Like the old Greek sages, I "was not in haste to speak; I said only that which I had resolved to say." The people listened to me, and prayed as if they felt the better for it. My meeting was full of success and my heart of hope.

Arrived at this point in my narrative, I feel myself in strong sympathy with the famous historian of Old Mother Morey. For, when "my story 's just begun," why, “now, my story's done.”

"Ce n'est pas la victoire, mais le combat," which is as suitable for autobiographical material, as to "make the happiness of noble hearts."

From the time of that little Wednesday-evening meeting my life in Storm was a triumph and a joy, in all the better meanings that triumph and joy can hold. My people respected me first and loved me afterwards. I taught them a little, and they taught me a great deal. I brightened a few weeks of their dulled, drowsy, dejected life: they will gild years of mine.

I desire especially to record that all sense of personal embarrassment and incongruity to the work rapidly left me. My people at once never remembered and never forgot that I was a woman. The rudest of the readers of the "Age of Reason" tipped his hat to me, and read" Ecce Homo" to gratify me, and after that the Gospel of John to gratify himself.

Every Sabbath morning I read a plain-spoken but carefully written sermon, which cost me perhaps three days of brain-labor. Every Sabbath afternoon I talked of this and that, according to the weather and the audience. Every Wednesday night I sat in the school-house, behind the little table and the tallow candle, with the old people and the young mothers, and the hush, and the familiar hymns, and lines of hungry faces down before me that made my heart ache at one look and bound at the next. It used to seem to me that the mountains had rather starved than fed them. They were pinched, compressed, shut-down, shut-in faces. All their possibilities and developments of evil were

those of the dwarf, not of the giant. They were like the poor little Chinese monsters, moulded from birth in pitchers and vases; all the crevices and

contortions of life they filled, stupidly. Whether it was because, as Mary Ann said, they "got as used to the mountains as they did to washing-day,” and the process of blunting to one grandeur dulled them to all others, I can only conjecture; but of this my New Vealshire experience convinced me: the temptations to evil of the city of Paris will bear no comparison to those of the grandest solitude that God ever made. It is in repression, not in extension, that the danger of disease lies to an immortal life.

No risks equal those of ignorance. Daniel Webster may or may not escape the moral shipwrecks of life, but what chance has an idiot beside him?

"It's enough to make a man wish he 'd been born a horse in a treadmill and done with it!" said Happen to me one day. Happen was a poor fellow on whom I made my first “parish call"; and I made a great many between Sunday and Sunday. He lived five miles out of the village, at the end of an inexpressible mountain road, in a gully which lifted a pinched, purple face to the great Harmonia Range. I made, with difficulty, a riding-skirt out of my waterproof, and three miles an hour out of Mr. Dobbins's horse, and got to him.

The road crawled up a hill into his little low brown shanty, and there stopped. Here he had "farmed it, man and boy," till the smoke of Virginia battles puffed over the hills into his straightforward brown young eyes.

"So I up and into it, marm, two years on 't tough; then back again to my hoe and my wife and my baby, to say nothing of the old lady, — you see her through the door there, bedridden this dozen year, and never a grain of salt too much for our porridge, I can tell ye, when one day I'm out to cut and chop, ten mile deep in the furrest, —alon' too, — and first I know I'm hit, and down with the trunk of a great hickory lyin' smash! along this here leg.

Suffer? Well; it was a day and a half before they found me; and another halfday afore you can get the nighest doctor, you see, over to East Storm. Well, mebbe he did his best by me, but mebbe he did n't know no more how to set a bone nor you do. He vowed there was n't no fracture there. Fracture ! it was jelly afore his eyes. So he ties it up and leaves a tumbler of suthin', and off. Mortified? Yes. Been here ever since - on this sofy - yes. Likely to be here bless you, yes! My wife, she tends the farm and the baby and the old lady and me. Sometimes we have two meals a day, and again we don't. When you come to think as your nighest neighbor 's five mile off, and that in winter-time, why, I can see, a-lookin' from my sofy six feet of snow drifted across that there road to town, and nought but one woman in gunshot of you, able to stir for you if you starve; why, you feel, sometimes, now, marm, beggin' your pardon, you feel like hell! There's summer-folks in their kerridges comes riding by to see them there hills, — and kind enough to me some of 'em is, I'll say that for 'em, and I hear them a-talking and chattering among themselves, about the grand sight,' says they. 'The d-d sight,' says I; for I lie on my sofy and look over their heads, marm, at things they never see, lines and bars like, over Harmonia, redhot, and criss-cross like prison grates. Which comes mebbe of layin' and lookin' so long, and fanciful. They say, I'd stand a chance to the hospital to New York or Boston, mebbe. I hain't gin it up yet. I've hopes to go and try my luck some day. But I suppose it costs a sight. And my wife, she's set her heart on the leg's coming to of itself, and so we hang along. Sometimes folks send me down books and magazines and such like. I got short o' reading this winter and read the Bible through; every word, from 'In the beginning' to 'Amen.' It's quite a pretty little story-book, too. True? I don't know about that. Most stories set up to be true. I s'pose if I was a

parson, and a woman into the bargain, I should think so."

Among my other parochial discoveries, I learned one day, to my exceeding surprise, that Samphiry- who had been reticent on her family affairs — was the widow of one of my predecessors. She had married him when she was young and pretty, and he was young and ambitious, "Fond of his book, my dear," she said, as if she had been talking of some dead child, "but slow in speech, like Aaron of old. And three hundred and fifty dollars was tight living for a family like ours. And his heart ran out, and his people, and maybe his sermons, too. So the salary kept a-dropping off, twenty-five dollars at a time, and he could n't take a newspaper, besides selling the library mostly for doctor's bills. And so he grew old and sick and took to farming here, without the salary, and baptized babies and prayed with sick folks free and willing, and never bore anybody a grudge. So he died year before last, and half the valley turned out to bury him. But that did n't help it any, and I know you'd never guess me to be a minister's widow, as well as you do, my dear. I'm all washed out and flattened in. And I can't educate my children, one of them. If you'll believe it, I don't know enough to tell when they talk bad grammar half the time, and I'd about as lieves they'd eat with their knives as not. If they get anything to eat, it's all I've got heart to care. I've got an aunt down in Massachusetts, but it's such a piece of work to get there. So I suppose we shall live and die here, and I don't know but it 's just as well.”

What a life it was! I felt so young, so crude, so blessed and bewildered beside it, that I gave out that night, at evening prayers, and asked Samphiry to "lead" for herself and me. But I felt no older, no more finished, no less blessed or bewildered, when she had done so.

I should not neglect to mention that I conducted several funerals while I was in Storm. I did not know how,

but I knew how to be sorry, which seemed to answer the same purpose; at least they sought me out for the object from far and near. On one occasion I was visited by a distant neighbor, with the request that I would bury his wife. I happened to know that the dead woman had been once a member of the Methodist church in East Storm, whose pastor was alive, active, and a

man.

"Would it not be more suitable," I therefore suggested, "at least more agreeable to the feelings of Brother Hand, if you were to ask him to conduct either the whole or a part of the service?"

"Waal, ye see, marm," urged the widower, "the cops was partikelar sot on hevin' you, and as long as I promised her afore she drawed her last that you should conduct the business, I think we'd better perceed without any reference to Brother Hand. I've been thinking of it over, and I come to the conclusion that he could n't take of fence on so slight an occasion!"

-a

I had ministered "on trial" to the people of Storm, undisturbed by Rev. Dr. Zangrow, who, I suspect, was in private communication of some sort with Mr. Dobbins, for a month, month of pouting, spring weather, and long, lazy walks for thinking, and brisk, bright ones for doing; of growing quite fond of salt-pork and barley bread; of calling on old, bedridden women, and hunting up neglected girls, and keeping one eye on my Tom Paine friends; of preaching and practising, of hoping and doubting, of struggling and succeeding, of finding my heart and hands and head as full as life could hold; of feeling

I felt that fate was stronger than I. I bowed my head submissively, and packed my valise shockingly. Some of the people came in a little knot that night to say good by. The women

cried and the men shook hands hard. It was very pleasant and very heartbreaking. I felt a dismal foreboding that, once in the clutches of Hercules and Mädchen, I should never see their dull, dear faces again. I left my sorrow and my Jeremy Taylor for Happen, and my rubber-boots for Samphiry. I tucked the lace collar and the spare paper of hairpins into Mary Ann's upper drawer. I begged Mr. Dobbins's acceptance of Barnes on Matthew, with the request that he would start a Sunday school.

In the gray of the early morning the patient horse trotted me over, with lightened valise and heavy heart, to the crazy station. When I turned my head for a farewell look at my parish, the awful hills were crossed with Happen's redhot bars, and Mary Ann, with her mouth open, stood in her mother's crumbling door.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

IN

BIBRACTE.

N the first of these papers I described some of the outside appearances of what is going forward on the summit of Mount Beuvray, where a determined and enthusiastic antiquary has spent several summers, and many bank-notes also, in the study of Gaulish antiquity. During my stay at his encampment, one night, when it was late enough for us to be sure of uninterrupted hours, when the workmen were asleep in their narrow huts, or had descended to their families in the valley, and all picnic parties had returned to the places whence they came, I begged M. Bulliot to give me a succinct account of the great Bibracte controversy. It was, of course, more interesting to me, as I heard it at midnight in the camp itself, surrounded by Celtic remains just recently disinterred, and on the summit of that hill of refuge whose fortifications I had followed through forest and broom, than it is likely to be to readers beyond the broad Atlantic; but it is one of the best privileges of literature to bring many minds into unison with that of the writer, and an author may, without presumption, count upon interesting others if only he has been really interested himself.

Any intelligent person, however little of an antiquarian, would have felt interested in my place. My host had given, year after year, such genuine and undeniable proofs of devotion to his great enterprise, that it was not possible to listen to him without attention. Labors pursued solely for the increase of the world's knowledge, without any selfish aim beyond the noble desire to see one's name attached to a discovery,

labors pursued, too, in all but unbroken silence, without self-assertion, without the least evidence of vanity, in patient persistence against calumny,

against unceasing efforts to make them appear futile and of no account, - labors such as these give weight to a man's words. And I did not come altogether unprepared. I had heard the other side first, especially the constant reassertion of the falsehood that M. Bulliot had found nothing on the Beuvray, except the walls of a few cottages. For even now, when antiquities have been found upon the Beuvray literally by cart-loads, it is still repeated in the neighborhood that nothing has been discovered there.

The point of the controversy is, whether the Celtic Bibracte of Cæsar was situated at the top of Mount Beuvray or on the site afterwards occupied by Augustodunum, the modern Autun.

This controversy has raged in the neighborhood for many years, and if the reader will only imagine a similar controversy in his own neighborhood, causing every man to imply, more or less politely, that his neighbor was something lower than an idiot, he will at once realize the chronic local disturbance which has resulted from it. The quarrel has become of national importance since the Emperor Napoleon took a part in it, and sided with M. Bulliot. His Majesty has received many an envenomed letter on the subject since the publication of the Vie de César, but as he never reads any letters himself except such as are at the same time very short, and written in a big, legible hand, with sufficient spaces between the lines, it is likely that one of his secretaries received the brunt of these attacks.

The passage in the Emperor's Life of Cæsar which clearly committed him to M. Bulliot's party is the following note (Vol. II. p. 59), which stands opposite to one of the beautiful maps with which the work is enriched.

Even the map itself committed him, for there the line of march of the Roman army is so traced, that, by an inevitable deduction (supposing this line of march to be the true one) Bibrate cannot have been at Autun. But in the map preceding this one, the "General Map of the Campaign of the Year 696," Bibracte is positively fixed upon the Beuvray. Here is the note in question :

"It is generally admitted that Bibracte stood upon the site of Autun, on account of the inscription found in this latter city in the seventeenth century, and preserved in the cabinet of antiquities at the Imperial Library. Another opinion, which identifies Bibracte with the Mount Beuvray (a hill of great extent, thirteen kilometres to the west of Autun) had, however, found, long ago, a few supporters. It may be observed, in the first place, that the Gauls selected for the sites of their cities, when they were able to do so, places difficult of access; in hilly countries they chose steep heights (as, for example, Gergovia, Alesia, Uxellodunum, etc.); in flat countries they chose lands surrounded by marshes (as Avaricum). The Ædni, consequently, would not have built their principal town on the site of Autun, situated at the foot of the hills. It used to be thought that a table-land as high as that of the Mount Beuvray (its summit is 810 metres above the sea) could not have been occupied by a great city. And yet the existence of eight or ten roads, which lead to this tableland, abandoned for so many centuries, and of which some are in quite a surprising state of preservation, ought to have led to an opposite conclusion. Let us add that recent excavations leave no doubt about the matter. They have brought to light, over an extent of 240 acres, foundations of Gaulish walls, some round and some square, mosaics, foundations of Gallo-Roman walls, gateways, chiselled stones, heaps of tiles, amphoræ in prodigious quantities, a semicircular theatre, etc. In short, everything leads us to place Bibracte on the Mount Beuvray; the striking

resemblance between the two names, the designation of ppoúptov, which Strabo gives to Bibracte, and even the vague and persistent tradition which, reigning amongst the inhabitants of the district, makes the Mount Beuvray a venerated centre."

The fatality in this controversy is, that not one ancient author uses a phrase or an expression which can really be held to settle it. For instance, there is that word opoúpiov of Strabo, which had a general sense, citadel, garrison town, and a special sense, hill-fort. If Strabo used it in this special sense, the point in dispute would be settled beyond question, but there is nothing to prove that he did so, and Augustodunum might have been a opoúpiov, according to the non-specialized meaning of the word. So with Julius Cæsar himself, though he visited Bibracte in person, and mentioned it in his Commentaries, there is not a syllable of natural description relative to its site. A modern writer would hardly, under any circumstances, fail to give us, at least, a few words of such description as might serve to identify a locality, but Cæsar does not tell us whether Bibracte was on a hill, or near a river, or in the midst of a level plain.

It has been observed, however, that Strabo used the word nóλis to designate such a town as Châlons, for instance, reserving poúpiov for the Gaulish fortresses; and with reference to the silence of Cæsar concerning the landscape about Bibracte, it may be added that he gives at least a measurement, — that of the distance of Bibracte from his line of march when pursuing the Helvetii.

Into all the discussion about that line of march it is impossible for me to enter. The dispute is simply interminable, and can have little interest for readers who are not familiar with the localities. But it is worth mentioning, as an additional instance of the curious way in which modern investigation often finds the solution of a difficulty to be dependent upon something with