking between him and Whole- 
some, but each was more or less a source of wonder- 
ment to the other. Nor was it long before I saw 
that both these men were patient lovers in their way 
of the quiet and pretty Quaker dame who ruled over 
our little household, though to the elder man, Mr. 
Schmidt, she was a being at whose feet he laid a 
homage which he felt to be hopeless of result, while 
he was schooled by sorrowful fortunes to accept the 108 
THEE AND YOU 
position as one which he hardly even wished to 
change. 
It was on a warm sunny morning very early, for 
we were up and away betimes, that Mr. Schmidt 
and I and Wholesome took our first walk together 
through the old market-sheds. We turned into 
Market Street at Fourth Street, whence the sheds 
ran downwards to the Delaware. The pictures they 
gave me to store away in my mind are all of them 
vivid enough, but none more so than that which I 
saw with my two friends on the first morning when 
we wandered through them together. 
On either side of the street the farmers’ wagons 
stood backed up against the sidewalk, each making a 
cheap shop, by which stood the sturdy owners under 
the trees, laughing and chaffering with their custom- 
ers. We ourselves turned aside and walked down 
the centre of the street under the sheds. On either 
side at the entry of the market, odd business was 
being plied, the traders being mostly colored women 
with bright chintz dresses and richly-tinted ban- 
danna handkerchiefs coiled turban-like above their 
dark faces. There were rows of roses in red pots, 
and venders of marsh calamus, and “ Hot corn, sah, 
smokin’ hot,” and “ Pepper-pot, bery nice,” and sell- 
ers of horse-radish and snapping-turtles, and of 
doughnuts dear to grammar-school lads. Within 
the market was a crowd of gentlefolks, followed by 
their black servants with baskets,—the elderly men 
in white or gray stockings, with knee-buckles, the 
younger in very tight nankeen breeches and pumps, 
frilled shirts, and ample cravats, and long blue swal- THEE AND YOU 
low-tailed coats with brass buttons. Ladies whose 
grandchildren go no more to market were there in 
gowns with strangely short waists and broad gypsy 
bonnets, with the flaps tied down by wide ribbons 
over the ears. It was a busy and good-humored 
throng. 
“Ah,” said Schmidt, “what color!” and he stood 
quite wrapped in the joy it gave him looking at the 
piles of fruit, where the level morning sunlight, 
broken by the moving crowd, fell on great heaps of 
dark-green watermelons and rough cantaloupes, and 
warmed the wealth of peaches piled on trays backed 
by red rows of what were then called love-apples, 
and are now known as tomatoes; while below the 
royal yellow of vast overgrown pumpkins seemed to 
have set the long summer sunshine in their golden 
cheeks. 
“ If these were mine,” said Schmidt, “ I could not 
forever sell them. What pleasure to see them grow 
and steal to themselves such sweet colors out of the 
rainbow which is in the light!” 
“ Thee would make a poor gardener,” said Whole- 
some, “ sitting on thy fence in the sun and watching 
thy pumpkins,—damn nasty things anyhow!” 
I looked up amazed at the oath, but Schmidt did 
not seem to remark it, and went on with us, lingering 
here and there to please himself with the lovely con- 
trasts of the autumn fruit. 
“ Curious man is Schmidt,” remarked Wholesome 
as we passed along. “ I could wish thee had seen 
him when we took him this way first. Old Betsey, 
yonder, sells magnolia flowers in June, and also pond- THEE AND YOU. 
110 
lilies, which thee may know as reasonably pleasant 
things to thee or me; but of a sudden I find our 
friend Schmidt kneeling on the pavement with his 
head over a tub of these flowers, and every one 
around much amazed.” 
“Was it not seemly?” said Schmidt, joining us. 
“There are those who like music, but to me what 
music is there like the great attunement of color? 
and mayhap no race can in this rise over our black 
artists hereabout the market-ends.” 
“ Thee is crazed of many colors,” said Wholesome, 
laughing,—“a bull of but one.” 
Schmidt stopped short, to Wholesome’s disgust. 
“ What,” said he, quite forgetful of the crowd, “ is 
more cordial than color ? This he recalleth was a 
woman black as night, with a red turban and a lapful 
of magnolias, and to one side red crabs in a basket, 
and to one side a tubful of lilies. Moss all about, I 
remember.” 
“ Come along,” said Wholesome. “ The man is 
cracked, and in sunny weather the crack widens.” 
And so we went away down street to our several 
tasks, chatting and amused. 
Those were most happy days for me, and I found 
at evening one of my greatest pleasures when 
Schmidt called for me after our early tea and we 
would stroll together down to the Delaware, where 
the great India ships lay at wharves covered with 
casks of madeira and boxes of tea and spices. Then 
we would put out in his little row-boat and pull away 
toward Jersey, and, after a plunge in the river at 
Cooper’s Point, would lazily row back again while THEE AND YOU. 
the spire of Christ Church grew dim against the fading 
sunset, and the lights would begin to show here and 
there in the long line of sombre houses. By this 
time we had grown to be sure friends, and a little 
help from me at a moment when I chanced to guess 
that he wanted money had made the bond yet 
stronger. So it came that he talked to me, though I 
was but a lad, with a curious freedom, which very 
soon opened to me a full knowledge of those with 
whom I lived. 
One evening, when we had been drifting silently 
with the tide, he suddenly said aloud, “ A lion in the 
fleece of the sheep.” 
“ What?” said I, laughing. 
“ I was thinking of Wholesome,” he replied. “ But 
you do not know him. Yet he has that in his coun- 
tenance which would betray a more cunning crea- 
ture.” 
“ How so ?” I urged, being eager to know more of 
the man who wore the garb and tongue of Penn, and 
could swear roundly when moved. 
“ If it will amuse,” said the German, “ I will tell 
you what it befell me to hear to-day, being come 
into the parlor when Mistress White and Wholesome 
were in the garden, of themselves lonely.” 
“ Do you mean,” said I, “ that you listened when 
they did not know of your being there ?” 
“ And why not ?” he replied. “ It did interest me, 
and to them only good might come.” 
“ But,” said I, “ it was not ” 
“Well?” he added, as I paused," ‘Was not 
honor,’ you were going to say to me. And why 112 
THEE AND YOU. 
not? I obey my nature, which is more curious than 
stocked with honor. I did listen.” 
“And what did you hear?” said I. 
“ Ah, hear!” he answered. “ What better is the 
receiver than is the thief? Well, then, if you will 
share my stolen goods, you shall know, and I will 
tell you as I heard, my memory being good.” 
“ But ” said I. 
“Too late; you stop me,” he added; “you must 
hear now.” 
The scene which he went on to sketch was to me 
strange and curious, nor could I have thought he 
could give so perfect a rendering of the language, 
and even the accent, of the two speakers. It was 
also a revelation of the man himself, and he seemed 
to enjoy his power, and yet to suffer in the telling, 
without perhaps being fully conscious of it. The 
oars dropped from his hands and fell in against the 
thwarts of the boat, and he clasped his knees and 
looked up as he talked, not regarding at all his 
single, silent listener. 
“ When this is to be put upon the stage there shall 
be a garden and two personages.” 
“Also,” said I, “a jealous listener behind the 
scenes.” 
“ If you please,” he said promptly, and plunged at 
once into the dialogue he had overheard : 
“ ‘ Richard, thee may never again say the words 
which thee has said to me to-night. There is, thee 
knows, that between us which is builded up like as 
a wall to keep us the one from the other.’ 
“‘But men and women change, and a wall crum- THEE AND YOU. 
bles, or thee knows it may be made to. Years have 
gone away, and the man who stole from thee thy 
promise may be dead, for all thee knows.’ 
“ ‘ Hush ! thee causes me to see him, and though 
the dead rise not here, I am some way assured he is 
not yet dead, and may come and say to me “ ’Cilia,” 
—that is what he called me,—“ thee remembers the 
night and thy promise, and the lightning ail around 
us, and who took thee to shore from the wrecked 
packet on the Bulkhead Bar.” The life he saved I 
promised.’ 
“ ‘ Well, and thee knows By Heaven ! you 
well enough know who tortured the life he gave,— 
who robbed you,—who grew to be a mean sot, and 
went away and left you ; and to such you hold, with 
such keep faith, and wear out the sweetness of life 
waiting for him!’ 
“ * Richard!’ 
“ ‘ Have I also not waited, and given up for thee a 
life, a career,—little to give. I hope thee knows I 
feel that. Has thee no limit, Priscilla ? Thee knows 
—God help me! how well you know—I love you. 
The world, the old world of war and venture, pulls 
at me always. Will not you find it worth while to 
put out a hand of help ? Would it not be God taking 
your hand and putting it in mine ?’ 
“ ‘ Thee knows I love thee.’ 
“ ‘ And if the devil sent him back to curse you 
anew ’ 
“ ‘ Shame, Richard ! I would say, the Lord who 
layeth out for each his way, has ’pointed mine.’ 
'“And I?’ 114 
TIIEE AND YOU. 
“ ‘ Thee would continue in goodness, loving me 
as a sister hardly tried.’ 
“ ‘ By God ! I should go away to sea.’ 
“ ‘ Richard!’ 
“ Which is the last word of this scene,” added 
Schmidt. “You mayhap have about you punk and 
flint and steel.” 
I struck a light in silence, feeling moved by the 
story of the hurt hearts of these good people, and 
wondering at the man and his tale. Then I said, 
“ Was that all ?” 
“ Could you, if not a boy, ask me to say more of 
it? Light thy pipe and hold thy peace. Happy 
those who think not of women. I, who have for a 
hearth-side only the fire of an honest pipe ’Way 
there, my lad! pull us in and forget what a loose 
tongue and a soft summer night have given thee to 
hear from a silly old German who is grown weak of 
head and sore at soul. How the lights twinkle!” 
Had I felt any doubt at all of the truth of his nar- 
ration, I should have ceased to do so when, for the 
next few days, I watched Mr. Wholesome, and saw 
him, while off his guard, looking at Mistress White 
askance with a certain wistful sadness, as of a great 
honest dog somehow hurt and stricken. 
When an India ship came in, the great casks of 
madeira, southside, grape juice, bual, and what not 
were rolled away into the deep cellars of the India 
houses on the wharves, and left to purge their vinous 
consciences of such perilous stuff as was shaken up 
from their depths during the long homeward voyage. 
Then, when a couple of months had gone by, it was TIIEE AND YOU. 
115 
a custom for the merchant to summon a few old gen- 
tlemen to a solemn tasting of the wines old and new. 
Of this, Mr. Wholesome told me one day, and thought 
I had better remain to go through the cellars and drive 
out the bungs and drop in the testers, and the like. 
“ I will also stay with thee,” he added, “ knowing 
perhaps better than thee the prices.” 
I learned afterward that Wholesome always stayed 
on these occasions, and I had reason to be glad that 
I too was asked to stay, for, as it chanced, it gave me 
a further insight into the character of my friend the 
junior partner. 
I recall well the long cellar running far back under 
Water Street, with its rows of great casks, of which 
Wholesome and I started the bungs while awaiting 
the new-comers. Presently came slowly down the 
cellar-steps our senior partner in nankeen shanks, 
silk stockings, and pumps,—a frosty-visaged old 
man, with a nose which had fully earned the right to 
be called bottle. Behind him limped our old porter 
in a blue check apron. He went round the cellar, 
and at every second cask, having lighted a candle, 
he held it upside down until the grease had fallen 
thick on the cask, and then turning the candle stuck 
it fast in its little pile of tallow, so that by and by 
the cellar was pretty well lighted. Presently, in 
groups or singly, came old and middle-aged gentle- 
men, and with the last our friend Schmidt, who wan- 
dered off to a corner and sat on a barrel-head watch- 
ing the effects of the mingling of daylight and can- 
dlelight, and amused in his quiet way at the scene 
and the intense interest of the chief actors in it, 116 
THEE AND YOU. 
which, like other things he did not comprehend, had 
for him the charm of oddness. I went over and 
stood by him while the porter dropped the tester- 
glass into the cool depths of cask after cask, and 
solemn counsel was held and grave decisions reached. 
I was enchanted with one meagre, little old gentle- 
man of frail and refined figure, who bent over his 
wine with closed eyes, as if to shut out all the sense- 
impressions he did not need, while the rest waited to 
hear what he had to say. 
“ Needs a milk fining,” muttered the old gentle- 
man, with eyes shut as if in prayer. 
“ Wants its back broke with a good lot of egg- 
shell,” said a short, stout man with a snuff-colored 
coat, the collar of which came well up the back of 
his head. 
“Ach!” murmured Schmidt. “The back to be 
hurt with eggshell! What will he say with that ?” 
“Pshaw!” said a third: “give it a little rest, and 
then the white of an egg to every five gallons. Is it 
bual ?” 
“ Is it gruel ?” said our senior sarcastically. 
“ Wants age. A good wine for one’s grandchil- 
dren,” murmured my old friend with shut eyes. 
“ What is it he calls gruel ?” whispered Schmidt. 
“ How nice is a picture he makes when he shuts his 
eyes and the light of the candle comes through the 
wine, all bright ruby, in the dark here! And ah, 
what is that?” for Wholesome, who had been taking 
his wine in a kindly way, and having his say with 
that sense of being always sure which an old taster 
affects, glancing out of one of the little barred cellar- THEE AND YOU. 
windows which looked out over the wharf, said ab- 
ruptly, “ Ha ! ha! that won’t do !” 
Turning, I saw under the broad-brimmed hat in 
the clear gray eyes a sudden sparkle of excitement 
as he ran hastily up the cellar-stairs. Seeing that 
something unusual was afloat, I followed him quickly 
out on to the wharf, where presently the cause of 
his movement was made plain. 
Beside the wharf was a large ship, with two planks 
running down from her decks to the wharf. Just at 
the top of the farther one from us a large black- 
haired, swarthy man was brutally kicking an aged 
negro, who was hastily moving downward, clinging 
to the hand-rail. Colored folks were then apt to be 
old servants,—that is to say, friends,—and this was 
our pensioned porter, old Tom. I was close behind 
Wholesome at the door of the counting-house. I 
am almost sure he said “ Damnation!” At all events, 
he threw down his hat, and in a moment was away 
up the nearer plank to the ship’s deck, followed by 
me. Meanwhile, however, the black and his pur- 
suer had reached the wharf, where the negro, stum- 
bling and still clinging to the rail, was seized by the 
man who had struck him. In the short struggle 
which ensued the plank was pulled away from the 
ship’s side, and fell just as Wholesome was about to 
move down it. He uttered an oath, caught at a loose 
rope which hung from a yard, tried it to see if it was 
fast, went up it hand over hand a few feet, set a foot 
on the bulwarks, and swung himself fiercely back 
across the ship, and then, with the force thus gained, 
flew far in air above the wharf, and dropping lightly 118 
THEE AND YOU. 
on to a pile of hogsheads, leapt without a word to 
the ground, and struck out with easy power at the 
man he sought, who fell as if a butcher’s mallet had 
stunned him,—fell, and lay as one dead. The whole 
action would have been amazing in any man, but to 
see a Quaker thus suddenly shed his false skin and 
come out the true man he was, was altogether be- 
wildering,—the more so for the easy grace with 
which the feat was done. Everybody ran forward, 
while Wholesome stood, a strange picture, his eyes 
wide open and his pupils dilated, his face flushed and 
lips a little apart, showing his set white teeth while 
he awaited his foe. Then, as the man rallied and sat 
up, staring wildly, Wholesome ran forward and looked 
at him, waving the crowd aside. In a moment, as 
the man rose still bewildered, his gaze fell on Whole- 
some, and, growing suddenly white, he sat down on 
a bundle of staves, saying faintly, “ Take him away! 
Don’t let him come near!” 
“ Coward!” said I; “ one might have guessed that.” 
“ There is to him,” said Schmidt at my elbow, 
“ some great mortal fear; the soul is struck.” 
“Yes,” said Wholesome, “the soul is struck. 
Some one help him,”—for the man had fallen over 
in something like a fit,—and so saying strode away, 
thoughtful and disturbed in face, as one who had 
seen a ghost. 
As he entered the counting-house through the 
group of dignified old merchants, who had come out 
to see what it all meant, one of them said, “ Pretty 
well for a Quaker, Friend Richard !” 
Wholesome did not seem to hear him, but walked THEE AND YOU. 
in, drank a glass of wine which stood on a table, and 
sat down silently. 
“ Not the first feat of that kind he has done,” said 
the elder of the wine-tasters. 
“ No,” said a sea-captain near by. “ He boarded 
the Penelope in that fashion during the war, and as 
he lit on her deck cleared a space with his cutlass 
till the boarding-party joined him.” 
“ With his cutlass ?” said I. “ Then he was not 
always a Quaker?” 
“ No,” said our senior; “ they don’t learn these 
gymnastics at Fourth and Arch, though perchance 
the overseers may have a word to say about it.” 
“ Quaker or not,” said the wine-taster, “ I wish any 
of you had legs as good or a heart as sound. Very 
good body, not too old, and none the worse for a 
Quaker fining.” 
“That’s the longest sentence I ever heard Wilton 
speak,” said a young fellow aside to me; “ and, by 
Jove ! he is right.” 
I went back into the counting-house and was 
struck with the grim sadness of face of our junior 
partner. He had taken up a paper and affected to be 
reading, but, as I saw, was staring into space. Our 
senior said something to him about Old Tom, but he 
answered in an absent way, as one who half hears or 
half heeds. In a few moments he looked up at the 
clock, which was on the stroke of twelve, and seeing 
me ready, hat in hand, to return home for our one- 
o’clock dinner, he gathered himself up, as it were, 
iimb by limb, and taking his wide-brimmed hat 
brushed it absently with his sleeve. Then he looked THEE AND YOU. 
120 
at it a moment with a half smile, put it on decisively 
and went out and away up Arch Street with swifter 
and swifter strides. By and by he said, “You do 
not walk as well as usual.” 
“ But,” said I, “ no one could keep up with you.” 
“ Do not try to; leave a sore man to nurse his 
hurts. I suppose you saw my folly on the wharf,— 
saw how I forgot myself?” 
“ Ach!” said Schmidt, who had toiled after us hot 
and red, and who now slipped his quaint form in be- 
tween us; “Ach! ‘ You forgot yourself.’ This say 
you ? I do think you did remember your true self 
for a time this morning.” 
“Hush! I am a man ashamed. Let us talk no 
more of it. I have ill kept my faith,” returned 
Wholesome, impatiently. 
“ You may believe God doth not honor an honest 
man,” said Schmidt; “ which is perhaps a God 
Quaker, not the God I see to myself.” 
I had so far kept my peace, noting the bitter self- 
reproach of Wholesome, and having a lad’s shyness 
before an older man’s calamity; but now I said in- 
dignantly, “ If it be Friends’ creed to see the poor 
and old and feeble hurt without raising a hand, let 
us pray to be saved from such religion.” 
“ But,” said Wholesome, “ I should have spoken 
to him in kindness first. Now I have only made of 
him a worse beast, and taught him more hatred. 
And he of all men!” 
“ There is much salvation in some mistakes,” said 
Schmidt, smiling. 
Just then we were stopped by two middle-aged THEE AND YOU. 
Friends in drab of orthodox tint, from which now- 
adays Friends have much fallen away into gay 
browns. They asked a question or two about an 
insurance on one of our ships; and then the elder 
said, “ Thy hand seems bleeding, Friend Richard 
which was true; he had cut his knuckles on his op- 
ponent’s teeth, and around them had hastily wrapped 
a handkerchief which showed stains of blood here 
and there. 
“ Ach !” said Schmidt, hastening to save his friend 
annoyance. “ He ran against something. And how 
late is it! Let us go.” 
But Wholesome, who would have no man lie ever 
so little for his benefit, said quietly, “ I hurt it knock- 
ing a man downand now for the first time to-day 
I observed the old amused look steal over his hand- 
some face and set it a-twitching with some sense of 
humor as he saw the shock which went over the 
faces of the two elders when we bade them good- 
morning and turned away. 
Wholesome walked on quickly, and as it seemed 
plain that he would be alone, we dropped behind. 
“ What is all this ?” said I. “ Does a man grieve 
thus because he chastises a scoundrel ?” 
“ No,” said Schmidt. “ The Friend Wholesome 
was, as you may never yet know, an officer of the 
navy, and when your war being done he comes here, 
there is a beautiful woman whom he must fall to 
loving, and this with some men being a grave disor- 
der, he must go and spoil a good natural man with 
the clothes of a Quaker, seeing that what the woman 
did was good in his sight.” 122 
THEE AND YOU. 
“ But,” said I, “ I don’t understand.” 
“ No,” said he; “ yet you have read of Eve and 
Adam. Sometimes they give us good apples and 
sometimes bad. This was a russet, as it were, and at 
times the apple disagrees with him for that with the 
new apple he got not a new stomach.” 
I laughed a little, but said, “ This is not all. There 
was something between him and the man he struck 
which we do not yet know. Did you see him ?” 
“ Yes, and before this,—last week some time in the 
market-place. He was looking at Old Dinah’s tub 
of white lilies when I noticed him, and to me came 
a curious thinking of how he was so unlike them, 
many people having for me flower-likeness, and this 
man, being of a yellow swarthiness and squat- 
browed, minded me soon of the toadstool you call a 
corpse-light.” 
“ Perhaps we shall know some time; but here is 
home, and will he speak of it to Mistress White, do 
you think ?” 
“ Not ever, I suppose,” said Schmidt; and we went 
in. 
The sight we saw troubled me. In the little back 
parlor, at a round mahogany table with scrolled 
edges and claw toes sat facing the light Mistress 
White. She was clad in a gray silk with tight 
sleeves, and her profusion of rich chestnut hair, with 
its wilful curliness that forbade it to be smooth on 
her temples, was coiled in a great knot at the back 
of her head. Its double tints and strange change- 
fulness, and the smooth creamy cheeks with their 
moving islets of roses that would come and go at a THEE AND YOU. 
123 
word, were pretty protests of Nature, I used to 
think, against the demure tints of her pearl-gray 
silken gown. She was looking out into the garden, 
quite heedless of the older dame, who sat as her 
wont was between the windows, and chirruped now 
and then, mechanically, “ Has thee a four-leaved 
clover?” As I learned some time after, one of our 
older clerks, perhaps with a little malice of self-com- 
fort at the fall of his seniors principles, had, on 
coming home, told her laughingly all the story of 
the morning. Perhaps one should be a woman and 
a Friend to enter into her feelings. She was tied by 
a promise and by a sense of personal pledge to a 
low and disgraced man, and then coming to love an- 
other despite herself she had grown greatly to honor 
him. She might reason as she would that only a 
sense of right and a yearning for the fulness of a right- 
eous life had made him give up his profession and 
fellows, and turn aside to follow the harder creed of 
Fox, but she well knew with a woman’s keenness of 
view that she herself had gone for something in this 
change; and now, as sometimes before, she re- 
proached herself with his failures. As we came in 
she hastily dried her eyes and went out of the room. 
At dinner little was said, but in the afternoon there 
was a scene of which I came to know all a good 
while later. 
Some of us had gone back to the afternoon work 
when Mr. Wholesome, who had lingered behind, 
strayed thoughtfully into the little back garden. 
There under a thin-leaved apricot tree sat Mistress 
White, very pretty, with her long fair fingers clasped THEE AND YOU. 
over a book which lay face down on her lap. Pres- 
ently she was aware of Richard Wholesome walking 
to and fro and smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, 
then, as yet in England, called a churchwarden. 
These were two more than commonly good-looking 
persons, come of sturdy English stock, fined down 
by that in this climate which has taken the coarse- 
ness of line and feature out of so many of our 
broods, and has made more than one English painter 
regret that the Vandyke faces had crossed the ocean 
to return no more. 
Schmidt and I looked out a moment into the long 
vista where, between the rose-boughs bending from 
either wall under the apricot, we could see the gray 
silvery shimmer of the woman’s dress, and beyond 
it, passing to and fro, the broad shoulders of the ex- 
captain. 
“ Come,” I said, “ walk down with me to the 
wharf.” 
“Yet leave me,” he returned. “I shall wisely do 
to sit here on the step over the council-fire of my pipe. 
Besides, when there are not markets and flowers, 
and only a straight-down, early-afternoon sun, I 
shall find it a more noble usage of time to see of my 
drama another scene. The actors are good and 
he pointed with his pipe-stem down to the garden. 
“ And this,” he said, “ is the mute chorus of the 
play,” indicating a kitten which had made prey of 
the grand-dame’s ball of worsted, and was rolling it 
here and there with delight. 
“ But,” I answered, “ it is not right or decent to 
spy upon others’ actions.” THEE AND YOU. 
125 
“For right!” he said. “Ach! what I find right 
to me is my right; and for decent, I understand you 
not. But if I tell you what is true, I find my pleas- 
ure to sit here and see the maiden when at times the 
winds pull up the curtain of the leaves.” 
“ Well! well!” said I, for most of the time he was 
not altogether plain as to what he meant, as when he 
spoke of the cat as a chorus. “ Well! well! you 
will go out with me on the water at sundown ?” 
“ That may be,” he answered ; and I went away. 
I have observed since then, in the long life I have 
lived, that the passion called love, when it is a hope- 
less one, acts on men as ferments do on fluids after 
their kind,—turning some to honest wine and some to 
vinegar. With our stout little German all trials seemed 
to be of the former use, so that he took no ill from 
those hurts and bruises which leave other men sore 
and tender. Indeed, he talked of Mistress White to 
me, or even to Wholesome, whom he much embar- 
rassed, in a calm, half-amused way, as of a venture 
which he had made, and, having failed, found it pleas- 
ant to look back upon as an experience not altogether 
to be regretted. We none of us knew until much 
later that it was more than a mere fancy for a woman 
who was altogether so sweet and winsome that no man 
needed an excuse for loving her. When by and by I 
also came to love a good woman, I used to try myself 
by the measure of this man’s lack of self-love, and won- 
der how he could have seen with good-will the woman 
he cared for come to like another man better. This 
utter sweetness of soul has ever been to me a riddle. 
An hour passed by, when Schmidt heard a footfall 126 
THEE AND YOU. 
in the room behind him, and rising saw an old mem- 
ber of the Society of Friends who came at times to 
our house, and was indeed trustee of a small estate 
which belonged to Mistress White. Nicholas Old- 
mixon was an overseer in the Fourth Street meeting, 
and much looked up to among Friends as a prompt 
and vigilant guardian of their discipline. Perhaps 
he would have been surprised to be told that he had 
that in his nature which made the post of official 
fault-finder agreeable; but so it was, I fancy, and he 
was here on such an errand. The asceticism of 
Friends in those days, and the extent to which Mr. 
Oldmixon, like the more strict of his sect, carried 
his views as to gravity of manner and the absence 
of color in dress and furniture, were especially hate- 
ful to Schmidt, who lived and was happy in a region 
of color and sentiment and gayety. Both, I doubt 
not, were good men, but each was by nature and 
training altogether unable to sympathize with the 
other. 
"Good-evening!” said Schmidt, keeping his seat 
in the low window-sill. 
Mr. Oldmixon returned, “Thee is well, I trust?” 
“Ach! with such a sun and the last roses, which 
seem the most sweet, and these most lovely of fall- 
flowers, and a good book and a pipe,” said Schmidt, 
“ who will not be well ? Have you the honest bless- 
ing of being a smoker?” 
“ Nay,” said the Quaker, with evident guarding of 
his words. “ Thee will not take it amiss should I 
say it is a vain waste of time ?” 
“ But,” answered Schmidt, “ time hath many uses. THEE AND YOU. 
The one is to be wasted; and this a pipe mightily 
helps. I did think once, when I went to meeting, 
how much more solemn it would be for each man to 
have a pipe to excuse his silence.” 
“ Thee jests idly, I fear,” said the Friend, coloring, 
and evidently holding himself in check. “ Is that 
friend Wholesome in the garden ? I have need to 
see him.” 
“Yea,” said Schmidt, with a broad smile, “he is 
yonder under a tree, like Adam in the garden. Let 
us take a peep at Paradise.” 
Mr. Oldmixon held his peace, and walked quietly 
out of the window and down the gravelled path. 
There were some who surmised that his years and 
his remembrance of the three wives he had outlived 
did not altogether suffice to put away from him a 
strong sentiment of the sweetness of his ward. Per- 
haps it was this notion which lit up with mirth the 
ruddy face of the German as he walked down the 
garden behind the slim ascetic figure of the overseer 
of meeting in his broad hat and drab clothes. On 
the way the German plucked a dozen scarlet roses, a 
late geranium or two, and a few leaves of motley 
Poinsetta. 
Wholesome paused a moment to greet the new- 
comer quietly, and straightway betook himself ab- 
sently to his walk again to and fro across the garden. 
Mistress White would have had the old overseer 
take her seat, but this he would not do. He stood 
a moment near her, as if irresolute, while Schmidt 
threw himself down on the sward, and, half turning 
over, tossed roses into the gray lap of Mistress 128 
THEE AND YOU. 
White, saying, “ How prettily the God of heaven has 
dressed them !” 
Mistress White took up the flowers, not answering 
the challenge, but glancing under her long lashes at 
the ex-captain, to whom presently the overseer turned, 
saying, “ Would thee give me a word or two with thee 
by ourselves, Richard ?” 
“ There are none in the parlor,” said Priscilla, “ if 
thee will talk there.” 
“ If,” said Wholesome, “ it be of business, let it 
wait till to-morrow, and I will call upon thee: I am 
not altogether myself to-day.” 
“ Nay,” said Nicholas, gathering himself up a little, 
“ thee must know theeself that I would not come to 
thee here for business: thee knows my exactness in 
such matters.” 
“ And for what, then, are you come ?” said Whole- 
some, with unusual abruptness. 
“ For speech of that in thy conduct which were 
better, as between an elder Friend and a younger, 
to be talked over alone,” said Mr. Oldmixon, se- 
verely. 
Now, Wholesome, though disgusted by his lack 
of power to keep the silent pledges he had given 
when he entered the Society of Friends, was not 
dissatisfied with his conduct as judged by his own 
standard of right. Moreover, like many warm- 
hearted people, he was quick of temper, as we have 
seen. His face flushed, and he paused beside the 
overseer: “ There are none here who do not know 
most of what passed this morning; but as you do 
not know all, let me advise you to hold your peace TIIEE AND YOU. 
and go your ways, and leave me to such reproach as 
God may send me.” 
“ If that God send thee any,” muttered Schmidt. 
But Nicholas Oldmixon was like a war-horse 
smelling the battle afar off, and anything like resist- 
ance to an overseer in the way of duty roused him 
into the sternness which by no means belonged to 
the office, but rather to the man. “ If,” he said, 
“ any in membership with us do countenance or pro- 
mote tumults, they shall be dealt with as disorderly 
persons. Wherefore did thee give way to rash vio- 
lence this morning?” 
Priscilla grew pale. “ I think,” she said, “ Friend 
Nicholas, thee forgets the Christian courtesy of our 
people one to another. Let it rest a while; friend 
Richard may come to think better of it by and by.” 
“And that I trust he may never,” muttered Schmidt. 
But the overseer was not to be stayed. “ Thee 
would do better to mind the things of thy house and 
leave us,” he said. “ The ways of this young man 
have been more than once a scandal, and are like to 
come before the meeting to be dealt with.” 
“ Sir,” returned Wholesome, approaching him and 
quite forgetting his plain speech to make it plainer, 
“ your manners do little credit to your age or your 
place. Listen: I told you to speak no more of this 
matter;” and he seized him by the lappel of his coat 
and drew him aside a few paces. “ For your own sake, 
I mean. Let it die out, with no more of talk or 
nonsense.” 
“For my sake!” exclaimed the overseer; “and 
why? Most surely thee forgets theeself.” THEE AND YOU. 
130 
“ For your own sake,” said Wholesome, drawing 
him still farther away, and bending toward him, so 
that his words were lost to Schmidt and Priscilla, 
“ and for your son John’s. It was he whom I struck 
to-day.” 
Mr. Oldmixon grew white and staggered as if 
stricken. “ Why did thee not come and tell me ?” 
he said. “ It had been kinder; and where is that 
unhappy man ?” 
“ I do not know,” returned Wholesome. 
“ Nevertheless, be it he or another, thee was in the 
wrong, and I have done my duty. And is my un- 
happy son yet alive ?” and so saying, he turned away, 
and without other words walked through the house 
with uncertain steps and went down the street, while 
Wholesome, with softened face, watched him from 
the doorstep. Then he went back quietly into the 
garden, and turning to Schmidt, said, “ Will you 
oblige me by leaving me with Mistress White? I 
will explain to thee by and by.” 
Schmidt looked up surprised, but seeing how pale 
and stern he looked, rose and went into the house. 
The woman turned expectant. 
“ Priscilla, the time has come when thee must 
choose between me and him.” 
“ He has come back ? I always knew he would 
come.” 
“Yes, he has come back; I saw him to-day,” said 
Wholesome, “and the John Oldmixon of to-day is 
more than ever cruel and brutal. Will thee trust me 
to make thee believe that?” 
“ I believe thee,” she returned; “ but because he is THEE AND YOU. 
this and worse, shall I forget my word or turn aside 
from that which, if bitter for me, may save his soul 
alive ?” 
“ And yet you love me ?” 
“ Have I not said so ?” she murmured, with a half 
smile. 
The young man came closer and seized both hands 
in his: “ Will it not be a greater sin, loving me, to 
marry him ?” 
“ But he may never ask me, and then I shall wait, 
for I had better die fit in soul to be thy wife than 
come to thee unworthy of a good man’s love.” 
He dropped her hands and moved slowly away, 
she watching him with full eyes. Then he turned and 
said, “But should he fall—fall as he must—and come 
to be what his life will surely make him, a felon whom 
no woman could marry ” 
“ Thee makes duty hard for me, Richard,” she 
answered. “ Do not make me think thee cruel. 
When in God’s good time he shall send me back the 
words of promise I wrote when he went away a dis- 
graced man, to whom, nevertheless, I owed my life, 
then Oh, Richard, I love thee! Do not hurt 
me. Pray for me and him.” 
“ God help us!” he said. “ We have great need to 
be helpedand suddenly leaning over he kissed her 
forehead for the first time, and went away up the gar- 
den and into the house. 
The soft September days were past, and the crisp 
October freshness was with us before my little drama 
went a step further. Wholesome had got into a 
fashion of seeking loneliness, and thus Schmidt and 132 
THEE AND YOU. 
I were more than ever thrown together. So it came 
that on a Saturday,—which to me, a somewhat priv- 
ileged person in the counting-house, was always a 
half-holiday,—and on Sunday afternoon, if I went 
not to Christ Church, we were wont to wander at 
will about the lovely country along the Schuylkill or 
up the Wissahickon talking of many things. Nor 
did Schmidt ever tire of the crowded market-place, 
and although in our walks he talked of what he saw 
there and elsewhere as with a child’s pleasure in his 
own thoughts and words, they never wearied me. 
To many he was more odd than pleasant, because on 
all subjects and at all times he turned himself inside 
out, with little regard to what he had to say or who 
heard him. I recall well some of our morning 
strolls. 
“ Let us walk serenely,” he said. (I suppose he 
meant slowly enough to think.) “ The Wholesome 
goes before, and with what a liberal strength he 
walks ! How beautiful to see! As if he would give 
away his legs when he walks, so much is there of 
strength he needs not in the Quaker life.” 
“ I cannot see yet,” I said, “ why he must turn 
Quaker. I would have trusted that man with untold 
gold or a woman’s honor the first half-hour he talked; 
to me.” 
“ I like not that sect,” returned Schmidt. “ It does 
make nicer women than men. Should there be two 
religions for the two sexes ? and do you think ever 
Penn and Mr. Fox did take among the women a 
vote when they went to the queerness of robe which 
is theirs ?” THEE AND YOU. 
133 
“ I have heard,” I said, “ that it is only a continu- 
ance of the plainer fashions of their own time.” 
“ And why,” he said, “ should to-day wear the 
garments of a century away? And does not Nature 
mock their foolish customs ? Even now behold how 
pretty a sight is this.” And he paused before a stall 
where the ripe Spanish watermelons split into halves 
showed their gorgeous red. “ How spendthrift is 
Nature of her tints! and in the peach-time there is a 
pleasure to eat of this scarlet! I thought it so pretty 
last week when we dined with Mr. Wilton,—the red 
melons on the shining brown mahogany, and the 
gray-greens of the apples, and the Heath peaches, 
soft and rosy, with the ruby of the madeira wine. 
How charming a thing is a table after dinner what 
few do ever think !” 
“ Stop !” I said : “ look there !” A little way be- 
fore us, in simple tints of gray serge, and with rebel 
curls peeping out under her stiff, ugly silk bonnet, 
Priscilla was moving down the market. She was 
busy with her daily marketing, and behind or beside 
her was our old brown Nancy, trim and cleanly, with 
her half-filled basket. A few steps in the rear was a 
man who paused and held back as she stopped, and 
then went on. As I caught his side face and hungry 
eyes, and a certain hyena-like swiftness of impatient 
movement, I knew him for the man whom Whole- 
some had struck on the wharf a few weeks before. 
Now he was clad in the height of the fashion, with 
striped silken hose, tight nankeen breeches, a brown 
swallow-tailed coat, and an ample cambric cravat. 
The bright brass buttons were new, the beaver hat, THEE AND YOU. 
134 
scroll-rimmed and broad on top, was faultlessly- 
brushed. 
“ Ach !” said Schmidt, “a devil which is handsome 
for little of good! The plainer parent must have 
been made to be liberal of money to plume the fine 
bird.” 
Just then the man looked round, and, Whole- 
some being gone on ahead, and seeing no one he 
knew, he paused beside Priscilla and spoke to her. 
What he said we did not hear. She turned, a little 
startled, and dropped her purse. The man set his 
foot on it, and stooping as if to look for it, deftly 
picked it up and slipped it into his pocket. 
I started forward. 
“ Nay,” said Schmidt, “ the audience shall not 
spoil the play. Wait.” 
Her face grew pale, and I at least thought she saw 
but would not notice the mean theft. A few brief 
words passed between them. He asked something, 
and she hesitated, I thought. Then a few more 
words, and as we went by I heard her say something 
about the afternoon, and then with a word more he 
turned and left her. 
“ Also,” said Schmidt, “ the plot thickens. How 
handsome and foul he is, with that visage clean 
shaven and the nose of hawk! We shall see when 
all the performers are come upon the stage. Good- 
by! I go to see if further he will amuse me.” 
For my part, bewildered at Priscilla’s knowledge 
of this ruffian, astonished at his gay change of dress, 
and recalling his emotion on the wharf, I also began 
to feel an interest in the drama going on about me. THEE AND YOU. 
After dinner next day, when her guests save myself 
Lad gone away to their several tasks, Mistress Pris- 
cilla in the garden grew busy among the roses with 
the dead leaves and the bugs. A very pretty picture 
she made, and if I had been a painter it is thus I should 
have wished to paint her. Against the wall of dark- 
red brick the long bending rose-branches made a bri- 
ery hedge of green and leafy curves, flecked here and 
there with roses red, white, and pink; and against 
this background there was the charming outline of 
Priscilla in ashen-tinted silk, with a fine cambric hand- 
kerchief about her throat, and a paler silk kerchief 
pinned away from the neck on the shoulders, much as 
Friends wear them still. A frail pretence of a cap 
there was also, and wicked double tints of hair the 
color of chestnuts and dead leaves and buttonwood 
bark and such other pretty uncertain tints as have 
stored away a wealth of summer sun. Now and then 
she was up on tiptoe to pluck a rose or break off a 
dead stem, and then the full ripe curves of her figure 
were charming to see. And so, like a gray butterfly, 
she flitted round the garden-wall, and presently, quite 
in a natural way, came upon me demurely reading. 
“ Thee should be up and away to thy business, 
friend loiterer,” she said. 
“ I think I shall stay at home this afternoon,” I 
answered, giving no reason. 
I saw she looked troubled, but in a moment she 
added, “ Not if I wanted thee to do an errand for me 
in Front Street.” 
“ I have a bone in my foot,” said I, recalling one 
of our boy excuses for laziness. 
135 136 
THEE AND YOU. 
“ But I would pay thee with a rose and some 
thanks,” she returned, laughing. 
“ No doubt that would pay some folks, but I am 
not to be bribed. If I were older it might answer; 
but as I am only a boy, I may tell you how pretty 
you look among the roses. And I think you are 
dressed for company this afternoon.” 
“ Thee is a very saucy lad,” she replied, half 
troubled, half smiling, “and—and—I must tell thee, 
I suppose, that I am looking for a friend to come 
on a business of mine, and I shall like thee better 
if thee will go away to-day, because ” 
“ Because why ?” I said. 
“ Because I ask thee to go.” 
At this moment, as I rose to obey her, laughing 
and saying, “ But will you not tell me his name ?” 
Schmidt appeared in the window. 
“ Ah !” said he, smiling his pleased, quiet smile, 
which rarely grew into noisy mirth, “ we masquerade 
of this pleasant afternoon as a queen of pearls. You 
would have lacked some one to admire you were I 
not come back so good luckily now.” 
Priscilla blushed, but said quickly, “This lazy boy 
has been saying much the same things. Ah!” and 
she looked worried of a sudden as the knocker 
sounded. “ There !” she exclaimed, “ some one is 
coming to see me—on business. Please to leave me 
the parlor.” 
“ Ah, well!” said Schmidt, smiling, “ we will go 
and he turned to enter the house. 
“ But not that way,” she said hastily. “ I—I am 
in trouble: I do not want you to see— I mean— THEE AND YOU. 
please to go out by the garden-gate: I will explain 
another time.” 
Schmidt looked surprised, but, taking my arm, went 
without more words down the garden, saying in my 
ear, in his queer jerky way, “ Hast thou ever seen 
what a smear the slimy slug will make on the rose- 
leaf?” 
I said, “ I do not understand.” 
“ But God does, my lad; and when thy rose comes, 
pray that there be no vile slugs afoot.” 
From that evening we all noticed a sad change in 
Priscilla. The gay sallies and coquetry which had 
defied all bonds were gone, and she went about her 
needed household work silent, preoccupied, and pale. 
The greatest charm of this woman was in her pretty 
little revolts against Quaker ways, and her endless 
sympathy with everybody’s tastes and pursuits; but 
now she was utterly changed, until all of us who loved 
her, as friend or as more than friend, began to notice 
her sadness and to question among ourselves as to 
its cause. 
It soon grew to be known among us that in the 
afternoons Priscilla had meetings at home with a 
stranger, and we observed also that Wholesome had 
become silent and abstracted. This was a source 
of some amusement to our little company of India 
clerks and supercargoes, who laid it to the fact that 
Wholesome’s sad conduct having been brought to 
the consideration of the monthly meeting, the over- 
seers had waited upon him and wasted much time in 
fruitless admonitions, the ex-captain proving quite 
unable to see that he had acted otherwise than be- 
137 THEE AND YOU. 
came a God-fearing man. I suspect this treason to 
the creed of Friends sat easy on him, and graver by 
far were the other questions which beset him on 
every side. 
At last, one afternoon early in October, Wholesome 
had started a little late for the counting-house, when, 
as we passed down Arch Street near Fifth, he suddenly 
stopped and said, “ I must go back. This thing has 
gone on long enough. A man must put his hand in 
the business.” 
“ What is it?” said I, surprised at the sternness of 
his manner. 
“ Do you see that person?” he replied, pointing to 
a fashionably-dressed gentleman on the far side of 
the way, going up the street with a certain leisurely 
swagger. It was the man he had struck on the 
wharf, and whom I had seen in the market-place. 
I said, “ Yes, I see him. What do you mean to 
do ?” 
“ No matter. I am going home: I have stood this 
long enough.” 
“ But what do you mean to do?” 
“ Kill him,” said Wholesome, quietly. 
I was at once shocked, alarmed, and a little amused, 
it seemed so incongruous a threat from a man in drab 
and broad-brim. But I had the sense to try to dis- 
suade him from returning as we stood under the 
lindens, he cool and quiet, I anxious and troubled, 
as any man so young would have been. At last he 
broke away, saying, “ I am going home. You need 
not come. I do not want you.” 
“ If you go back,” I said, “ I go also.” THEE AND YOU. 
139 
“ As you please,” he returned ; and we went swiftly 
homeward, without a word on either side. 
Since then I have seen on the stage many and 
curious scenes, but none more dramatic than that on 
which the curtain rose at four o’clock on this pleas- 
ant October evening. 
Wholesome, pale, cold-visaged, handsome, opened 
the door as if his being there were a matter of course, 
and walked into the back parlor. Between the win- 
dows, as usual, sat the older dame, of no more mortal 
consequence than a clock. On the window-step we 
saw Priscilla, and as we passed out of the nearer 
window into the garden, I observed our dark-visaged 
friend leaning against the window-jamb and talking 
earnestly to her. 
She rose up, a little flurried and anxious, saying, 
“ Perhaps thee remembers John Oldmixon, Richard? 
And these are Richard Wholesome and a new friend, 
Henry Shelburne.” 
As she spoke she scanned furtively and with a 
certain uneasiness the two strongly-contrasted faces. 
Neither man put out his hand, but Wholesome said, 
“Yes, I remember him, and well enough. He has 
not changed, I thinkand as he ended, his glance 
rose to meet the darker eyes of his foe. If will to 
hurt had been power to slay with the look which 
followed this silent challenge, there would have been 
a dead man at Priscilla’s feet. John Oldmixon must 
have been well used to the eye of hate. 
“ Nay,” he said, “ we have shifted parts like men 
in a play I once saw. I went away a Quaker, and 
am come back a man of the world: you went away THEE AND YOU. 
a gay midshipman, and here you are a Friend in 
drab.” 
“ Yes, a Friend,” said Priscilla, quickly, lifting her 
eyes to Wholesome’s with mute pleading in their 
fulness, 
“ I suppose,” said I, desirous to turn the talk from 
what seemed to me dangerous ground,—“ I suppose 
there is no rule about Friends’ dress, is there ? Who 
sets the fashions for Friends ?” 
“There are none,” she said, smiling. “Like the 
flowers of the field and the trees, our dress is ever 
the same.” 
“Ah,” said Wholesome, who was getting his pas- 
sion well in hand, “ I think thee will see some new 
fall patterns in the leaves overhead, Priscilla. Thee 
has given us a weak example for Friends.” 
“ It has little beauty,” said Oldmixon, “ this Friends’ 
dress, but it may have its use, for all that. For in- 
stance, no one would insult or strike a man in drab, 
however great the provocation he might give. It is 
as good as chain-armor.” 
“ Why not ?” replied Wholesome, flushing. “ A 
man may be a man, whatever his garb, and I, for one, 
should feel as free to chastise a scoundrel to-day as 
ten years ago, and as ready to answer him.” 
“ Oh, Richard ! Richard ! thee forgets !” 
“True,” he said, “I did. I forgot you. Pardon 
me!” 
“ It is so easy to brag in drab,” returned Oldmixon. 
“ That’s another of its uses. But that concerns no 
one here. Shall I see you to-morrow, Priscilla ?” 
The last insult quieted Wholesome, as such things Til EE AND YOU 
do quiet some men. He made no answer, but smiled 
and went away down the garden whistling,—a thing 
I had never heard him do before,—while Priscilla 
said in a half whisper, “ No, not to-morrow. How 
can thee find it pleasing to annoy my friends? Does 
thee think that a thing I should like?” 
“ He is not my friend,” replied the man, brutally, 
and losing his temper as easily with the woman as 
he had kept it with the man. “ Folks who masquer- 
ade in Quaker clothes need to be taught lessons 
sometimes.” 
“ Thee forgets thyself,” said Priscilla. “ Think a 
little, and take back thee words.” 
“ Not I,” said he, sneeringly. “ A fellow like that 
wants a teacher at times.” 
Priscilla was a woman, and the man thus jeered at 
was out of earshot, and she loved him ; so for once 
her creed and temper alike failed her, and she said 
proudly, “ I hear it is thee rather that has been to 
school to him, and did not like thee lesson.” 
“ By Heaven !” said he, angrily, “ you are no better 
Quaker than he! I hope my wife will have better 
manners.” He flushed with shame and with wrath 
at thus coming to learn that Priscilla knew of his 
humiliation. “ Good-by!” he said, and turned to 
leave. 
But Priscilla was herself again. “ I beg of thee do 
not go in anger,” she said. “ I was wrong: pardon 
me!” 
“ Not I,” he returned. “ Think a little next time 
before you speak.” 
“John!” she said, reproachfully, but he was gone. 142 
THEE AND YOU. 
As he went I saw Wholesome pass quietly out of 
the garden-gate, and surmising that he had gone to 
meet Oldmixon, and not knowing what might come 
of it, I made some excuse, and leaving Priscilla pale 
and shaken, I followed by the front door. 
I was right. As Oldmixon crossed Second Street, 
I walking behind him, Wholesome came from a 
side lane and touched him on the shoulder. There 
was no woman now, and both men came out in their 
true colors. 
Oldmixon paused. He looked uneasy, and, I 
thought, scared. “ What do you want ?” he said. 
Wholesome turned to me: “ This is no business 
of yours : leave us, Shelburne.” 
“ Not now,” I said. 
“ Well, as you please ; but step out of earshot. I 
have something to say to this man which concerns 
only him and me.” 
Upon this I walked away, but as their voices rose 
I caught enough to surprise me. 
Wholesome spoke to him quietly for several min- 
utes. Then Oldmixon replied aloud, “And if I say 
no?” 
“ Then,” said Wholesome, also raising his voice, 
“ I will tell her all.” 
“ And what good will it do ?” answered the other, 
angrily. “ Do you think I will release her ? and do 
you think she will lie while I carry this ?” and he 
touched his breast-pocket. “ She may never marry 
me, but you, at least, will be no better off. It will 
only be said you told a pretty story, thinking to 
compass your own ends.” THEE AND YOU. 
143 
Almost without knowing it I drew nearer, unnoted 
by the two angry men. 
“ Yet I will do it,” said Wholesome. 
“ You little know her: tell her and try it,” said the 
other. 
Wholesome paused. Then he said, “ I believe you 
are right, or let us suppose you so. What is to stop 
me from delivering you to justice to-morrow,—to- 
day ?” 
The other smiled: “Just because, if you feel sure 
this woman will marry me, you love her too well to 
damn her husband quite utterly.” 
Wholesome laughed hoarsely, and said, “ Don’t 
count on my goodness in that kind of fashion. By 
Heaven ! you have been nearer death within this last 
week or two than you dream of; and I should no 
more think twice about the lesser business of putting 
you out of the way of soiling better lives than about 
crushing a cockroach.” 
Oldmixon looked at him keenly, and no doubt 
made the reflection that had he meant to act he 
would have done so without warning. His face lit 
up as if he were about to speak. Then he changed 
his purpose, was silent a moment, and said, “ Richard 
Wholesome, there has been enough bad blood be- 
tween me and you already. Let it stop here. This 
woman is out of your reach, and always will be while 
I live. For her sake let us be at peace.” 
“ Peace!” said Wholesome. “You would not be- 
lieve it if I were to say that if she loved you, and 
you were any way worth loving, I would help you 
to marry her and go away not quite unhappy. But THEE AND YOU. 
now,”—and his scorn grew uncontrollable,—“ now, to 
talk of peace,—peace with a cur, with a creature who 
holds a pure woman by a girl’s promise which he 
treats as a business contract,—peace with a man who 
trades on a woman’s hope that she can drag him out 
of the mire of his vices ! I wonder at my own self- 
restraint,” he added, as the other fell back a step 
before his angry advance. 
“ Will you hear me ?” said Oldmixon. 
“ Hear you ? No,” said Wholesome. “ When 
you hear of me again, it will be through the sheriff.” 
“ Ah, is it so really ?” returned the other. “ Have 
your way, then, and see what will come of it;” and 
so saying, he turned and went away. 
Wholesome stood an instant, and then, looking 
up, said to me, “ You here yet? I suppose you have 
heard enough to trouble you. Do me the kindness 
not to mention it. I did not mean the talk should 
have been a long one, and it had better have been 
elsewhere, but a man is not always his own master.” 
This I thought myself, but the upper streets of 
Philadelphia were in that day half country, the way- 
farers scarce, save on the main highways. I said to 
him that I had heard a good deal of what was said, 
but did not fully understand it. 
“ No need to,” he replied. “ Forget it, my lad.” 
That evening late, as we sat at our window in the 
second story, Schmidt and I, we heard voices in the 
garden just below us, at first low, then louder. 
“ It is Priscilla and Wholesome, not yet gone away 
to sleep,” said Schmidt. “What will he? There is THEE AND YOU. 
a something which ever she asks and ever he will 
not. And if she would it ask of the other, which is 
me, there would be ways to do it, I warrant you, and 
that quickly. Canst hear, my boy ?” 
“ Hear?” said I aloud, so as to disturb the couple 
below, who, however, were too intent to heed my 
warning. “Hear? What business have I with 
other people’s affairs?” and so I coughed again 
lustily. 
“Foolish imp! why shall you spoil my drama?” 
said Schmidt. “ Never have you paid as I have to 
get an interest in them which play; and think what 
a rare piece you spoil, and how pretty, too, with this 
jealous lover on the balcony and the drab Romeo 
and Juliet in the moonshine beneath! See! what is 
it they speak ? He says, ‘ Yes, you shall have your 
way.’ And about what, my lord ? Would you mind 
if that I go below to hear ?” 
“ Nowr that,” I said, “ you shall not do.” 
“And wherefore should I tarry?” he returned. 
“ Are my motives as the crystal to be seen through ? 
And if I listen for ill, that is ill; and if I go to listen 
for good ” 
“ Good or ill,” said I, “ friend Schmidt, we do not 
do such things here.” 
“ And there is to myself wonderment that it is so,” 
he returned; “ and as it is my conscience that will 
bleed, I go.” 
“ Not so,” said I, laughing, and began to hail 
Wholesome in the garden, and to ask him to throw 
me a cheroot. 
As I called out the voices ceased, and Schmidt, THEE AND YOU. 
quite furious, exclaimed, “There is not so much of 
amusing in the life of gray and drab here as that an 
interest shall be taken out of it, and nevermore be 
missed. The thing you have done is unhuman.’’ 
Meanwhile, Wholesome had thrown up to me his 
cigar-case, and Priscilla had flitted into the house like 
a misty ghost through the moonlight. 
The little I had heard that night, and what Schmidt 
had added as comment, and what Wholesome had 
said to Oldmixon, could not fail, of course, to make 
clear to me that here was a mystery which seemed 
to be growing deeper. 
Meanwhile, our daily work went on, while Mis- 
tress White grew paler than her white kerchief, and 
went about her household tasks watched by loving 
and tender eyes. As I was a sort of extra clerk at 
our counting-house and received no salary, I went 
and came with more liberty than the rest; whence it 
chanced that sometimes I was at home when John 
Oldmixon paid his frequent afternoon visits. I liked 
the man little, and since his meeting with Wholesome 
less than ever. Once or twice I found Priscilla crying 
after he had gone; and this so moved me that I made 
up my mind to tell Schmidt, partly because I was 
curious, and partly because, with a boy’s lack of 
knowledge of the perplexities of life, I hoped to find 
or hear of some escape for her. I was saved this 
need by an event which chanced a day or two later. 
I came home early in the afternoon with Schmidt 
to get our rough clothes, as we meant to be gone a 
day or two down the river in his boat, and to sleep 
the first night at Chester or Marcus Hook. As we THEE AND YOU. 
entered the parlor I heard a harsh voice saying 
roughly, “ I will wait no longer. Be as good as your 
written pledge, or let me go and drift to the devil, as 
I shall. Only one person can save me.” 
Schmidt seized my arm and held me back at the 
door a moment, and I heard Priscilla say, “ Can thee 
fail to see how ill I grow? Will thee not wait but a 
little while, John,—only a little ? Richard has prom- 
ised me thee shall take no hurt: thee knows he would 
not lie.” 
All this while, at brief intervals, like a scared bird 
who sees near her nest a serpent, the old lady from 
her seat between the windows kept sounding her one 
note: “Has thee a four-leaved clover?” in a voice 
shrill and feeble. 
Meanwhile, I had turned away as Oldmixon replied 
to Priscilla, “ Not a week longer,—not a week ! You 
are lying to me in your heart, and you only just dare 
not lie with your lips.” 
This brutal speech was too much for Schmidt. 
“ The man,” he said, “ which can this suffer should 
no more breathe the air of God and so saying went 
in abruptly. 
As he entered, I being behind him, John Old- 
mixon, confused and wrathful, let go his rough hold 
on Priscilla’s wrists and rose up, seeking to compose 
his disturbed features. The German walked straight 
up to him. “ Not ever do we abuse women in this 
house,” he said. “ Go straightways out of it.” 
Oldmixon laughed. “How is this, ’Cilia?” he 
said. 
“ What is called a gentleman,” said Schmidt, “ he 
147 THEE AND YOU. 
is very mild to women. Talk your great talk to me 
who am a man : what need to shelter by a petticoat.” 
By this time Priscilla was her quiet self. “ Hush, 
John!” she said. “You will both remember my 
aged mother.” 
“Has thee a four-leaved clover?” said the old 
dame. 
“ There is of you but a child,” returned Schmidt 
to Priscilla softly : “ the ways of foul things like this 
one you do not know. Leave us but a moment, and 
never shall he more trouble thy sweetness.” 
Oldmixon’s face grew gray with rage. “ Insolent 
little Dutchman !” he said. 
“ Hush !” again broke in Priscilla. “ Speak not 
thusand turning to Schmidt, “ This is my husband 
that shall be. How we may differ is for us alone. 
I pray thee to go away, and be angry no more for 
the cross that is to be borne by me with what patience 
the Lord shall help me to get.” 
“ He does not help me to any patience,” said 
Schmidt, “ seeing these things; but if it be. as you 
say, I go; but as for this man ” 
“ Well ?” said Oldmixon. 
“ Come away, Schmidt,” I exclaimed. “ This is no 
business of yours. Come!” 
“ Yes, go,” said Priscilla, anxiously, standing like 
an angel of peace between the two angry men. 
“ Let it then be so,” said Schmidt, “ for now.” 
“ And for always,” said she. 
And we turned and went without more words. 
Another week went by, when one morning Schmidt 
proposed to me that we should walk up the Schuyl- THEE AND YOU. 
kill to the Falls; and as I was always glad of his 
company, we set out after our one-o’clock dinner. 
Where we walked by ponds and green fields and 
gardens the great city has come and left no spot un- 
filled ; but now, as then, above Fairmount the river 
rolled broad between grassy hills and bold rocky 
points. We hailed a boatman just below Callowhill 
Street, and being set on the far side went away north- 
ward along the river-marge. It was lovely then: it 
is so to-day. We walked on, leaving above us on 
the bank the sloping lawns of Solitude, Sweetbrier’s, 
Eaglesfield, and at last Belmont, and, now by the 
water-side and now under the overhanging catalpas 
of the “ River Road,” came at last to the “ Falls.” 
In those days a vast rock extended two-thirds of the 
way across from the west side, and so dammed up 
the waters that they broke in foam through the nar- 
row gap on the east, and fell noisily about six feet 
in a hundred and fifty yards. The rock, I recall well, 
was full of potholes, and there was one known from 
its shape as Devil Foot. Of all this there is to-day 
nothing left, the dam at Fairmount having hidden it 
under water, but in those times the view from the 
rock took in a lovely sweep of river down to Peter’s 
Island and far beyond it. 
That was a day to remember, and it brought out 
all that was most curious and quaint and sincere in 
my German friend. It was mid-October, and a haze 
which was gray or gold as shade or sun prevailed lay 
moveless everywhere. 
Said Schmidt to me, basking on the rock, “ Have 
you learned yet to look with curiousness at this THEE AND YOU. 
pretty Nature which for us dresses with nice changes 
all the days ?” 
His speech often puzzled me, and I said as much 
this time. 
“ It is my bad English which I have when I try 
not to talk my Spenser or my Shakespeare, to which 
I went to school. It was not a mystery I meant. I 
would but this say, that it is gainful of what is most 
sweet in living to have got that wise nearness of love 
to Nature. Well! and I am not yet understood? 
So let it be. When a music which pleases you is 
heard, is it that it fills up full your throat some way 
and overflows your eyes ?” 
I was ever sensitive to harmony, and could follow 
him now. I said, “ Yes, there are songs which are 
most sweet to me,—which so move me that I scarce 
hear them willingly.” 
“ Thus,” he said, “ I am stirred by the great orches- 
tra of color which is here, but music I know not. 
How strange is that! And if,” he said, “you were 
to shut your eyes, what is it in this loveliness would 
stay with you ?” 
“ Oh, but,” said I, “ no one thing makes it lovely. 
It is not only color, but sounds, like this rush of 
water at our feet.” 
“ It is as you say,” replied Schmidt. “ And what 
a sweet-tempered day, with a gray haziness and a not 
unkindly coolness to the air where the sun is not!” 
“A day like Priscilla,” I said, demurely. 
“Yes,” he replied, “that was well said,—like Pris- 
cilla. How lovely sad that is,” he went on, “ to see 
the leaves shiver in the wind and rain all reds and THEE AND YOU. 
golds through the air! And do you see this picture 
behind us, where is that great green fir, and around 
it to the top, like a flame, the scarlet of your Virginia 
creeper ? And below these firs on the ground is a 
carpet,—a carpet all colors near, and gray pinks to 
us far away; and under the maples what you call,— 
ach ! the wild words which fail me,—fine broken-up 
gold and red bits. It is what you call stippled, I 
mean.” 
“ And the curled leaves afloat,” I said, “how pretty 
they are.” 
“And the brown sedges,” he added, “and the 
crumpled brown ferns, and over them the great 
splendid masses of color, which do laugh at a 
painter!” 
Then we were silent a while, and the blue smoke 
went up in spirals from Schmidt’s meerschaum. At 
last he said, in his odd, abrupt way, “ To talk helps 
to think. This is a strange coil we have about our 
good Priscilla. I have been going it over in my own 
mind.” 
“ I understand it so little,” said I, “ that I am un- 
able to help you. Can you tell me more of it than 
I know already ?” 
“ And why not ?” said Schmidt, frankly. “ This is 
it ” 
“ But stop !” said I. “ If it involves other folks’ 
secrets, I do not want to know it.” 
“ That is my business,” returned Schmidt, delib- 
erately filling his pipe. “ What I do I settle with 
my own conscience if I have any; which I know not 
clearly. How amazing some day to be called to an 152 
THEE AND YOU 
account for it, and then to put hands in the moral 
pockets and say, ‘ Where is it ?’ Let me talk my 
dark thoughts out to daylight.” 
“ Well, then,” I said, laughing, “ go on.” 
“And first of Oldmixon. There is, I have come 
to know, a black history of this man in the war. 
Our good Wholesome was in the way to help him 
with money, so much that to pay he could not. Then 
is there a not nice story of a shipwreck, and boats 
too full, and women which he would throw overboard 
or not take in from a sinking ship, and sharp words 
and a quarrel with Wholesome, and these followed 
by a stab in the darkness, and a good man over in a 
raging sea and no more seen of men.” 
“ Good Heavens!” said I: “do you mean he 
stabbed Wholesome ?” 
“ It is so,” he replied. 
“ And then ?” said I. 
“ Next,” he said, “ is some foul horror of women 
shrieking lonely on a vessel’s deck over which go the 
wailing seas. But this Wholesome is by a miracle afloat 
for hours on a spar, and saved by a passing ship.” 
“ But knowing all this,” I said, “ why does he not 
tell it and drive the wretch away ?” 
“ Because,” returned Schmidt, “ there is another 
side,—of a little Quaker girl, the ward of Nicholas 
Oldmixon, who is on a time before this saved from 
great peril of fear more than of death by this man, 
John Oldmixon, and then such love between them 
as may be betwixt a fair woman and a foul man-.” 
“ But,” said I, “this does not seem enough to make 
our present tangle.” TIIEE AND YOU. 
153 
“Assuredly never,” he went on. “But also the 
man takes to worse ways, and to the woman’s girl- 
love comes later her belief that here is a soul to save. 
And, come what will, she, when he has fled away, 
writes letters in which she makes foolish promise to 
marry him when he comes back.” 
“ But will she keep such an absurd promise ?” 
I said. 
“ Is she a woman ?” he answered. “ There is a 
creature mingled of angel and fool which will do this 
thing, and let no man stop her.” 
“ But,” I added, “ you have not told me why 
Wholesome does not go to the recorder and tell his 
story, and have the scoundrel arrested.” 
“ Ah, true !” he said. “ A day more and the thing 
would have been ; but the beast, well warned by our 
foolish Quaker war-man, goes swiftly to Priscilla and 
is penitent over again, and will she save him ?” 
“ And then ?” said I. 
“This Quaker woman turns my man Wholesome 
her finger around, and says, * God has set me the 
task to marry this man, John Oldmixon, and save 
his soul alive,’—whatever that may mean,—and so 
she has Wholesome’s good promise that he will leave 
the wretch to her and his conscience forever.” 
“ And so it ends,” said I, “ and Priscilla is a dead 
woman. If I were Wholesome, I would save her 
despite herself, even if she never married me.” 
“ But you are not Richard Wholesome,” he re- 
turned. “There is half of him Quaker and half a 
brave gentleman, and all of him the bond-slave of a 
woman’s foolish will.” 154 
THEE AND YOU 
“ Then is it a tale told ?” I said. 
“ Hardly do I know,” replied Schmidt, rising. 
“ There are two ends to all things. Let us go : the 
twilight falls, and how lovely is the golden light on 
the yellow hickories yonder!” 
And so we strolled homeward lazily, the chill 
October evening air growing damper and the twi- 
light well upon us before we reached the city. 
Just as we were come to our own door, Schmidt, 
who had been long silent, stopped me and said, 
“ There is a thing I would say to you for lack of an 
elder to listen. But first make me a promise that no 
man’s ear shall get the value of what I have said to 
you.” 
“ I will tell no one,” I answered. 
Then he paused : “ This more I want of you. I have 
much weighed it before I thought to put on one so 
young what may come to be a burden ; but also there 
is none else. Some time if that I send or write for 
you to follow me, do it swiftly as I may direct. Will 
you ?” 
I said yes with a sense that it was to one of my 
bringing up a little too romantic, and so far absurd; 
yet his tone was earnest, and even sad, and I there- 
fore took care not to smile. 
“That is all,” he returned ; and we went in. 
All that time is broken up for me into distinct 
scenes like a play, some of them, as I said before, 
having the clearness of pictures, being like these but 
the scenes of a moment. The days and hours be- 
tween are less well defined in my memory. There is 
one of these brief pictures which hangs as it were in THEE AND YOU. 
155 
my mind, and which I could wish that some one 
would paint for me. 
The next day was Sunday, and Wholesome, as had 
often chanced of late, did not go to meeting, but after 
breakfast walked out of the room with a sombre face 
and clouded brow, and went slowly up-stairs to his 
chambers in the third story. In one he slept; the 
other was a sitting-room, filled with relics of his 
many voyages,—skins of wild beasts, deer and moose 
horns, pipes and the like,—of which I found it pleas- 
ant to hear him chat. I followed him up-stairs, and 
with Schmidt came to the door of his room, meaning 
to ask him to walk with us. He must have been 
much taken up with his own thoughts, for he did not 
hear us, and, the door being ajar, Schmidt of a sudden 
checked me and pointed into the room. Against 
the farther wall was a tall mahogany clock, such as 
are common in old houses here,—a rather stately 
timepiece, crowned with a carven cock over its ample 
metal face. Below it, on the floor, lay a large tiger- 
skin, upon which stood Wholesome. The clock-door 
was open, and he seemed to have just taken from its 
interior a pair of rapiers. One he had set against the 
clock, and unsheathing the other he held the point 
in one hand and the haft in the other, and bent it as 
if to try its temper. I can see the man now in his 
drab clothes, his curly hair, his look of easy, ample 
strength, the tiger-skin and the open clock. Then I 
can see him throw his chest out and lunge twice or 
thrice at the wall with the lightsome grace of a prac- 
tised hand. 
Schmidt stepped back on tiptoe, whispering, “Come THEE AND YOU. 
away,” and silently we went down the staircase, I 
wondering, and he moody and abstracted, making 
no reply to my questionings and comments. 
At last he said, “I walk not to-day. Will you 
please me to not forget what you have promised 
yesterday ?” 
The summons came soon. I was lying on the 
grass under the apricots, teasing the cat for the lack 
of better amusement, that Sunday in the early after- 
noon. Across me fell the shadow of Schmidt coming 
noiseless over the sward. I rolled over on my back, 
laughing and tossing the angry cat about, knowing 
not it was the shadow of a tragedy which had fallen 
across me at my careless play. 
Schmidt regarded me a moment with a soft, grave 
look, and then, dropping on the grass beside me, said, 
“ I have before me in the day which goes a business 
which will not be the play of boys; but being, as you 
know, a man of lonely ways, there is not one I can 
think to ask that they go with me.” 
“ And why not take me,” I said, “ as you meant to 
do, I suppose ?” 
“ I would not if I could help it,” he returned. 
“ Now, Mr. Schmidt,” said I, abruptly, “ it is a fancy 
you and Mr. Wholesome have to make a boy of me; 
but if not forty, I am no more a boy than you. If 
you want help and I can give it, I am at your call. 
If you want to explain your purpose, I will listen. If 
you choose to hold your tongue, I am willing to go 
with you anywhere without question.” 
“ That was nice-spoken,” he said, quietly, “ and 
with good trust. There will a woman love you well THEE AND YOU. 
157 
some day for the sweet honest ways of you. Come, 
then, and wait for me at the door a moment.” 
He presently appeared with a long plaid cloak over 
his shoulders, the air being shrewd and cool, and 
we went away down Arch Street together. 
At the corner of High and Front stood a building 
with hipped roof and many gables, once the London 
Coffee-House, but at the time I speak of rather fallen 
in its fortunes to be a lodging-house of no great 
repute, but not ill kept, and in the war a great resort 
of privateersmen. 
As we turned into the bar-room together, Schmidt 
said to me, “ You are here only to see, and to re- 
member what you come to see.” 
Then he exchanged a few words with the landlord, 
like himself a German, and, laughing gayly, went 
away up the narrow stairs to a front room on the 
second story, where he knocked. I heard no reply, 
but, at all events, Schmidt walked in, and as I passed 
him turned, locked the door, and, keeping the key in 
his hand, went a pace or two before me. At the 
table between the windows sat John Oldmixon. He 
turned his head, and with an oath too profane to 
repeat threw down his pen, and rising faced us. 
Schmidt walked to the table, and glancing at the 
half-written letter which lay there, said, smiling, “You 
write to Richard Wholesome ? Then am I yet in 
good time.” 
“ For what?” exclaimed Oldmixon, angrily. “To 
look at a private letter ? Who the devil asked you to 
come here ? Leave my room, or ” 
“Hush!” said Schmidt, quietly. “You are, as I THEE AND YOU 
do suppose, a man of the world, and what is called a 
gentleman. I have a brief business with you, which 
I would not for the sake of myself and you should 
be known.” 
“ I do not know, sir,” returned Oldmixon, “ of any 
business you can possibly have with me. Open that 
door and leave my room.” 
“ Ach ! well!” said Schmidt. “ Will you then 
listen to me ?” 
“ No !” cried the other. “ No man shall play this 
kind of game on me. Go, or I shall have to make 
you.” 
“ It will be well if you shall hear me,” replied 
Schmidt, quite master of himself. 
“ Then,” said the other, “ I shall open the door by 
force and have you put out.” 
“ But to my side there are two,” said Schmidt, as 
Oldmixon advanced. 
On this hint I stood against the door, saying, 
“ What Mr. Schmidt wants I know no more than 
you, but until you hear him you do not leave this 
room.” 
Oldmixon looked from one to the other, and then, 
as by a sudden resolution, said, “A deuced pretty 
business, indeed! I cannot fight two. What is it 
you want?” 
“ Now you are come into the land of reason,” said 
the German. “ I pray of you to hear me, and with 
tranquilness to think.” 
“ Go on,” said Oldmixon. 
“ Good !” returned Schmidt. “ Mr. Wholesome,—■ 
who does well know all of you, from the one side of THEE AND YOU. 
you to the other, what you call through and through, 
—he has his cause why he may not tell of you and 
send you away or have you put in jail.” 
“ Nonsense ! what stuff is this ?” exclaimed Old- 
mixon. 
“ Yet hear,” said Schmidt. “ I have put on paper, 
which is in my pocket here, a little account of you 
for to be given to a magistrate. When he comes to 
see it there arrives straight the constable, and he 
touches you on the shoulder and says,‘You come 
with me.’ ” 
“ Pshaw!” said the other. “ Is this a theatre ?” 
“ It is a theatre,” returned Schmidt, “ and we are 
the actors, and the play is good. This paper you 
can have on your own terms if you are wise; and 
once it is yours, I swear to you I shall not ever in life 
speak or write of you again. But if you will not, 
then when I go from this, in a time but short, it shall 
be in the hands of the recorder.” 
“Do you take me for an idiot?” said the other. 
“ What do I care for your terms ? and what are 
you to me ? Wholesome will never testify against 
__ >> 
me. 
“ Perhaps,” said Schmidt; “ and still you will be 
no less a man ruined; and here at least there shall 
be no place for you, and no woman—ay, not the 
lowest—will look on you with grace.” 
Oldmixon fell back a pace, hesitated, and said 
hoarsely, “ What do you want?” 
Schmidt leaned over and said something to him 
which I did not hear. 
Oldmixon started. “ Fight you !” he said, with a 160 
THEE AND YOU. 
sort of bewilderment. “What for? We have no 
quarrel. What utter nonsense !” 
“ Nonsense or not,” cried Schmidt, “you fight or I 
go; and what shall follow I have not failed to tell 
you.” 
“ Do you suppose,” said the other, “ I am to be at 
the beck and call of every foreign adventurer? If 
you come on Wholesome’s quarrel, go back and tell 
him I will meet him anywhere with any weapons. 
With him, at least, I have a score to settle.” 
“ And what score ?” returned Schmidt. 
“ He has struck me,1' said Oldmixon. “ I am only 
waiting my time. I have no quarrel with you.” 
“ That is a thing easy to mend,” said Schmidt; and 
to my surprise and horror he struck Oldmixon on 
the face with the leather glove he held. 
The other, wild with rage, hit out at him fiercely 
as I threw myself between them, and there was a 
moment’s struggle, when Schmidt exclaimed, step- 
ping back, “ Will that be enough ?” 
“Too much!” cried the other, furiously. “You 
shall have your way, and your blood be on your own 
head, not on mine. I take you, sir, to witness,” he 
added, appealing to me, “ that he provoked this 
quarrel.” 
“ It is so,” said Schmidt; and turning to me, “ Let 
come what shall, Herr Shelburne, you will say it was 
my quarrel. And now,” to Oldmixon, “ the terms 
are but theseand he talked apart with his foe a 
few moments. There was anger and dissent and in- 
sistance in their words, but I could not, and did not 
wish to, hear them. At last Schmidt said aloud, “It is the letters- 
against this paper, and Mr. Shelburne to hear and 
take notice.” 
I bowed, somewhat in the dark, I confess. 
“ Mr. Shelburne has my full confidence,” said Old- 
mixon, saluting me, and now full master of himself. 
“And what time to-morrow shall it be?” he added. 
“To-day,” returned Schmidt. 
“ Ah! as you like,” said the other, with a good 
show of indifference; “and the hour and place, if 
you please ?” 
“ To-day,” said Schmidt, “ at six o’clock. There 
are certain willows of a clump which stand a mile 
below Passyunk Road in the meadow on the way to 
League Island. Four there are and one dead,—on 
the left. If at that hour we meet not, the word shall 
to the magistrate, as I have said it.” 
“ Never fear,” said Oldmixon; “ I shall not fail 
you. The threat was little needed. Who is your 
second. Mine will be ” 
“There will be no second or any to see,” said 
Schmidt. 
“ But this is not a duel: it is murder!” exclaimed 
Oldmixon. 
“We will call no names,” replied the German. 
“ Will you be there ? And listen : if I am not of the 
lucky side, you will take this paper and your letters, 
and so will it end. That is my bargain, and you 
have much to win.” 
“ Enough !” cried the other. “ I shall be there,—• 
ay, and ready. Your weapons ?” 
“These,” said Schmidt; and throwing back his 
THEE AND YOU. 162 
THEE AND YOU. 
cloak, he displayed the two rapiers we had seen 
Wholesome handling. 
“At six ?” 
“At six,” said the other; and with no more words 
we left the room. 
During this singular scene I had held my peace, 
but as we reached the street I said, “You cannot 
really mean to meet this man ?” 
“ But I shall,” he replied, “ and you will here leave 
me.” 
“ That,” said I, “ I shall not do. If you go alone, 
it must seem to any one a murder should either of 
you die. I go with you, come what may.” 
He reasoned with me in vain, and at last, seeing 
that the time sped away, he yielded, and we hastily 
took a chaise from a livery-stable, and, I driving, 
we went away to the place set. Within a hundred 
yards of it we tied the horse and silently walked 
down the road. Presently Schmidt got over a fence, 
and crossing a meadow paused under a group of 
pollard willows. 
The scene is with me now, to fade only when I 
also vanish. A nearly level sun shot golden light 
across the tufted marsh-grasses of the low Neck 
lands, already touched with autumn grays. There 
was no house near us, and far away I could see over 
the ditches and above the dikes of this bit of Hol- 
land the tops of schooners on the distant Schuylkill. 
To the north the broken lines of the city still took 
the fading sun, while around us a chill October haze 
began to dim the farther meadows, and to hover in 
the corners of the dikes and over the wider ditches. THEE AND YOU. 
We had waited a few moments only, I leaning 
thoughtfully against a tree, Schmidt quietly walking 
to and fro, smoking as usual, and, as far as I could 
see, no more moved than if he were here to shoot 
for a wager. The next moment I started, as behind 
me broke out the loud roar of some ancient bullfrog. 
In fact, I was getting nervous and chilly. Schmidt 
laughed merrily at my scare. “ And listen !” he said, 
as all around the frogs, big and little, broke into 
hoarse croakings and chirrups. “ Ah !” he went on, 
“ there is to nature always a chorus ready. Do you 
find a sadness in their tongues to-day ?” 
It seemed to me horrible, indeed, as I listened, but 
it had never so seemed to me before. 
“And now is our man here,” exclaimed Schmidt, 
as the sound of distant horse-hoofs caused us to turn 
toward the road. 
A moment or two later, Oldmixon, who had dis- 
mounted and tied his horse, came swiftly over the 
field. 
“ There are two!” he exclaimed, abruptly. 
“ It is not my fault,” said Schmidt. “ But Mr. 
Shelburne shall walk a hundred yards away and 
wait. If you kill me, it will be not so bad a thing to 
have one to say there was a fair play.” 
“As you will,” said the other; “but we did not so 
agree.” 
“ The paper,” said Schmidt, “ is here; and the 
letters ? ” 
“ Are here,” returned Oldmixon. 
“ Mr. Shelburne shall take them, if you please,” 
added Schmidt. “ If you have good fortune, they THEE AND YOU. 
both shall to you ; and if I am to win, Mr. Shelburne 
shall me kindly give them, and I pledge my honor 
as a man to be truthful to what I have you promised. 
And as you are a gentleman, is this all of them ?” 
“ On my honor,” returned Oldmixon, proudly, with 
more courtesy than was common to him. 
“These, then, to you, my Shelburne,” said Schmidt; 
“ and, as I have said, you will amuse yourself a hun- 
dred yards away, not looking until there is no more 
sound of swords.” 
I felt there was no more to be done, and so walked 
slowly away, carrying the papers, while the two men 
took off their coats. I turned at the sharp click of 
the meeting blades, and looked with wild eagerness. 
The contrast between the German’s close-set, ungainly 
form and the well-knit, tall figure of his foe filled me 
on a sudden with foreboding. I was surprised, how- 
ever, in a moment to see that Schmidt was a master 
of his weapon. For a minute or so—I cannot tell 
how long, it seemed to me an eternity—the swords 
flashed and met and quivered and seemed glued to- 
gether, and then there were two cries of rage and 
joy. Schmidt’s foot had slipped on the tufted sward, 
and Oldmixon’s sword-point had entered his right 
breast. The German caught the blade with his left 
hand, and ran his foe furiously through the sword- 
arm, so that he dropped his weapon, staggered, 
slipped, and fell, while the German threw the blade 
far to the left. I ran forward at once. 
“ Back!” cried Schmidt; and, gathering himself 
up, said to Oldmixon, “ Your life is mine. Keep still 
or I will kill you: as I live, I will kill you! You THEE AND YOU. 
165 
had Priscilla’s letters : they are to me now. And do 
you give her up for always ?” 
“ No,” said Oldmixon. 
“ Then I shall kill you,” said Schmidt. “ Say your 
prayers: you have no more to live.” 
The fallen man was white with fear, and turned 
towards me for help. The German, hurt, unsteady, 
feeling his minutes precious, was yet cool and stern. 
“ The words !” he said. 
“ I am in your power,” said Oldmixon. 
This was all, as it were, a moment’s work, while I 
was advancing over the half-meadow across which I 
had retreated. 
“ Schmidt,” I said, “ for Heaven’s sake, remember 
me at least. Don’t kill a defenceless man in cold 
blood.” 
“Back!” he answered: “ not a step more near or 
he dies as by youand his dripping sword-point 
flickered perilously over Oldmixon as he lay at his 
feet. “Quick!” he said. “I am hurt,—I fail. To 
kill you were more sure. Quick! the words! the 
words!” 
“What words?” said Oldmixon. “I am in your 
power. What are your terms ?” 
“ You will say,” said Schmidt, his hand on his side 
and speaking hard, “ you will say, ‘ I give back her 
words—with her letters.’ ” 
“ I do,” said Oldmixon. 
“And you hear?” said Schmidt to me coming 
near; “and take that other rapier, Shelburne.” 
Oldmixon had risen and stood facing us, silent, 
ghastly, an awful memory to this day as a baffled 166 
THEE AND YOU. 
man, and around us the brown twilight, and his face 
black against the blue eastern sky. 
“Yet a word more,” said Schmidt. “You have 
lost, and I have won. To-night shall my charge be 
set before a magistrate. You have a horse: go! 
Let us see you not any more.” 
It was after dark by the time I reached home in 
the chaise with my companion, as to whom I felt the 
most bitter anxiety. At first I spoke to him of his 
condition, but upon his saying it hurt him to talk, I 
ceased to question him and hurried the horse over 
the broken road. When at last we were at our house- 
door, I helped him to get out, and saw him sway a 
moment as with weakness. As I opened the door I 
said, “ Let me help you to bed.” 
He replied, “Yes, it were well;” and resting a 
hand on my shoulder, used one of the sheathed 
rapiers as a staff. 
Candles were burning in the parlor, and an astral 
lamp, and voices sober or merry came through the 
half-closed door. On the hall-table was also a can- 
dle. Of a sudden Schmidt paused, and said in a 
voice broken by weakness, with a certain pitiful terror 
in its tones, “The power goes away from me. I 
grow blind, and shall—see—her—no—more.” 
Meanwhile he rocked to and fro, and then with a 
cry of “ Priscilla!” he turned from my supporting 
shoulder, and as one dazed, pushed open the parlor 
door, and staggering, sword in hand, into the room, 
dropped it and leant both hands on the little round 
table for support, so that for a moment the light fell THEE AND YOU. 
on his ghastly white face and yearning eyes. Then 
he swayed, tottered, and fell on the floor. 
They were all around him in a moment with cries 
of dismay and pity. 
“ What is this ?” said some one to me. 
Priscilla was on the floor at once, and had lifted 
his head on to her knee. 
“ He is hurt,” said I. 
“Ah! God have pity on us!” exclaimed Whole- 
some, picking up his rapier. “ I understand. Bring 
water, some one, and brandy. Quick !” 
“ Does thee see,” cried Priscilla in sudden horror, 
“ he is bleeding ? Oh, cruel men !” 
I stood by with fear, remorse, and sorrow in my 
heart. “ It was ” I began. 
“ Hush!” broke in Wholesome, “ another time. 
He is better. His eyes are open: he wants some- 
thing. What is it, Heinrich ?” 
“ Priscilla,” he said. 
“ Priscilla is here, dear friend,” she said quietly, 
bending over him. 
“ I thought I was a little boy and my head in my 
mother’s lap. Where am I ? Ah, but now I do 
remember. The letters!” and he fumbled at his 
pocket, and at last pulled them out. “ With this on 
them,” he said, “ you cannot ever any more think of 
him.” 
They were stained with the blood from his wound. 
“Never! never! never!” she cried piteously: “for 
this last wickedness no forgiveness !” 
“ And he is gone,” he added. “ And Shelburne,— 
where is my Shelburne ?” 168 
THEE AND YOU. 
“ Plere ! here !” I said. 
“ Tell her—he gives her up—for always—never no 
more to trouble her good sweetness. Wholesome, 
where art thou ?” 
“ I am with you,” said the captain, in a voice husky 
with emotion. 
“Quick! listen!” continued Schmidt, gasping. 
“ Time goes away for me. Is it that you do love 
her well ?” 
“ Oh, my God !” said Wholesome. 
“ But never more so well as I,” said Schmidt. 
“Priscilla!” As he spoke his eyes looked up with 
yearning into the face above his own. Then suddenly 
he drew a long breath, his hands ceased to clutch 
her dress, his head rolled over. He was dead. 
When another summer again lit up the little garden 
with roses, and the apricot blossoms were as snow 
in the air of June, Priscilla married Richard Whole- 
some. 
All of Heinrich Schmidt’s little treasures were left 
to her, but out of his memory came to her other 
things : a yet more gracious tenderness in all her 
ways,—to her religion a greater breadth, to her 
thoughts of men a charity which grew sweeter as it 
grew larger, like her own spring roses. 
The Quaker captain lived as he had lived, but grew 
more self-contained as years went by, and children 
came to chide with gentle wonder the rare outbreaks 
which were so sad a scandal to Friends. 
We laid Heinrich Schmidt away in the shadow of 
Christ Church, and around his grave grew flowers in THEE AND YOU. 
such glorious abundance as he would have loved, 
and by what gentle hands they were planted and 
cared for it were easy to guess. 
I am an old man to-day, but I cannot yet trust 
myself to try and analyze this character of his. I 
still can only think with tenderness and wonder of 
its passionate love of nature, its unselfish nobleness, 
its lack of conscience, and its overflowing heart. A DRAFT 
ON 
THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
Not many of us would be eager to live our lives 
over again if the gift of a new life were possible; but 
when I think upon the goodness and grace and love 
that have these many years gone side by side with 
mine, I doubt a little as to how I should decide. In- 
deed, were God to give it me to turn anew the stained 
and dog-eared pages of the life-book, it would not 
be for the joy of labor, or to see again, the marvels 
of growth in knowledge, that I should so yearn as 
for the great riches of love which have made for me 
its text and margins beautiful with the colors of 
heaven. And so, when I recall this life, and its sor- 
rows and adventures and successes, with every mem- 
ory comes to me first of all the tender commentary 
of that delightful face; and I rejoice with a sudden 
following of fear as I turn to see it again, and once 
more to wonder at the calm of sweet and thoughtful 
gravity which the generous years have added to its 
abundant wealth of motherly and gracious beauty. 
It is a little story of this matron and myself which 
I find it pleasant to tell you; chiefly, I suppose, be- V]2 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
cause it lets me talk of her and her ways and doings, 
—a very simple story, with nothing in the least start- 
ling or strange, but so cheerful and grateful to me to 
think over that I cannot but hope you too may get 
good cheer from it, and like her a little, and find 
interest in my old friend the clockmaker and his boy, 
and haply come at last to believe that you would be 
pleased to smoke a pipe with me, and to give me too 
of such love as you have to spare; which, I take it, 
is for a man to get from man or woman the most de- 
sirable of earthly things. 
We had been married a twelvemonth, I think, and 
were coming on in years, she being eighteen, and I— 
well, somewhat older, of course. From among gentle 
and kindly folks, long and steadily rooted in the soil 
of one of our oldest Dutch towns in Middle Penn- 
sylvania, we had come, with good courage and great 
store of hopes, to seek our fortunes in the Quaker 
City, whose* overgrown-village ways always seem 
to the stranger from the country so much more home- 
like than the bullying bustle of its greater sister. 
I smile now when I think what very young and 
trustful people we were, May and I, and how full of 
knowledge we thought ourselves of men and things. 
I had been bred an engineer, and when I married 
May was a draughtsman in a great manufactory, 
with just enough of an income to make our marriage 
what most folks would call unwise,—an opinion in 
which, perhaps, I might join them, were it not that 
so many of these reckless unions, in which there is 
only a great estate of love, have seemed to me in the 
end to turn out so well. A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
Away from broad fields, and laden barns, and my 
father’s great farmhouse, and plenty, and space, we 
came to grope about for a home among strangers, 
with at least a hope that somewhere in the city we 
should find a little of what my wife’s old father, the 
schoolmaster, used to call “ homesomeness.” With 
great comfort in our mutual love, we found for a long 
while no abiding-place which seemed to us pleasant, 
until at last a happy chance brought us to lodge 
within the walls which for some two years of our 
young married life were all to us that we could ask. 
It chanced one day that I had to have a watch 
mended, and for this purpose walked into a shop in 
one of the older streets,—a place altogether deserted 
by the rich, and not fully seized upon by trade. 
There were many great warerooms and huge store- 
houses, with here and there between them an old 
house built of red and glazed black brick, with small 
windows full of little gnarled glasses, and above them 
a hipped roof. Some of these houses had at that 
time half doors, and on the lower half of one of these 
was leaning a man somewhat past middle life. The 
window-cases on either side were full of watches, 
and over them was a gilded quadrant 'and the name 
F. Willow. As I drew near, the owner—for he it 
was—let me in, and when I gave him my watch, took 
it without a word, pushed his large spectacles down 
over two great gray eyebrows on to eyes as gray, 
and began to open and pore over the timepiece in a 
rapt and musing way. 
At last said I, “ Well ?” 
“ In a week,” said he. J74 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SFAIN. 
“ A week!” said I; “ but how am I to get on for a 
week without it ?” 
“Just so!” he returned. “ Sit down while I look 
at it, or come back in half an hour.” 
“ I will wait,” said I. 
Without further words he turned to his seat, 
screwed into his eye one of those queer black- 
rimmed lenses which clockmakers use, and began to 
peer into the works of my sick watch. In the mean 
while I amused myself by strolling between the little 
counters, and gravely studying the man and his be- 
longings, for both were worthy of regard. A man 
of fifty-five, I should say,—upright, despite his trade, 
—gray of beard and head,—with an eagle nose and 
large white teeth. Altogether a face full of power, 
and, as I learned, of sweetness when I came to know 
better its rare smile. The head was carried proudly 
on a frame meant by Nature to have been the envy 
of an athlete, but now just touched with the sad 
shadows of fading strength. Wondering a little at 
the waste of such a frame in so petty a toil, I began 
to hear, as one does by degrees, the intrusive ticking 
of the many clocks and watches which surrounded 
me. First I heard a great tick, then a lesser, then by 
and by more ticks, so as at last quite to call my at- 
tention from their owner. There were many watches, 
and, if I remember well, at least a dozen clocks. In 
front of me was a huge old mahogany case, with a 
metal face, and a ruddy moon peering over it, while 
a shorter and more ancient time-piece with a solemn 
cluck, for which at last I waited nervously, was curi- 
ous enough to make me look at it narrowly. On A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
the top sat a neatly-carved figure of Time holding in 
both hands an hour-glass, through which the last 
grains were slowly dropping. Suddenly there was a 
whirring noise in the clock, and the figure grimly 
turned the hour-glass in its hands, so that it began 
to run again. The sand was full of bits of bright 
metal,—gold perhaps,—and the effect was pretty, 
although the figure, which was cleverly carved, 
had a quaint look of sadness, such as I could 
almost fancy growing deeper as he shifted the glass 
anew. 
“ He hath a weary time of it,” said a full, strong 
voice, which startled me, who had not seen the 
clockmaker until, tall as his greatest clock, he stood 
beside me. 
“ I was thinking that, or some such like thought,” 
said I, but feeling that the man spoke for himself as 
well as for his puppet. “ I wonder does time seem 
longer to those who make and watch its measurers 
all day long ?” 
“ My lad,” said he, laying two large white hands 
on my shoulders with a grave smile and a look which 
somehow took away all offence from a movement 
so familiar as to seem odd in a stranger,—“ my lad, I 
fancy most clockmakers are too busy with turning 
the dollar to care for or feel the moral of their tick- 
ing clocks.” Then he paused and added sadly, “ You 
are young to moralize about time, but were you 
lonely and friendless you would find strange com- 
pany in the endless ticking of these companions of 
mine.” 
With a boy’s freedom and sympathy I said quickly, 176 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
“ But is any one—are you—quite lonely and friend- 
less ?” 
“I did not say so,” he returned, abruptly; but he 
added, looking around him, “ I have certainly more 
clocks than friends.” v 
“ Well, after all,” said I, “ Mr. Willow, what is a 
clock but a friend, with the power to do you one 
service, and no more ?” 
“ I think,” said he, “ I have seen friends who 
lacked even that virtue, but this special little friend 
of yours needs regulation; its conscience is bad. 
Perhaps you will be so kind as to call in a week; it 
will take fully that long.” 
I went out amused and pleased with the man’s 
oddness, and feeling also the charm of a manner 
which I have never since seen equalled. As I passed 
the doorway I saw tacked to it a notice of rooms to 
let. I turned back. “ You have rooms to let. 
Might I see them ?” 
“ If it please you, yes,” he said. “The paper has 
been up a year, and you are the first to ask about it. 
You will not wish to live long in this gloomy place, 
even,” he added, “ if I should want you.” 
Then he locked the shop-door and led me up a 
little side-stair to the second story, and into two 
rooms,—the one looking out on the street, and the 
other on a square bit of high-walled garden, so full 
of roses—for now it was June—that I quite won- 
dered to find how beautiful it was, and how sweet 
was the breeze which sauntered in through the open 
casement. 
“Pardon me,” said I, “but did you plant all these?” A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
“ Yes,” he said. “ My boy and I took up the 
pavement and put in some earth, and made them 
thrive, as,” lie added, “ all things thrive for him,— 
pets or flowers, all alike.” 
I turned away, feeling how quaint and fresh to me 
was this life made up of clocks and roses. The rooms 
also pleased me, the rent being lower than we were 
paying; and so, after a glance at the furniture, which 
was old but neat, and observing the decent cleanli- 
ness of the place, I said, “ Have you any other 
lodgers ?” 
“ Two more clocks on the stairway,” he replied, 
smiling. 
“ My wife won’t mind them or their ticking,” I 
said. “ I am always away until afternoon, and per- 
haps she may find them companionable, as you do!” 
“ Wife!” he said, hastily. “ I shall have to see 
her.” 
“ All right!” said I. 
“ No children ?” he added. 
“ No,” said I. 
“ Humph ! Perhaps I am sorry. They beat clocks 
all to pieces for company, as my boy says.” 
“ Only my wife and I, sir. If you do not object, 
I will bring her to look at the rooms to-morrow.” 
As I turned to leave, I noticed over the chimney- 
place a tinted coat-of-arms, rather worn and shabby. 
Beneath it was the name “ Tressilian,” and above it 
hung a heavy sabre. 
As I walked away I mused with a young man’s 
sense of romance over the man and his trade, and 
the history which lay in his past life,—a history I i;8 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
never knew, but which to this day still excites my 
good wife’s curiosity when we talk, as we often do, 
of the clocks and the roses. 
I shall never forget the delight that my little lady 
found in our new home, to which we soon after 
moved. It was a warm summer afternoon, as I well 
remember. The watchmaker and his boy, whom I 
had not yet seen, were out, and the house was in 
charge of a stout colored dame, who was called 
Phoebe, and who was never without a “ misery” in 
her head. 
My May followed our trunks up-stairs, and went 
in and out, and wondered at the coat-of-arms and 
the sabre; and at last, seeing the roses, was down- 
stairs and out among them in a moment. I went 
after her, and saw, with the constant joy her pleas- 
ures bring to me, how she flitted like a bee to and 
fro, pausing to catch at each blossom a fresh per- 
fume, and shaking the petals in a rosy rain behind 
her as her dress caught the brambles. 
“ May,” said I at last, “ you have demolished a 
thousand roses. What will their owner say ? Look ! 
there is Mr. Willow now.” 
Then, like a guilty thing, caught in her innocent 
mood of joy and mischief, she paused with glowing 
cheeks, and looked up at the window of our room, 
whence Mr. Willow was watching her, with the lad 
beside him. “ Oh, what a scamp I am, Harry !” said 
she, and in a moment had plucked a moss-rose bud, 
and was away up-stairs with it. 
When I reached the room she was making all sorts 
of little earnest excuses to the watchmaker. “ But I A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
179 
have spoilt your rose-harvest,” she said. “ Will you 
let me give you this one ?” and as I entered the man 
was bending down in a way which seemed to me 
gracious and even courtly, a moisture in his eyes as 
she laughingly pinned the bud to the lappel of his 
threadbare coat. 
“ Well, well!” he said. “ It is many and many a 
day since a woman’s hand did that for me. We must 
make you free of our roses,—that is, if Arthur likes.” 
The lad at this said gravely, “ It would give me 
the greatest pleasure, madam.” 
I smiled, amused that the little woman should be 
called madam in such a reverential fashion, while she 
retreated a step to see the effect of her rose, and then 
would arrange it anew. They made freshness and 
beauty in the old wainscoted chamber,—the man, 
large and nobly built, with a look of tenderness and 
latent strength ; the girl, full of simplicity and grace, 
hovering about him with mirthful brown eyes and 
changeful color; the lad, tall, manly, and grave, 
watching with great blue eyes, full of wonder and a 
boy’s deep worship, her childlike coquetries and 
pretty ways. From that day forward father and son, 
like another person I know of, were her humble 
slaves, and from that day to this the wily little lady 
has only gone on adding to her list of willing vas- 
sals. 
It was early agreed that the clockmaker, his son, 
and ourselves should take meals in common in our 
little back room, which, under my wife’s hands, soon 
came to look cheerful enough. By and by she quietly 
took control of the housekeeping also, and with A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
Phoebe’s aid surprised us with the ease in which we 
soon began to live. But as to the roses, if they had 
thriven in the care of Arthur and his father, they now 
rioted, if roses can riot, in luxury of growth over 
wall and trellis, and, despite unending daily tributes 
to make lovely our table and chamber, grew as if 
to get up to her window was their sole object in life. 
I have said those were happy days, and I doubt not 
that for others than ourselves they were also delight- 
ful. Often in the afternoon when coming back from 
my work, I would peep into the shop to see the 
watchmaker busy with his tools, the lad reading 
aloud, and my wife listening, seated with her needle- 
work between the counters. Often I have stayed 
quiet a moment to hear them as the lad, perched on 
a high stool, would sit with a finger in his book, 
making shrewd comments full of a strange thought- 
fulness, until the watchmaker, turning, would listen 
well pleased, or May would find her delight in urging 
the two to fierce battle of argument, her eyes twink- 
ling with mischief as she set about giving some ab- 
surd decision, while the clocks big and little ticked 
solemnly, and the watches from far corners made faint 
echoes. Or perhaps, in the midst of their chat, all 
the clocks would begin to strike the hour, and on a 
sudden the watchmaker would start up from his seat 
and stride toward some delinquent a little late in its 
task, and savagely twist its entrails a bit, and then 
back to his seat, comforted for a time. My May had 
all sorts of queer beliefs about these clocks and their 
master, and delighted to push the hands a little back 
or forward, until poor Willow was in despair. One A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
hapless bit of brass and iron, which was always five 
minutes late in striking, she called the foolish virgin, 
and at last carried off to her room, explaining that 
it was so nice to get up five minutes late, and the 
clock would help her to do it; with other such pleas- 
ant sillinesses as might have been looked for from a 
young person who kept company with idle roses and 
the like. 
But if the clockmaker and my wife were good 
friends, the lad and she were sworn allies, and just 
the frank, wholesome friend she has since been to 
my boys she was then to young Willow. His white 
mice and the curiously tame little guinea pig, which 
had been taught not to gnaw the roses,—hard sen- 
tence for those cunning teeth of his!—were hers 
in a little while as much as the boy’s, and the two 
had even come at last to share his favorite belief 
that the solemn old battered box-turtle in the garden 
had been marked with “ G. W.” by General Wash- 
ington, and was to live to be the last veteran of ’76. 
I used to propose in my unheroic moments that the 
old fellow should apply for a pension, but my jeers 
were received with patience, and this and other boy- 
beliefs rested unshaken. 
There are many scenes of our quiet life of those 
days which are still present to me in such reality as 
if they were pictures which I had but to open a gal- 
lery door to see anew. The watchmaker seems to 
me always a foremost figure in my groups. He was 
a man often moody, and prone when at leisure to sit 
looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows into 
some far-away distance of time and space; almost 182 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
haughty at times, and again so genial and sunshiny 
and full of good talk and quick-witted fancies that it 
was a never-ceasing wonder to us unmoody young 
folks how these human climates could change and 
shift so strangely. His wintry times were sadly fre- 
quent when, as we came to know him better, he 
ceased to make efforts to please, and yielded to the 
sway of his accustomed sadness. The boy made a 
curious contrast, and was so full of happy outbursts 
of spirits and mirth, so swiftly changing too, with an 
ever-brightening growth of mind, that beside his 
father no one could fail to think of him as of the 
healthful promise of the springtide hour. And as 
for my wife, in his better times the watchmaker had 
a pretty way of calling her “ Summer,” which by and 
by, for his own use, the lad made into “ Mother Sum- 
mer,” until at length the little lady, well pleased with 
her nicknames, answered to them as readily as to her 
lawful titles. 
I used to think our happiest days were the bright 
Sundays in the fall of the last year of our long stay 
with the Willows. We had taken up the habit of 
going to the Swedes’ Church, which in fact was the 
nearest to our house, and surely of all the homes of 
prayer the quaintest and most ancient in the city. 
Always when the afternoon service was over we used 
to wander a little about the well-filled churchyard 
and read the inscription on Wilson’s grave, and won- 
der, with our boy-friend, who knew well his story, if 
the many birds which haunted the place came here 
to do him honor. Pleasant it was also to make our 
way homeward among old houses long left by the A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
rich, and at last to find ourselves sauntering slowly 
up the wharves, quietest of all the highways on Sun- 
day, with their ships and steamers and laden market- 
boats jostling one another at their moorings, like 
boys at church, as if weary of the unaccustomed 
stillness. Then, when the day was over, we were in 
the habit of sitting in the open doorway of the shop 
watching the neatly-dressed Sunday folk, lulled by 
the quiet of the hour and the busy, monotonous 
ticking of the little army of clocks behind us, while 
my wife filled our pipes, and the talk, gay or grave, 
rose and fell. 
On such an early October evening came to us the 
first break in the tranquil sameness of our lives. We 
had enjoyed the evening quiet, and had just left the 
garden and gone into the shop, where Mr. Willow 
had certain work to do, which perhaps was made 
lighter by our careless chat. By and by, as the night 
fell, one or two sea-captains called in with their chro- 
nometers, that they might be set in order by the 
clockmaker. Then the lad put up and barred the 
old-fashioned shutters, and coming back settled him- 
self into a corner with a torn volume of “ Gulliver’s 
Travels,” over which now and then he broke out into 
great joy of laughter, which was not to be stilled 
until he had read us a passage or two, whilst between- 
times my wife’s knitting-needles clicked an irregular 
reply to the ticking clocks, and I sat musing and 
smoking, a little tired by a long day’s work. 
At last the watchmaker paused from his task and 
called us to look at it. It was some kind of register- 
ing instrument for the Coast Survey,—a patent on 184 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
which he greatly prided himself. Seven or eight 
pendulums were arranged in such a manner that their 
number corrected the single error of each escapement. 
Further I do not remember, but only recall how we 
marvelled at the beautiful steadiness of the movement, 
and how my wife clapped her hands joyously at the 
happy end of so much toil and thought. 
“ It is done,” said the watchmaker, rising. “ Let 
us look how the night goesfor it was a constant 
custom with him always before going to bed to stand 
at the door for a little while and look up at the heav- 
ens. He said it was to see what the weather would 
be, a matter in which he greatly concerned himself, 
keeping a pet thermometer in the garden, and noting 
day by day its eccentricities with an interest which 
no one but my wife ever made believe to share. I 
followed him to the open door, where he stood lean- 
ing against the side-post, looking steadily up at the 
sky. The air was crisp and cool, and overhead, thick 
as snow-flakes, the stars twinkled as if they were 
keeping time to the ticking clocks. Presently my 
wife came out, and laying a hand on his arm stood 
beside us and drank in the delicious calm of the 
autumn night, while the lad fidgeted under his elbow 
between them, and got his share of the starlight and 
the quiet. 
“ It seems hard to think they are all moving for 
ever and ever,” said the boy. “ I wonder if they are 
wound up as often as your clocks, father?” 
“ It is only a great clock, after all,” said Willow, 
“and must stop some of these days, I suppose. Did 
ever you think of that, little Summer ?” A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
185 
“ Will last our time,” said my wife. 
“Your time!” returned the clockmaker. “Your 
time is forever, little woman: you may live in the 
days not of this world to see the old wonder of it all 
fade out and perish.” 
Just then a man stopped in front of us and said, 
“ Does Mr. Willow live here?” 
“ Yes,” said I; and as he came toward us we 
naturally gave way, thinking him some belated cus- 
tomer, and he entered the lighted shop. 
Then Willow turned again, and the two men came 
face to face. The stranger was a man of great height, 
but spare and delicate. He leaned on a gold-headed 
cane somewhat feebly, and seemed to me a person of 
great age. What struck me most, however, was the 
ease and grace of his bearing and a certain elegance 
of dress and manner. The moment Willow set eyes 
on him he staggered back, reeled a moment, and, 
catching at a chair, fell against the tall clock over 
which he had set the figure of Time. “ What has 
brought you here ?” he cried, hoarsely. 
“ My son, my boy,” said the elder man, in a voice 
shaken by its passion of tenderness. “ Can you 
never, never forget ?” 
“ Forget!” said the other. “ I had almost come to 
that, but, remembering anew, how can I ever forgive ? 
Go!” he cried, fiercely, darting forward on a sudden 
and opening the door. “ Go, before the madness 
comes upon me. Go, go before I curse you.” Then 
he reeled again, and growing white, fell into a chair, 
and as if choked with emotion, stayed, rigidly point- 
ing to the door. 186 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
Then my wife ran forward. “ Leave us,” she said, 
“whoever you are. You see how ill he is. You 
can do no good here. Come again if you will, but 
go away now.” 
The stranger hesitated and looked in bewilderment 
from one to another, while the lad, till then silent, 
opened the door wider and said, gently, “ Will it 
please you to go, grandfather ?” 
“ My boy—his boy!” exclaimed the new-comer, 
patting his curly head. “ Now am I indeed pun- 
ished,” he added, for the lad shrunk back with a look 
of horror quite strange on a face so young, and, 
suddenly covering his face with both hands, the 
elder man went by him and passed out into the street 
without a word. Then the boy hastily shut the door, 
and we turned to Willow, who had fallen in some- 
thing like a swoon from his chair. Silently or with 
whispers we gathered about him, while my wife 
brought a pillow and some water and gave him to 
drink. At last we got him up-stairs to our own 
room, where for some days he lay in a state of feeble- 
ness which seemed to me very strange in one so 
vigorous but a little while before. On the next 
morning after his attack he showed some uneasiness, 
and at length was able to bid us take down the 
painted arms over the fireplace and hide them away; 
but beyond this he gave no sign of what he had passed 
through, and by slow degrees got back again very 
nearly his wonted habits and mode of life. 
I need scarcely say that so strange an event could 
hardly take place in our little household without 
awakening the curiosity of two people as young and A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
romantic as May and I. Indeed, I greatly fear that 
the little lady so far yielded to the impulses of her 
sex as even to question young Willow in a round- 
about way; but the lad was plainly enough schooled 
to silence, and you had only to look at his square, 
strongly-built chin to learn how hopeless it would be 
to urge him when once his mind was made up. He 
only smiled and put the question by as a man would 
have done, and before us at least neither father nor 
son spoke of it again during the next month. 
The pleasant hazy November days came and went, 
and one evening on my return home I learned that 
Mr. Willow had suffered from a second attack of 
faintness, and from my wife I heard that the lad had 
let fall that his grandfather had called once more, and 
that the two men had had another brief and bitter 
meeting. The following morning, as I went to my 
work, I saw the stranger walking to and fro on the 
far side of the street. Nothing could be more piti- 
able than his whole look and bearing, because nothing 
is sadder to see than a man of gentle breeding so 
worn with some great sorrow as to have become 
shabby from mere neglect of himself. He peered 
across the street, looked up at the windows and at 
the shop, and at last walked feebly away, with now 
and then a wistful look back again,—such a look as 
I saw once in my life in the great eyes of a huge 
watch-dog whom we left on the prairie beside the 
lonely grave of his master. 
From this time onward, all through a severe win- 
ter, he haunted the neighborhood, once again, and 
only once, venturing to speak to the clockmaker, to A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
whom his constant presence where he could hardly 
fail to see him at times became a torture which was 
plainly wearing his life away. Twice also he spoke 
to the boy, and once urged him to take a little pack- 
age which we supposed might have been money. At 
last my anxiety became so great that I spoke to him 
myself, but was met so coldly, although with much 
courtesy, that I felt little inclined to make the same 
attempt again. 
I learned with no great trouble that he lived quietly 
during this winter at one of our greater hotels, that 
he seemed to be a man of ample means, and that his 
name was Tressilian, but beyond this I knew no 
more. He came, at last, to be a well-known figure 
in our neighborhood, as he wandered sadly about 
among rough porters and draymen and the busy 
bustle of trade. His visits to our house, and his 
questions about Mr. Willow, were added sources of 
annoyance to the latter, who rarely failed to look 
gloomily up and down the street, to make sure of 
his absence, before he ventured out of doors. 
Under this system of watching and worry, Mr. 
Willow’s attacks grew at last more frequent, and as 
the spring came on my good wife became, as she said, 
worked up to that degree that she at last made up 
her feminine mind; and so one fine morning sallied 
out and had her own talk with the cause of our 
troubles. 
I think the good little woman had determined to 
try if she could reconcile the father and son. She 
came to me in the evening a good deal crestfallen, and 
with very little of the blessedness of the peacemaker A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
in her face. While Mr. Willow was out she had sent 
his son, who was keeping guard in the shop, on an 
errand, and had then actually brought the stranger 
into the house, where, refusing to sit down, he had 
wandered to and fro, talking half coherently at times, 
and at last urging her to induce his son to speak 
with him once more. As to their cause of quarrel 
he was silent. “ A lonely, sad old man,” said my 
wife. He said he would kneel to his boy, if that 
would do good, but to go away, to go away and leave 
him, that he could not do,—that he would not do. 
God would bless her, he was sure; and might he kiss 
her hand? and so went away at last sorrow-stricken, 
but wilful to keep to his purpose. 
Perhaps my wife’s talk may have had its effect, 
because for a month or two he was absent. Then he 
came and asked at the door for Willow, who was out, 
and for a while haunted the street, until late in the 
spring, when we saw him no longer. 
Meanwhile, Willow had become more feeble, 
and a new trouble had come to our own modest 
door. 
Many years have since gone by, and happier for- 
tunes have been ours,—brave sons and fair daugh- 
ters, and more of this world’s gear than perhaps is 
good for us to leave them,—but to this day I remem- 
ber with discomfort that luckless evening. I hastened 
home with the news to my wife; and what news to 
two trustful young folks, who had married against 
the will of their elders, and had seen, as yet, no cause 
to regret their waywardness ! 
“ May,” said I,—and I can recall how full my 190 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
throat felt as I spoke,—“ May, I—I am thrown out 
of work. The company is lessening its staff, and I 
am to be discharged.” 
I thought the little woman would have been 
crushed, but, on the contrary, it was I, who meant to 
comfort her, who was the beaten one. 
“ Well, Harry,” said she, in a cheery way, “ I did 
not suppose it would last forever.” 
Man though I was, I sat down and covered my 
face with my hands. We were very young, and very, 
very poor. I had been offered, not long before, a 
place in the West, but our little treasury was very 
low, and to secure the position with a probable fu- 
ture of success required some hundreds of dollars, 
so that we had not dared to give it another thought; 
and now, at last, what were we to do ? 
“ Do !” said May. “ Why But kiss me, 
Harry,—you haven’t kissed me since you came 
in.” 
I kissed her, rather dolefully I fear. “ We can’t 
live on kisses,” said I. 
“ Not as a steady diet,” she replied, laughing. 
“ Perhaps this may have good news for usand so 
saying, she handed me a letter. 
I opened it absently and glanced over it in haste. 
“ Misfortunes never come single, May,” said I. 
“ No, my darling,” she answered, laughing; “ they 
only come to married people, to make them good 
girls and boys, I suppose. What is it, you grumpy 
old man ?” 
I read it aloud. It was a request—and a rather 
crusty one too—from a bachelor cousin to return to A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
him a small sum which he had lent us when we were 
married. He had met with certain losses which 
made it needful that he should be repaid at once. 
“ Any more letters, May ?” said I, ruefully. 
“ Nonsense!” said she. “ Let us think about it 
to-morrow.” 
“ What good will sleeping on it do ?” I replied. 
“ Do you expect to dream a fortune ?” 
“ I have dreamed a good many,” she said, “ in my 
time, and all for you, you ungrateful fellow. Now 
suppose ” 
“ Well, suppose what ?” said I, crossly. 
“ Suppose,” she returned,—“ suppose we two laugh 
a little.” 
That woman would have laughed at anything or 
with anybody. 
“ I can’t laugh, May,” said I. “ We are in a rather 
serious scrape, I assure you.” 
“ Scrape !” said she. “ Old age is a scrape, but at 
twenty-two all the good things of time are before us; 
and—and God, my darling, has he not been very, 
very good to us two sparrows ?” 
“But, May,” said I, “it is not myself I think of; 
it is ” 
“ Me, I suppose,—me. Do you know how rich I 
am, Harry? It seems to me I never can be poor. 
There’s, first, your love,—that is twenty thousand 
dollars; then there is that dear old bearded face of 
yours,—that is ten thousand more; then there is all 
the rest of you,—that’s ever so much more; and then 
there are my Spanish castles ” 
“ May, May,” said I, “ if castles in Spain would A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
aid us, I Avould gladly enough help you to build 
them ; but for my part ” 
“ For my part,” she broke in, “ castles in Spain 
do help me. They help me to get over the shock of 
this horrid bother, and to gain a little time to steady 
myself. Indeed, I think if I were to draw a big 
check on the Rothschilds at this very moment, it 
would ease me a bit. It would ease me, you see, 
even if they did not pay it.” 
“ May, May !” said I, reproachfully. 
“ Now, Harry,” she cried, laughing, “ I must laugh 
and have my nonsense out. I can’t cry, even for you. 
Let us go out and have a good long walk, and to- 
morrow talk over this trouble. We shall live to 
smile at the fuss we have made about it. So, change 
your coat and come with me; I was just dressed to 
go out to meet you.” 
“ Well, May,” I said, “ if only ” 
“If!—fiddlesticks!” she cried, putting her hand 
over my mouth and pushing me away. “ Hurry, or 
we shall be late.” 
I don’t often resist the little lady, and so I went 
as she bid me, and by and by coming back, there 
was May laughing and making absurdly merry over 
a bit of paper on the desk before her. I leaned over 
her shoulder and said, “ What is it, sweetheart?” 
“ Riches,” said she. 
“ Nonsense !” said I. 
“ What a relapse !” cried the wifey. “ So you 
despise gold, do you ? See what I have been doing 
for you while you have been idling in the next 
room.” A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
“ What is it ?” said I, laughing, for not to laugh 
when she laughed was simply out of the question. 
She gave me the paper, and I read j ust this pretty 
stuff: 
“ The Bank of Spain, please pay to Bearer (who, 
the benevolent bank should know, is out of place 
and out of humor, and owes money not of Spain) 
One Thousand Dollars. 
“$iooo. “The Best of Wives.” 
We left the order and the wretched letter on the 
desk, and went merrily down-stairs, full once more 
of hope and faith, comforted somehow by so little a 
thing as this jest of hers. I made, as I remember, a 
feeble effort to plunge anew into my griefs, but May 
rattled on so cheerfully, and the laugh and the smile 
were so honest and wholesome, that good humor 
could no more fail to grow in their-company than a 
rose refuse to prosper in the warm sweet suns of 
June. I have loved that woman long, and have greatly 
loved her afresh for the good and tender things I 
have seen her do, but it was on the summer evening 
of our trouble I first learned that I could love her 
more, and that truly to love is but to grow in all 
knowledge of such courage and winning sweetness 
and gallant, cheery endurance as she showed me 
then, just as it were for a little glimpse of the gra- 
cious largeness of this amazing blessing which had 
fallen into my poor lap and life. 
That warm June afternoon was filled full for me 
of those delightful pictures which I told you have A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
194 
hung, with others more or less faded, in the great 
gallery of art which adorns my Spanish castle. There 
are bits by a rare artist of the long-gone gables and 
hip-roofs and half doors which used to make old 
Swanson Street picturesque. There is one little 
group of boys just loosed from school, ruddy and 
jolly, around a peanut-stand, alike eager and penni- 
less, while behind them May—reckless, imprudent 
May!—is holding up a dime to the old woman, and 
laughing at the greedy joy that is coming on a sud- 
den over the urchins’ faces as the nuts become a 
possible possession. 
We were great walkers in those days; and as we 
walked and the houses and poor suburbs were left 
behind, and we gained the open roads which run 
wildly crooked across the Neck, it was pleasant to 
feel that we had escaped from the tyranny of right 
angles. It was the first time we had gone south of 
the city, and we found there, as you may find to-day, 
the only landscape near us which has in it something 
quite its own, and which is not elsewhere to be seen 
near to any great city in all our broad country. It 
has helped me to one or two landscapes by Dutch 
artists, which will fetch a great price if ever my heirs 
shall sell the Spanish castle. 
Wide, level, grassy meadows, bounded by two 
noble rivers, kept back by miles of dikes; formal 
little canals, which replace the fences and leave an 
open view of lowing cattle; long lines of tufted pol- 
lard willows, shock-headed, sturdy fellows; and here 
and there a low-walled cottage, with gleaming milk- 
cans on the whitewashed garden palings; and, be- A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
195 
tween, glimpses of red poppies, tulips, and the like, 
while far away in the distance tall snowy sails of 
hidden hulks of ships and schooners move slowly to 
and fro upon the unseen rivers. 
Charming we found it, with a lowland beauty all 
its own, lacking but a wind-mill here and there to 
make it perfect of its kind. Along its heaped-up 
roads we wandered all that summer afternoon, until 
the level sun gleamed yellow on the long wayside 
ditches, with their armies of cat-tails and spatter- 
docks and tiny duckweed; and at last the frogs came 
out, both big and small, and said or sung odd bits 
of half-human language, which it pleased the little 
woman to convert into absurd pieces of advice to 
doleful young folks such as we. She would have 
me pause and listen to one solemn old fellow who 
said, I am sure, “ Good luck! good luck!” and to 
another sturdy brown-backed preacher, who bade 
us “ Keep up ! keep up !” with a grim solemness of 
purpose most comforting to hear. Then we stopped 
at a cottage and saw the cows milked, which seemed 
so like home that the tears came into my wife’s 
eyes; and at last we had a bowl of sweet-smelling 
milk, and then turned homeward again, the smoke 
of my pipe curling upward in the still cool evening 
air. 
It was long after dark when we reached home. 
As we went up the side stair which opened on the 
street by a door of its own, I put my head into the 
shop and bade Mr. Willow good-night. He was 
seated at his bench studying the strange swing of 
the many pendulums of his new instrument, but in A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
place of the pleased look which the view of his com- 
pleted task usually brought upon his face, it was sad 
and weary, and he merely turned his head a moment 
to answer my salute. On the stairs we met Phoebe, 
who was greatly troubled, and told us that a little 
while before dusk, Mr. Willow and his son being out, 
the stranger had called, and asking for my wife,— 
for the little lady, as he called her,—had pushed by 
the maid and gone up-stairs, saying that he would 
wait to see her. Phoebe, alarmed at his wild manner, 
had kept watch at our door until her master came 
back. Then she had heard in our room, where the 
son and father met, fierce and angry words, after 
which the old man had gone away and the clock- 
maker had retired to his shop. All that evening we 
sat in the darkness of our room alone, thinking it 
best not to disturb Mr. Willow and his lad, who were 
by themselves in the shop. About ten the boy came 
up, bade us a good-night, and soon after we ourselves 
went, somewhat tired, to bed. 
The next day was Sunday, and as usual we slept 
rather later than common. After dressing I went 
into the back room, and, throwing up the window, 
stood still to breathe the freshness of the time. The 
pigeons were coquetting on the opposite gables and 
housetops, and below me, in the garden, the rare 
breezes which had lost their way in the city were 
swinging the roses and jessamines like censers, till 
their mingled odors made rich the morning air. 
Suddenly I heard a cry of surprise, and turning, 
saw my May, prettier and fresher than any roses in 
her neat white morning-dress. Her face was full of A DA'A FT ON THE BANK OF STAIN. 
wonder, and she held in her hands the papers we had 
left on the table the night before. 
“ What is it now, May ?” said I. 
“ Look!” she said, holding up her draft on the 
Bank of Spain. 
Beneath it was written, in a bold and flowing hand, 
“ Paid by the Bank of Spain,” and pinned fast to the 
paper was a bank-note for—I could hardly credit 
my eyes—one thousand dollars. We looked at one 
another for a moment, speechless. Then May burst 
into tears and laid her head on my shoulder. I can- 
not understand why she cried, but that was just what 
this odd little woman did. She cried and laughed 
by turns, and would not be stilled, saying, “ Oh, 
Harry, don’t you see I was right? God has been 
good to us this Sabbath morning.” 
At last I took her in my arms and tried to make 
her see that the money was not ours, but then the 
little lady was outraged. She called Phoebe, and 
questioned her and young Willow in vain. Neither 
knew anything of the matter, and my own notion as 
to its having been a freak of the English stranger she 
utterly refused to listen to. 
It was vast wealth to us needy young people, this 
thousand dollars, and as it lay there on the table it 
seemed to me at times unreal, or as if it might be the 
dreamed fulfilment of a dream, soon to vanish and 
be gone. My wife must also have had some such 
fancy, for she was all the time running back and for- 
ward, now handling the note, and now turning to cry 
out her gratitude and thankfulness upon my breast. 
To this day we know not whence it came, but as 198 
A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN 
Willow’s father was plainly a man of wealth, and as 
he had spoken in words of strong feeling to my wife 
of the little service she had tried to render him, I 
came at last to believe that the gift was his. At all 
events, we heard no more of the giver, whoever he 
may have been. I trust that he has been the better 
and happier for all the kind and pleasant things my 
wife has said of him, and for the earnest prayers she 
said that night. 
While we were still talking of the strange gift, 
young Willow suddenly returned, and, after waiting 
a moment, found a chance to tell us that his father’s 
room was empty, and to ask if we knew where he 
could be. I felt at once a sense of alarm, and ran 
up-stairs and into Mr. Willow’s chamber. The bed 
had not been slept in. Then I went hastily down to 
the shop, followed by my wife and the lad. On 
opening the door the first thing which struck me was 
that the clocks were silent, and I missed their ac- 
customed ticking. This once for years they had not 
been wound up on Saturday night, as was the clock- 
maker’s habit. I turned to his workbench. He was 
seated in front of it, his head on his hands, watching 
the pendulums of his machine, which were swinging 
merrily. “ Mr. Willow,” said I, placing a hand on 
his shoulder, “ are you sick ?” He made no answer. 
“ Why don’t he speak ?” said May, with a scared 
face. 
“ He will never speak again, my darling,” I replied. 
“ He is dead!” 
I have little to add to this simple story. On in- A DRAFT ON THE BANK OF SPAIN. 
199 
quiry I found that the stranger had left the city. No 
claimant came for our money, and so, after a little, 
having buried Mr. Willow in the Old Swedes’ church- 
yard, we went away with his son to the West. The 
lad told us then that it was his father’s desire that on 
his death he should take his true name. An evil fate 
went with it, and to-day young Tressilian lies in a 
soldier’s nameless grave beneath the giant shadows 
of Lookout Mountain,—one more sweet and honest 
life given for the land he had learned to love and 
honor. 
THE END.