the water of the big earthenware pot (marmite) was hot. A second piece of bread our man put under his arm, and munched at it on his way to the yard, placing the rest of his supply in some corner, to take with him at nine o'clock to his breakfast, on which he spent five or seven sous, according as he did or did not have broth. In the former case, he kept the little bit of meat that was served to him for the two-o'clock meal, which he ate sitting on the plaster or in a corner of the yard."1 As to the spendthrifts, money melts in their hands; they spend it in drink on pay-day or the day after, and eat dry bread for the remainder of the week, or try to borrow money which they never repay. Their conversation is, for all that, very amusing, and the misers have a most peculiar knack of making them talk. It would take too long to follow young Nadaud through the different stages of his career as a workingman. Wages were at first miserably low. He received thirty-six sous a day, or two francs for the long days. The full-trained maçon got only three and a quarter to three and a half francs. In 1831 he had a terrible accident, falling from a third floor into a cellar, and thereby injuring his head and breaking both arms at the wrists. He recovered, however, and at seventeen became a workman, or compagnon, with a boy to help him, such as he had been himself hitherto. In the winter of 183233 the maladie du pays took hold of him. He had not seen his mother or sisters for three years. But doctors' fees and three months' idleness after his accident had swallowed up his small savings, and he had to borrow two hundred francs of a friend, out of which he renewed his wardrobe; buying, amongst other things, a fine blouse with red and blue collar, and a tricolor belt, which was the height of fashion amongst workingmen in those 1 Young Nadaud himself seems never to have eaten meat till he came to Paris, and then disliked it, changing his bit for vegetables. days. When he reached home, he found his mother and sisters eating their supper, soup and radishes. The next day, after a dinner of whey, bread, and potatoes, he began working as a peasant, beating out the sheaves, a fatiguing task which lasted a couple of weeks. It was also his business, before nightfall, to cut wood for the veillées, to be burnt in fireplaces six feet wide. Neighbors came to these veillées, particularly to hear the maçon, who had so much to tell about Paris. Young Nadaud, however, by this time preferred to go about to the balls held in one or another village, always in a barn, and almost always beginning with the traditional bourrée. It is a singular custom that the young men should open these balls by inviting the oldest women present to dance the bourrée with them. Pretty women, Nadaud tells us, abound in the Creuse, and at the balls marriages are soon arranged, which generally take place within a few weeks, as the month of March drives away the younger men from the villages. In this same year one of Nadaud's sisters was engaged. But twelve hundred francs had to be paid by way of dot, or marriage portion, and the Nadauds owed already about ten thousand francs, pretty nearly what the Martinèche property was worth. They had to borrow four hundred francs at thirty per cent, young Nadaud joining in signing bills, though only seventeen years old. Three or four days after the marriage he returned to Paris, to find the building trade in a state of great depression, the worst labor crisis he ever went through, except that of 1848. He had to take work again as a builder's lad, earning only two francs two sous a day, and met with another mishap through having a stone flung by accident on his arm. was only a contusion, but he fainted, and had to go to a hospital. After a few weeks of enforced idleness he obtained a little work, but only to be interrupted by a strike of the carpenters, which cost him five weeks more of idleness. It The 1833 and 1834 were very years bad for him. At one time he had to work as a mere wagoner, earning fifty-five sous, and later three francs a day. Those were evil days for the French working class. The jealousies between the workmen of different trades were more than ever embittered. To put a stop to the fights between the compagnons on tramp, the government forbade them to carry sticks. Even among the Creusois there were rivalries between the men of different cantons or communes, so that a foreman of the one set durst not give a job to men of the other. There were two or three years of great lawlessness. For a gesture, for a word, men came to blows. Twice in a short space of time young Nadaud was taken up by the police. To break his son of his bad habits, the elder Nadaud got three worthy mates of his to talk with him, and one of them offered to take the young man into his own lodgings. Eventually the two secured quarters in one of the quietest neighborhoods in Paris, that of St. Louis. From henceforth Nadaud was a reformed character. Paris was just then opening free schools for the working class. He went to one of these, and was soon made monitor. But this was a loss of time for him. He tried a private master, and could now measure his literary ignorance. Yet what he most wanted was technical instruction. He bought drawing materials, and began attending a course. But, on calculation, he saw that the time needed to go through the course lesson by lesson was more than he could afford. He was able to borrow a book containing a complete course, and worked out its twentyfour plates in his own room, then returned for four or five months to his teacher. All this time the family indebtedness weighed upon him. Twenty pounds of in terest had to be paid every year. What if he could earn this by teaching others? There were all around him worthy, hardworking young fellows who could not even sign their names. At four francs a month each he might earn from four to five hundred francs in the year. He tried the experiment, and succeeded. Fifteen pupils came, as many as his room would hold. The work was hard. He had to get up at five in the morning, crush plaster till six P. M., rush back from the building-yard to swallow the soup of the garni, and then return home to teach till eleven. He taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, and the principles of building. If master and pupils got tired of study, they talked politics. "It is often fortunate," he says, "for a man to be born poor. I believe this was the case with me. If my family debts had not weighted me with five hundred francs yearly interest to pay, the idea of opening the school would never have come to me, and I should very likely have remained unknown among my companions in work and misery. This long assiduity in intellectual labor, lasting from 1838 to 1848, is what has most contributed to implant in my mind the taste for study and serious reading; and I also acquired during this period the habit of speaking in public." At the age of twenty-four he married a young girl of his own country, and had to leave her seventeen days after the wedding to return to work. It was three years before he saw her again, bringing with him an unheard-of pile of savings, four thousand francs, which all went towards paying the family debts, but still left one thousand francs due. A hard life, surely, so far, and a worthy one; it remains to be seen how the maçon fared later. J. M. Ludlow. XVIII. A SINGULAR LIFE. ing its sword of flame on the undulating gray downs, and the summer was spent. A FIERY July was followed by a Yet, at every march and countermarch scorching August. There was a long in the drill of duty, he was aware of her. drought, and simooms of fine, irritating It could not be said that she ever overdust. The gasping town and inland stepped the invisible line which he had country flocked to the coast in more than elected to draw between them, though the usual force. The hotels brimmed it might be said that she had the fine over. Even Windover fanned herself, pride which did not seem to see it. and lay in hammocks lazily, watching for Helen had the quiet maidenly reserve of the two-o'clock east wind to stir the top- an elder and more delicate day than ours. sails of the schooners trying, under full To throw her young enthusiasm into his canvas, to crawl around the Point. In work without obtruding herself upon his Angel Alley the heat was something un- attention was a difficult procedure, for precedented; and the devil shook hands which she had at once the decorum and with discomfort, as he is fain to, and made the wit. new comrades. Bayard was heavily overworked. He gave himself few pleasures, after the fashion of the man; and the summer people at the Point knew him not. He was not of them, nor of their world. Afterwards, he recalled, with a kind of pain lacking little of anguish, how few in number had been his evenings in the cool parlor of the cottage, where the lace curtains blew in and out through the purple twilight, or on the impearled harbor, in the dory, when the sun went down, and he drifted with her between earth and heaven, between light and reflection, in a glamour of color, in alternations of quiet, dangerous talk and of more dangerous silence; brief, stolen hours, when duty seemed a dimming dream, and human joy the only reality, the sole value, the decreed and eternal end of life. Upon this rare and scanty substitute for happiness he fed, and from it he fled. Between his devotions and his desertions the woman stood mute and inscrutable. And while they still moved apart, saying, "The summer is before us," lo, the petals of the Cape roses had 'flown on the hot winds, the goldenrod was lift She followed neino rules nor prece At unexpected crises and in unthoughtof ways he came upon her footprints or her sleight of hand. Helen's methods were purely her own. ther law nor gospel; dents controlled her. She relieved what suffering she chose, and omitted where she did elect; and he was sometimes astonished at the common sense of her apparent willfulness. She had no more training in sociological problems than the goldenrod upon the bosom of her white gown; yet she seldom made an important mistake. In a word, this summer girl, playing at charity for a season's amusement, poured a refreshing amount of novelty, vigor, ingenuity, and feminine defiance of routine into the labors of the lonely man. His too serious and anxious people found her as diverting as a pretty parlor play. A laugh ran around like a light flame whenever she came upon the sombre scene. She took a bevy of idle girls with her, and gave entertainments on which Angel Alley hung, a breathless and admiring crowd. She played, she sang, she read, she decorated. Pictures sprang on barren walls; books stood on empty shelves; games crowded the smoking-room; a piano replaced the pains taking melodeon; life and light leaped where she trod, into the poor and unpopular place. The people took to her one of the strong, loyal fancies of the coast. Unsuspected by her, or by Bayard himself, she began, even then, to be known among them as "the minister's girl." But this hurt nobody, neither herself nor him, and their deference to her never defaulted. In the indulgence of that summer's serious mood, Helen seldom met - he was forced to suspect that she purposely avoided the preacher. Often he entered a laughing home from which she had just vanished. Sometimes — but less often - he found that she had preceded him where death and trouble were. Their personal interviews were rare, and of her seeking, never. "She is amusing herself with a novelty," he thought. Then came the swift, unbidden question, If this is her beautiful whim, what would her dedication be? Since to play at helping a man's work, though at the tip of the sceptre by which he held her back, meant sense and sympathy, fervor and courage like this, what would it be to the great and solemn purpose of his life if she shared it, crowned queen? It was an August evening, sultry and smoky. Forest fires had been burning for a week on the wooded side of the harbor, and the air was thick. It was Sunday, and the streets and wharves and beaches of Windover surged with vacuous eyes and irritable passions. The lockups were full, the saloons overflowed. The ribald song and excessive oath of the coast swept up and down like air currents. There had been several accidents and some fights. Rum ran in streams. It was one of the stifling evenings when the most decent tenement retains only the sick or the helpless, and when the occupants of questionable sailors' boardinghouses and nameless dens crawl out like vermin fleeing from fire. It was one of the nights when the souls of women go perdition, and when men do not argue to with their vices. It was one of the nights when ease and cool, luxury and delicacy, forget the gehenna that they escape, and when only the strong few remember the weakness of the many. Upon the long beach of fine white sand which spanned the space between the docks and the cliffs of the wooded coast, there gathered that evening a large and unusual crowd. Angel Alley was there en masse. The wharves poured out a mighty delegation. Dories put out from anchored vessels whose prows nodded in the inner harbor, and their crews swarmed to the beach in schools, like fish to a net. A few citizens of another sort, moved, one might say, by curiosity, innocent or malicious, joined themselves to the fishermen and sailors. Their numbers were increased by certain of the summer people from the Point, drawn from their piazzas and their hammocks by rumors of a sensation. An out-of-door service, said to be the first of its kind conducted by the remarkable young preacher of such excellent family and such eccentric career, was not without its attractions even on the hottest evening of the season. There might have been easily eight hundred or a thousand people facing the light temporary desk, or table, which had been erected at the head of the beach for the speaker's use. The hour was early, and it would have been very light but for the smoke in the air, through which the sun hung, quivering and sinister, with the malevolent blood-red color of drought and blasting heat. Eliot, or Fox's Book of Martyrs. Perhaps it is the Memoirs of Whitefield; but certainly" "Possibly," suggested Helen, "it may have been the New Testament." "That's it! You have it!" cried Mrs. Carruth, with mild relief. "That's the very thing. How extraordinary! It is the New Testament I have got into my head.” The Professor of Theology changed color slightly, but he made no answer to his wife. He was absorbed in watching the scene before him. There were many women in the crowd, but men predominated in proportion significant to the eye familiar with the painfully feminine character of New England religious audiences. Of these men, four fifths were toilers of the sea, red of face, uncertain of step, rough of hand, keen of eye, and open of heart, "Fearing no God but wind and wet." The scent of bad liquor was strong upon the heavy, windless air; oaths rippled to and fro as easily as the waves upon the beach, and (it seemed) quite as much according to the laws of nature. Yet the men bore a decent look of personal respect for the situation. All wore their best clothes, and most were clean for the occasion. They chatted among themselves freely, paying small heed to the presence of strangers, these being regarded as inferior aliens who did not know how to man a boat in a gale. The fisherman's sense of his own superior position is, in any event, something delightful. In this case there was added the special aristocracy recognized in Angel Alley as belonging to Bayard's people. Right under the ears of the Professor of Theology uprose these awful words: You "Ben Trawl! Hello, Trawl! here? So fond of the minister as this?" 'I like to keep my eye on him," replied Ben Trawl grimly. Captain Hap, distributing camp-chairs for the women of the audience, turned and eyed Ben over his shoulder. The Captain's small, keen eyes held the dignity and the scorn of age and character. "Shut up there!" he said authoritatively. "The minister's comin'. Trot back to your grog-shop, Ben. This ain't no place for Judases, nor yet for rummies." "Gorry!" laughed a young skipper, "he ain't got customers enough to okkepy him. They're all here." Now there sifted through the crowd an eager, affectionate whisper. "There! There's the preacher. Look that way see? That tall, thin fellar him with the eyes." A billow of applause started along the beach. Then a woman's voice called out, Boys, he don't like it!" and the wave of sound dropped as suddenly as it rose. "He comes!" cried an Italian. "So he does, Tony, so he does!" echoed the woman. "God bless him! "He comes," repeated Tony. "Hush you, boys the Christman comes ! The Professor of Theology pressed |