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So.

I saw what she was up to. Felicia did not want me to have a past, no matter how innocent a one. The vain woman wanted it to be wiped out. She will loudly deny this, of course, and pretend that it is not But do not listen to her. It may even be that she was not aware of her own bad purpose, that it was instinct which sent her on her relentless warfare on poor Rosalie. But now I had the key. Many a small act of Felicia's that had no significance at the time now meant something to me; and it all meant the same thing, the undermining of Rosalie's influence.

The campaign against Miss Katon meant nothing else. Felicia had not cared a picayune about Miss Katon. She marked her with the insulting ticket, "Not Dangerous," the very first second her eye rested on her. This whole elaborate campaign had been a flank attack on Rosalie, although Rosalie's name had never, during these weeks, been mentioned between us. You see, it all meant, "How mistaken you were about Catherine Katon, who, though such a nice girl, is, Heaven knows, dull company enough; therefore your Rosalie-aren't her perfections the imagination of your inexperienced youth?"

To which I replied sternly: "No. Furthermore, you shall not rob me of my sweetest memory. You shall not rob me of Rosalie."

"I have caught you," Felicia would accuse me, "wondering what would have happened if you had not quarrelled."

"That is not true," I would assure Felicia with suspicious haste.

Out loud, you may be sure, I was always careful to call them fine fellows.

"I don't sit mooning about them, looking into the grate," she retorted, as if that had anything at all to do with the case.

It was natural, with all these underground messages snapping out at each other, that we should disagree with some asperity as to which theatre we wanted to go to that night. When a man first marries, he imagines that if he always speaks tactfully to his wife, it will be enough; but there is lots more in it than that. Just try thinking tactlessly for a while, and see what happens to you.

I do not like to present myself as a superior person, but I cannot forbear contrasting my conduct and Felicia's. Her old beaux I let live-I did not notice them enough to try and kill off their memories. If Felicia wanted to let her fancy play with a lot of unlicked cubs who had once wanted to marry her, and who had since then married fat and disagreeable wives, I let her; I did not bother about them. But Felicia attacked poor Rosalie as remorselessly as an Indian. She would crawl through the brush for the sake of firing one poisoned arrow at her. She stalked her in my mind. She got so I couldn't have a comfortable ten minutes of sad might-have-been meditation on Rosalie without looking up guiltily to see if Felicia had surprised us. I was driven by Felicia into the most underground methods. It is by such constant espionage that the innocent are often made guilty.

And what irritated me most was that

"Besides that," Felicia went on, "you outwardly Felicia was as calm as a picture

like the color of her hair best."

I never said so!" I protested. And all the time, while these unseemly conversations were going on, our tongues would be blandly discussing where we would go to the theatre, for these communications, so humiliating to both of us, were held in that voiceless language known to all married people.

"It is not that I mind her," Felicia would pursue, "but I hate to see you waste your time on that kind of a woman. It is not dignified. If she really were worth while, now-but no one likes to see a man she cares for taken in."

At this, stung to the breaking point"What about your old beaux?" said I.

of Peace consorting with Mercy. Not an eye did she bat while she was trying to shrivel up in me the sweet memory of Rosalie. There was a little piece of poetry that I had written to Rosalie in our early days, and in a moment of early married folly, before I knew anything about the nature of women, I had confessed to Felicia whose poem it was. She used this against me in a number of subtle ways. If I had it to do over again, I would say that I had just written it to any one, or that it had been just sitting in my mind, waiting for Felicia to come along and take it. It began:

"Thy hair is like a forest dark,
I enter in and lose my way."

It went on better than that; I wish I had room to quote it all here. It was a very nice poem indeed.

Well, I do not need to describe all the engagements of my battle for Rosalie. It was fought out to the finish, each foot of ground disputed, and I won finally, in those shadowy places where our encounters took place. I kept the memory of Rosalie for myself, a battered little memory, it is true, and one who showed the marks of the conflict of which she had been the cause; but, nevertheless, I had won, and I thought to keep Rosalie for myself always, the more so as it seemed to me that Felicia had at last given up; for there came a time when she seemed at last to have realized my loyalty and the futility of attempting to undermine it.

But I misjudged Felicia. Many men have fought a similar battle, have tried to keep to themselves some early memory, some kind face, and have thought that they had won, and then have failed miserably, as I did, but not many fail in such a cruel way as I did; and before I go on to the end of this warning to young men about to be married, I want to put you a question. It is: did Felicia arrange it all herself or was Fate unfair and one-sided enough to play into her hands?

We have dined and counterdined with the Morris's all the years we have been married, without the name of Rosalie Carlton ever having come to the surface; so you cannot blame me for disloyal suspicion when I wonder if Felicia's fine Italian hand had not something to do with its coming up as it did. Before I knew where we were:

"Rosalie Carlton?" I had already exclaimed to Mrs. Morris. "Why, I didn't know you knew Rosalie Carlton."

"Know her! I should think I did. I suffered under Rosalie's caprices enough when I was in school. I was," she added gratuitously, "a little bit of a girl, and Rosalie was in the graduating class-let's see-why, Rosalie must be thirty-eight by now."

I had never mentioned to Felicia that Rosalie was a little bit older than myself.

"Are you sure we mean the same Rosalie?" I temporized; although the word "caprices" rather clinched the matter. I

knew Rosalie's caprices myself. It was because of one of them that the final misunderstanding which had separated us had come about.

"Oh, we must mean the same girl," Mrs. Morris replied. "My Rosalie was a little, black, shiny girl-hard, like an ant, and with a face like a bad-tempered dachshund."

My glance travelled involuntarily to my wife. She was listening, but her face gave me nothing; she was listening with that polite attention which one accords to the reminiscences of one's husband's old friends, whom one has never met. She merely murmured: "You never told me she looked like a dachshund."

I never had. I had never thought of it; but now that my attention was called to it, she did rather.

"Is she married?" I asked.

"Good heavens, no!" replied Mrs. Morris. "Fools as men are, there's no man living so foolish as to marry Rosalie!" Bobby was a great beau of hers once," Felicia volunteered.

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"Well, now," said Mrs. Morris, "to think of Rosalie's ever having had a beau-and a nice one, too!"

"I wasn't the only one," I said stiffly. "She was a most clever and interesting girl."

"Oh, Rosalie's no one's fool," Mrs. Morris agreed. "The ingenuity she showed in tormenting us younger girls! You never knew where to find her. She could obscure herself from view by her bad temper. I never knew any one who could retire so impenetrably into a mist of sulks."

Felicia looked at me. I knew what she was thinking was, "That was what you meant by her 'mysterious quality."" And the humiliating part of it is, that that is exactly what I must have meant. I listened abstractedly as Mrs. Morris prattled on, and piled one anecdote on another of her school-days-stories of Rosalie's sulking tyranny; there was a verisimilitude in these pictures of Rosalie; someway, they fitted in only too well with the picture of Rosalie that I had. Mrs. Morris prattled on, as a woman will do when started on childhood reminiscences, every now and then saying tactlessly:

"To think, Bobby, of your having liked Rosalie!" While Felicia ate nuts with an

absent-minded air, which tried to say that all this had nothing to do with her, nor was she very much interested in it.

At last I tried to lure my friend away from the topic.

"Does Rosalie still live with her horrid stepmother?" I asked.

I had only touched another spring. "Horrid stepmother!" cried my treacherous friend-when you think that I have been talking all these years about how pretty Mrs. Morris is, she might have done better for me than this. "Horrid stepmother! It would be just like Rosalie to pretend that that angel of light was horrid. Why, Rosalie's stepmother was a perfect martyr to her; and the dance Rosalie led her! When she dies, 'Sulked to Death' will be put on that poor woman's tombstone. And usually, when one's got a difficult girl like that, one can hope to marry her off; but poor Mrs. Carltonthere was no hope for her getting rid of Rosalie that way from the first. Rosalie always quarrelled with every one. The first thing she'd have done, if she'd ever had the luck to get engaged to a man, would have been to quarrel with him, in that queer, sulky, impenetrable way of hers."

Indeed and indeed it was my Rosalie! Yes, this was the ugly warp on which was woven the mysterious and alluring web of Rosalie's intricate character. Other memories crowded in on me. I remembered how Any Miller used to take Mrs. Carlton's part in Rosalie's quarrels. He had always called her "that little black beast," and I had thought him a fool.

"There was one moment of hope for poor Mrs. Carlton," my friend pursued. "Rosalie thought of being a teacher; and when Professor Northrup heard of that, 'God help the school!' he said. But of course it came to nothing. And Rosalie is the kind of girl that gets worse as years go on. I saw her, only the other day, looking as pleasant as a fog bank; and her nose grows longer every year."

At this final touch, Felicia saw the indecency of pursuing Rosalie any further. Her downfall was complete enough, even for the most exacting rival, and Felicia showed her decency by changing the subject. You see, there wasn't one thing left. Poor Rosalie was shrivelled up entirely. After that I couldn't, could I, go on dreaming about her in the fire? And when you think that her nose was growing longer every year-! Especially since all these things sounded but too possible, even to my partial ears. I can only be grateful that they allowed she was clever and interesting. That is all that I salved out of the shipwreck of my memories of Rosalie.

But the question will always remain to me: was the exposure of Rosalie as a sulky termagant, with a nose which grew longer every year, a put-up job on Felicia's part? You may be sure I shall never learn this from her, though what makes me suspicious is that she has gloated so little. She has never teased me once since that evening. Only, on the way home that night, I fancied I heard her quoting softly to herself. Perhaps it was my guilty imagination, but it sounded like,

"Thy hair is like a forest dark."

[graphic]

F

OLLOWING so soon upon the death of Charles Eliot Norton, the death of Donald G. Mitchell points the same moral. The moral is that it is perfectly practicable for an American, given "the amateur spirit" in himself, and possibly some modicum of private means, to lead a retired and gracious and beneficent life. This is quite inconceivable to a foreigner, perhaps particularly to an Englishman, who, by very dint of his proximity, is, in certain essential respects, so much more a foreigner than the Continental. To the foreigner in general and the Englishman in particular the notion of a retired or retiring American is an anomaly which he refuses to entertain. The American who does not wriggle or strut toward the limelight, and mistake that progress for a struggling toward the light, the American who does not strive nor cry, is, to the general European appreciation, a solecism in nature. Of course, he is a familiar, though not a familiar enough phenomenon to us others, us natives. Unhappy he of us, even though himself engaged in what old Wiclif calls "parlous battle," who does not know at least one dear old man, or perhaps not so old, who occupies some "quiet seat above the thunder," "Like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle," who judges the current phenomena with an aloofness, who has no need to keep his ear to the ground or his nose to the ticker, and who is able to "shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour" and lead his own dignified and individual life.

The Amateur Spirit."

One rejoices to see, in the obituaries of "Ik Marvel," that this capability is noted with admiration and even with envy. The case is more compelling than that of Professor Norton, because of his senior's and survivor's early and unquestioned literary successes. Professor Norton never made such successes. It might be said with plausibility that his retiracy was as much enforced as spontaneous. Indeed, that might be said of Mr. Mitchell, too, though the enforcement in his case came from a valetudinary condition. Certainly not from failure of any literary aspirations which he may have en

tertained.

Perhaps nothing else ever seized and held the attention of so many of the candid youth of America as "Dream Life" and the "Reveries of a Bachelor." · At any rate, the seizure and the holding were quite unmistakably attested. If it were really weak health alone that induced the winner of these successes to abdicate his victorious position instead of trying to repeat them, then one might find in the abdication an abundant consolation even for a valetudinary condition. To turn from failure to "do chores" and solace one's leisure with the Georgics and Columella is one thing: to turn from signal success to the same vocations and avocations is quite another, and immensely more exemplary. And to have this turning away from "any of the objects of ordinary ambition" recognized as admirable and truly successful, as it has been ungrudgingly recognized in our more thoughtful quarters, is the attestation of what one may properly call a triumph of right living. There is a pathetic passage in one of the private letters of Donald G. Mitchell's contemporary, George William Curtis, cited in Mr. Edward Cary's "Life," which is illuminating as well as pathetic. "How much I prefer these quiet hills," he writes at some political crisis, "and how I am driven out on the stormy seas." Not that Curtis was at all blamable for being "out on the stormy seas," but that Mitchell was all the more enviable for being in the quiet nooks, "the still air of delightful studies." Enviable and also admirable, for he had shaped his life according to his requirements, and remained far, yet not too far, from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.

His own escapades into public life were the merest avocations. "Julius Cæsar was a consul; so was Napoleon Bonaparte; so was I"-as he begins his record of his Venetian consulate by saying; and proceeds to show what a hollow mockery the consulate was, Franklin Pierce consule. How admirable if it was willed, how enviable even if it was imposed, that lifelong addiction after an initial success that would have turned

most heads that addiction to a course of life that "kept him out of the common controversies of the street and of the forum," and so incidentally gave rise to so much good reading as to tempt the reader to insist, quite in opposition to a recent contention, that all literary men should be amateurs. "What I wonder at," says Stevenson's practical man to Stevenson's artist, "is that you should not want to do anything else."

For the fruit of this learned and gentlemanlike leisure is so much more to the purpose than the entire "life-work" of many literary exclusives. The "collective edition" which Ik Marvel had the honest pleasure of surveying during the last year of his long life, was a worthy and merited tribute to what may be called, without any real contradiction in terms, the Earnest Amateur. To a man who had never written for his living, as one may say, to have the fruit of his horæ subsecivæ set before him, sixty-one years, as he himself records, after he had begun to make that humane use of his spare hours, was a solatium senectutis such as few men have and few men earn. There stands "Edgewood" still, looking eastward over the fields where are the young Yale barbarians all at play. Until its late occupant is quite forgotten, it will stand to instil into certain of the young barbarians, looking westward up the hill, one of the most beneficent uses which a "liberal education" can conserve.

F

An Adopted Americanism

RIEND after friend departs, who has not lost a friend? Americanism after Americanism is replevined by our kin across the sea, and we Yankees stand by helpless and supine. What have we left for our very own, if our indigenous vocabulary is proved to be only a collection of transplanted seedlings? A senator of the United States and from Massachusetts! has delighted in a scholarly collecting of the Americanisms which he finds flourishing abundantly in the pages of Shakspeare. And before that traitorous deed was done, another Massachusetts man, the author of a group of satirical ballads called the "Biglow Papers," had gone out of his way to show that many of our most vigorous localisms of speech were mere survivals. Even rare in the sense of underdone is not our own, since it was once known to the British, who chose to allow it to fall into innocuous desuetude. Indeed, we need not be sur

prised if some British witling some day ventures the suggestion that the author of "Every Man in His Humor" was called Rare Ben Jonson simply and solely because his plays were not well done.

And now another vocable which we had cherished as our own is to be ravished from us. Could there be a more characteristic Americanism than rough-rider? Is not this hyphenated term redolent of the ferocious and lanate Occident? Could any of us ever have the slightest doubt as to its origin? Yet even if we did invent it, we were anticipated by our cousins in that distant isle off the coast of France. An American may have devised rough-rider off-hand as the best term to describe a thing that needed a name. But the name itself was not novel; it can be foundhyphen and all-in a novel, or at least, in a work of fiction written in London in 1843 or thereabouts, by one George Barrow. The book is called "Lavengro"; it is a record of adventures and a gallery of human character, which has long been the joy of all who delight in a good fight sympathetically set forth. And in the thirteenth chapter of this veracious chronicle Lavengro is set astride of a fiery steed. He manages to stick on as best he can; and as he does not fall off, the groom sees fit to encourage him by crying out. "That's it, now abroad with you; I'll bet my comrade a pot of beer that you'll be a regular roughrider by the time you come back!" And there's an end to our paternal pride in the phrase. We did not beget it, at best we only adopted a bantling born to another sire.

ΤΗ

HE female American has been of late "catching it" in the columns of a serious, if visionary, London journal. Her assailant, a Scotch-Canadian, has managed to infuriate her British sisters also by declaring that when he says the American woman he does not mean the general American woman, but only a type of womanhood which is highly developed in the United States, but of which the representatives abound in the United Kingdom. he assails upon the ground that it is like the lilies of the field in that it toils not, neither does it spin. Also it does not bear children. It is given, above other women, to fads and fancies.

The type

The Male American

Undoubtedly this type has been developed so highly in this country that it is not unfair

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