It occurred to me indeed, when Mrs. Stormer settled in England again, that by making a shrewd use of both her children she might be able to rejuvenate her style. Ethel had come back to gratify her young ambition, and if she couldn't take her mother into society she would at least go into it herself. Silently, stiffly, almost grimly, this young lady held up her head,

there was something monstrous in the impudence with which he played his part in the comedy. When I wondered how she could play her part I had to perceive 5 that her good faith was complete and that what kept it so was simply her extravagant fondness. She loved the young imposter with a simple, blind, benighted love, and of all the heroes of romance who had passed

clenched her long teeth, squared her lean 10 before her eyes he was by far the most

elbows and made her way up the stair-
cases she had elected. The only communi-
cation she ever made to me, the only ef-
fusion of confidence with which she ever
honored me, was when she said: 'I don't 15
want to know the people mamma knows;
I mean to know others.' I took due note
of the remark, for I was not one of the
' others.' I could n't trace therefore the
steps of her process; I could only admire 20
it at a distance and congratulate her
mother on the results. The results were
that Ethel went to 'big' parties and got
people to take her. Some of them were
people she had met abroad, and others 25
were people whom the people she had met
abroad had met. They ministered alike
to Miss Ethel's convenience, and I won-
dered how she extracted so many favors
without the expenditure of a smile. Her 30
smile was the dimmest thing in the world,
diluted lemonade, without sugar, and she
had arrived precociously at social wisdom,
recognizing that if she was neither pretty
enough nor rich enough nor clever enough, 35
she could at least in her muscular youth
be rude enough. Therefore if she was
able to tell her mother what really took
place in the mansions of the great, give her
notes to work from, the quill could be
driven at home to better purpose and pre-
cisely at a moment when it would have to
be more active than ever. But if she did
tell, it would appear that poor Mrs.
Stormer did n't believe. As regards many 45
points this was not a wonder; at any rate
I heard nothing of Greville Fane's having
developed a new manner. She had only
one manner from start to finish, as Leolin
would have said.

brilliant. He was at any rate the most real she could touch him, pay for him, suffer for him, worship him. He made her think of her princes and dukes, and when she wished to fix these figures in her mind's eye she thought of her boy. She had often told me she was carried away by her own creations, and she was certainly carried away by Leolin. He vivified, by potentialities at least, the whole question of youth and passion. She held, not unjustly, that the sincere novelist should feel! the whole flood of life; she acknowledged! with regret that she had not had time to feel it herself, and it was a joy to her that the deficiency might be supplied by the sight of the way it was rushing through this magnificent young man. She exhorted him, I suppose, to let it rush; she wrung her own flaccid little sponge into the torrent. I knew not what passed between them in her hours of tuition, but I gathered that she mainly impressed on: him that the great thing was to live, because that gave you material. He asked! nothing better; he collected material, and the formula served as a universal pretext.. You had only to look at him to see that, with his rings and breastpins, his crossbarred jackets, his early embonpoint, his eyes that looked like imitation jewels, his various indications of a dense, full-blown temperament, his idea of life was singularly vulgar; but he was not so far wrong as that his response to his mother's expectations was not in a high degree practical. If she had imposed a profession on him from his tenderest years it was exactly a profession that he followed. 50 The two were not quite the same, inasmuch as his was simply to live at her expense; but at least she couldn't say that he had n't taken a line. If she insisted on believing in him he offered himself to the sacrifice. My impression is that her secret dream was that he should have a liaison with a countess, and he persuaded! her without difficulty that he had one. II

40

She was tired at last, but she mentioned to me that she could n't afford to pause. She continued to speak of Leolin's work as the great hope of their future (she had saved no money) though the young man 55 wore to my sense an aspect more and more professional if you like, but less and less literary. At the end of a couple of years

don't know what countesses are capable of, but I have a clear notion of what Leolin was.

stairs it was
because he would have
alighted on her at the bottom.

When she went to live at Primrose Hill I called upon her and found her weary and 5 wasted. It had waned a good deal, the elation caused the year before by Ethel's marriage; the foam on the cup had subsided and there was a bitterness in the draught. She had had to take a cheaper house and she had to work still harder to pay even for that. Sir Baldwin was obliged to be close; his charges were fearful, and the dream of her living with her daughter (a vision she had never men

He did n't persuade his sister, who despised him she wished to work her mother in her own way, and I asked myself why the girl's judgment of him did n't make me like her better. It was because it did n't save her after all from a mute agreement with him to go halves. There 10 were moments when I could n't help looking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging him to confess his fantastic fraud and give it up. Not a little tacit conversation passed between us in this 15 tioned to me) must be renounced. 'I

way, but he had always the best of it. If
I said: 'Oh, come now, with me you
need n't keep it up; plead guilty, and I'll
let you off,' he wore the most ingenuous,
the most candid expression, in the depths 20
of which I could read: 'Oh, yes, I know
it exasperates you - that's just why I do
it.' He took the line of earnest inquiry,
talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked

would have helped with things, and I could
have lived perfectly in one room,' she said;
'I would have paid for everything, and
after all I'm some one, ain't I? But I
don't fit in, and Ethel tells me there are
tiresome people she must receive. I can
help them from here, no doubt, better than
from there. She told me once, you know,
what she thinks of my picture of life.

terous!" No doubt it is, but she's vexed
with me for letting my prices go down;
and I had to write three novels to pay for
all her marriage cost me. I did it very
well- I mean the outfit and the wedding;
but that's why I'm here. At any rate she
does n't want a dingy old woman in her
house. I should give it an atmosphere of
literary glory, but literary glory is only the
eminence of nobodies. Besides, she doubts
my glory-she knows I'm glorious only
at Peckham and Hackney. She does n't
want her friends to ask if I've never
known nice people. She can't tell them
I've never been in society. She tried to
teach me better once, but I could n't learn.
It would seem too as if Peckham and
Hackney had had enough of me; for
(don't tell any one!) I've had to take less
for my last than I ever took for anything.'
I asked her how little this had been, not
from curiosity, but in order to upbraid her,
more disinterestedly than Lady Luard had
done, for such concessions. She answered
'I'm ashamed to tell you,' and then she
began to cry.

me if I thought Dickens did exaggerate 25" Mamma, your picture of life is preposand Thackeray ought to be called a pessimist. Once he came to see me, at his mother's suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in my opinion, in the Enlish novel, one really might venture 30 to go.' He was not resigned to the usual pruderies — he suffered under them already. He struck out the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far we might go, for nobody had ever tried. Did I think he 35 might safely try-would it injure his mother if he did? He would rather disgrace himself by his timidities than injure his mother, but certainly some one ought to try. Would n't I try - could n't I be 40 prevailed upon to look at it as a duty? Surely the ultimate point ought to be fixed - he was worried, haunted by the question. He patronized me unblushingly, made me feel like a foolish amateur, a45 helpless novice, inquired into my habits of work and conveyed to me that I was utterly vieux jeu and had not had the advantage of an early training. I had not been brought up from the germ, I knew 50 nothing of life. did n't go at it on his system. He had dipped into French feuilletons and picked up plenty of phrases, and he made a much better show in talk than his poor mother, who never had time to 55 read anything and could only be vivid with her pen. If I did n't kick him down

I had never seen her break down, and I was proportionately moved; she sobbed, like a frightened child, over the extinction of her vogue and the exhaustion of her vein. Her little workroom seemed indeed a barren place to grow flowers, and I won

dered, in the after years (for she continued to produce and publish) by what desperate and heroic process she dragged them out of the soil. I remember asking her on that occasion what had become of Leolin, and how much longer she intended to allow him to amuse himself at her cost. She rejoined with spirit, wiping her eyes, that he was down at Brighton hard at work

crimson, in blue, on the book-table that groaned with light literature. Once I met her at the Academy soirée, where you meet people you thought were dead, and she 5 vouchsafed the information, as if she owed it to me in candor, that Leolin had been obliged to recognize insuperable difficulties in the question of form, he was so fastidious; so that she had now arrived at a definite understanding with him (it was such a comfort) that she would do the form if he would bring home the substance. That was now his position - he foraged for her in the great world at a

he was in the midst of a novel — and 1o that he felt life so, in all its misery and mystery, that it was cruel to speak of such experiences as a pleasure. He goes beneath the surface,' she said, ' and he forces himself to look at things from which he 15 salary. 'He's my "devil," don't you see? would rather turn away. Do you call that amusing yourself? You should see his face sometimes! And he does it for me as much as for himself. He tells me everything he comes home to me with 20 his trouvailles. We are artists together, and to the artist all things are pure. I've often heard you say so yourself.' The he would invent a new crime.

as if I were a great lawyer: he gets up the case and I argue it.' She mentioned further that in addition to his salary he was paid by the piece: he got so much for a striking character, so much for a pretty name, so much for a plot, so much for an incident, and had so much promised him if

novel that Leolin was engaged in at Brigh-'He has invented one.' I said, ' and he's ton was never published, but a friend of 25 paid every day of his life.'

'What is it?' she asked, looking hard at the picture of the year, 'Baby's Tub,' near which we happened to be standing.

I hesitated a moment. 'I myself will write a little story about it, and then you'll

see.'

mine and of Mrs. Stormer's who was staying there happened to mention to me later that he had seen the young apprentice to fiction driving, in a dogcart, a young lady with a very pink face. When I suggested 30 that she was perhaps a woman of title with whom he was conscientiously flirting my informant replied: She is indeed, but do you know what her title is?' He pronounced it it was familiar and descrip-35 tive but I won't reproduce it here. I don't know whether Leolin mentioned it to his mother: she would have needed all the purity of the artist to forgive him. I hated so to come across him that in 40 the very last years I went rarely to see her, though I knew that she had come pretty well to the end of her rope. I did n't want her to tell me that she had fairly to give her books away - I did n't 45 Don't you think we can go a little fur

want to see her cry. She kept it up amazingly, and every few months, at my club, I saw three new volumes, in green, in

But she never saw; she had never seen anything, and she passed away with her fine blindness unimpaired. Her son published every scrap of scribbled paper that could be extracted from her table-drawers, and his sister quarreled with him mortally about the proceeds, which showed that she only wanted a pretext, for they cannot have been great. I don't know what Leolin lives upon, unless it be on a queer lady many years older than himself, whom he lately married. The last time I met him he said to me with his infuriating smile:

ther still just a little?' He really goes too far.

From The Real Thing, 1893.

CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON (1840-1894)

Constance Fenimore Woolson, a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, was one of the most promising of the later school of American novelists. Henry James wrote an appreciative study of her work for his Partial Portraits, and for a time she was compared even with George Eliot. She began, like Rose Terry Cooke and others of her generation, as a poet. then as a snort story writer of the mid century type, but in the early seventies she caught the spirit of the times and her strong studies of life in the upper lake region, issued in 1875 as Castle Nowhere, were decidedly a force in the shaping of the new fiction. Later she removed to the South and for a period worked strongly with Southern materials, first for short stories, like those in Rodman the Keeper, and then for novels like East Angels and Jupiter Lights. Her last literary period was spent in Italy writing short stories of Italian life, the best of which were published in 1895 with the title The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories. Strong as her work was, it somehow has failed to hold the place it once was supposed to have won. She must be ranked, however, with the pioneers of a vital era, and, judged by her best work, she may still be rated with the select few who have produced notable fiction in a period that was distinctive in its fictional product.

THE OLD AGENCY 1

The buildings of the United States Indian Agency on the Island of Mackinac were destroyed by fire December 31, at midnight.Western Newspaper item.

But the Indian warriors could not return the United States agent had long ago moved to Lake Superior, and the deserted residence, having only a mythical owner, 5 left without repairs year after year, and under a cloud of confusion as regarded taxes, titles, and boundaries, became a sort of flotsam property, used by various persons, but belonging legally to no one. Some tenant, tired of swinging the great gate back and forth, had made a little sally port alongside, but otherwise the place remained unaltered; a broad garden with a central avenue of cherry trees, on each side dilapidated arbors, overgrown paths, and heart-shaped beds, where the first agents had tried to cultivate flowers, and behind the limestone cliffs crowned with cedars. The house was large on the ground, with wings and various additions built out as if at random; on each side and behind were rough outside chimneys, clamped to the wall, in the roof over the central part dormer windows showed a low second story, and here and there at irregular intervals were outside doors, in some cases opening out into space, since the high steps which once led up to them had fallen down, and remained as they fell, heaps of stone on the ground below. Within were suites of rooms, large and small, showing traces of workmanship

The old house is gone then! But it shall not depart into oblivion unchronicled. One who has sat under its roof-tree, one 10 who remembers well its rambling rooms and wild garden, will take the pen to write down a page of its story. It is only an episode, one of many; but the others are fading away, or already buried in dead 15 memories under the sod. It was a quaint, picturesque old place, stretching back from the white limestone road that bordered the little port, its overgrown garden surrounded by an ancient stockade ten feet in 20 height, with a massive, slow-swinging gate in front, defended by loopholes. This stockade bulged out in some places and leaned in at others; but the veteran posts, each a tree sharpened to a point, did not 25 break their ranks in spite of decrepitude, and the Indian warriors, could they have returned from their happy hunting grounds, would have found the brave old fence of the Agency a sturdy barrier still. 30

1 Copyright by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., in Castle Nowhere, 1875.

5

elaborate for such a remote locality; the
ceilings, patched with rough mortar, had
been originally decorated with molding,
the doors were ornamented with scroll
work, and the two large apartments on
each side of the entrance hall possessed
chimney-pieces and central hooks for
chandeliers. Beyond and behind stretched
out the wings; coming to what appeared
to be the end of the house on the west, 10
there unexpectedly began a new series of
rooms turning toward the north, each with
its outside door; looking for a correspond-
ing labyrinth on the eastern side, there was
nothing but a blank wall. The blind stair- 15
way went up in a kind of dark well, and
once up it was a difficult matter to get
down without a plunge from top to bot-
tom, since the undefended opening was
just where no one would expect to find it. 20
Sometimes an angle was so arbitrarily
walled up that you felt sure there must be

a

Americans who, dressed in cheap imitations of fine clothes, are forever traveling - traveling — taking the steamers not from preference, but because they are less costly than an all-rail route. The thin, listless men, in ill-fitting black clothes and shining tall hats, sat on the deck in tilted chairs, hour after hour, silent and dreary; the thin, listless women, clad in raiment of many colors, remained upon the fixed sofas in the cabin hour after hour silent and weary. At meals they ate indiscriminately everything within range, but continued the same, a weary, dreary, silent band. The one exception was an old man, tall and majestic, with silvery hair and bright, dark eyes, dressed in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest, albeit slightly tinged with frontier innovations. He came on board at Detroit, and as soon as we were under way he exchanged his hat for a cloth cap embroidered with Indian bead work, and when the cold air, precursor of the gale, struck us on Huron, he wrapped himself in a large capote made of skins, with the fur inward.

In times of danger formality drops from us. During those long hours, when the next moment might have brought death,

secret chamber there, and furtively rapped on the wall to catch the hollow echo within. Then again you opened a door, 25 expecting to step out into the wilderness of a garden, and found yourself in a set of little rooms running off on a tangent, one after the other, and ending in a windowless closet and an open cistern. But 30 this old man and I were together; and the Agency gloried in its irregularities, and defied criticism. The original idea of its architect - if there was any had vanished; but his work remained, a not unpleasant variety to summer visitors accus- 35 tomed to city houses, all built with a definite purpose, and one front door.

After some years of wandering in foreign lands, I returned to my country, and took up the burden of old associations 40 whose sadness time had mercifully softened. The summer was over; September had begun, but there came to me a great wish to see Mackinac once more; to walk through the aisles of its pines, among its 45 spicy cedars and blue-green spruces; to breathe its exhilarating air; to look again upon the little white fort where I had lived with Archie, my soldier nephew, killed at Shiloh. The steamer took me safely 50 across Erie, up the brimming Detroit River, through the enchanted region of the St. Clair flats, and out into broad Lake Huron; there, off Thunder bay, a gale met us, and for hours we swayed between life 53 and death. The season for pleasure traveling was over; my fellow passengers, with one exception, were of that class of

when at last the cold dawn came, and the disabled steamer slowly plowed through the angry water around the point, and showed us Mackinac in the distance, we discovered that the island was a mutual friend, and that we knew each other, at least by name; for the silver-haired priest was Father Piret, the hermit of the Chenaux. In the old days, when I was living at the little white fort, I had known Father Piret by reputation, and he had heard of me from the French half-breeds around the point. We landed. The summer hotels were closed, and I was directed to the old Agency, where occasionally a boarder was received by the family then in possession. The air was chilly, and a fine rain was falling, the afterpiece of the equinoctial; the wet storm flag hung heavily down over the fort on the height, and the waves came in sullenly. All was in sad accordance with my feelings as I thought of the past and its dead, while the slow tears of age moistened my eyes. But the next morning Mackinac awoke, robed in autumn splendor; the sunshine poured down, the straits sparkled back, the forest glowed in scarlet, the larches waved their