5

some expected letters. The steamer came in slowly, the mail was distributed slowly, and I stopped to read my letters before returning. I had a picture-paper for Jacques, and as I looked out across the straits, I saw that the storm was over, and decided to return to the Chenaux in the afternoon, leaving word with my halfbreeds to have the sail-boat in readiness Io at three o'clock. The sun was throwing out a watery gleam as, after the lapse of an hour or two, I walked up the limestone road and entered the great gate of the Agency. As I came through the garden 15 along the cherry-tree avenue, I saw Jacques sitting on that bench in the sun, for this was his hour for sunshine; his staff was in his hand, and he was leaning back against the side of the house with his eyes closed, as if in reverie. "Jacques, here is a picture-paper for you," I said, laying my hand on his shoulder. He did not answer. He was dead.

"What is the verse, anyway?" I said 20 at last.

"It is my death-wish, as I said before, mon père." And he repeated the following. He said it in French, for I had given him a French translation, as he 25 knew nothing of German; but I will give you the English, as he had altered it:

The Emperor's face with its green leaf band
Shall rest on my heart that loved him so. 30
Give me the sprig in my dead hand,
My uniform and saber around me.

Amen.

'So prays Grenadier Jacques. 'The old soldier had sacrificed the smooth metre; but I understood what he meant.

'Alone, sitting in the sunshine, apparently without a struggle or a pang, the soul of the old soldier had departed. Whither? We know not. But smile if you will, Madame - I trust he is with his Emperor.'

I did not smile; my eyes were too full of tears.

I buried him as he wished,' continued Father Piret, in his old uniform, with the picture of Napoleon laid on his breast, 35 the saber by his side, and the withered sprig in his lifeless hand. He lies in our little cemetery on the height, near the shadow of the great cross; the low white board tablet at the head of the mound once bore the words "Grenadier Jacques," but the rains and the snows have washed away the painted letters. It is well.'

The storm increased, and I spent the night at the Agency, lying on the bed of 40 boughs, covered with a blanket. The house shook in the gale, the shutters rattled, and all the floors near and far creaked as though feet were walking over them. I was wakeful and restless, but 45 Jacques slept quietly, and did not stir till daylight broke over the stormy water, showing the ships scudding by under bare poles, and the distant mail-boat laboring up toward the island through the heavy 50 sea. My host made his toilette, washing and shaving himself carefully, and putting on his old clothes as though going on parade. Then came breakfast, with a stew added in honor of my presence, and as 55 by this time the steamer was not far from Round Island, I started down towards the little post-office, anxious to receive

The priest paused, and we both looked toward the empty bench, as though we saw a figure seated there, staff in hand. After a time my little hostess came out on the piazza, and we all talked together of the island and its past. My boat is waiting,' said Father Piret at length; 'the wind is fair, and I must return to the Chenaux to-night. This near departure is my excuse for coming twice in one day to see you, Madame.'

6

Stay over, my dear sir,' I urged. 'I too shall leave in another day. We may not meet again.'

'Not on earth; but in another world we

SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881)

Of the younger group of Southern poets, those who began their work after 1870, the leader was Sidney Lanier, of Macon, Georgia. As with Timrod and Hayne, the current of his life was changed utterly by the outbreak of the war. He had been gently reared in a refined home amid books and literary conversation. His father, a lawyer, a man of the older classical culture, sent his son to Oglethorpe College, not far from his home, and saw him graduate at eighteen with a scholastic record that won for him an appointment as tutor in languages for the following year. There were dreams of German universities, of advanced courses, and a career as a scholar, but in April of his first year as a teacher there came to the little college the sudden call of war. Four years of soldiering followed, ending in capture by the enemy and four months in a Federal prison. Then in the spring of. 1865, with permanently shattered health, the veteran of twenty-three went back to Georgia, to find poverty and desolation. his mother dying of consumption, and his own career almost hopeless. School teaching was his only resource. A brief period of this, and he broke down almost completely with the disease that had taken his mother. The remaining fifteen years of his life was a bitter fight with consumption, the odds completely against him. He spent a winter in Texas, and, falling in with a rare group of musicians, was made aware that he had a gift for music that amounted to genius. Later he was able to secure a position as flute-player in Thomas's orchestra, New York, and at length was called to Baltimore to take part in the Peabody Symphony concerts conducted by Hamerik. It is the testimony of musicians that Lanier was unquestionably the most inspired flute-player America has produced. Now it was that he began to turn again to poetry, the passion of his boyhood. The poem Corn' in Lippincott's attracted the attention of Bayard Taylor who gave him encouragement and secured for him the commission to write the Centennial cantata which made him a national figure. In 1877 he issued a volume of poems, and shortly afterwards was called to the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as a lecturer on literature. He was ready now to reap the rewards of his success, and began eagerly, excitedly, to pour out the message that was within him. But it was too late. The disease he had fought so long could no longer be denied; he died in the Southern pines at the age of thirty-nine.

Although the greater part of Lanier's published work is in prose, it is as a poet that he will endure, if he is to endure, for we must say at the start that he was not a poet of the first rank. To turn the pages of his small collection is to be impressed with its fragmentariness and, in the case of much of it, its immaturity. His early handicaps, his constant ill health when merely to live required his best effort, and his impetuous, highly imaginative temperament all tended to make his output sporadic and excited. He was essentially an improvisatore, a maker of splendid fragments, of rhapsodic outbursts, of tip-toe glimpses.' In his best pieces like Sunrise' and 'The Marshes of Glynn,' and 'The Symphony' he attempted with considerable success to blend music and poetry in harmonious word symphonies. What he might have done had he lived we can only conjecture. We know that his last work was by far his best. His 'Sunrise' he wrote while literally on his death bed, with temperature at high fever rate, and his voice weakened to a whisper. Surely the silencing of a gift of music at such a pitch of melody and spiritual uplifting must be counted as one of the tragedies of our American literature. Some of his realistic pictures of Southern life in his early novel TigerLilies, made several years before the advent of Harte and his school, place him among the pioneers in what we realize now is an important area of American literature.

CAIN SMALLIN

Cain Smallin was the most indefatigable of scouts. He was always moving; the whole country-side knew him. His good-natured face and communicative habits procured for him a cordial welcome at every house in that quiet country, where as yet only the distant roar of the

war had been heard, where all was still and sunny and lonesome, where the household talk was that of old men and women, of girls and children, whose sons and 5 brothers were all away in the midst of that dimly-heard roaring. In this serene land a soldier's face that had been in front of cannon and bullets was a thing to be looked at twice, and a soldier's talk

was the rare treasure of a fireside. The He walked rapidly, and aimlessly. The gunboats in the river, upon which these cruel torture would not permit him to neighbors looked whenever they walked rest; his grief drove him about; it lashed the river bank, had ceased to be objects him with sharp thongs. Across fields and of alarm, or even of curiosity. They lay 5 marshes, through creeks and woods, with there quietly and lazily, day after day, bent head, with hands idly hanging, with making no hostile sign; and had lain so unsteady step, he circled. A tear since Norfolk fell. And as for the eve- emerged from his eye. It stopped in a ning-gun at Fortress Monroe - that had furrow, and glistened. Occasionally he boomed every sunset for many a year 10 muttered to himself,— before the war.

On his way to the Point which terminates between Burwell's Bay and Smithfield Creek, and which afforded store of succulent grass and clover for the horses, 15 Cain Smallin passed the house of a neighbor who had particularly distinguished himself in kindness to our little party of scouts. The old gentleman was seated in the open doorway, in the midst of a pile 20 of newspapers.

'We was poor. We ain't never had much to live on but our name, which it was good as gold. An' now it ain't no better 'n rusty copper; hit 'll be green an' pisenous. An' who's done it? Gorm Smallin! Nobody but Gorm Smallin! My own brother, Gorm Smallin! Gorm,

Gorm.' He repeated this name a hun dred times, as if his mind wandered and he wished to fix it.

The hours passed on and still the mountaineer walked. His simple mountain

worse than any sorrow. It was disgrace.

'Good mornin'! Mr. Smallin. Couldn't stand it any longer, you see, so I sent life had known few griefs. This was Dick away up to Ivor yesterday to try and get some papers. Here's another 25 He knew no sophistries to retire into, in stinger in the Examiner. Sit down here; I want you to read it.'

'Thank 'ee, sir, don't care if I do rest a leetle; tollubble warm walkin' this mornin',' replied the mountaineer, and fell 30 to reading a slow operation for him whose eye was far more accustomed to sighting a rifle than deciphering letters.

Massy me!' said he, after some silence, our men's desertin' mighty fast, 35 up yan, f'om the army. Here's nigh to a whole column full of "Thirty Dollars Rewards" for each deserter. Let's see if I know any of 'em.'

Cain's lips moved busily, in what might 40 well have been called a spell of silence. Suddenly he dropped the paper and looked piteously upward.

'May be I spelt it wrong, le 'm me look again, muttered he, and snatched the 45 paper up to gaze again upon that dreadful Thirty Dollar column.

It was there.

the ostrich-fashion wherewith men avoid dishonor. He had lost all. Not only he, but all whom he loved would suffer.

'What will the Sterlin's say? Old John Sterlin'; him that stuck by us when corn was so scurce in the Cove? an' Philip! him that I've hunted with an' fished with an' camped with, by ourselves, in yan mountains? And Miss Felix! Miss Felix!'

The man dwelt on this name. His mind became a blank, except two luminous spots which were rather feelings than thoughts. These were, a sensation of disgrace and a sensation of loveliness: the one embodied in the name Gorm, the other in the name Felix. He recoiled from one; he felt as if religion demanded that he should also recoil from the other. He suffered more than if he had committed the crime himself. For he was innocence, and that is highly tender and sensitive, being unseared.

At length the gathering twilight at50 tracted his attention. He looked around, to discover his locality. Leaping a fence he found himself in the main road, and a short walk brought him to a low house that stood in a field on the right. He 55 opened the gate, and knocked at the door. 'Here's whar he said he 'd stay,' he muttered. Gorm himself came to the door.

'Put on your hat, Gorm!'

The stern tone of his voice excited his brother's surprise.

'What fur, Cain?'

'I want you to walk with me, a little piece. Hurry!' Gorm took down his hat and came out.

'Whar to, brother Cain?'

'Follow me,' replied Cain, with a motion of displeasure at the wheedling tone 10 of his brother.

Leaving the road, he struck into a path leading to the Point from which he had wandered. As he walked his pace increased, until it required the most strenu- 15 ous exertions on the part of his companion to keep up with his long and rapid strides.

'Whar the devil air you gwine to, Cain? Don't walk so fast, anyhow; I'm a'most out o' breath a'ready!'

The mountaineer made no reply, but slackened his pace. He only muttered to himself: 'Hit's eight miles across; ye'll need your strength to git thar may be.'

The path wound now amongst gloomy pines, for some distance, until suddenly they emerged upon the open beach. They were upon the extreme end of the lonely Point. The night was dark; but the sand-beach glimmered ghastly white through the darkness. Save the mournful hooting of an owl from his obscure cell in the woods, the place was silent. Hundreds of huge tree-stumps, with their roots upturned in the air, lay in all fantastic positions upon the white sand, as the tide had deposited them. These straggling clumps had been polished white by salt air and waves. They seemed like an agitated convention of skeletons, discussing the propriety of flesh. A small boat rested on the beach, with one end secured by a painter' to a stake driven 45

in the sand.

voice, have ye ever know'd me to say I'd do anything an' then not to do it?' 'I-I-no, I have n't,' stuttered the deserter, cowering with terror and sur5 prise.

'Remember them words. Now answer my questions, and don't say nothin' outside o' them. Gorm Smallin, whar was you born?'

'What makes you ax me sich foolish questions, Cain? I was born in Tennessy, an' you know it!'

Answer my questions, Gorm Smallin! Who raised you, f'om a little un?' 'Mother an' father, o' course.' 'Who's your mother and father? What's ther name?'

'Cain, air you crazy? Ther name's Smallin.'

Gorm Smallin, did you ever know any o' the Smallins to cheat a man in a trade?'

'No, Cain; we 've always been honest.' 'Did ye ever know a Smallin to swar to a lie afore the Jestis?'

'No.'

'Did ye ever know one to steal another man's horse, or his rifle, or anything?"

'No.'

Did ye ever know one to sneak out f'om a rightful fight?'

'No.'

'Did ye ever know one to the words came like lightning with a zigzag jerk — 'to desert from his rigiment?'

The flash struck Gorm Smallin. He visibly sank into himself like a jointed cane. He trembled, and gazed apprehensively at the pistol in his brother's right hand which still towered threateningly aloft. He made no reply.

'Ye don't like to say yes this time!' continued Cain. Gorm Smallin, altho' I say it which I'm your brother,― ye lied every time ye said no, afore. You has cheated in a dirty trade; you has swore to a lie afore God that's better than the Jestis; you has stole what's better 'n any rifle or horse; you has sneaked out f'om the rightfullest fight ye ever was in; you has deserted f'om your rigiment, an' that when yer own brother an' every friend ye had in the world was fightin' along with

As he led the way to the boat, suddenly he stopped and turned face to face with his recreant brother. His eyes glared into Gorm's. His right hand was raised, 55 ye. and a pistol-barrel protruded from the long fingers.

Gorm Smallin,' he said, with grating

Gorm Smallin, you has cheated me, an' ole father an' mother an' all, out of our name which is it was all we had; you has