Miser Farrel's Bequest

I.

IT is barely possible that some citizens of the republic who are now voting — as well as their fairer contemporaries at present restrained from that manly exercise — may not have read the numbers of the Atlantic Monthly that were issued before they were born. Only persons of this defective education can be ignorant of Miser Farrel’s bequest to one of our New England centres of the higher education. For in the good old times, when Plaucus was consul and Fields was editor, the writer who now guides the stylograph — then driving the less tractable pen of the period — was at pains to give the particulars of that posthumous donation which is to-day the source of a revenue so comfortable to the College. And now, standing in fear of that accusation of plagiarism preferred against the appropriators of unacknowledged material, he thinks it well to begin with a handsome confession of obligation to the ancient author some of whose researches he may find it convenient to adopt.

The well-known Mather Safe, which for three quarters of a century has been a conspicuous object in the Library of the College, was the bequest of one Isaac D. Farrel, more popularly known by the sobriquet which still clings to whatever may be left of him. As a collateral descendant of the author of the Magnalia, he had inherited the huge oaken cabinet that was once the property of that volu-

minous divine ; and this it was that he bequeathed to the College in lieu of those titles to solid gold and silver with which its civilities to the wealthy bachelor ought to have been rewarded. Having caused the door of the Safe to be secured by two massive locks, the testator enjoined that their respective keys should be forever held by the President and Treasurer of the institution, to the end that neither should have access to its contents except in the presence of his brother officer. He further required that this bulky receptacle should be opened for the deposit of such packages as their owners desired to keep from the world for at least fifty years. It is needless to say that no sane corporation would have endured this posthumous fussiness, had it not been for certain mysterious papers which Farrel had caused to be let into the wood in one corner of the structure. These occult documents — which must remain untouched for one hundred years — were supposed to indicate the locality of buried treasure, or to point out some means whereby immense wealth would finally accrue to the College. Now, as it turned out that this eccentric benefactor, however penurious in most respects, had saved nothing in lawyers, there was really no way of disregarding his wishes except by relinquishing all claims under the will. So it came to pass that the Mather Safe was opened to the public under the conditions which its donor had prescribed.

The number of persons who appeared to claim the privilege of the Miser’s singular bequest excited the amazement of the academic authorities who had it in charge. Carefully enveloped parcels, containing manuscript or other important matter, were constantly confided to the Mather Safe ; these were usually addressed to the specified descendant of some living person, or to the future occupant of some professor’s chair or metropolitan pulpit. There were wild rumors of secrets borne by this messenger between the generations. It was said that journals and letters had been deposited which would change the current gossip of history, and explode bubble reputations that had glittered before the world. There were hints of deadly sins committed by those high in Church and State, which the perpetrators lacked courage to confess to their contemporaries, but which, in the bitterness of remorse, they had recorded in the Mather Safe ; thus taking a ghastly satisfaction in the thought that they should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men.

It is to be regretted that the advantages of the Safe were occasionally abused by those unbalanced persons who unhappily are to be found in all centres of culture and propriety. A poor crank of this description once insisted upon depositing certain strands of a rope which an outraged public sentiment had placed upon the neck of a foolish prater called Harrison ; at least, if this was not his name, it was certainly something very like it. Now the talk of this fellow was highly offensive not only to the College officers of his day, but to their numerous friends among gentlemen of property and standing. In view of this fact, it was a violation of the decencies, no less than of the probabilities, of life when the follower of this fanatic decreed that his hempen trophy should be given to the president of an historical society (whom he absurdly supposed might be some person then living) on the day when a colossal statue of this pestilent Harrison should be placed on the most fashionable thoroughfare of the city. Yet in spite of a few such melancholy perversions of the Farrel gift, it was considered — a quarter of a century ago, when the writer made his last report of it — an interesting and, on the whole, a useful bequest. Of its present condition and estimation, there is no need of citing the many accessible sources of information ; the fact that the Mather Safe was connected with an occurrence about to be related must justify this brief notice of its former history.

It has been recently hinted in these pages that the publication of the Life and Letters of the Reverend Charles Greyson will give the future pew-holders of St. Philemon’s considerable information, of which those at present listening to this stimulating rector are profoundly ignorant. The uncalculating openness of his correspondence with the chaplain of the British Embassy in a noted European capital will reveal the shady recesses of an epoch that had more in it than the glare and clamor now chiefly perceptible. It is certain that the singular connection which existed between the clergyman and Dr. Ernest Hargrave, Peckster Professor of Osteology, will be more intelligible to our successors than it can be made to the majority of existing readers. While it is easy to understand that a man may inherit a brain which he lacks the energy to put to full service, it is hard to see how this power can be supplied from the vehement vitality of another person. The experiments of Dr. Liebeault, proving the possibility of ameliorating character through hypnotic suggestion, may dimly enlighten certain passages in the following extract from one of Mr. Greyson’s letters. We shall, nevertheless, do well to pass lightly over difficulties, confident that they will be satisfactorily removed by some theory of ganglionic friction familiar to the future annotator of this correspondence.

“ Of course it was a good idea to send you the photographs ; how could I have done better when a sudden rush of work kept me from entering the epistolary confessional at the usual time ? Never fear that I cannot spare them ; they come to me in great numbers. The maidenly zeal for ecclesiastical personages, which used to work itself off in slippers, suspenders, and penwipers, now keeps me supplied with specimens of amateur photography. This is a great gain ; they may be packed in a small compass, and are not attacked by moths. Some of the objects represented seem to have puzzled you. I did not write their names on the backs, because it would have subjected the parcel to letter-postage. I will now supply the information for which you ask.

“ ‘ The iron-bound clothes-press, wide enough to accommodate a summer Sunday-school,’ is your irreverent designation of our famous Mather Safe. Extensive additions to the original cabinet have been contrived by the present authorities of the College, who have discovered that Miser Farrel made a more valuable bequest than their predecessors imagined. They perceived that a repository so well advertised, and exciting such general interest, had — figuratively speaking, at least — a good deal of money in it, and that this could be extracted by demanding a heavy payment for all packages consigned to its keeping. This sort of parlor-car arrangement has undoubtedly some disadvantages. Had it not been for the fortune of his wife, Professor Hargrave scarcely would have been able to place in the Safe the important contributions to history and philosophy which he has dispatched to an age that can make use of them. Still it must be admitted that the price of admission has brought old Farrel’s strong-box into high fashion. There are always persons who like to show their wealth by buying some privilege from which their less fortunate neighbors are debarred. The anticipated revenue has been fully realized ; it comes from that natural selection of the richest whose law some moneyed Darwin should give us with proper explicitness.

“It is much to be regretted that the income from the Safe cannot be accumulated to create that Professorship of Heredity which President Cooley considers the most pressing need of the College, and which Dr. Hargrave places next in importance to the Professorship of the Higher Psychology, not to be hoped for at present. For the function of human brain-matter, according to the view of the latter gentleman, may be compared to that of a bank : it must be so managed as to preserve all valuable ancestral deposits, that they may be loaned upon good security for the needs of the passing generation. ‘ Although there are many points upon which the President and I do not agree,’he said to me the other day, ‘ I am sure he is right in thinking that a well-endowed professorship for the objective study of hereditary proclivities might solve many problems connected with education; it would show what sort of marriages are likely to transmit those motor-adjustments of the brain which the College is at such cost to cultivate. When I can establish my ideal Chair of Psychology to train the organist, Dr. Cooley’s Chair of Heredity will see that the best instrument is provided for his touch.’

“ To return to the photographs. ‘The indefinite portrait of a lady ’ was taken from a painting by Stirmice, and represents an individuality no less definite than that of my friend Clara Hargrave. Yes, I am prepared for your comment: ‘ The face is handsome and intellectual, to be sure, but there is nothing to justify the ardent admiration you have so often expressed for this woman,’ This is easily explicable. The likeness was painted before her marriage, and shows no trace of the efflorescence of mind and soul which Professor Hargrave has called into being. The soft radiance of eyes that have pierced the supposed barriers of the knowable, the charm of feature moulded by impressions more delicate than those which reach us through the senses, you must cross the ocean to see. And why not do this ? Why not come over to our College Centennial, which takes place in about six weeks ? You shall preach your most stirring sermon at St. Philemon’s, and look down upon better dressed women than can be found in any London church.

“ Let us get through with the photographs. ‘ The anatomical picture,’ as you call it, was taken from the bones of the Glyptodon discovered by Professor Hargrave during his recent visit to Brazil. The shaded portions, about one third of the bones represented, were exhumed; the skeleton is completed by plaster casts, modeled by the discoverer, — a wonderful example of scientific inference. It was this specimen which suggested the paper upon Ankylosed Vertebrae which keeps the Professor in the leadership of his department of science. It is acknowledged that his work in the limestones of the Sãao Francisco basin is well abreast of the study of those bone-caverns by Lund, the Danish osteologist. I mention this to show that you were mistaken in supposing that the Professor’s article in the Columbian Review — published just before his three months’ absence — would have direful consequences. Why, he simply indorsed the position of Alfred R. Wallace that phenomena, explicable only by the existence of spiritual powers, were real and indisputable, and were proved as well as many other facts are proved in our mundane sciences. I can assure you that I was more struck by the reticence than by the freedom with which he wrote. You will find no hint of the mastery of transcendental forces which he has achieved by methods utterly unknown to academic lectureships. No man more fully recognizes the folly of revealing the higher psychic laws to a society absorbed in the cynicism and push of the materialism in which we live. The work which Professor Hargrave believes to be especially assigned to him is to influence his generation by the implantation, through mystical processes, of some part of the knowledge it so deplorably lacks. He will not attempt to reveal the experimental proof by which this knowledge has been reached to an age that wavers in a maze of vacillation and doubt, — an age when those who devote themselves to psychical inquiries are unable to deal with phenomena above the level of thought-transference in its most material aspects. I have said enough to make it clear that the College authorities have no way of getting rid of this man, as it is very probable they would like to do. To put one of inferior scientific reputation in the Peckster Professorship is a responsibility they dare not assume. They must accept the situation. ‘ Another of his fathom they have not to lead their business.’

“ It is pleasant to see the Professor once more in his pew at St. Philemon’s, though of course I miss his admirable letters from the South. He agrees with the opinions of Agassiz, expressed more than twenty years ago, that there are elements of high progress in Brazil, and that the inhabitants are unusually susceptible to lofty impulses and emotions. Some of Hargrave’s former pupils are now leading men of the empire, and are pushing inquiries into the supersensual world, as well as into that which lies beneath them. He finds them surrounded by climatic and other influences so favorable to success that, were he free from obligations which keep him here, I think he would make his home in that country. Fortunately for us, he is tethered by a sense of obligation to the College, and this he is not the man to repudiate.

“ Let me see : what were your other questions ? Yes, I remember one of them : you asked why Mrs. Hargrave did not accompany her husband. Well, because she dreaded the sea voyage; and if that answer is not sufficient, because the fact of his absence necessitated no real separation even for a day. Indeed, there was probably no hour when some flag-signaling did not pass between them. How do I know this ? By the word of a woman who is incapable of deceit. ‘ But not of delusion,’ you remark in a whispered aside. Then I must tell you, sir, that I assert only what I have verified ; nay, what in some measure I can give you the means of verifying. Mrs. Hargrave has repeatedly told me that the Professor was writing ; and, after detailing the events that were passing about him, has assured me that I should find them recorded in the letter. I inclose you my notes of what she said, taken as the words fell from her lips, and with them I send copies of her husband’s letters bearing the same date. Please to read the two accounts of the chaffering with the Indian for the bones of the Dasypus : you will find them identical, even to the absurd incident of supplementing two hundred milreis with four buttons and a tobacco-box.

“ Shall I go on to still stranger things ? Well, then, this sensitive lady is at times able to throw the focus of consciousness upon the future. No, I am telling no tale of Sindbad or the flying carpet. Quite the contrary. I simply claim, with Cicero and the Greek philosophers, to say nothing of the Christian seers, that the vision of what shall be is not above the powers of the human soul. I say that there are wide and deep sources of knowledge, that occasionally engulf the petty occurrences of life which are too ready to monopolize our consciousness. Goethe, who is held up as the sanest man of the century, tells us that

his grandfather had the power of prevision. Schopenhauer, emancipated from all ecclesiastical prejudices, is at pains to relate an instance of the possession of this faculty by his maid-servant, and asserts that our ‘ dreaming omniscience ’ is always striving to come to the aid of our waking ignorance. Look through the Memoirs of Baroness d’Oberkirch, and you will find sufficient evidence that the prophecy of Cazotte, detailing so minutely the horrors of the Reign of Terror, was known and commented upon before the occurrence of the events that it revealed. Take down your Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, and read of the prevision of the assassination of Chancellor Percival, of your British Exchequer. But I have no time to cite even a tithe of the evidence which goes to show that our branch of the Church has been too hasty in limiting the faculty of beholding the future to Scriptural times. We know that Elisha established a school of prophets near Jericho. What do you suppose he taught in that transcendental seminary ? You may say that it was something analogous to the process by which science foretells an eclipse ; and I must grant that—given an intelligence adequate to grasp the complexities of the problem — it would be possible to compute what shall be from what is. But I think it more probable that Elisha’s curriculum, if we may reverently speculate concerning it, was so arranged as to bring his pupils into temporary relation with that mastering and pervasive Intelligence to which the future is as the present. For there is a second consciousness in man, of which dreams sometimes give us faint suggestions ; and this may be so stimulated to coherence and intensity that we may share the Perception that sees ‘ within the green the mouldered tree, and towers fallen as soon as built.’ All this is written to put into your prosaic British pate the fact that your friend is not necessarily a fool or a shadow-hunter because he believes that under rare conditions the veil which conceals the future is as penetrable now as it was in the time of Daniel. It is certain that Clara Hargrave occasionally touches a state in which events are not arranged in succession as we see them, but appear in vivid coexistence. She penetrates some shy recess of time we have not yet reached, and describes the figures that await our coming. This she has done with an accuracy that no theory of coincidence can be stretched to explain.

“ To bound off to matters sociological: I agree with what you say in criticism of the doctrines of Mr. Henry George. ‘ Monstrous ’ is indeed the word for his scheme of confiscating the deposits of the poor in the savings-banks, which, by legislative decree, are loaned chiefly upon land-values. As Lincoln said of slavery, if that is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Yet I share the widespread dissatisfaction with our present type of social structure. Why should this plethora of material prosperity be confined to a handful of not very deserving people ? Here in our democratic America, we have our growling crowd of lack-alls and our obsequious company of lackeys, — and I know not which is the sadder sight. I was startled, the other day, when a newspaper, which does not exclude such religious statistics as may be likely to interest its readers, announced that I preached every Sunday to fifty millions. (Please do not mistake this for a pathetic exaggeration of the numerical attendance at St. Philemon’s !) Well, I go among these possessors of the earth’s fatness to find too many of them deadened by worldliness and the selfish philosophies of the post-Darwinian epoch. At the Friday Club I meet those who are said to be the perfect flower of scholarly and scientific culture, only to be struck with the vacillation and inconsistency of their attitudes to the questions of the time; all agree in the destructiveness of contemporary criticism, and apparently can agree in nothing else.

“ And yet, disheartening as the situation is, I shudder when I think how much worse it might be made by ill-considered attempts to mend it. Our social perplexities must be approached with the leisurely deliberation of the thinker; not with the passion of those who are struggling for bread ; not with the cynicism and envy of the unsuccessful wealthworshipers, who bear upon their foreheads George Eliot’s fearful inscription, Sold, but not paid for ! I am troubled in spirit as I stand before a congregation dominated by conceptions radically opposed to those of which I profess to be the exponent, and find myself compelled to read the Scriptures by the golden light which the gorgeous Peckster Window throws upon the lectern. It is not until sermon-time that I fully escape the pressure of my surroundings. Then I meet the calm, intelligent eyes of Ernest Hargrave, and the fifty millions relax their throttling grasp upon my throat. My life is uplifted as I share this man’s tender sympathy with the troubles of his age, his perception of the historical processes of human thought, his knowledge gained by rigid experimental inquiries into a supersensuous world. I feel a persistent ego in every nerve. I care not if Dr. Fairchild Bense regards me as a puppet, mouthing and gesticulating as the strings of inheritance and circumstance are twitched by some misty Unknowable whom I foolishly personify as master of the show. Bense is a good physician, a capable art-critic, or he would not be director of our metropolitan picture-gallery ; but of the meta-organic consciousness, conversant with the secrets of time and space, he is as ignorant as was his supposed arboreal ancestor who struggled up from monkeydom, “ This leads to a confession which I think will interest you. When the Professor was absent in Brazil, I felt his presence in the church as if he were bodily in the familiar seat. He told me that it would be so ; he said that his thoughts would be fixed upon St. Philemon’s during our weekly services, and that I should be conscious he was with me.

“ Do you want an illustration ? Well, he was at Rio, — it was the second Sunday he passed there. On the previous Saturday evening, I had been meditating upon Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. It suggested my morning’s text: ‘ Can these bones live ? ’ I selected this question as representative of modern inquiries which religious men must recognize. Can this luxurious society accommodate itself to the claims of the coming democracy ? Can these dry bones take upon themselves new life without breaches of law, coups d’ états, violent subversions of existing relations ? I assumed that the bones, dry as they had become, were the necessary props of the social order, the foundations upon which a better State must somehow be built. As I rose in the pulpit, a cool wind seemed to blow past me. Influence acting from a distance — we have no word to express it like the German Fernwikung — took possession of me. Complemental material was drifted into my mind ; I saw the capabilities of my subject from the standpoint of science. Those bones which I had assumed to be the basis upon which the social organism was reared were by analogy only a secondary formation, a deposit from the growing tissues, and were not to be mistaken for a framework about which the body politic must be built. Bones were virtually formed by the casting off of waste material; their excessive production resulted from a failure of vigorous vitality. To a practiced sermonizer like yourself, I need go no further. You see how shallow was the thought I had brought into the pulpit compared with the scientific truth upon which I founded my discourse. Can you believe that much of what I said came from my friend in Rio, speaking with the immediate power of my living voice ?

“ I cannot see why you should have difficulty in believing this ; for you tell me that you are following with interest the publications of your Anglican Research Society, and have grappled with the bulky volumes it has put forth under the title of Phantasms of the Living. They claim to prove by direct testimony — which is reiterated to the point of tediousness — that there is no mundane distance at which effects may not be produced by the action of mind upon mind; they show that messages may be flashed between zones, even when their senders are under the disturbing processes of death. And if this is so, how much more easily shall a man under the conditions of bodily and mental soundness make himself felt by those who require his service ! It need not be said that a patient student of nature like Professor Hargrave has had no difficulty in mastering the processes by which the constructive force liberated from his mind becomes an impinging impact upon his friend under other skies.

“ This reminds me that, if you make us a visit, I may be able to show you something better than the fine dresses which I jestingly mentioned. I would try to induce the Professor to let you see some of the earlier chapters of his great book on the Will. These have been put in type-writing, and constitute the introduction to a work which will scarcely be completed, and certainly not published, during the life of the author. You would admire the ease with which he brushes through the metaphysical brambles which make Will a mere selfdeception, and which caught the skirts of so sturdy a traveler as our great Jonathan. The chapter on Conjoint Motives, followed by the Exercises for Will-Practice (designed to assist volition in exciting its proper potency of motor outcome), will give you some idea of the regions of mentality, hitherto unexplored, which this man has discovered and developed. Did you ever think how the normal force of the Will is neutralized by conflicting motives before it issues from the mind ? Beaten hither and thither by these multitudinous impulses, it finally escapes, torn and bedraggled, for a feeble flight. Now Professor Hargrave has formulated a process by which the discordant motives are made to work — if I may so express it — with the same push, and thus to effect a result precisely equivalent to their united energy. No, I am not getting beyond my depth, though I feel the constraint of our English terminology, which is inadequate to represent just what I would say; German might do better, but, unfortunately, I do not write it with any facility. As the treatise is systematic, there is necessarily a fundamental tone which no statements about it can make audible ; you should come to it after comparing the achievements resulting from the trained volition of the Professor with the haphazard performances of those who are absurdly said to have a will of their own. A large and free conversation with this man — at least I could promise you this — would impart a sense of what he is and does, and show you that the Centres of Ossification, by which he is known in Europe, is a poor fragment from the sum of his accomplishment.

“ Your account of Mr. Peckster’s sonin-law, the Duc de Fleuron, is not inspiring. I feared he was the meagre and frivolous personage that you represent him. The match was arranged by Mrs. Peckster, who has been in Paris nearly three years to see what could be done for the daughter. Since the son was killed on the railroad, she has been the presumable heiress to the family millions. It was rumored here that the Duke required a certified copy of Mr. Peckster’s will as the consideration-in-chief for his condescension. If this was the case, the consequence to the College of its failure to give Hargrave his well-earned doctorate of laws may be more serious than its authorities apprehended.

“ Although Mr. Ephraim Peckster rallied from his inflammatory disorder of two years ago, he is at present very feeble. He is the last representative of his name, and I am sorry to say — for there is much that I like about the man — that there will be no loss to the world when it dwindles to eight letters of mortuary sculpture. A hundred years ago the family flowered in Gideon Peckster, the benefactor of the College, and has since been gradually falling from the aristocracy that was to the plutocracy that has succeeded it. The Peckster Pasture made its proprietors so rich that they were compelled to devote their energies to schemes for becoming richer. I forget whether I have ever mentioned this bit of ancient meadow-land, which has retained its name since the son of the emigrant purchased it for the necessities of his cow. The huckleberry bushes were long ago replaced by stately dwellings, and these, again, by the lofty stores and warehouses which now pay their quarterly tribute to the poor sick gentleman on Brandon Avenue. A study of the influence of this territorial possession upon the character of the family would be a valuable contribution to social science.

“ And this reminds me that you are wide of the mark in your surmises about our new novel. The character of Euripides Texter in Counterstrokes is emphatically not ‘ Ephraim Peckster rouged for the footlights ’ ! A similar jingle in the names is the only resemblance. Texter makes his millions by wrecking railroads and buying patents ; Peckster’s rents admit him to the councils of railroad-builders, and his agents are sent out to buy land wherever stations are to be established. Texter’s connection with the Institute of Erudition is a gross caricature of Mr. Peckster’s relations with the College. The novelist seems to have taken the remark of our second President, Adams, about the sycophancy of learned bodies without the ocean of salt water that should dilute its asperity. The learned pate does not nowadays duck to the golden fool, in the coarse fashion in which Shakespeare put it. There is only a state of exquisitely good manners on both sides. Our millionaire undoubtedly has a dim consciousness of the obligations, as well as of the satisfactions, of his descent from Gideon Peckster ; while the College has a proper appreciation of the riches of the greatgrandson of its benefactor, and a general sense of the desirableness of effecting a confluence between the streams of wealth and science. In the slang of the period, ‘ that is all there is to it.’

“ As for Texter’s purchase of the senatorship, I assure you that there can be nothing resembling it in the biography of Ephraim Peckster. The instinct of accumulation would have prevented such a scandal. Indeed, there is a club story that Mr. Peckster was once visited by a committee of political managers, who complimented him upon the soundness of his principles, and intimated that there was no office within their gift to which he might not aspire. ‘ Why, as for principles, gentlemen,’ said the host, who seemed gratified at the prospect presented, ‘ I think you may be sure that a man who has twice married mill-property will sustain the party of high tariff from the bottom of his heart.’ ‘ Et jusqu’au fond de la bourse ? ’ whispered the latest Mrs. Peckster, who found it expedient to cross the room at that critical moment. Whereupon her lord perceived what the committee wanted of him, and pronounced his Nolo episcopari with unwavering emphasis. The legend has undoubtedly some sort of foundation, but surely nothing that can support the absurd parallelism your fancy has invented.

“ Enough of this. I am provoked that your mistaken notion has led me to mention some traits in Mr. Peckster’s character that are as well forgotten. I am often at his house, and assure you there is more in him than the sordid money-craving that has so narrowed his life. He has come to feel the mockery of fate, which denies us any adequate view of the goal we are striving for until it is gained, and discovered to be a vaporous illusion, not having even the substance of paint and tinsel. He told me that he had several times drafted a letter to President Cooley which might inclose a check sufficient to establish the much-desired Professorship of Heredity; yet, when it came to the point, he could not bring himself to subtract from the accumulating millions the number of thousands necessary for the purpose. And then the poor man sighed ; feeling, I am sure, how much worthier his life might have been had he heeded the teachings of his never-founded professorship instead of furnishing one more illustration for its use.

“ For after speaking very tenderly of a certain ‘ Juno-like girl,’ the daughter of the clergyman of a Berkshire village, he exclaimed, ‘ Suppose I had come forward in a manly way, and brought it to pass ! ’ And there were sequent suppositions and interrogations, which I think I read correctly, though he did not utter them. Were those two feeble, frivolous Mrs. Pecksters worth taking, even with all the money they brought him ? There was poor Henry Peckster, son of the first, and the Duchess of Fleuron, daughter of the second : both of them with more or less of that ‘ Nero-like physiognomy ’ which Professor Cope discovers in those spoiled children of luxury whose only study is to expend wealth in sensuous gratification. Suppose an old-fashioned family of children, whose numbers compelled unselfish action; suppose them brought up by the ‘ Juno-like ’ woman under conditions that would have given the latent good in the Peckster blood a chance to assert itself! Ah, well, suppose and suppose ; there is no end to it. Heaven grant that you and I may be spared the pain of discerning when it is too late to rectify !

“ Do not understand me as implying that Mr. Peckster has not done all that the world expects from a gentleman in his position. His subscriptions to our church charities are quite up to the general standard. In the paper I sent you last June, you will find his name conspicuously among the donors to my seaside home for the diseased and stunted children of the tenement-houses. We have bought an island, you know, where we strive to keep these wretched little beings alive, until — well, I suppose I must write it — until they are of the age to provide a posterity to sustain the State. The irony is in the situation, not in the heart that feels it; not in the hand that must do the nearest right, even though some distant wrong should be the outcome.

“ To go to a pleasanter subject, I can assure you that Mr. Peckster appreciates the high ends to which the studies of Professor Hargrave have been directed, no less than he enjoys the distinction that has come to the family Professorship. The order he has lately given to the young Brazilian artist, Affonso Varella, was both generous and sagacious. Thus it happened. You may remember that the Professor’s friends have long wished him to sit for the portrait that should adorn the great banqueting-hall of the College, and that any proposition to this effect was so distasteful to him that nothing could be accomplished. Hitherto I have acquiesced in letting the project drop. It was a case where the spiritual ego was so far above the organism that such dull record of racial or family traits as might be within the capacity of our living artists would show a feeble shadow of the man. It would be little more than the picture of a tub. with an inscription beneath it signifying that Diogenes was inside. Well, there are artists and artists ; and in Varella we have found one to whom the spiritual processes that make life are not masked by the body. Mr. Peckster has commissioned him to work into oil some sketches of Professor Hargrave which, unknown to the original, he has taken in his lecture-room. I am satisfied that this young Southerner has genius ; he has seized just the movements which convey character, and will show the bold and elastic spirit of his subject upon a plane far above the level of any passive sitter.

“ This completed portrait will be one more sight I can promise you when you come to America. Should pecuniary obstacles bar your visit, let me mention that we are absorbent of lectures to an extent which is quite incredible. I could arrange a course for you that would more than meet expenses.”

It may be well to mention that the portion of the letter above given was not selected to illustrate the character of Charles Grey son, but for the light it throws upon events with which he was connected. Is it wrong for a minister to receive with exceeding joy testimony to beliefs he has accepted on the authority of records upon which an incredulous age has fixed an ugly interrogation mark ? “I want more,” asserted that good Churchman, Samuel Johnson, when the virtuous Boswell opined that Scriptural evidence concerning an immaterial world ought to be sufficient for him. The excellent logician, Archbishop Whately,—perhaps just because he was a logician, — also seems to have wanted more ; and he did not scruple to look for it in the region of phenomena into which the rector of St. Philemon’s had been led. What if Mr. Locke’s experience-philosophy, Philistine as it has been thought, should provide new armor for religion, after all!

II.

Hamlet was right in maintaining that there are features connected with the decline of life which should not be pictured with minuteness. That Danish Zola, who brought his detestable realism to bear upon the venerable sage of the story-books, got off all too easily with the epithet “ rogue ” which the prince applied to him. While making a duty call upon some moneyed patriarch of the Avenue, let us be satisfied with contemplating the social importance that his millions will give him to the last; it will be well to crowd into the limbo below consciousness any rising sense of the plentiful lack of wit, the most weak hams, and other characteristics of the boozy and incapable life which awaits even Dives ere the curtain is rung down.

The above reflection will excuse us from considering too curiously the languid and shadowy remnant of existence which was being meted out to Mr. Ephraim Peckster. Any reader who may insist upon fuller satisfaction has only to ask his family doctor how much will be left of a man who has been bled for peritonitis in the sixty-seventh year of his pilgrimage, — remarking, by the way, that the subject was not distinguished for heroic qualities before the phlebotomy. “ Such a person as you describe,” the average practitioner will be likely to answer, “ has probably outlived himself.” If, however, the question is addressed to a physician in the front rank of his profession, — to one like Dr. Fairchild Bense, for example, — yon may get a less conventional response : “ It is probable that the person you speak of has come into what we have a right to call his true and essential self.” And the doctor, if not pressed for time, will go on to tell you how different portions of the ancestral substratum are turned up to the light as the ploughshare of circumstance is driven through our lives, and how the hard pan upon which they all rest is not among the loveliest products of nature.

Indeed, any sensitive person, accustomed to dine at the great house on Brandon Avenue while its proprietor was enjoying the “ health and wealth ” which the British Prayer-Book peremptorily demands for the sovereign, cannot be advised to visit it under present circumstances. The disposition of the property has been made, and the most assiduous attentions will profit nothing. And surely the spectacle of Mr. Ephraim Peckster, with shaking head and limbs shuffling their slippered feet over his costly carpets, has small attraction for the lovers of the good things of this present world. The evolutive changes are over with him; the degenerative changes have set in. Organic processes of digestion, circulation, and respiration are continuing a feeble attendance upon the retrograde metamorphosis of mind, which, like a spent teetotum, is wobbling discursively to its final rest.

Whatever may be thought of his fate in the next world, the man of millions has certain palpable advantages in taking leave of this. The most eminent doctor calls to comfort his body with medical sedatives, and the soft-speaking clergyman who happens to be in fashion will apply ghostly anodynes to his soul. It were hard indeed if the clerical assurance of admission to the Blessed City, which gives murderers their glowing dismissal, should be withheld from a gentleman of whom all audible voices speak praise. As for any chance of — Well, a minister is not worth much who cannot explain away these dead men’s symbolisms. Even if there should turn out to be such a locality, it must be a sort of summer resort, just warm enough to supply the sanitary thermal springs adapted to relieve those maladies which overfeasting will unhappily produce.

But even if the future can be so pleasantly disposed of, the past is still troublesome ; at least, it was troublesome to Mr. Peckster, as he sat in listless expectancy in the magnificent solitude of his drawing-room. The exquisite specimens of art which he had collected gave him no pleasure. He could not remember that table of their values he had once been at pains to learn. Did two Ruysdaels make one Constable, or was it just the other way ? He looked inquiringly at the curtains of Chinese silk, in shades of blue and gold, which covered the windows, and then at a structure of little shelves bearing vases of rare china and antique pottery. The medicine bottles and tin boxes of pepsin tablets, that were mingled with these latter curiosities, reminded him that Dr. Bense, who was momentarily expected, knew all about picture prices, and would solve his difficulty.

On the table before Mr. Peckster had been laid two newspapers ; both were unopened. The large folio sheet was the Daily Adviser, the matutinal counselor of Mr. Peckster from his youth up ; the counselor also of his father and of his grandfather. The proportions of objects change as we proceed on life’s journey ; even the Adviser was not quite what it had been. Yet among all the vicissitudes of its existence the journal had maintained its identity. If exigencies had compelled it to put off one set of respectable opinions and take up another, it had never changed suits with careless alacrity. It had retired, as it were, to its vestry, re-robed with due decorum, and appeared again as guide and philosopher to the prosperous portion of humanity, and friend to whatever had gotten itself established. The Adviser had always been the recognized organ and laureate of the College. Its leaders upon the claims of the higher education were written in subdued and weighty English : they gave one a sense as of huge beasts chewing the classical cud under the shade of the tree of knowledge ; they imparted a confidence that the croaking isms — as radicalism, socialism, and the rest of their shabby family — would never puff themselves into precedence of their tranquil solidities. Yet there was the colossal Harrison statue visible from the parlor window ! The representatives of culture and property had given the fellow no quarter, yet there he sat firmly upon his granite base, while the fancied immobilities of forty years ago were upon their trial, or perchance already condemned. The latter view of their condition was taken by the Weekly Adventurer, a labor organ of very advanced views. A copy of this waspish journal lay by the side of the Adviser, and, strangely enough, enjoyed the right of entry to the sumptuous house.

“ Why does Mr. Peckster take that miserable Adventurer, and worry himself to death over its absurd prophecies of things that can never happen?” inquired a collateral offshoot of the family, who had called on Dr. Bense during office-hours in order to obtain his professional view of the situation.

“ It is just as natural,” said the doctor in reply, “ for a man with a debilitated heart to worry over something unreasonable as it is for a consumptive to comfort himself with the expectation of joyful activities in which he can never take part. Quantitative blood deficiencies establish melancholic conditions; that is all we can say about it. The feeling of anxious distress gathers about any object which presents itself. In Mr. Peckster’s case it is Socialism ; but it might just as well be the dread of collision with a comet, or of the coming unfashionableness of stove -pipe hats. To your other question, about an application for money, I can give no encouraging answer. Mr. Peckster has always been close, and senile dementia is notoriously characterized by penuriousness. Not that I attribute that condition to him at present; still there are indications of what may be which we cannot quite overlook. The childish satisfaction he took in the legal opinion given by Ex-Judge Hensleigh, the other day, was certainly ominous. You heard of it? No? Well, the great lawyer had called to recommend the foreclosure of a mortgage, by which a valuable piece of land might be added to the family estate, and in the course of some trifling conversation advanced the opinion that the Courts, being bound to respect the maxim, Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad cœlum, must sustain Mr. Peckster’s title to territorial possessions, not only in the sun and moon, but in whatever planetary or stellar bodies might be found to lie between the Pasture and the ever-retreating œlum of modern science.”

“ If Hensleigh gave that opinion, there can be no doubt that it is sound law,” said the visitor, smiling.

“ So sound,” rejoined the doctor, " that I told Mr. Peckster it could be adequately paid for only by giving his counselor a deed of his entire domain above the altitude of a hundred feet. Well, there was something portentous in the excited manner with which he repudiated my suggestion. ‘ Doctors know nothing about the value of real property,’ he said. ‘ Hensleigh will send his bill, and I shall pay the usual fifty dollars for his opinion, but not one cent more, sir, I can assure you! ’ It was easy to catch the idea that was cloudily shaping itself. Why might not a syndicate of landholders exact payment for daylight, which can reach the community only by concession of right of way through their ethereal possessions ? That is a floating straw, to be sure, yet it shows the direction in which the stream is running. You might visit him for a week, and not notice anything to indicate that the dissolution of what we call mind had begun. Nevertheless, an occasional incident, like that I have mentioned, testifies to irregular action in one of those little nerve-tracts which, taken together, make up the complex unity of the brain. There is a broken string in the harp, though of course simple tunes may still be played without touching it.”

The unconscious subject of these medical opinions, which were being delivered a few blocks off, was absorbed in listening to voices that had uttered their last sentences more than half a century ago. There was Joseph Russell’s description of the Terror as he had seen it in Paris. Ephraim was a college boy when the ghastly story was told at his father’s dinner-table, yet he could remember every inflection and emphasis of the narrator ; the continuous fall of the guillotine, severing the necks of aristocrats, then seemed a horror of yesterday. Certainly it was but yesterday when, openmouthed, he had received Mr. Russell’s recital. Two yesterdays had passed, and the centennial of that dire holocaust was close upon us. Where were the intervening hundred years ? Mr. Peckster had assisted his friends on the Avenue in commemorating the various Church and State centennials with which recent decades have been so plentifully besprinkled. Perhaps his health would permit him to occupy his reserved seat upon the platform during the College celebration, now two weeks off. Then would come the centennial of the great Revolution. The Adventurer announced that a committee had been already appointed to attend to its suitable observance. Chairman Lazarus would come from the slums, and set himself down before the rich man’s door ; not in supplication, as of old, but in menace. A grimy and sordid procession, marshaled by leaders whose hot enthusiasm might make up for their lack of wisdom, would demand an account of the stewardship of the product of their toil. Those Celtic faces, pale, immitigable, as Russell had described them, — were they not represented by a progeny in this new America ? Here too they professed to discover droits de seigneur that were usurping mights, and not rights at all. Had they not already abolished that most ancient and comfortable droit de silence des grenouilles, which a generation ago had been measurably enforced ? The clamor from the unwholesome marshes of democracy was now permitted to disturb slumberers upon the welldrained Avenue, and the remonstrances of the Daily Adviser were powerless to put things back to their old position. As Mr. Peckster contemplated his copy of that venerable journal, there arose a doleful foreboding that the anarchists would some day supply it with an editor, without going through the formality of purchasing the stock. How would the familiar heading look printed in letters of red ink ? What hope was left for the awful and lawful respectabilities of Church and College, if this Samson of the decorums were compelled to grind in the mills of the Philistines ?

Here Mr. Peckster, remembering that he had not taken his morning glance at the news, adjusted his spectacles and unfolded the paper. Had his late tremors solidified into the letters that met his sight ? They were printed in ink of the usual sable, yet no anarchical printer could have arranged his type in an order more startling. Could it be that his glasses were dim ? They were removed and carefully wiped, but the capitals which headed the fifth inside column would combine no other reading. There it stood in black andwhite : ABOLITION OF THE PECKSTER PROFESSORSHIP.

The heading preceded a report of a meeting of the Council of Regents, the governing board of the College, which had been held on the previous evening. It had there been solemnly voted that the money of Gideon Peckster, which had so long supported the Chair of Osteology, should do so no more. There followed a preamble and resolutions, which had complimentary reference to the work done by the present Professor, and declared that his Centres of Ossification was a book highly creditable to American science. After these resolutions had been unanimously passed, the Council adjourned.

This was not all: there was a significant editorial paragraph, given, as it were, in collusion with the report of the meeting. It was probably inspired by the collective Council, and put in writing by some discreet unit of that body. As it seems worth the wear of scissors and cost of paste to any one making an historical scrap-book, there is no harm in preserving it here : —

“ The announcement that after the approaching Centennial celebration of the College the most famous of its professorships will cease to exist will be a surprise to many of our readers. It has generally been supposed that the terms of the benefaction made the maintenance of the Chair of Osteology a perpetual obligation. This, however, is by no means the case. At the request of the Council of Regents, Judge Hensleigh, Bulder Professor in the Law Department, and ex officio counsel of the College, has made an exhaustive examination of the original deed of gift. This he finds to be so loosely drawn that the donor, whatever may have been his intentions, did not succeed in limiting the College to any one method of advancing his favorite study. To inquire what Gideon Peckster may have wished during his lifetime is no longer pertinent; we have to consider what he would wish to-day, were he conscious of the minute subdivisions in every branch of science which have become necessary for its successful prosecution. This question the Regents have answered in a manner which will commend itself to the intelligence of this community. The funds which have so long sustained the great Professorship will now be devoted to minute tutorships of the ribs, the spine, the fibula, and other fragments of animal anatomy. It is by diligently searching the microscopic corners of nature that we can successfully add to the multitudinous facts, or factlets, with which Science must now equip itself. The distinguished scholar whose last moments were embittered by the regret that his life had not been devoted to the exclusive contemplation of the dative case, showed a true sense of the contraction of outlook which is imperatively demanded of the modern investigator. While, therefore, we do not claim that the young gentlemen who will hereafter divide Professor Hargrave’s department are likely to produce a work of the mental grasp of the Centres of Ossification, we are confident that for the reasons which have been given, as well as for others which it may be inexpedient to mention, the action taken by the Regents at their meeting last evening will be heartily welcomed by the wisest friends of the College.”

For a time Mr. Peckster could only gaze at his paper in speechless astonishment. A shudder ran through his frame, as he grasped the fact that the gentle Adviser, whose coos were as those of a sucking dove, had suddenly turned into a bird of prey, swooped down, and caught him in its talons. The tinglings of impotent indignation ran up and down his veins ; then these were deadened by the crushing consciousness of defeat, from which there was no rallying. Finally the old man relieved his feelings in a bitter cry : “ What does it mean ? What does it mean ? What is the Daily Adviser doing ?”

“ Doing ! ” echoed the Rev. Charles Greyson, as he entered the room. “ Why, it is setting springes to catch woodcock, traps into which the devoted friends of Professor Hargrave are politely invited to walk. I tell you that one man — I need not name him — is at the bottom of this miserable business. The stupid fowl of the Council, roosting in their sleepy innocence, can be driven into any snare he sets for them. Those resolutions — bah ! As if nobody were bright enough to read what is written between their lines ! ”

“ Perhaps I am not bright enough,” said Mr. Peckster sadly. " I am not the man I have been. Please read them for me.”

“ Let me begin with the preamble, then,” assented the rector, with somewhat more heat than is prudentially advisable for a gentleman of his calling. “ We will burrow through these pretty phrases, and get at the central fact, — unmask these formal whereases, and show what is behind them! Listen while I give them to you in the revised version : Whereas, Dr. Ernest Hargrave has brought scandal upon the College by departing from that exclusive basis of physical research upon which the Peckster Professorship should rest; and whereas, he has presumed to declare that the spiritual nature of man is scientifically proved, notwithstanding the most eminent scientific authorities have decreed otherwise ; and whereas, we recognize that there are difficulties in the way of asking Dr. Hargrave to resign a professorship to which his investigations have added new lustre ; and whereas, Ephraim Peckster — Perhaps I had better not go on.”

“ Yes, do go on ; I am not afraid of what you were going to say. Besides, I do not seem to be properly myself this morning, so it cannot trouble me.”

“ Well, then, Whereas, Ephraim Peckster, the last bearer of a name once influential in New England, is in feeble health and not likely to give anything to the College, now therefore, Resolved, that instead of asking Dr. Hargrave to resign the Professorship, we will slip the Professorship from under Dr. Hargrave.”

“ I see it, I see it,” murmured Mr. Peckster; “ your way of putting it makes everything clear to me.”

“ The matter might be made plainer still by adding one more to the world’s stock of aphorisms,” continued Mr. Greyson. “ “When a man climbs too high upon the tree of knowledge, avoid the scandal, of pulling him down by quietly sawing off the branch upon which his feet rest.”

“ But how if he refuses to drop? ” exclaimed an invigorating voice, as the door was suddenly opened. “ How if some good angel bends a higher branch within his reach before the familiar foothold falls away?”

The presence of Ernest Hargrave filled the room with the rich outglow of an October morning ; it seemed to collect the scattered rays of energy, and focus them into one cheerful point of light and heat. Only a man whose aims are as noble as they are clearly defined can attain the passionless serenity which of necessity is radiated upon those about him.

“ Ministers of grace indeed there are,” assented the rector; “and they will help us do our work among the world-wide changes which are threatening. I was going on to assure our friend that only some poor sham sphinx need fear burial from the drift of these scientific sands. One who knows the answer to the riddle may charm their arid surface to bear corn and wine for the sustenance of man.”

“ I accept the encouragement of your words,” replied the Professor. “ The task appointed me remains; but my presence in this northern latitude is no longer necessary for its prosecution. We have talked together of the forces which threaten that splendid material fabric of civilization of which the College is a conspicuous ornament. No one has a more painful consciousness of their existence than our friend in whose parlor we meet. Change, great change, there must be. Shall it come by revolution or evolution ? I answer, By both ; yet it is possible to mitigate the one by bending the higher energies to help forward the other. My work for the College is not over. I shall command new means of widening the narrow nest that has cast me out. I shall extend it upon lines which are not those of the Regents, for I have mastered powers of which they know nothing. My effort shall be to broaden its science, till it can again take that spiritual leadership of the community which Gideon Peckster prayed it might always hold. Here is a letter I received this morning from Brazil: read it, both of you, and give me your sympathy in accepting the golden opportunity I am offered.”

“ Come nearer to me,” said Mr. Peckster ; “ just now there was a heavy weight upon my chest, but you are removing it. Somehow, you brush away my confusions. Let Mr. Greyson read the letter aloud ; very slowly, if you please, sir, or I shall not be able to take it in.”

The letter was dated at one of the provincial capitals of the Brazilian empire, and signed by certain persons of the highest enlightenment. These gentlemen, some of whom Professor Hargrave had met during his recent visit to the South, had perfected an organization for the noblest educational object; namely, the awakening and perfecting of those mysterious inner senses, for whose existence in a small number of persons there is a daily-increasing mass of affirmative evidence. These students of Nature in her higher aspects had been joined by a few well-equipped scholars from Germany, France, and India. The association had come into possession of an ancient monastery of the Benedictines, and proposed to succeed the worthy ecclesiastics who had there taught such lore as they could master. Of this distinguished body Professor Hargrave was invited to assume the direction. The opportunity was indeed exceptional. The brotherhood would push investigation in all directions; emphatically in all directions, above as well as below. There were limestones packed with the bones of animals of high antiquity ; this extinct fauna might be reconstructed, almost revivified, by the genius of the Peckster Professor. It was believed that the subjective activity, which sought insight into the nature of the Absolute and wiser appreciation of the needs of the human race, would be most successful when balanced by studies in the objective world. The members were all married ; but their marriages were those rare and exceptional unions which must be recognized as spiritual matings for time and eternity. They held that a combination of the male and female mind is essential for the highest work of which man is capable; it was a neglect of this great truth that too often had filled convents with hysteria, and made monasteries the retreat of pulpy idleness. Briefly, the objects of the brotherhood were these: first, to give the well-born children of the community the all-round education that should fit them for the intellectual and moral leadership of their generation ; secondly, by the exercise of occult influence, as subtle as it would be effective, to save society from the effusion of blood which has hitherto accompanied great political and social changes.

“ Although the Peckster Professorship is lost, you see that the battle of life may still be won,” said Hargrave, when the reading was finished.

“ I shudder to think of your acceptance of this exile,” said Mr. Greyson. “ Surely every man is born into a bondage of local obligations which he may not lightly repudiate.”

“ But their fulfillment has no necessary connection with locality,” replied the Professor. " Distance has no effect upon those actions and reactions which take place between the inner states of men. Your better judgment will tell you that I can do more for the life which centres about the College than if I remained to be disturbed by its dissonancies and hampered by its prejudices. Have you forgotten how easily you were set right in your sermon based upon the phenomena in the Valley of Jehoshaphat ? If so much can be done to prevent a harmless misstatement of a fact of science, what may not be accomplished when nobler objects stimulate to supreme mental effort! Society is propelled by agencies that the superficial overlook. The great results are not obtained by those who employ direct methods, and blow the trumpets which lead the march. The work of this Southern society as a generator of social momentum will be felt among you ; we can send modifying contributions to the rush of energies now making for revolution. New historical characters, now lingering in the green-room, await the signal to appear upon the stage. They are from the class that feels most acutely the evils of the present, and knows nothing whatever of the history of the past. Hence there will be no comprehension of the inexorable law of social progress among those who are thrown to the front. Now do you think it will be impossible for us to radiate intelligence that shall tend to give direction to their crude thought ? ”

“ I have reason to know that this is not impossible,” replied the rector. " But you have not thought of the enervation of a tropical climate ; you forget that man makes his noblest efforts in the colder latitudes.”

“ And you seem to forget where the great religions came from,” rejoined Hargrave, with a smile. “ The surrender of the coat to him that would take the cloak, the prohibition of thought for the morrow, — were these precepts generated over a stove, with the outside thermometer below zero ? Man is by nature a tropical animal, and if he is to find more than temporary and one-sided elucidation for his difficulties, it must come from lands where the sun is nearer the zenith.”

“ And yet it is there that the errors of Romanism flourish with peculiar exuberance,” said the minister doubtfully.

“ Are not some of the errors you are thinking of false only from the point of view of the Scotch Presbyterian, or from that of the money-getting Agnostic who has been evolved out of him? You Broad-Church rectors might widen in other directions besides that of rationalism ; you might inquire whether some of the errors you have officially repudiated were errors, after all. The Roman Church has rightly recognized the life of being as well as that of doing, and has understood that the former may be active in the more efficient way. Her monastic institutions may sometimes have been centres of laziness and spiritual pride ; yet the theory of the cloisters was correct. It posited the infinite value of right thought; it asserted that great law of human sympathy, by which holy aspiration and self-denying study may do more for the world than all the plasters for its sores that your fullest contribution-box can purchase.”

“ I must provide such alleviations for those wounded in the competitive struggle as our collections will permit,” said the rector sadly. “Yet I well know that the most we can do at St. Philemon’s is to send out a few poor skirmishers against the forces of evil. You who have received the ten talents may be permitted to sit apart as commander, — not out of danger, however, — and direct the battle.”

“ Please to compare my work with healing, rather than with fighting,” suggested the Professor. “ When did a sick man’s introspection cure his disease ? It is the diagnosis from the outside that finds the remedy.”

Mr. Peckster had been moving uneasily, as if desiring to take part in the conversation, although the paths by which it could be entered seemed closed to his present capacities. He felt conscious that any remark he could make would have a quality of second-rateness, when interpolated in the talk that was going forward. Still there was a tradition that a man should be something more than an auditor in his own house.

“ I think your society should establish itself in India,” he said at last. “ Yes, Professor, you should go East. I am told that there are remarkable persons who live upon mountains somewhere in Asia, and that they know enough to teach all the colleges in the land.”

“ Not East, my dear sir,” answered Hargrave, with the kindly humor of one who adapts himself to a child. “ Why, the East is where the wise men come from; to find where they go, we must consult the authorities. ‘ Westward the course of empire takes its way,’ declares our great bishop. ‘ Go West, young man,’ responds the practical philosopher. If we are to lift up our eyes unto the hills, according to the Psalmist’s admonition, let us look to the Andes. Let us maintain that there are beings living upon their slopes to whose society no adept from the Himalayas would be admitted without a competitive examination, which it is scarcely possible he could survive. All, Mr. Peckster, in these days a man must do something more than boast of his country ; he must stand up for his hemisphere ! ”

An impressive step upon the staircase prevented any rejoinder. It marked the gradual ascent of a person of some dignity, and the interest of the invalid’s day reached its climax as Dr. Fairchild Bense was ushered into his presence. There comes an end to banter and controversy when the practiced eye of the physician ranges over the possibilities of life and death, and is selecting one of them which he will adopt as a probability. The gentlemen representing science and theology held their peace, and scrutinized the doctor’s movements as, tenderly bending over his patient, he applied his ear to different points of the chest. Was he detecting some valvular lesion, or listening to the doleful bruissement, as the medical vocabulary designates a certain vibratory fremitus perceptible in the arterial trunks ?

Whatever may have been the result of the examination, nothing could be gathered from the doctor’s face as he recovered his erect position. He was familiar with the resources of mind-cure, and indeed had used them with good effect long before the exaggerated claims of that practice were mouthed by ignorant adventurers. No man was more conscious of the dispiriting flatness of things than was Dr. Bense ; but he recognized the professional necessity of appearing to stand on a pedestal of health and cheerfulness, and he had drilled himself to do this with remarkable success.

“ Well, Mr. Peckster,” said this wise practitioner, “ everything seems to be going on finely. I can prescribe nothing more suitable than a drive in your carriage, and that I need n’t write in Latin. Go in the sunny part of the day, and avoid the pavements as much as possible. As to diet, — I have really no change to suggest. Pigeons to-day, I think your man told me as I came upstairs : yes, they are unobjectionable, if plainly cooked. If you really want the claret, I suppose I must n’t object; but I would n’t take over half a pint. I see you’ve been reading the papers ; you had better not do it, — they are too exciting.”

“I — I think I shall not want to go to the College Centennial, doctor,” said the sick man, slowly forcing out a remark which he felt had better be made.

“ A very wise decision,” replied the doctor approvingly. “ These centennial exercises are apt to be tedious ; there’s too much advertising about them. I just met Tom Stapleton, who told me he shouldn’t go. He said that, after what the Regents did last night, it would be like celebrating one’s mother’s birthday when she was in the penitentiary.”

It was the pleasant custom of Dr. Bense, when visiting well-paying patients for whom nothing could be prescribed, to retail for their entertainment any brisk saying that he had picked up on his rounds ; or, if visitors happened to be present, he would set in motion a conversation that might lighten the pressure of the silent seclusion which oppresses ailing humanity.

“ There are some good pictures here, Mr. Grey son,” observed the doctor, after looking about for some topic that was free from any medical savor; “ still, I must criticise Mr. Peckster’s last acquisition, A fine Scriptural subject, — Balaam’s adventure on his journey with the princes of Moab, — but I have seen it better treated in the foreign galleries. Do you know that to me the angel has a bleached, anæmic appearance, and the foreshortening of his left wing is not quite correct ? On the other hand, the rage in Balaam’s face is perfect, and the invincible obstinacy of the ass is well suggested. Look at the terror in the position of the hind-legs; I have seen just that petrified immobility in cataleptic patients. Yes, the picture might be called a good one, if we could only get rid of the angel; but I don’t see how that could be done.”

“ Nothing is easier,” said the rector quietly. “ The artist has only to paint out the celestial presence, and then to paint plenty of ‘ expectant attention ’ into the eyes of the animal. You must agree that this would be a truer representation of what really occurred.”

“ Or, better still, let it be painted as a trick-donkey, such as they show at the circus,” added Professor Hargrave. “ Then our sympathies would be with the prophet, who is plying the cudgel with the zeal of a Seybert commissioner.”

Dr. Bense was an honest man. Honest, that is to say, with the smouldering, quiescent variety of the quality which does not consume a surplusage of tissue, or materially injure one’s prospects of getting a living. He had met these gentlemen before in that very house. He had then used certain expressions about the studies of Professor Hargrave which it would be impossible for him to employ again. He perceived that these slurring words had been remembered by his companions, and that they were a barrier to those cordial relations which it was pleasant to maintain with contemporary organisms. The eminent neurologist was now constrained to acknowledge that he had caught a glimpse of an unknown sea, the existence of which he had once stoutly denied, insisting that it was a mere mirage of hysteria and epilepsy. Yes, there it was ; though whether the Professor had found any plummet-line to reach its bottom was of course questionable. Yet as the turbid waters could no longer be denied, the attempt at scientific sounding was not the folly he had once supposed it to he. As much as this it would be the generous tiling to acknowledge.

“ There is a tone in your remarks, gentlemen,” said Dr. Bense, “ which indicates that you recall my manner of speaking of a certain attempted investigation into things outside this visible scene of earth and sky that was undertaken two years ago in this very house. I then believed that you mistook the common phenomena of hysteria and human mendacity for an impossible manifestation of an extra-mundane force. I then thought — as the most sensible men now think — that Professor Hargrave’s transcendental pursuits were all froth and fancy-work. I have had reason to change iny opinion.”

“ Is Saul also among the prophets ? ” asked the rector.

“ Not a bit of it,” replied the doctor decidedly. “ He particularly wishes to keep out of their company. Like the later Saul, he is busy at his trade of tent-making, — or rather of tent-repairing, as I suppose his physicking might more properly be called. He is simply willing to confess that he no longer considers the prophets as necessarily knaves or fools. His vertebræ — not being ankylosed, like those of the Glyptodon, which formed the subject of the Professor’s paper — are willing to assume the proper curve for apology.”

“ May I ask how far your testimony goes ? ” inquired Mr. Greyson. “ I can scarcely suppose you are prepared to admit anything which contradicts the automatic theory of man.”

“Not as at present advised,” responded the doctor, after slight hesitation; “ and as to my testimony, it goes nowhere, — I shall keep it to myself. But I am willing to make the honorable amends to you two gentlemen by telling you experiences which I should have to admit, were it wise for a man in my position to admit anything, as it certainly is not. Stay: perhaps I can show you another’s statement, that with insignificant modifications I can adopt.”

Hereupon Dr. Bense produced a large pocket-book, and selected a newspaper cutting from its miscellaneous contents.

“ Yes, I thought I had it,” he continued. “Now here is something written by a minister, the Rev. Minot J. Savage. I do not know the gentleman. I suppose he is a believer in miracles, like the rest of his cloth, and this of course diminishes the value of his evidence. Yet I must do him the justice to say that the substance of what he says here my personal experience compels me unwillingly to confirm.”

“Unwillingly?” repeated Professor Hargrave, in order to give opportunity for correction.

“ Most unwillingly,” reiterated Dr. Bense, with firmness. “ What am I to do with facts which seem to negative positions which modern researches have made impregnable ? I am not one of those parlor lecturers who cater for the pious vote with their unscientific muddlement of soul and body. Man’s nature is either wholly natural or wholly spiritual ; no thinker entitled to the slightest respect has discovered a compromise. The truth lies with Berkeley or with Büchner, — and it does n’t lie with Berkeley.”

“I see that Mr. Savage knows why the circulars of your Psychical Society are likely to find repose in the wastepaper basket,” remarked the rector, looking up from his reading. “ He says it is because the recipients of such experiences prefer not to be pitied as lunatics, or even treated with the blunt brutality winch says, ‘ You may mean all right, but you ’re a fool! ’ ”

“Well put,” acquiesced Dr. Bense; “ and in view of this objection you cannot wonder that I have withdrawn from the Research Society, and propose to keep what I know to myself. The position of a medical man in the great bread-struggle is always critical; it may be lost by the slightest indiscretion. There are those pressing behind me who would like nothing better than to circulate the report that I had gone crazy over ‘Spiritualism,’ and was consequently unworthy the patronage of my patients on the Avenue.”

“ You are mistaken in supposing that the conditions upon which a successful doctor holds his place are in any way peculiar, " remarked Hargrave. " Everywhere competition is so intense that some microscopic advantage is sufficient to keep the victor in his place, or to assign it to a rival. Since my article in the Columbian Review, men whose names are familiar to you — actuaries, bank presidents, treasurers of corporations, and the like — have opened their minds to me, and related facts which the common sense of the street, as well as the common science of the College, would regard as evidence of mental weakness which must relieve the narrators from all moneyed responsibility.”

“It is not the bread-question alone,” replied Dr. Bense. “ The fact is, I am too old to reëxamine the fundamental principle upon which my studies have been based. I have concerned myself with man as a vertebrate animal. I have dissected him, experimented with him, and arrived at certain conclusions regarding his mechanism. These conclusions are the capital with which I work, the axioms from which I start; it is impossible for me to change them.”

“ Yet you confess that certain facts have been thrust upon your attention which go to show that your axioms are unverified hypotheses, and that the supposed certainty of your inferences may be delusive.”

“ You are too hasty,” resumed the doctor. “ It is true that I have encountered facts for which I have no place in my catalogue. If I believe them, it is with the Credo-quia-impossibile swallow of theology. I don’t digest them; I only gulp them. I cannot interpret them otherwise than in harmony with my ideas and my temperament; that is, I have no interpretation to offer. They are true; and yet the probabilities against their truth are as a hundred to one.”

“ Perhaps if you will tell me one of these facts which are crushed into nothing by the weight of the hundred which oppose it, I may be able to supply ninetynine similar facts which I have verified, and even go on to reverse the probabilities.”

“ I don’t want them reversed,” said Dr. Bense decidedly. “ My book on the Body demonstrates that there is no possibility of showing an ego outside the organism, and that every new observation renders the existence of any such thing more and more unlikely. ‘ My siege is made,’ as the Abbe Vertot said. I want to get rid of facts with which I can do nothing. I will bestow them upon you ; but you must promise not to return them.”

It is not necessary to give the doctor’s narrative in detail. The scene was a parlor on the Avenue, just two streets nearer the country. A casual meeting of five acquaintances. No instability of cerebral equilibrium ; all was health and merriment. Dr. Bense was entertaining the company with the exhibition of a little heart-shaped table, supported upon two wheeled legs and a lead-pencil ; it had been captured somewhere by a brother researcher. Placing the instrument upon a sheet of paper, he proceeded to show the facility with which it could be operated. He could push it about and make it write anything ; and with considerable effort he certainly did succeed in writing several sprawling words. Then a young-lady teacher in Mr. Greyson’s Sunday-school, saying that she had never seen the thing before, and would like to try it, placed the tips of her fingers upon the narrow shelf. The little apparatus now ran about the paper as if it were alive. Muscular direction, of course ! After a time the pencil began to write in a clear, round hand. " I am not forming these letters ; I do not know what it is writing,” said the lady, in a tone of which the truthfulness was apparent. Very likely not; there are certain nervous states in which the muscles act without consciousness. “ Dr, Bense may ask a mental question,” wrote the pencil. The physician smilingly complied. An answer, unexpected, but singularly pertinent, was promptly written. Extraordinary coincidence ! Out came the professional note-book, almost automatically, and the incident was confided to its pages. “Let the doctor write some questions in his book ; we have unusual power to-night,” wrote the pencil. Again there was compliance ; but not until Dr. Bense so arranged a screen that no alien eye could see the motion of his hand. “ In what month of the year does Christmas come ? ” The mind-reading theory came into the doctor’s head, and he thought he would test it by making a vivid mental picture of the word December. “ A trifling question ; look in the almanac for your answer! ” wrote the pencil. Why, this was no thought-reflection; the banter was like that of a person. The pencil was suddenly agitated, and wrote a name unknown to any one present. It was written that a man bearing this name had certain specified transactions with an ancestor of Dr. Bense who had lived in the last century. After a moment it was added that a record could be found in a certain public building that would prove the truth of the assertion. (The next day, after much searching, the document was discovered, and the truth of the statement established.) The perambulatory power of the pencil was withdrawn for some moments. Then, with a series of jerks, it scrawled a sentence containing vulgarities of expression and gross blunders of grammar for which it seemed impossible that the conscious mind of any one present could be responsible. Puzzling enough. Another name, — this was written with a rolling progression of the pencil, of a character not before observed, — Gustave Bernville. No ; Dr. Bense had never known such a person. Stay : had he not met a medical student of that name, forty years before, in Paris ? “ Yes, it must have been at Madame Eugénie D’Uvert’s pension” thought the doctor, as he wrote a question that might elicit that answer, and fixed Madame D’Uvert’s name before his mental vision, as if it were chalked upon a huge blackboard. “ I met you at the crémerie on the Quai des Augustins, where we breakfasted together for a week.” The blackboard business evidently did not work. When, later in the evening, the perplexed researcher consulted a bundle of old letters, he found that “ Gustave ” was right about the place of their meeting, and that he was wrong.

There is no need of relating other phenomena, even more unassimilable with the previous experience of Dr. Bense, which took place that evening. Cognition so strange, so conclusive of something unrecognized by presidents of colleges and superintendents of hospitals, may be rare ; may be as rare, if you like, as the fall of a hundred-pound meteor. Nevertheless, — unless the testimony of men of high intelligence is to be rejected,—it occurs. We may not like it, nor see the use of it; but there it is. Chemist Lavoisier, of the French Academy, once told the world that, as it was certain there are no stones in the sky, it must be equally certain that none can fall to the earth. The logic is so perfect that one may well feel provoked with foolish Brown or Smith, who sees a mass of iron descend in his back yard, and dares to find it red-hot in the six feet of earth into which it has burrowed.

Dr. Fairchild Bense was in a maze. Frogs with their brains taken out were sensitive to sensory stimulation. The case of St. Catherine of Siena was simply one of hystero-epilepsy. Brown-Séquard had shown that cell-matter may draw unusual powers from contiguous nerve-cells, — all, of course, being inclosed by the same skull. Jugglers could beat Slade at his own tricks. All these were undeniable propositions, and had done good service in their time; but turn them over as he might, the doctor could not torture them into shedding the faintest glimmer of light upon the facts set down in his note-book.

“ There,” said the excellent gentleman, giving a sigh of relief as he finished his story of occurrences which have been only hinted at in this narrative, " if all that had not been written down at the time to stare me out of countenance in black and white, I should deny my own experience as confidently as I now assert it. You have had the facts to which, were it worth while to say anything about them, I should be willing to make oath ; and yet — and yet — as the Irish bishop said about Gulliver’s travels — I don’t believe half of them.”

Professor Hargrave evinced no surprise at the doctor’s paradoxical conclusion, but quietly remarked that he had now a request to make which seemed to him reasonable.

“ To admit the world to the confidence I have reposed in you ! ” exclaimed Dr. Bense. “ Impossible ! I tell you that I do not admit to myself what clashes with all my antecedent knowledge. To do so would be to paralyze effort upon lines of research which I understand, and to which I owe all that I am. Would the Philadelphia neurologists send their summer patients to a man who had paltered with doctrines of which charlatans should enjoy the monopoly ? No, sir, my position is peculiar ; you do not know what you ask.”

“ I think it is you who do not know what I ask, seeing that as yet I have asked nothing,” said Hargrave, with a smile. “ My proposition is only that you shall do what other men of your delicate social relations have done at my request. I want to prove that the testimony you have just given is not that of a weak, untrained mind, led into inaccuracy through love of the marvelous.”

“ I think I have not that sort of mind,” said Dr. Bense decidedly.

“ I think so, too ; and I want others, whom neither of us will ever see, to come to the same conclusion. One of the causes of our slow spiritual development has been the fact that successive generations do not succeed to the knowledge acquired by their predecessors. Results do not reach us in a form in which they can be unreservedly accepted. Thus we are compelled to spend useless years in verifying what has been already established before we can push on to new work. At certain periods of the world’s history, the spiritual forces, which are always behind matter, are manifested with unusual power. It is so in our own time; it was so in New England two hundred years ago. Many of the manifestations were then, as now, mixed with the grossest fraud. Some of them were stupid, coarse, and wicked ; others seem to have been dignified and valuable. Clergymen, scholars, and magistrates have left us their records of these unusual phenomena. Now, supposing their testimony, instead of coming to us in the loose and traditional form in which it exists, had been taken under rigorous conditions ; in that case, can there be any doubt that the beliefs which determine conduct at the present time would be other than they are ? ”

“ It was impossible, at that day, to make a thorough sifting of the evidence,” remarked the doctor.

“ Impossible then, perhaps, but not now. I believe you know Judge Hensleigh, of our law department ? ”

“ I meet him occasionally at the Friday Club. A very bright man, but what I call a bigoted Agnostic. Why, he does n’t even go to church ! ”

“ Perhaps not; but he is the best cross-examiner in America, which is more to our present purpose,” responded Professor Hargrave. " Now I ask you to submit what you have just told us to his probing methods of inquiry. He will handle you as a lawyer retained by the other side ; one, moreover, with a persistent sense of the a priori objections to your story. His examination, as taken down by a short-hand reporter, who is sworn to secrecy, will fix the precise evidential value of what you assert.”

“ But to what end does this strange scheme tend ? What is to follow my compliance ? ”

“ The reporter’s document will be copied out, and consigned with others of the same character to the trusty keeping of the Mather Safe. When at length it returns to the light, you will be out of the way of injury ; but you will have left that contribution to the knowledge of posterity which every generous nature must wish to make. I have already an engagement with Dr. Cooley and the Treasurer of the college. They are to

open the Mather Safe immediately after the President’s reception on the evening of the Centennial. There is my plan ; you will not refuse the necessary coöperati on ? ”

Dr. Bense was much relieved upon learning the moderate nature of the proposal. He had been imprudent in departing from his rule of silence; but having broken it, he had been let off easily. The Professor’s will had of late come to have something of the character of an inexorable fate which it was impossible to resist. Here was an acceptable compromise. A man’s knowledge may be said to belong to the world, but surely he may select the time for communicating it; he may prudently minimize his personal concernment in its reception.

“I shall comply with your request,” said the doctor graciously. " When can Judge Hensleigh do his part of the business ? ”

“ Have you any engagement for next Thursday evening at ten o’clock ? ”

After consulting some ivory tablets, it was signified that the hour was unappropriated.

“ Then come to my house,” said the Professor. " Hensleigh is to be there all the evening. Do not fear keeping him up ; he is a late sitter, and will be well paid for his work. I am sorry that the earlier hours are engaged. He begins at half past seven with the actuary of a great trust company ; at quarter before nine he takes a popular trustee, who holds a million or two, and hopes to get as much more. Perhaps you had better make your hour half past ten ; by that time we shall be sure to have finished with the trustee, who has exacted a pledge that he shall meet no one coming in or going out.”

“ Ah, I see,” said the doctor, with a significant sniff of comprehension. " Some of my office patients have the same feeling, and I humor them, if I can. Well, then, at half past ten you may look for me. . . . And now, Mr. Peckster, I must bid you good-morning. I wonder if you have followed our talk ? Nonsense, — or something like it, — from beginning to end; but then, for a person a little under the weather, it may have been none the worse for being so. Take a nap after your drive, if you can, and look for me early to-morrow.”

So saying, the medical gentleman departed, to carry his good manners and cheerful presence into neighboring sickrooms. He was conscious that a certain self-defensive energy upon which he prided himself had been notably lessened while in Professor Hargrave’s company. But the October air would be sure to set him to rights again, and revive the breezy confidence with which it was desirable to meet the fever-mists he daily encountered.

“ There is something responsive in the man, after all,” said Mr. Grayson. “ I hope that he may yet recognize another domain than that of physical forces and chemical substances.”

“ The first step towards an enlargement of our conceptions,” said Hargrave, “is to come to some appreciation of the fact that others have gone beyond us. So far Dr. Bense seems to me to have traveled. That a man laden with his social and professional fetters should penetrate to the truths underlying the mere surface phenomena he has encountered is scarcely to be expected. It is much that his active opposition to us will cease. Yes, he is under conviction, — the conviction that the automatism of man, which logically kills him as a moral being, is open to question. Perhaps he has also reached the suspicion that others may do better work for the world than he can, simply because they have reached a higher stage of development.”

The tall footman suddenly filled the

doorway. He bore a telegram, which summoned the Professor to meet a gentleman just arrived from Brazil, who had important business with him. No excuse for departure was necessary. Both millionaire and minister comprehended the crisis in their friend’s life, which compelled a prompt obedience to the summons.

As the door closed upon Hargrave, an intensity of expression came into Mr. Peckster’s face, and lifted for a moment the brooding vapors of his invalidism. An impetuous ancestral quality, long overlaid by the languid features, now asserted itself. An idea which called for action waved aside the dream-shadows which had held the stage of consciousness with such persistence. The voice was shot into the room with the force of a projectile.

“ The picture ! Varella’s picture, that I was to give the College upon its Centennial! ”

“ I had not thought of that,” said the rector. “ It is to be finished next week. You must make some other disposition of it. It cannot be placed next Copley’s Gideon Peckster, as you proposed. Indeed, it is now clear to me that the authorities will not hang it at all.”

“ It is clearer to me,” asserted Mr. Peckster, “ that the College will hang the portrait next that of my ancestor, and value it as a priceless possession. I shall want but one assistant to compel this recognition of my gift.”

“ And who is that ? ”

“ Time ! ” exclaimed the sick man, rising from his chair, and speaking as if giving a word of command. “ Did you not hear that the Mather Safe is to be opened on the evening of the festival ? The portrait of Professor Hargrave shall be consigned to its keeping for a hundred years! ”

J. P. Quincy.