That is it exactly. This drum-chronicler, type of the popular mind, actually ascribes the triumphs which convulsed half the world to the noise made by his drumming grandfather, while "superfluous lags the veteran "Turenne at the end of the stanza, as a sort of afterthought, or perhaps merely to fill up the line and furnish the rhyme.

But to return to our horn-blowings: "Peace hath her 'horns' not less renowned than war. The man who goes into the contest of life aiming at success alone, and comparatively unembarrassed by any scruples as to the means by which success is to be achieved, must not leave his horn hanging idly against the wall, but must bear it constantly with him as his most potent weapon. He knows that it is one which has been tried and proved, and which will not fail him.. He remembers that the frowning walls of Jericho fell prostrate at the sound of the trumpets; he has vague recollections that the

"blast of that wild horn

On Fontarabian echoes borne,"

accomplished vast though somewhat indefinite results at some far-off period; and these memories of the past give him an unshaken faith in the efficacy of horn-blowing.

There shall be two men, W and X, who shall jointly engage in a certain project. The former gives all his time, thoughts and energies to the labor; pulls stroke-oar unintermittingly, and is so busy about getting the work done that he does not have time to look around and see if people are noticing hfs activity. On the other hand, X judiciously bethinks himself that after all it is not of so much importance to do a thing as it is to get people to believe you are doing it. So he does not overwork himself, keeps fresh and in good talking order all the time, heralds himself widely as the prime mover in the affair, and. announces in an infinite variety of ways that it is his shoulder which is at the wheel. Well, what is the result? Why, people, in spite of the evidence of their own eyes, are forced by the irresistible logic of horn-blowing into the conviction that X is a man of dazzling genius and untiring application. They sound his praises on housetops, and in other localities even more suitable for the purpose, and prepare and present costly testimonials to his excellence and worth; while poor W, hard at work pushing on the scheme to a glorious completion, is regarded as a plodder, a man who can do well enough so long as X is by to direct him, but who must ignominiously fail if left to himself.

Shall these things be? Is hornless, merit to be perpetually unnoticed? Shall untrumpeted industry forever sink into obscurity? Must voiceless talents and vigor and endurance invariably be passed in the race by mere sound? Let us each one resolve that, whatever others may do, we will from this time henceforth deposit our respective trumpets upon some remote and inaccessible shelf, and sedulously devote ourselves to the work of blowing the horns of other people. It may be that in this self-sacrificing toil we shall find that it is sweeter to praise than to be praised, far nobler to extol others than to laud ourselves.

H. R. C.

358

THE GOLDEN FURROW.

UND

NDERCLIFF," my friend George Brooker's country-seat, was a very handsome place. The commodious mansion, whose liberal proportions made up for its lack of architectural point, was set back at the foot of the river's tremendous bluffs, far enough from them to be safe from landslides, near enough to hold the alternate wooded knolls and bare whitened faces of rock as a sort of frame-work to its comfortable picture. The house was flanked and overarched by several stately, full-grown forest-trees, while in front of it was a smooth lawn that stepped down to the river's margin in a succession of rounded terraces a lawn that was variously beautiful with ornamental trees and shrubbery and gay parterres of flowers. Two hundred yards from the house, on the right, a winding brook went gurgling over rocks and roots, between its willow-fringed banks, with lingering tardy flow, as if glad to pause and move on slow again after its impetuous chase and breathless tumble from the hills and down through the deep shadows of the black ravine above the house. Across this brook the meadow spread its broad, low surface, brown and fat with crumbly new-ploughed tilth.

Upon a piece of springy sod, still unploughed along the meadow's edge, we walked together-George Brooker, Doctor Conrad Krätpfuhl, and I-following the devious course of the little stream towards the river. We had just dined rather later than usual, Mrs. Brooker told me I suppose because I was a new guest and this the first day of my visit and were walking and smoking after the meal. That is to say, I was smoking my cigar, and the Doctor puffing great clouds from a monstrous German pipe with a stem four feet long and a great tasselled china bowl that must have held near quarter of a pound of Knaster when filled; Brooker, however, was prohibited from smoking by the Doctor, who seemed a tyrannical and very eccentric somebody, with a quaint German accent and very heteroclite

manners.

"Poof!" he cried, with the high nasal tone of a wild-goose, "if man cannot schleep, man moost not schmoke. For me, den, it is needful. altogether to schmoke with incessancy, or should I waste hours inconceivably precious in beastly slumber. Not beastly to you, Meester Brooker, who are denied what I have such hateful superfluity in, and to whom that is pure balm which to me is pure disgust. Ah! sleep that darns up the tattered elbows of- I perceive that I do misquote your poet's language. It matters but small. See, Meester Graves," said he to me, pointing to the meadow, which I saw was but recently ploughed, "this is our apothecary-shop that shall fetch sirops in mandragora steeped to bring sleep abundant to our friend's all-weary lids."

His clumsy energy and vehement gesticulation heightened the effect of his very comical figure, which was that of a short, stout man, with

d

stumpy legs set into his round, shapeless body like the wooden legs of a butcher's chopping-block, and atop of this block a head was screwed in without the convenience of a neck. This head kept such an angle with the body that, while his chin was the most advanced portion of his face, and the round glasses of his spectacles gleamed at you nearly horizontally, the collar of his coat rubbed against his bump of caution and lifted up his monstrous hat towards his eyebrows. His face was not a bad one, however: there was an owl-like air of wisdom and mystery about his eyes, and his broad, placid smile, large, liberal features, and abundant yellow hair and whiskers, gave him a certain leonine look.

"The Doctor has condemned me to the plough," said Brooker, in his languid way, so different from the fierce, fiery energy that I remembered him possessed of twenty years before: "would you believe it, Graves, all this is my work?" pointing to the ploughed meadow.

"Ay!" interposed, Doctor Krätpfuhl, striking the handles of a small iron plough with his pipe-stem, "it is brave work our friend has done in his pharmacy. See! this is the pestle and mortar in which his simples he commixes. Ach, my friends! it is heresy to physic; but I tell you, in the sweat of the brow all good-doing simples can alone be brewed."

"You certainly seem to have gone at it systematically, and have taught yourself to plough, even if you have not found in the ploughing all that Doctor Krätpfuhl claims for it," said I.

"Ach, yes!" interrupted the Doctor again, before George could speak, "and at first could with labor and hard breathing but one furrow turn; now, a dozen do not suffice, before breakfast."

George looked over the brown acres, and with a certain sort of weariness remarked, "I have done what would earn my salt, perhaps ; but the old vigor will not come back, nor will the dreary wakefulness and headache, and the dull, uneasy dreams, leave me. I want an interest in something, John," said he, with sudden, bullet-like energy, "and I believe it is better to wear out than to rust out. I shall go back to business again, kill or cure. I cannot stand it here." Doctor Krätpfuhl groaned audibly, and beat upon his toppling hatcrown with both of his white, fat, uplifted hands.

I looked at my friend curiously, for the strange pucker about his eyebrows and the nervous unrest of his mobile lip told a momentous history. And this then was the man, I thought, whom twenty years ago I had fixed upon for a model and pattern of human capacity for happiness! As to the rest of my classmates I had doubted, but George Brooker, I was very sure, would sail smoothly along the middle course of life, avoid all reefs and sand-bars, and put into none but snug and pleasant harbors to the end of the voyage. Yet here he was, scarce forty years old, stranded already, and so badly wrecked that it was doubtful if he would ever again get an offing.

our arms.

I knew the outlines of his history, though I had only casually met him, until now, since we parted at college, with our diplomas under A frank, easy, good-tempered man, with no great talents, but an indomitable persistence in any pursuit that took his fancy, and a fiery energy when aroused which made that pursuit a chase, he had

rich.

come to college well prepared, and with a full purse, for he was very After graduating, he had dawdled through ten years of idle life in Europe and America, spending his money extravagantly, and drifting, it may be, out towards those purgatorial regions betwixt the Devil and the Deep Sea which are set apart for just such wasteful fainéants who spill life and purpose as wine is spilt in the last hours of a banquet. Then, however, he fell in love, and won a noble woman to his wife; for, though he was as ugly a fellow as you would choose to meet, with a great shock of red hair like the stage Highlander's wig, and knock-kneed legs, and great red bony hands, he was honest, warm, upright, unselfish, and looked it all; he had a bonhomie that supplied his lack of grace, and as I have already said, his pursuit had that sort of constant tenacity which so often wins against odds.

Contemporaneously with his marriage there came certain financial storms, out of which George's fortune, already impaired by extravagance and loose management, emerged waterlogged and swamped almost beyond repair. He had removed his moneys from the safe securities in which they had been so long nursed, and put them into precarious stocks and bonds, whose values shrivelled in the first breath of the panic. These losses vexed him sorely, for he had incurred them while endeavoring to get richer, and so found his wouldbe thrift more costly even than his former foolish unthrift. George, however, was equal to the new condition of things more than equal to them, in fact. He purchased with the remnant of his fortune an interest in an established banking-concern, and, bending all his energies to master the intricate complications and ambiguous contrivances of the stock-market, he speedily became one of the closest financiers and boldest and most successful gamblers in all the tribes of "Bull" and "Bear." After ten years of this life it was an unhappy decade to his wife, who could not deem money to be worth the martyrdoms its acquisition cost he had about restored his fortune to its liberal original proportions, but he had in the struggle got his soul and mind nipped severely in the nut-crackers of continual niggardly stint and repression; and as for his body, he had treated it so ill that it had at last gone into open revolt. Hence the troubles that now

vexed him.

When he was definitively laid upon his back with a broken-down stomach and an obstinate nervous fever, George at last resolved that he would take thought for himself, and if he should recover, would quit money-getting for the more rational endeavors of life. But it was not so easy for him either to recover his health or to shake off old bad habits. His body had lost its pristine elasticity and rebound, and his relaxed and unstrung mind was subject to insomnia, and a throng of wretched evil fancies and morbid clouds, which were the more vexatious because it had formerly been so crystalline clear and sparkling. When he got up, he abandoned business and bought "Undercliff," removing to it in March. Now, in the day of my visit, the roses were fully in bloom, and he was still an invalid, still, I saw, a hypochondriac.

"I don't think going back to business would profit you any, George," I said, in answer to his impatient exclamation. "It is your failing

that you make yourself a galley-slave whenever you bend your oar to any undertaking. Now the Doctor tells you that ploughing is physic: why don't you plough as you did your other business? Who knows what may come of the right sort of energy given to ploughing? Your sort of energy, I mean? Do you remember the story of John Wilde ?"

'No," said he, with an invalid's languid curiosity; "tell it, if there be anything to interest me. Who was John Wilde?"

'Johannes Wilde of Rodenkirchen?" screamed the Doctor, as he swooped into the dialogue like a hawk into a covey of partridges. "I know him well! It is excellent parable! It is a story that would not disgrace the Bahar Danush, if indeed it does not come from that precious receptacle of the ethnic myth. Papae! I am delighted to tell you this favorite legend of the Wends. You must know, gentlemen," said this incorrigible bore, flinging himself into a rhapsodic attitude, "that in Rügen, the underground people, the Trolls, the Nisse, the the what you call - Fairies - are some of them the most amiable creatures in existence, beauty-worshippers who dwell

ah!

'Tief in des Erdballs Kern,'

and occupy their time to fashion delicate ornaments of gold and silver, so fine in texture that the gossamer spider's web compares to them as a ship's cable to a strand of cambric. In summer, when the roses blow as now—ach, how fragrant!-they come forth at night an d dance their rondels in the green grass, to the sound of such music as only fairies can make and only Mendelssohn could imitate. At Rodenkirchen then, in Rügen, dwelt a certain sordid wretch called John Wilde, who lay in wait for a fairy revel, and snatched in haste one of their dainty little glass shoes, which some careless fellow had kicked from his tiny foot in the delirious whirl of the dance. Now John knew that the fairy would have to go barefoot until his shoe was recovered, which was hard for one who tripped it so indomitably upon the light fantastic toe, so he resolved to drive a hard bargain ere he surrendered it. The fairy sent for his shoe, and came for it himself, in various disguises, but could not recover it until he had bequeathed to John Wilde, in perpetual fee, the privilege of turning up a golden ducat out of every furrow his plough made. And that was the end of John Wilde, for he never ceased ploughing any more from that time, but kept on winter and summer, turning his furrows and picking up his golden ducats, until at last he dropped down at the tail of the plough like an exhausted November fly, dead; and so had no good whatsoever of his money at all. And it is a good story, that!" added the Doctor, pushing his hat back and rolling the lake-like mirrors of his spectacles towards me with a singular look. "It is a goot story— it is the lesson of human nature."

"It is a good story," assented George; "and if one could only find a fairy shoe, how nice it would be to bring about such a condition of things as to turn gold and health out of the same furrow with a simultaneous scoop of your plough's mould-board."

That, too, is not impossible," I answered; "for this enchanted spot is the seat of Rodman Drake's Revels of the Fays, who doubtless must have lost many a glass slipper beneath these willows.'