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It is a mistake to suppose that we did not have, sixty years ago, in New England, associations already historic. At home we had various family portraits of ancestors in tie-wigs powdered hair. We knew the very treasures which Dr. Holmes describes as gathered in his attic, and never were tired of exploring old cupboards and hunting up traditions. We delighted to pore over the old flat tombstones in the Old Cambridge cemetery, stones with long Latin inscriptions, on which even the language is dead, celebrating virtues ending in issimus and errimus. The most impressive of all was the Vassall monument, raised on pillars above the rest, and bearing no words, only the carved goblet and sun (Vassol), the monument beneath which lie, according to tradition, the bodies of two slaves:

At her feet and at her head Lies a slave to attend the dead, But their dust is white as hers.

This poem was not yet written, but Holmes's verses on this churchyard were familiar on our lips, and we sighed with him over his sister's grave, and over the stone where the French exile from Honfleur was buried and his epitaph was carved in French. Moreover, the "ever-roaming girls" whom Holmes exhorted to bend over the wall and "sweep the simple lines" with the floating curls then fashionable,-these were our own neighbors and sweethearts, and it all seemed in the last degree poetic and charming. More suggestive than all these were the eloquent fissures in the flat stones where the leaden coats of arms had been pried out to be melted into bullets for the Continental army. And it all so linked us with the past that when, years after, I stood outside the Temple Church in LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. 601

MAGAZINES.

London, and, looking casually down, saw beneath my feet the name of Oliver Goldsmith, it really gave no more sense of a dignified historic past than those stones at my birthplace. Nor did it actually carry me back so far in time.

In the same way, our walks, when not directed toward certain localities for rare flowers or birds or insects,-as to Mount Auburn sands, now included in the cemetery of that name, or the extensive jungle north of Fresh Pond, where the herons of Longfellow's poem had their nests,-were more or less guided by historic objects. There was the picturesque old Revolutionary Pow der Mill in what is now Somerville, or the remains of redoubts on Winter Hill, where we used to lie along the grassy slopes and repel many British onslaughts. Often we went to the fascinating wharves of Boston, then twice as long as now, and full of sea-smells and crossed yards and earringed sailors. A neighbor's boy had the distinction of being bad enough to be actually sent to sea for a dubious reformation; and though, when he came back, I was forbidden to play with him, on the ground that he not only swore, but carried an alleged pistol, yet it was something to live on the same street with one so marked out from the list of common boys, and to watch him from afar exhibiting to youths of laxer training what seemed to be the weapon. (I may here add that the only other child with whom I was forbidden to play became in later life an eminent clergyman.) Once we undertook to go as far as Bunker Hill, and were ignominiously turned back by a party of Charlestown boys,"Charlestown pigs," as they were then usually and affectionately called,-who charged us with being "Port chucks" (that is, from Cambridgeport) or "Pointers" (that is, from Lechmere Point, or East Cambridge), and ended with the mild torture of taking away our canes.

Or we would visit the ruins of the Ursuline Convent, whose flames I had seen from our front door in Cambridge, standing by my mother's side; all that I had read of persecutions not implanting so lasting a love of liberty as that one spectacle. I stood by her also the day after, when she went out to take the gauge of public opinion in consultation with the family butcher, Mr. Houghton; and I saw her checkmated by his leisurely retort, "Wal, I dunno, Mis' Higginson; I guess them biships are pretty dissipated characters." The interest was enhanced by the fact that a youthful Cambridge neighbor, Maria Fay, was a pupil in the school at the time, and was held up by the terrified preceptress to say to the rioters, "My father is a judge, and if you don't go away he will put you all in jail." The effect of the threat may have been somewhat impaired by the fact that her parent was but a peaceful judge of probate, and could only have wreaked his vengeance on their last wills and testaments. At any rate, there stood the blackened walls for many years, until the State was forced to pay for them: and there was no other trace of the affray, except the inscription "Hell to the Pope" scrawled in charcoal on a bit of lingering plaster. We gazed at it with awe, as if it were a memorial of Bloody Mary-with a difference.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

And, tragical to relate, that evening in the study Barty and I fell out, and it led to a stand-up fight next day.

There was no preparation that evening; he and I sat side by side reading out of a book by Châteaubriand-either "Atala et Réné" or "Les Natchez," I forget which. I have never seen either since.

The study was hushed; M. Dumollard was de service as maître d'études, although there was no attempt to do anything but sadly read improving books.

If I remember aright, Réné, a very sentimental young Frenchman, who had loved the wrong person not wisely, but too well (a very wrong person indeed, in his case), emigrated to North America, and there he met a beautiful Indian maiden, one Atala, of the Natchez tribe, who had rosy heels and was charming, and whose entire skin was probably a warm, dark red, although this is not insisted upon. She also had a brother, whose name was Outogamiz.

Well, Réné loved Atala, Atala loved Réné, and they were married; and Outogamiz went through some ceremony besides, which made him blood brother and bosom friend to Réné a bond which involved certain obligatory rites and duties and self-sacrifices.

Réné

Atala died and was buried. died and was buried also; and every day, as in duty bound, poor Outogamiz went and pricked a vein and bled over Réné's tomb, till he died himself of exhaustion before he was many weeks older. I quote entirely from memory.

This simple story was told in very touching and beautiful language, by no means telegraphese, and Barty and I were deeply affected by it.

"I say, Bob!" Barty whispered to me, with a break in his voice, "some day I'll marry your sister, and we'll all go off to America together, and she'll die, and I'll die, and you shall bleed yourself to death on my tomb!"

"No." said I, after a moment's I'll marry thought. "No-look here! your sister, and I'll die, and you shall bleed over my tomb!"

Then, after a pause.

a view to ascertaining the cause of the disturbance. Before I could get down the rebels had completely surrounded the tower-so quickly did they overrun the city-and I was a prisoner.

When the work of destruction was finished, they offered to spare my life if I would descend. I knew what their proposition meant. The end would be worse than death. It meant torture. So I declined, but heaped upon their heads such insult as my vocabulary was capable of, in the hope that they would shoot and end all quickly.

But

it was not to be so. Finally I was taken, stripped naked, my elbows tied behind my back, and led before The Protecting King.

This Wang had appropriated my headquarters, and, when I entered, was sitting in the very chair I had used so recently during my interview with

him.

He was in a furious rage, both because the city had been burned and because after his visit I had been very strict with my prisoners, being compelled to punish with instant death any infraction of the rules. I refused to kneel when ordered, with the idea of so insulting him that he would put me to death. His soldiers, however, easily forced me down, by striking me back of my knees. Wang was drinking out of a teapot when I was led in. As soon as I had been forced down he threw it at me, the scalding tea splashing over my head and breast. In response to his questions I replied that I alone was responsible for the orders to shoot the prisoners and burn the city. I hoped he would lose his temper and order me shot then and there. Such, however, was not the result; instead he devised quite an ingenious plan of torture, which contemplated that I should be covered with paper soaked in oil, then set on fire, and the amusement kept up until I should be reduced to cinders.

My guards led me to an underground room, lined with concrete, which had been used as a magazine, there to spend the night and await in anticipation of my approaching death. My legs as well as my arms were securely bound.

A crowd of curious rebels hung around the door, staring and jeering. Among them was the fourteen-year-old son of The Protecting King, who was accompanied by his tutor, a dignified and finelooking old fellow. The boy was smoking a silver pipe, and, puffing it rapidly until the bowl had become almost redhot, he touched it to my unprotected body. The flesh sizzled, and the crowd applauded the cruelty. He did it several times until, finally, his position bringing him within my reach, I drew back both feet and gave him a kick that knocked him down and sent him sliding across the room. The boy lost all control of his temper, and, picking up a gingal, hurled it at me. The iron struck my shoulder and knocked me flat.

It

The tutor had not entered into the spirit of the boy's torments at all, and at this cowardly act he administered to the lad a severe reproof, saying that honorable soldiers never took advantage of prisoners or unarmed men. turned out after all that the boy had a good heart. The tutor's words produced an effect, and he seemed thoroughly ashamed of his cruelty. Не begged me to forgive him, and swore that I should not be put to death by his father. From that hour he became my warmest friend and secret ally.

He was as good as his word. The next morning when I was led out for execution he pleaded my cause so earnestly that his father presently consented to spare my life. I confess that I had some fears that The Protecting King's action was not altogether from merciful motives, and that he had the intention to renew my agonies at no distant day.

Preparatory to the forward movement of the rebel forces, an iron collar was riveted around my neck and the end of a chain fastened to this collar and the other to the saddle of a packhorse. In this manner, with my arms bound and my person entirely naked, I walked or was dragged for more than thirty days under a broiling sun. It would be impossible to give a faint idea of my sufferings during that pe