His next diplomatic position was as Chargé d'Affaires, at Vienna, where he filled for a year and a half the vacancy occasioned by the resignation of Mr. Motley. After a summer in Switzerland, and a journey through Turkey and Italy, Mr. Hay returned to America, with the intention of embracing the profession of journalism; but the execution of this plan was delayed for nearly two years more by his appointment as Secretary of our Legation in Spain. This was, probably, the happiest accident of his life. It gave him the opportunity of witnessing, under the most favorable circumstances, the process of reconstructing a political society out of chaos, and threw him into somewhat intimate relations with the leading men in Spain. The result was his Castilian Days. In this little book we meet qualities rare that he cared for-he was in a mood to misread Shakespeare with the apocryphal actor "There's a divinity that shapes our ends rough,Hew them how we will." He returned to America in the autumn of 1870 with Castilian Days in his portmanteau. All the world was reading Mr. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee," and Col. Hay did what all the world was doing. 16 Whoever has read the "Heathen Chinee must have little curiosity if he do not make thor has written, and Colonel Hay's curihaste to read everything else that its auosity was of as good quality as that of the best of us. He read all the poems, but Chiquita" and "Cicely," which gave him particular pleasure, puzzled him, and set him thinking. He saw the value and the scope of the subtle and original genius that had produced these ballads. He saw how Haw-infinitely finer and better than nature they were, but, having been born and brought up as a Pike himself, he saw that they were not nature. He wrote "Little Breeches ' for his own amusement,—at least we have in American books of travel. It finds its proper place in a society of which any country might well be proud. It mates with Longfellow's Hyperion, with thorne's Our Old Home, with Howells' Italian Journey, with Curtis's Howadji. It would be hard to name any book that has been written about Spain in which the social life, the landscape, the art, the politics are more gracefully and yet more truthfully reflected than in Castilian Days. The grace of Colonel Hay's style does not interfere with the firmness and sureness of his touch, and he is informing and instructive without being guide-booky or statistical. The picturesque element in the book ought not to blind us to the value of the political chapters. Colonel Hay must take a not very cheerful satisfaction in the fulfillment of nearly all his predictions as to the political future, and in the justification of his estimates of the character of public men, and of the tendencies of the political current in Spain. But Castilian Days, clever as it was, was not destined to be Colonel Hay's card of introduction to his countrymen. Doubtless he would have preferred, if he could have had his way, the more decorous and elegant chaperon, as the world at large would esteem it, to the one Fate assigned him. No doubt, seeing how all that good breeding, careful teaching, manners infused with grace by long mingling with the polished world, and a native refinement, had made him able to do, was ignored by a public who would know him only as the author of rhymes that had cost him no labor, and represented nothing in himself VOL. VII.-47 heard that this is his account of the matter, -to see how a genuine Western feeling, would impress Western people. Whether expressed in genuine Western language, Colonel Hay really wrote " Little Breeches" with this deliberate purpose or not, he was not long in learning how Western peopie were impressed, or Eastern people either. Before he knew what was happening to him he found himself borne lightly on the top wave of popularity, where he and Mr. Bret Harte have since continued to sit and ride "Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, These many summers in a sea of glory." Whatever may have been Colonel Hay's notion in writing "Little Breeches," the public didn't concern itself about it, but took the good luck that fell to it in the possession of a bit of the real stuff of poetry, and asked no impertinent questions. If it be true that the ballad was written by way of criticism on Mr. Harte's ballad, it makes no more difference in our enjoyment of it than it did in our enjoyment of the late Mr. Poe's poem, "The Raven," when he told us that he wrote the last verse first, having been taken with the sound of the word "nevermore," and his mind feeling about to invent a verse for it sang the whole backward from the tail line to the first. So Godwin believed, and tried to make us believe, that he wrote Caleb Williams backward, the last chapter first, then the penultimate to account for the ultimate, and the antepenultimate to account for that, and so on. What do we care for these explanations? The important thing is that we have "Little Breeches," and "The Raven," and Caleb Williams-not, how we got them. Besides, the world mistrusts these explanations in cold blood of what was done when the mind was in a glow. The other "Pike" ballads have only a family resemblance to "Little Breeches." "Jim Bludsoe" is a true story of Western life without much exaggeration. We must think, however, that Jim's veracity, which seems to have rivaled that of the Father of his Country, must have begun to sprout after he had committed bigamy-unless there was an understanding between the two ladies "The one in Natchez-under-the-Hill, And the other here in Pike." But if there were such an understanding, the poet tells us nothing of it, and we are obliged to conclude either that Jim had been converted since he plighted double troth, or that the verse's end has forgotten its beginning. Banty Tim is a still closer and more unrelenting photographic likeness of the Southern Illinoisan. "The Mystery of Gilgal" has more art in its composition than any of the others, but its fun is rather ghastly, and the weak victim of civilization shudderingly hopes as he reads it that he may never find himself in Phinnland. The ballads were written within a few days of each other: two of them in a single evening. One would think that Colonel Hay looked upon his work, and pronounced it not good; for he laid it aside, and has rarely resumed it. But the obstinate public came to no such verdict, and to this day Colonel Hay's name at the head of a poem will sell an edition of whatever it is printed in. The Arabs, who have many good proverbs, have one which is found true and truer the more experience we have of life. "While the word is yet unspoken," they say, "you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you." Ill luck and good luck both know this proverb by heart, and though both quarrel with it they know well that their quarrel is hopeless. The "Oh, Stranger! what a word has escaped the fence of thy teeth!" so often repeated in Homer, has a familiar sound as we read it; for our hearts say it to our hearts life long, from the day when the heart has first a voice. An amusing story is told of Campbell, apocryphal, no doubt, how the expression, "the author of The Pleasures of Hope" forever tagged to his name, whether written or spoken, became at last a weariness to the flesh and to the spirit, and how he sighed out one day, that his spirit would dread to return to earth again lest it should read on his tombstone, "Here lies the author of The Pleasures of Hope." So we have heard of a distinguished traveler whose literary work is far from being contemptible, but whom it vexes to be denied the style of poet, by a world that knew him first as a narrator of traveling adventures, when travelers were rarer among us than they are to-day. Even so great a poet as Goethe, would have given some of his immortal laurels if he could have been reckoned among the men of science, and John Ruskin, who is pure poet, without a trace of the scientific faculty, insists that science is his field, and that the world misnames him critic and prose-poet. Doubtless, the list is a large one of the unhappy happy men whom Fame has taken by the hand, and who quarrel with that spoken word of theirs which caught her ear, and made her love them, and which her love repeats for ever. We have heard somewhere, somehow, that John Hay would reason the world, if he could, out of its foolish habit of forever coupling his name with "Little Breeches," with "Jim Bludsoe," "The Mystery of Gilgal," and the rest of the Pike County Ballads. Perhaps Lowell is tired of being known as the author of "The Biglow Papers," or of "The Courtin;" it may be, Longfellow would as lief not be spoken of so often as the author of "Evangeline;"perhaps, oh, perhaps! Bret Harte wishes in desperate moments, that the "Heathen Chinee had stayed in his ink stand? Penny-a-liners and men -"Born in blight, Victims of perpetual slight," wonder at this discontent; it looks to them like ingratitude. Gladly would they have one poor leaf of these bays. The public that enjoys Col. Hay's liter ary and poetic work, knows little of the plodding industry that bears such abundant fruit, handsome and wholesome, in his field as a journalist. As is well known, he is associated with a dozen other writers of talent on the editorial staff of the New York Tribune, and the work they all do goes to building up the great newspaper with no more individual profit to them than coral insects derive from their contributions to the reef. Col. Hay spends a few Col. Hay spends a few hours of each year in writing verses, and it must seem unjust to him that these verses give him more publicity than his editorial work for the year, which would perhaps amount, if collected, to a volume of twelve hundred octavo pages. But 'tis the world's nonchalant way, and we must accept it with equal nonchalance. The public does not know who does all the excellent work that makes its newspaper essential to it for enjoyment and for culture, but it would soon miss the hand withdrawn. The work must be its own reward, and, doubtless, to a true journalist like Hay, it is so. Here he finds use for all his faculties. All that a man has learned at school, in camp, in court and in the varied social life of the traveler, the diplomatist, the politician, finds full employment in the columns of a leading daily news paper. BELLES DEMOISELLES PLANTATION. THE original grantee was Count, assume the name to be De Charleu; the old Creoles never forgive a public mention. He was the French king's commissary. One day, called to France to explain the lucky accident of the commissariat having burned down with his account-books inside, he left his wife, a Choctaw Comptesse, behind. Arrived at court, his excuses were accepted, and that tract granted him where afterwards stood Belles Demoiselles Plantation. A man cannot remember everything! In a fit of forgetfulness he married a French gentlewoman, rich and beautiful, and "brought her out." However, "All's well that ends well;" a famine had been in the colony, and the Choctaw Comptesse had starved, leaving nought but a halfcaste orphan family lurking on the edge of the settlement, bearing our French gentlewoman's own new name, and being mentioned in Monsieur's will. And the new Comptesse-she tarried but a twelvemonth, left Monsieur a lovely son, and departed, led out of this vain world by the swamp-fever. From this son sprang the proud Creole family of De Charleu. It rose straight up, up, up, generation after generation, tall, branchless, slender, palm-like; and finally, in the time of which I am to tell, flowered with all the rare beauty of a century-plant, in Artemise, Innocente, Felicité, the twins Marie and Martha, Leontine and little Septima: the seven beautiful daughters for whom their home had been fitly named Belles Demoiselles. The Count's grant had once been a long point, round which the Mississippi used to whirl, and seethe, and foam, that it was horrid to behold. Big whirlpools would open and wheel about in the savage eddies under the low bank, and close up again, and others open, and spin, and disappear. Great circles of muddy surface would boil up from hundreds of feet below, and gloss over, and seem to float away, sink, come back again under water, and with only a soft hiss surge up again, and again drift off, and vanish. Every few minutes the loamy bank would tip down a great load of earth upon its besieger, and fall back a foot,sometimes a yard,—and the writhing river would press after, until at last the Pointe was quite swallowed up, and the great river glided by in a majestic curve, and asked no more; the bank stood fast, the "caving" became a forgotten misfortune, and the diminished grant was a long, sweeping, willowy bend, rustling with miles of sugar cane. Coming up the Mississippi in the sailing craft of those early days, about the time one first could descry the white spires of the old St. Louis Cathedral, you would be pretty sure to spy, just over to your right under the levee, Belles Demoiselles Mansion, with its broad veranda and red painted cypress roof, peering over the embank ment, like a bird in the nest, half hid by crown. The house stood unusually near the river, facing eastward, and standing four-square, with an immense veranda about its sides, and a flight of steps in front spreading broadly downward, as we open arms to a child. From the veranda nine miles of river were seen; and in their compass, near at hand, the shady garden full of rare and beautiful flowers; farther away broad fields of cane and rice, and the distant quarters of the slaves, and on the horizon everywhere a dark belt of cypress forest. known to all, and known only, as Ingin Charlie. One thing I never knew a Creole to do. He will not utterly go back on the ties of ties may be. For one reason, he is never blood, no matter what sort of knots those ashamed of his or his father's sins; and for another, he will tell you-he is "all heart!" So the different heirs of the De Charleu rights and interests of the De Carloses, estate had always strictly regarded the especially their ownership of a block of dilapidated buildings in a part of the city, which had once been very poor property, but was beginning to be valuable. This block had much more than maintained the time, and, as his household consisted only last De Carlos through a long and lazy lifeof himself, and an aged and crippled negress, the inference was irresistible that he an "Injin," was plainly a dark white had money." Old Charlie, though by sunk in the bliss of deep ignorance, shrewd, man, about as old as Colonel De Charleu, deaf, and, by repute at least, unmerciful. The master was old Colonel De Charleu, -Jean Albert Henri Joseph De CharleuMarot, and "Colonel" by the grace of the first American governor. would not speak to any one who called him Monsieur,-he "Colonel,”- -was a hoary-headed patriarch.alias His step was firm, his form erect, his intellect strong and clear, his countenance classic, serene, dignified, commanding, his manners courtly, his voice musical,-fascinating. He had had his vices,-all his life; but had borne them, as his race do, with a serenity of conscience, and a cleanness of mouth that left no outward blemish on the surface of the gentleman. He had gambled in Royal street, drank hard in Orleans street, run his adversary through in the duelling-ground at Slaughter-house Point, and danced and quarreled at the St. Phillippe-street-theater quadroon balls. Even now, with all his courtesy and bounty, and a hospitality which seemed to be entertaining angels, he was bitter-proud and penurious, and deep down in his hardfinished heart loved nothing but himself, his name, and his motherless children. But these! their ravishing beauty was all these!-their but excuse enough for the unbounded idolatry of their father. Against these seven goddesses he never rebelled. even required him to defraud old De Had they Carlos I can hardly say. Old De Carlos was his extremely distant relative on the Choctaw side. With this single exception, the narrow thread-like line of descent from the Indian wife, diminished to a mere strand by injudicious alliances, and deaths in the gutters of old New Orleans, was extinct. The name, by Spanish contact, had become De Carlos; but this one surviving bearer of it was English. This rare accomplishment, which The Colonel and he always conversed in the former had learned from his Scotch wife, the latter from up-river traders,they found an admirable medium of communication, answering, better than French could, a similar purpose to that of the stick which we fasten to the bit of one horse and breast-gear of another, whereby each keeps his distance. Once in a while, too, by way of jest, English found its way among the ladies of Belles Demoiselles, always signifying that their sire was about to have business with old Charlie. Charlie troubled the Colonel. He had no Now a long standing wish to buy out desire to oust him unfairly; he was proud of being always fair; yet he did long to engross the whole estate under one title. Out of his luxurious idleness he had conceived this desire, and thought little of so slight an obstacle as being already somewhat in debt to old Charlie for money borrowed, course, good, ten times over. Lots, buildand for which Belles Demoiselles was, of ings, rents, all, might as well be his, he thought, to give, keep, or destroy. "Had he but the old man's heritage. Ah! he might bring that into existence which his belles demoiselles had been begging for, 'since many years;' a home,-and such a home, -in the gay city. Here he should tear down this row of cottages, and make his to the tender influences of the approaching night. At such an hour the passer on the river, already attracted by the dark figures of the broad-roofed mansion, and its woody garden standing against the glow garden wall; there that long rope-walk should give place to vine-covered arbors; the bakery yonder should make way for a costly conservatory; that wine warehouse should come down, and the mansion go up. It should be the finest in the State. Mening sunset, would hear the voices of the should never pass it, but they should say 'the palace of the De Charleus; a family of grand descent, a people of elegance and bounty, a line as old as France, a fine old man, and seven daughters as beautiful as happy; whoever dare attempt to marry there must leave his own name behind him!' "The house should be of stones fitly set, brought down in ships from the land of 'les Yankees,' and it should have an airy belvedere, with a gilded image tip-toeing and shining on its peak, and from it you should see, far across the gleaming folds of the river, the red roof of Belles Demoiselles, the country-seat. At the big stone gate there should be a porter's lodge, and it should be a privilege even to see the ground." Truly they were a family fine enough, and fancy-free enough to have fine wishes, yet happy enough where they were, to have had no wish but to live there always. To those, who, by whatever fortune, wandered into the garden of Belles Demoiselles some summer afternoon as the sky was reddening towards evening, it was lovely to see the family gathered out upon the tiled pavement at the foot of the broad front steps, gaily chatting and jesting, with that ripple of laughter that comes so pleasingly from a bevy of girls. The father would be found seated in their midst, the center of attention and compliment, witness, arbiter, umpire, critic, by his beautiful children's unanimous appointment, but the single vassal, too, of seven absolute sovereigns. Now they would draw their chairs near together in eager discussion of some new step in the dance, or the adjustment of some rich adornment. Now they would start about him with excited comments to see the eldest fix a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. Now the twins would move down a walk after some unusual flower, and be greeted on their return with the high pitched notes of delighted feminine surprise. As evening came on they would draw more quietly about their paternal center. Often their chairs were forsaken, and they grouped themselves on the lower steps, one above another, and surrendered themselves hidden group rise from the spot in the soft harmonies of an evening song; swelling clearer and clearer as the thrill of music warmed them into feeling, and presently joined by the deeper tones of the father's voice; then, as the daylight passed quite away, all would be still, and he would know that the beautiful home had gathered its nestlings under its wings. And yet, for mere vagary, it pleased them not to be pleased. 66 perplexity. Papa is goin' to town!" The news passed up stairs. "Inno!"-one to another meeting in a doorway,-" something is goin' to took place!" "Qu'est-ce-que c'est !"-vain attempt at gruffness. "Papa is goin' to town!" The unusual tidings were true. It was afternoon of the same day that the Colonel tossed his horse's bridle to his groom, and stepped up to old Charlie, who was sitting on his bench under a China-tree, his head, as was his fashion, bound in a Madras handkerchief. The "old man The "old man" was plainly under the effect of spirits, and smiled a deferential salutation without trusting himself to his feet. "Eh, well Charlie!"-the Colonel raised his voice to suit his kinsman's deafness, -"how is those times with my friend Charlie?" "Eh?" said Charlie, distractedly. "Is that goin' well with my friend Charlie ?" "In the house,-call her,"-making a pretense of rising. "Non, non! I don't want,"-the speaker paused to breathe- “ ow is collection ?" "O!" said Charlie, "every day he make me more poorer!" "What do you hask for it?" asked the planter indifferently, designating the house by a wave of his whip. "Ask for w'at?" said Injin Charlie. "De house! What you ask for it?" "I don't believe," said Charlie. |