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front. You'll give me your word of honor to come back when the hour is up?" He cast a reproachful look upon her. "This from you, Roxella," he said weakly.

He drew in deep breaths of the summer air as they sat in the shadow of the south wall upon a long bench. A huge elm tree drooped its branches from the other side, and fragrant odors of summer floated about them. "Oh, to be free again and go my way unhindered with you beside me, "he sighed. Roxella rose hastily. "The kitchen clock 's striking four," she announced.

She locked the door of No. 9 upon him once more, and went back to preparations for the evening meal with troubled face. "It's nothing short of unfaithfulness to them that trust me," she acknowledged to her conscience. "I'm choosin' a wrong course deliberately rather than see a fellow bein' who is really innocent waste away before my eyes."

The following day was rainy, but Roxella and her charge walked for an hour up and down the gravel walk beneath a large umbrella.

"Even the rain is a blessed privilege - with you," he whispered.

away.

On the fourth day, as they sat again beneath the wall, the prisoner leaned suddenly toward his jailer. "Dearest " he began, but Roxella shrank "Don't!" she commanded. A sudden push sent her headlong upon the soft grass. Half stunned she scrambled to her feet, to find her prisoner scaling the high wall in a manner which indicated both strength and agility. Already his hands were grasping the very top. In Roxella's bewildered brain there was room for but one thought, her responsibility to Evergreen County. She flung herself against the wall, grasping his right foot with desperate energy, while the other flourished wildly about her head, and threats of dire vengeance all unheeded floated down to her from the top of the wall.

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"Help - help - help! - help!" screamed Roxella, though hopeless of aid; for Sheriff Thomas and his farm hands were two good miles away.

A well-aimed kick struck the top of her head. Roxella felt her brain reel and her grasp weaken. He would escape, and she had betrayed the trust of Evergreen County. Her hands weakly slipped from their hold, but a pair of strong arms reaching above her head pulled the escaping prisoner to the ground.

"You contemptible villain!" cried the indignant voice of No. 6. "I don't see why I didn't stop you before you got this fur."

He marched the recaptured prisoner back to his cell, delivering upon the way sundry pungent bits of advice and warning, while Roxella, with aching head and deep humiliation of spirit, followed with the political prisoner's hat.

"How'd you get out?" she questioned of No. 6 as they locked their prisoner in once more.

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"I ain't ever been locked in, replied No. 6 lightly. "Pete Thomas said he couldn't help my bein' fool enough to come here, since that was a matter between me and my own brains or the lack of 'em, but he swore he would n't never turn a key on me, and he has n't." He turned to Roxella. "What did you s'pose I was here for?" he asked. "No, I ain't goin' in again. My time was up two days ago, but I made a bogus excuse to Pete and hung on here to watch that fellow. I knew he was up to something of this kind, and I'd ought to stopped him sooner. What'd you say you thought I was here for?"

He laughed shortly at Roxella's faltered confession.

"That's Hi Risley in No. 9,” he said with some sarcasm. "Mighty slick talker, ain't he?"

Roxella, sitting down in the side doorway of the white house, subsided

No. 6's sar

into a flood of emotion.
castic tone changed instantly.

"Oh, come now, little girl, don't take it that way," he pleaded. ""T ain't any wonder after all. Hi's the slickest liar I ever saw, and he's fooled many a shrewd man who had long experience in the art himself. Why should n't he take in a tender-hearted little woman, who, bein' the soul of truth herself, has a right to expect it in other folks? That interestin' paleness of his was chalk, and them circles round his eyes black lead. More or less of it got rubbed off in rescuing him, but he'll have it on again before he goes before a jury. There, there, never mind. He ain't worth sheddin' a tear over. But with all his lyin' propensities there never was truer words spoke than those poetry pieces he wrote off about sunshine and angels gettin' into the jail."

"I would n't never believed it of a Hodges, Roxelly," said Sheriff Thomas in a reproachful tone as he listened to Roxella's confession. "I'm terribly disappointed. But there, as Tom Leslie says, it wa'n't any more than natural for one so innocent and trustin' to be taken in, and I've a strong sus

picion your to blame. Anyhow, Tom made me promise I would n't blame you, so we won't say no more about it. Court sets next week, and we 'll soon be rid of this blot on a respectable institution.”

father'd say I was the one

"Mr. Sheriff," questioned Roxella a few moments later, "who is No. 6, and what was he here for?"

"That," replied Peterson Thomas with satisfaction, "was Tom Leslie. He's been one of my best deputies for years, for all he's a young feller. And he's jest served a term of sixty days for contempt of Court in refusin' to testify against a neighbor, and send him to jail away from his dyin' wife and little children. It ought to been settled by a fine, but Tom and the Court was both stuffy, though the judge says to me afterwards, says he, Every inch of that fellow's six feet is clear man,' says he. And that's the truth. You've done well for yourself, Roxelly, and your father, who knows the Leslies, won't find no fault with me on that ground."

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"But it's not I did n't I have n't done anything," protested Roxella with burning cheeks.

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"You wait and see, replied Sheriff Thomas in prophetic tones.

Harriet A. Nash.

SOME NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICANS.

THE books on the biographical shelf of any library stand a double chance of interesting the reader to whom no human thing is foreign. They are like all other books in that the writers must give their own flavor, more or less individual, to each. They are unlike the rest of the library in that the theme of each is in evitably that most human of themes, person and his life, with all that is implied in the contact of one life with others. It may almost be said that a dou

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ble stupidity is required to make a biography dull, a stupidity enveloping both the writer and his theme. There are widely varying degrees of interest in the things to be revealed in different biographies, even as biographers display a wide diversity of cunning and power in making the most of their opportunities. Yet the stars do not often conjoin so malignly as to permit a complete disappointment both in theme and in treatment. Certainly the titles and the au

thorship of a few of the new accessions to the shelf of biography bear with them a promise of which at least a partial fulfillment is assured.

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It has become the fashion amongst biographers to let a man speak as volubly as possible for himself. through letters, diaries, and quotations from his published works. When the biographer is essentially less interesting than his theme, this is a fortunate fashion. This relation, however, does not always exist. It may even happen at times that the reader finds himself in the condition of a guest at a dinner to which a delightful host has asked him to meet a delightful friend. The guest goes home disappointed if the host has taken the rôle of a mere prompter, asking those leading questions which provide the links of conversation, and has contributed nothing more himself. Our host, Mr. Henry James, leaves no such regret with those whom he has introduced to William Wetmore Story and His Friends.1 His book has grown from “ boxful of old papers, personal records and relics all," which was placed in his hands. In printing these papers, chiefly letters, he has seized every opportunity to let Story speak for himself; but, in the nature of the case, the letters to Story outnumber those of his own writing. From beginning to end of the two volumes, moreover, Mr. James supplies a generous contribution of comment and interpretation, page after page of writing which could have come from no pen but his own. The reader is correspondingly grateful that Mr. James has not followed blindly the current fashion of biography, for besides learning all that is told of Story and his friends one gains a new and fuller acquaintance with Mr. James himself.

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The preliminary chapter, Precursors, strikes the keynote of Mr. James's special fitness for his task. His Precursors

1 William Wetmore Story and His Friends. By HENRY JAMES. In two volumes. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

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are those first Americans of the nineteenth century who found their native land barren of artistic promptings and satisfactions, and sought in Europe what they missed at home. The keen sympathy of Mr. James with these pioneers and their successors is repeatedly shown forth. This, indeed, is quite as it should be, for Story, with all his reasons for feeling himself a true portion of the Boston and Cambridge community, manifestly suffered from something very like homesickness when he revisited it. What it all amounted to as Mr. James himself has made bold to state the case"was that, with an alienated mind, he found himself again steeped in a society both fundamentally and superficially bourgeois, the very type and model of such a society, presenting it in the most favorable, the most admirable, light; so that its very virtues irritated him, so that its inability to be strenuous without passion, its cultivation of its serenity, its presentation of a surface on which it would appear to him that the only ruffle was an occasionally acuter spasm of the moral sense, must have acted as a tacit reproach." Yet Mr. James indulges the speculation that if Boston, and not Italy, had been the home of Story, the poet rather than the sculptor might have attained the higher development in him. The literary art, as the biographer subtly argues, "has by no means all its advantages in the picturesque country. . . . In London, in Boston, he would have had to live with his conception, there being nothing else about him of the same color and quality." In one way and another, then, it is honestly made to appear that Story paid the penalty of the absen

tee.

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But the points at which the insight of Mr. James has penetrated the less evident significances of this theme are quite too many to specify.

Of the letters at Mr. James's disposal, those written by Story himself reveal many winning qualities of a man with rarely versatile powers. In none of them

does he stand forth more clearly than when writing to the friends of longest association, Lowell and Mr. Norton. Yet

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he appears with but little loss of distinctness in the letters which all his friends wrote to him. One realizes him the more clearly for finding Lowell at his own delightful best in more than one of his characteristic bits of fooling. It is only to a man of a certain sort — none too familiar -that Browning could have written as he did in the great crisis that came to him with the death of Mrs. Browning. Of many other friends - such as Sumner, Landor, Lord Lytton there are characteristic glimpses. Mr. James's image of most of them as "ghosts" is forced perhaps into a duty too constant and obvious. In many passages of the biographer's work there is of course much that is anything but obvious. Humor, insight, delicacy of perception and expression, these good things are so abundant that one should not grow querulous over such sentences as, "The ship of our friends was, auspiciously — if not indeed, as more promptly determinant of reactions, ominously the America, and they passed Cape Race (oh the memory, as through the wicked light of wild seastorms, of those old sick passings of Cape Race!) on October 13th." This is not an isolated example of what may be called Mr. James's past-mastery of the English sentence. These happily separated fragments baffle and estrange one like passages from his later novels. Yet here they may be taken - like the inadequate index with which the volumes equipped not too seriously; for the compensations are many. The total impression of the volumes is that of a faithful picture of a delightful man, period, and group of personalities.

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The fruits of sophistication and of simplicity could hardly be contrasted more strongly than in turning from Mr. James's work to the record of Mr. J. T. Trow

1 My Own Story. With Recollections of Noted Persons. By JOHN TOWNSEND TROWVOL. XCIII. -NO. 555. 6

bridge's' fruitful years. In this volume, with which the readers of the Atlantic have already had some opportunity to familiarize themselves, subject and writer are one. The Backwoods Boyhood which Mr. Trowbridge describes, and his early experiences of teaching and bread-winning by various methods, provided as a whole the most valuable training he could have had for the work he was destined to perform. In spite of the novels and poems with which he has delighted his maturer readers, it is of course as a writer of stories for boys that he has taken his securest hold upon the remembrance of his generation. It is the privilege of maturity to exhibit toward what has concerned the boyhood left behind an attitude in which something patronizing, perhaps half apologetic, is found. But with this is blended the peculiar tenderness which accompanies a sense of proprietorship and early discovery. If the boys who have not yet grown to manhood are doomed to lack a memory which shall become a possession of this sort, so much the worse for them. Their fathers have had Mr. Trowbridge, and in his Own Story many of them will find abundant grounds for their allegiance to him.

The qualities in a writer upon which the youthful reader is perhaps surest to insist are those of directness and sanity. These appear with rare distinctness in Mr. Trowbridge's reminiscences. The manner of the narrative is simplicity itself. It is all as modest as the writer was when he spoke to Longfellow" of his being already a famous poet, a Cambridge professor, a man representing the highest culture, when I first came to Boston with the odor of my native backwoods still upon me,—without friends, or academic acquirements, or advantages of any sort; and of the feeling I could never quite get over, of the immense distance between us." Yet there is never a trace of that false modesty which BRIDGE. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

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sometimes becomes a distorting glass when its possessor looks through its medium upon surrounding objects and persons. This seeing of things clearly the quality which appeals to boys-gives a high value to the comments Mr. Trowbridge has made in the later chapters of his book upon contemporary writers. To Emerson his "spiritual indebtedness was first and last the greatest," and he acknowledges it generously. In writing of Whitman, whom he knew well, he takes the point of view which must ultimately come to prevail- of separating wheat from chaff, both in the man's character and in his work. His powers are recognized, and his limitations. His debt to Emerson is recorded, apparently beyond dispute. Against those later friends of Whitman who maintain " that he wrote his first Leaves of Grass before he had read Emerson," Mr. Trowbridge squarely arrays himself: "When they urge his own authority for their contention, I can only reply that he told me distinctly the contrary, when his memory was fresher." The handling of Alcott is as reverent as one with Mr. Trowbridge's esteem of Emerson's opinion would naturally make it. Yet the pervading sanity of the reminiscences incites the reader to draw his own conclusions from the story of Alcott on the Nantasket boat, complacently accepting the "provision" which he foresaw would be made for his fare, and of the Conversation in which the Sage ascribed to himself and Emerson the "highest" temperament, and placed his hearers, including Mr. Trowbridge, far lower in the scale. By swelling the list of just such anecdotes as these, Mr. Trowbridge does his part in confirming the justice of Professor Wendell's estimate of "the extreme type of what Yankee idealism could come to when un

1 Recollections Personal and Literary. By RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. Edited by RIPLEY HITCHCOCK, with an Introduction by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1903.

hampered by humor or common-sense." Indeed, there is hardly any one of whom Mr. Trowbridge has written without making a personality more definite. It is even worth while to know that Longfellow after a conversation with Dr. Holmes almost always suffered from a headache. It is noteworthy, also, that the author as if to symbolize his habit of getting at the reality of whatever he is writing about is fond of setting down the stature of his friends in feet and inches. The book, in a word, is one of those valuable contributions to the knowledge of a period which are also to be measured by the genuine pleasure they bring to the reader.

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The service of Mr. Trowbridge's boyhood in preparing him for his work in the world is one of those things which are easier to recognize when past than they would have been in looking forward. Yet the recognition is complete. The two other autobiographies in the present group of books provide instances of beginnings from which it is even harder to see how a poet and a scientist 2 could have emerged.

The New England childhood of Richard Henry Stoddard was of the somewhat squalid, quite unlettered kind not often recorded of real persons, for the simple reason that few who have experienced it have developed the power to conquer their circumstances. Even of his motherwho moved from one mill town to another, and after his father's death married a stevedore and drifted to New York, the son cannot give an encouraging report. His schooling was of the slenderest, yet, with what he taught himself by indomitable reading, it might have led to something more germane to his later life than the work in an iron foundry to which he found himself committed at

2 Reminiscences of an Astronomer. By SIMON NEWCOMB. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

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