without the risk of having our scalp nailed to the gates of the Massachusetts Cotton Mills.

When we asked Mr. Madder Spinney why there were no longer fish in the river, that enterprising mill-owner replied, that it was "owing to the progress of civilization"; whereupon we were led to wonder, whether, if we should cut all the belting in his mill, Mr. Spinney would say the machinery stopped by reason of the progress of civilization. Spinney junior is getting his education at Harvard, and there he will probably learn enough to understand that the fish were not taken care of, and therefore disappeared. If compelled to write a forensic on the subject, he might get enough information to tell the following sad tale of the destruction of the Autochthonoi.

Less than a century ago people were seized with a beaver-like desire to build dams. They called themselves slackwater companies, which referred, perhaps, to their finances. These dams bothered the fish, for no way was given to help them over, notwithstanding the old Crown law, and notwithstanding learned decisions, as in Stoughton versus Baker; for the beavers cared not for Crown law, and took no kind of interest in Mr. Stoughton or Mr. Baker. So the Salmon and Shad were diminished, yet not destroyed. Now ingenious gentlemen used to go up to Chelmsford and Dracut, and gaze at the river. Perhaps they considered how slack the water was. At any rate they soon began to resolve great things. If, thought they, a mill-pond will turn a wheel to grind corn, why not also a wheel to spin cotton? and why not thus spin a great deal of cotton? they began; while the merchants looked on with horror at this prospect of several thousand yards of cloth to be cast, in one vast flood, upon the market.

So

The fact is, the It is true the

dignity been so tried. dam had been raised. Salmon made nothing of it. The lazy ones went up the sloping part, while the more lively jumped the steeper portions; and one active fellow, incited by his lady-love, who was peeking over the crest of the fall at him, made such a frantic bound at the "corner," that he threw himself ten feet out of water, and came down, slosh, in the mill-pond above, to the delight of the females, though his own sex said anybody could do it who chose to try. The fishermen looked with apprehension on these increasing difficulties, and threatened to pull the dam down; but the gentlemen, from being ingenious, as aforesaid, now became defiant, and expressed themselves to this effect, namely, that they should like to see the fishermen do it. This was sarcasm; and though Whately says sarcasm should be used sparingly, in this instance the effect was good, and the dam remained.

By this time, what with seines, pots, dip-nets, spears, hooks, dams, and mills, the fisheries were in a poor way; and the old New Hampshire lady who used to spear Salmon with a pitchfork could do so no more. The fishes whimpered, and would have whimpered much more had they known what was coming.

Certain Pentakosiomedimnoi of Athens determined to put a hotbed of manufactures in a corner of Andover, on the Merrimack, and to grow mills, like early lettuce, all in four weeks. They spoke

"The words that cleft Eildon hills in three," "And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone";

and, when the Salmon and the Shad came up the next spring, they ran their noses against a granite scarp, twentythree feet high, from whose crest fell a thundering cataract. The Shad rolled up their eyes at it, waggled their tails, and fell down stream to Marston's Ferry. The Salmon, springing and plunging, eagerly reconnoitred the position from wing to wing. At last one lively grilse cried out: "Here is a sort of trough coming down from the top! but

it's awful steep!" "Stand aside," shouted the hoarse voice of an old male Salmon, whose glorious hooked jaw penetrated his upper lip, and stood out two inches above his nose. And with that he rushed tête baissée against the torrent. An old fisherman who was standing on the abutment suddenly exclaimed: "There was a whopper tried it! He got half-way up; but it ain't no kind er use. I told them County Commissioners that the only way they would get fish up that fishway was to hitch a rope to 'em. But they was like all folks that don't know nothin', they thought they knew all about it." The Lawrence dam and its noted fishway (constructed "to the satisfaction of the County Commissioners")

made an end of the Salmon, because

they can hatch their eggs only in the

mountain brooks; but the Shad could breed in warmer and more turbid waters, and they therefore continued to flourish in a limited sort of way. Time went on. Children who ate of the last shad of New Hampshire waters had grown to man's estate, and the memory of the diet of their youth seemed to have died within them; but

it slept only. In the year 1865 they

rose as one man and as one woman,

and cried: "Give us the flesh-pots of our youth, the Salmon and the Shad, and the Alewife, and the fatness thereof! or we will divert all the waters of the great Lake Winnipiseogee into the Piscataqua, which runs down to the sea over against Portsmouth!" These

cries came to the ears of the Pentakosiomedimnoi, the High Honorable Locks and Canals, and all the Mandarins of the Red Button that are in and about Franklin Street. They took counsel together. "Do nothing about it!" said the Mandarins. "Pay them," suggested the Pentakosiomedimnoi. "Dine them-Blackhawk-pigs' feet," murmured the High Honorable. Here the echoes seemed to say " Fishways!" This was a dreadful word, because to them a fishway (other than that of a County Commissioner) was a big gap to let all the water out of a mill-pond.

They appeared in force before the Legislature with a panathenaic chorus.

PARHODOS.*

O honorable Areopagites
Io! Io!-

Zeus the earth-shaker,
Poseidon, heaver of the waves,
Send us water; -
Hephaistos, the iron-worker,
And his much skilful Kuklops
Give us power:

Do not those wretches who cry
Fish! Fish!

Strive against the immortal Gods?

The Legislature did what everybody namely, first, not to assume said reought to do who has any responsibility: sponsibility; secondly, to gain time; thirdly, to get somebody else to do the form of two commissioners, the very work. The somebody else took on the These proceeded to collect information. "official persons" already referred to. They cross-questioned the oldest inhabitants, and got crooked answers; they entered into the mysteries of flashboards, and investigated the properties of garancine; they wandered on the river-banks after the manner of the spotted tatler (Totanus macularius); and at last they made a report only fifty pages long, the brevity of which proved two negative points: first, that the commissioners were not congressmen ;

and, second, that they had never written for newspapers or for periodicals. Thereupon the Legislature, gratified beyond measure, said: "Good boys! now work some more. Build some fishways. Breed some fish. And here is a check to pay for it all." Thus encouraged, the official persons did build fishways, especially a big one at Lawrence in place of the singular trough already referred to. But, when they came to Holyoke, on the Connecticut, the Wooden-Dam-and-Nutmeg Company there dwelling were inclined to the papal aphorism, Non possumus, which is equivalent to Mr. Toodles's "It's not quite in our line; and we really can't." The fact is, the Nut

Those who have studied the useful metrica! works of our universities will know that this is an iambic trimeter acatalectic in pyrrichium aut iambum Those who do not know this are to be pitied.

megs had a "charter" which they held to be a sovereign balm for fishways, and which they fulminated against the official persons, as William the Testy fulminated his proclamation against the Yankee onion patches. This, and the high water of that summer, retarded the development of the fishway for the time being; but meanwhile important incubations were going on just below the dam, — nothing less, indeed, than the hatching of Shad by an artificial method. All this is something to be explained, and deserves a new paragraph.

In the times of the later Roman emperors, to such a pitch had luxury risen, that a mullet was often sold - No! this is a little too bad; you shall not be bored with dreadful old stories of Heliogabalus and oysters, or of the cruel gourmet with his "in muranas." Well, then, start once more: In the Middle Ages, when Europe was overshadowed by monkish superstition, the observance of Lent rendered a large supply of fish necessary; fish-ponds were therefore- Oh! there we go again, more prosy than ever. Come, now, let us get at once to Joseph Rémy. Joseph Rémy, a man of humble station and slight education, but of studious and reflective temperament, was one of those instances, more common in America than abroad, where a man, without the external advantages of culture or of fortune, rises by his own efforts to a welldeserved eminence. He was a-yes, and all that sort of thing. The fact is, Rémy found he could squeeze the eggs out of fishes, and hatch them afterwards; and so can anybody else who chooses to try, and who will take pains enough. We have had Columbus and the hen's egg; now we have Rémy and the fish egg. As to the exact manner of hatching fish, is it not written in the report of the Commissioners for this year, and in the report of the United • House Document No. 60 (1868).

States Commissioner of Agriculture for 1866, and in the "Voyages" of Professor Coste, and in five hundred books and papers beside?

From this fish culture, if we will only make it a real industry in this Commonwealth, may come important additions to our bill of fare. Many things are more pleasant than paying as much as we now do for animal food. Fish, flesh, and fowl are all as dear as dear can be ; and, what is worse, they are hard to come at, for our back-country people, during the hot weather. We have two goodly rivers in Massachusetts, and plenty of streams, brooks, ponds, pools, and springs. We cultivate corn and potatoes on the land (and lose money on every bushel); why not cultivate fish in the waters, and make money? There are two secrets at the foundation of success. First, fishes must be taken from the domain of game, and become property. Secondly, the fishes must be fed for nothing; and the way to do that is to breed multitudes of herbivorous or of insectivorous fishes to feed the carnivorous fishes, which, in turn, are to feed man. Thus, if you have a thousand Trout, do you breed for their diet a million Shiners; and these will take care of themselves, except in the matter of getting caught by the Trout. So much for domestic culture, our fish-coop, as we may come to call it. Then, as to the encouragement of migratory sea-fishes, the Salmon, Sea-trout, Shad, Bass, Alewife, Sturgeon, if you would have children, you must have a nursery; if you would have fish, you must extend their breeding-grounds. Open, then, the ten thousand dams that bar our streams, and, with care and patience, these waters will be peopled; and we, whose mother earth is so barren, will find that mother sea will each year send abundant food into every brook that empties into a stream, that flows into a river, that runs to the ocean.

city of Paris. The ages have gnawed their solemn stones, and filled their scars with the dust, and tinted their old walls with the gray of all antique things. Raised by a humanity that is immortal, the rude movements of revolutions, the tooth and rigor of the winds and rains, all the unchronicled violences of time, have not altered the grandeur of their essential forms. Square, firm, majestic, they stand to-day over modern Paris as they stood yesterday over the pointed roofs and narrow streets of the ancient city. They make us know the grand spirit and ancient vigor of a people who had none of the things that are the boast of the modern man. They are the work of a people who were united and almost democratic without the newspaper and the railway, — a people who were poets and artists without critics, skilled workmen without printed encyclopædias, religious without tract societies and sectarian journals.

The grand cathedrals were simultaneously begun in the rich cities of France in what was called at the time the royal domain. During the twelfth century the people exhibited an extraordinary political movement for consolidation, and of emancipation from local powers. They ranged themselves under the large ideas of religion and monarchy. Led by the bishops, stimulated by the monks, instructed by the architects, they erected the cathedrals as visible types of something more mighty than barons, lords, and counts. They created in a grand effort of enthusiasm religious monuments and national edifices. It was from the union of all the forces of France of the twelfth century that the cathedrals were projected. No human work was ever more grandly nourished or more boldly conceived.

To-day we have marvellous agents

made great sanctuaries for each stricken soul, and visible proofs of the power of religious faith.

In the cathedrals that raised their grave and sculptured walls over the castles of dukes and barons to humble them, over the houses of the poor to console them, all the facts, dreams, and superstitions of their life in the Dark Ages were embodied. The cathedral stones held the memorials of the awful years of suffering and gross superstition that had afflicted populations after the dissolution of Roman order. The grotesque forms that seem to start out of the very walls, and speak to the mind, are not capricious and idle inventions. The very name they bear memorializes an old mediæval superstition, for during the Middle Ages the dragons of Rouen and Metz were called gargouilles. Gargouille is the French architectural term to-day.

It was in that night of ignorance, in those years in which society was plunged into almost historical oblivion, that those disordered and debased ideas of natural life had full play. The monkish workers in stone shared the superstition of the people, and they carved with gusto the typical vices and beasts, from which faith in religion alone could protect or deliver man. Later the more beautiful forms of the sinless flower and perfect leaf, which we find in the pure and noble Gothic, took the place of the beast and the dragon. The graceful vine, stone-carved, twined tenderly in the arches, or climbed the column, and the flower-petal unfolded in the capital, or under the gallery, or upon the altar. The monk had been delivered by art, the people had found an issue in the vigor of work and in the unity of faith.

The forms which like a petrified population look over Paris from the walls

and towers of Notre Dame are surprisingly vigorous and sincere in character. They show an uncommon knowledge of natural structure and a rare invention. Suppose you go with me to the summit of the towers of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier have gone before us, like students and poets. To go to the summit you enter the north tower through a little door, and ascend three hundred and eighty-nine steps, dimly lighted, worn down into little hollows, made visible by long, thin cuts in the wall, such as would serve for an arrow or a sunbeam. At length you reach the light gallery, supported by slender colums; about two hundred more steps in perfect darkness take you to the summit of the tower. You are pedestalled by centuries of human labor; you are surrounded by dragons, cranes, dogs, and apes. Dogs of a ferocious aspect; apes with the breasts of women and the powerful hands of men; a bear, an elephant, a goat; great muscular devils, with backs like dragons, and the face terminating in a snout or a beak, ears like swine, and horns like bulls, strange-looking bird, half parrot, half eagle, with a cloth thrown over the head, like an old woman! They are posed on the balustrade of the gallery, and at each angle of the towers; at other places they serve as water-spouts, and are called gargoyles. All these forms and faces are carved in the boldest and largest sculpturesque style; the anatomy is well based on nature; all the leading forms truly and expressively rendered, though entirely foreign to the Phidian idea of form. These figures, about the size of a man, posed at each corner of the gallery, or looking down upon Paris or afar off over the humid Seine, show dark against the sky, and are enormous in character; in each an amazing muscular energy has been expressed, never so much ferocious force and so much variety of invention. The grotesque of the bright Greek mind is child's play next to these intensely horrible figures. Some of them just touch the horrible, indecent, and ob

a

scene. All hold the horrible or stimulate the curiosity of the mind. On the towers, over the fatalest and gayest city of the world, your sentinels are monsters. You question which be the most terrible, these frank, gross demons about you, carved by the old Gallic stone-cutters, or the fair, smiling city, so vast and heterogeneous, below you. The radiant aspect of the city is deceptive, like the fabled smile of the Sphinx. At the Morgue every morning you will find a fresh victim who has failed under the task it imposed upon his life.

It is difficult to resist the thoughts that reach you at such a height. The city, which changes like the vesture of a man, far below you; the cathedral, which remains essentially the same through all the centuries, about you. Underneath, our great humanity dwelling in poor, little, suffering, foolish men; yet their hands were enough to raise such a monument! From their brain these inventions, from their hands these forms!

Strange exaltation and strange humiliation for us! We have been in our unity great enough to create the longenduring; and in our individual lives we are mocked by the grandeur we have made, and which is the memorial of our past existence. An awe of our ancestors steals over us; the ancient time takes awful proportions; we forget the actual Paris, with its costly and monotonous barracks, the new opera-house, the new wing of the Tuileries! With the deformed Quasimodo of Victor Hugo, we can neither feel alone nor occupy ourselves with the actual city. The old sculptors had left him the saintly figures and the grotesque dreams and dreads of their imagination. Kings, bishops, martyrs, saints! Around the ogival portals, the Last Judgment and its crowd of holy and serene souls, its mob of convulsed and damned beings. These were his friends when he entered the cathedral. When he went up to strike the sweet and awful bells of the great south tower, he went up to demons and dragons who were not less his friends,