Puslapio vaizdai
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little brass-plated dial enjoys a close intimacy with all the points of the compass, and faithfully indicates the name and quality of every peak that rears itself above the low foot-hills that close in the lake on its farther side. But Miss West, of course, knew nothing as yet of this fount of information; besides, what platform could be more advantageously placed than her present one, or what pedagogue more capable and sympathetic? So the voice and the sunshade of the Chatelaine went on in perfect accord and understanding as she marshaled the whole snowy host with conscientious exactitude: the Mönch, the Eiger, the broad-bosomed Jungfrau; the Breithorn, the Schreckhorn, the Wetterhorn, the Finsteraarhorn; Mont Blanc, the serrated Dent du Midi, the sharp tip of the Matterhorn; and finally, best and grandest of all despite its sixty miles of distance, her own Mountain. And her eye sparkled, and her manner took on an added warmth, for beneath those spreading snow-fields stood her ancestral home, and in her mind's eye she saw again the high and rugged valley where her ordinary courtesy title took on a tinge of actuality, and through whose confines she swayed it, in a certain modest, graceful fashion, as chatelaine indeed.

All this time a sedate, serviceable, middleaged person was pacing with a kind of steady shuffle along the walk at the back edge of the plateau, whence she varied an occasional glance toward her charge by a comparison of the twin spires of the church as they rose before the huddled roofs of the château just behind, or by now and then catching a sidelong glimpse, through the battlements of the wall she grazed, of the foundations of the château itself, as they rose from the vineyards that covered the slopes of the ravine; and to her it became apparent, as the Chatelaine stepped hither and thither with her firm, springy, self-assured tread,- Miss West following with her wavering high heels and her rattling passementerie as best she might, that something, out of sight, indeed, but still at just the present moment more engrossingly interesting than anything actually en evidence, was the matter that her young mistress had set herself to elucidate. The matter was simply this: the Chatelaine's godfather, the Governor, had a little plantation between Morat and Avenches,—a trifle of eight or ten acres, where, in such intervals of leisure as his scientific employments permitted, he engaged in the cultivation of Roman antiquities; and it was her effort precisely to locate this interesting tract, which was shut out from view by the range of hills which separates the Lake of Morat from the Lake of Neuchâtel, that thrust out the Chatelaine's arm and brought such an expression of painstaking peering to the face of her guest. And when, as her guest, this VOL. XLIV.-31.

young American had been received on the previous evening in one of those dim, fatigued, reticent old mansions down there on the edge of the water, the Governor, winding his way into the dusky drawing-room through numerous cases filled with specimens and preparations, and gazing down upon her with the benevolent interest which the professor is sometimes observed to show for his subject, had told her of his little farm and its perennial crop of antiquities, and had assured her of the pleasure it gave him to be able to start their brief course of instruction so nearly at the beginning.

This kindly old gentleman, who was ending his life at Neuchâtel, had spent the beginnings of it at Potsdam and Sans-Souci amidst a certain circle whose extreme altitude I must leave to your conjecture. He had considered himself born to la haute politique, and one of his early efforts, more daring than discreet, had ended in a banishment, more or less honorable, to Neuchâtel, then under Prussian rule. But even in this circumscribed field political activity was practicable enough for him; he harassed a succession of North German governors with suggestions and advice, and once, on the occasion of a sudden and unexpected interregnum, himself held the château a few months as acting governor. For all this, however, he never wore the title officially, and he was seldom addressed in such manner to his face; but any one who had a point to gain, or an ax to grind, never lessened his chances of success by whispering behind the old gentleman's back some such word as, "Yes; but would this please the Governor 66 ?" or Perhaps so; but what will the Governor say to anything like that?" He might properly have been called the Professor; but when it comes to a question of title the one bird in the bush may be preferred to any number in hand.

The Governor might have returned to Berlin years and years ago, but Neuchâtel pleased him well enough; besides, where was the ideal cosmopolite to be found if not in a German with French affiliations? In the governor's chair he had attempted a military severity, and in his correspondence he was inclined to aim at an acidulous wit-Frederick and Voltaire rolled into one, you understand; but, when all 's said, he remained simply a genial old gentleman, with an inordinate fondness for butterflies and a keen relish for his joke. In earlier years—years when he had regarded himself as quite a piece on the board, years a backward glance toward which almost revealed him to himself in the murky guise of a conspirator-he had been accustomed to read all the most ponderous political publications of the Continent; but in the course of time he tired, as everybody must, of those journalistic Jeremiahs who saw the

heavens falling every time two emperors came within fifty miles of each other, and most of his reading of late had been of a lighter nature. He had a sympathetic familiarity with most of the comic sheets from "Kladderadatsch" to "Pungolo," and found them, he declared, quite as trustworthy as the more serious ones, and infinitely more amusing. And if, as the years rolled on, the politician was overshadowed by the naturalist, it was not that he loved man less but nature more, and his conspiracies against the powers that be were diverted toward the Power that immemorially has been. He delighted in the insect world-when the insects were impaled in rows and correctly labeled; he exulted in the winged creation-when the creatures themselves were properly stuffed and mounted; he was overjoyed to bask in the great smile of nature-when that smile could be modified a trifle by the use of a little geological hammer. And the Chatelaine, who had passed an educational youth at Neuchâtel, and had accompanied her learned relative on many a scientific tramp, was as familiar with the various implements employed in the cosmical toilet as was the old gentleman himself.

Now on this very morning, and at the precise time when the Chatelaine was giving Aurelia West her introduction to the Alpine world, the Governor, with a crumpled letter in his hand, was pacing his library in a state of extreme excitement. This letter had come from the steward of his little inclosure on the Lake of Morat, and though the Governor's reading of it caused the immediate summoning of his chief neophyte from his own study, yet it is gratifying to recall that on receipt of it he was entirely alone. For within two minutes after tearing open the envelop he had abandoned himself to an ecstasy of joy such as might have been considered extreme even in one fifty years his junior. While he did not actually jump out of his slippers, he did give his head a triumphant wag that sent his skull-cap tumbling to the floor; and he started in a rapid walk to and fro through the big room, keyed up to a pitch of excitement that made him all regardless of a certain succession of reflections in the long mirror at the end of it—a fortunate circumstance, since where there are no eyes there is no spectacle, just as where there are no ears there is no sound.

As I have said, the Governor's cultivation of Roman ruins was carried on within a mile or two of Avenches; and Avenches is simply the ancient Aventicum, the capital of the Helvetii, the city beloved of Vespasian, and the most considerable of the Roman settlements in Switzerland - the tale of whose amphitheaters and temples, and basilicas and towered walls, you will find told, since you may never meet

the Governor personally, in any reputable work on Swiss antiquities. Well, the Governor read this old volume from the classic past, and read it very carefully; then he re-read it; then he began to edit it, with emendations and annotations; and at length the day came when he felt himself impelled to add an appendix to it— an appendix, like the original work, in stone and mortar. And the material for this was close at hand. If you have ever spent any time around Neuchâtel you may recall some of the more striking peculiarities of the Jurassic formations. A little scrambling over the Chaumont, or even a ramble on the slopes above St. Blaise, will show you how readily these rocks, block-shaped and lichen-grown, may take upon themselves the aspect of the antique, or even of the prehistoric. Heap a hundred of these upon one another in separating two pastures, and you have the relics of some human habitation antedating history. Pile another lot a little more liberally and judiciously and with a little more of conscious art, and you produce a something which the alert and sympathetic mind has no difficulty in connecting with the first historic civilization known to the land. And the mind of the Governor was a mind of this order. Beginning in a somewhat tentative way, he came in the course of a few years, with the help of a kindred spirit, a fanciful young stone-cutter at Morat, to be the possessor of such an array of baths, barracks, villas, and temples,- overlapping, outcrowding,that only one other tract of equal size in all the world, the Roman Forum itself, could parallel this instance of infinite riches in a little room.

One year Aventicum Novum would be a wealthy and favored suburb of the older and larger place, when villas would spring up and spread around, and bas-reliefs and mosaic pavements were likely to develop. Another year it would be simply an extreme military outpost from which to keep a sharp eye on the aborigines on the opposite side of the lake, a state of things calculated to produce little beyond barracks and mile-stones. On a third year the same quarter was likely to be given over to the worship of some particular divinity especially affected by old campaigners; and to such a period as this was due a certain temple consisting of two and a half Corinthian columns and an ell or more of entablature; and along with the temple went a single strayed pine which had been partly persuaded, partly coerced, into a semblance of the flat-spreading Southern type, as well as a fractured marble bench set in a bower of laurel. You will judge from the Governor's temple that most of his edifices consisted of ninety-nine parts of imagination to one part of reality—a proportion that I would most earnestly recommend to any

propagator of ruins. Indeed, one who is unable to see a complete basilica in a short, low ridge of battered masonry hardly rising above the surface of the ground, or to pave an entire forum in the course of one forenoon, should avoid this particular department of husbandry.

During this current season the Governor's energies were bent on nothing less than a marmorata on the edge of the lake, a wharf at which the stone used in the construction of Aventicum the Elder had been landed after a rafting across from the shore below Mont Vully. To confess the exact truth, the Governor's purpose here was less esthetic than practical; he wished to enlarge his little property at the expense of the shallows before it, and he hoped that the building of a suitable landing-place might come to make Aventicum Novum an occasional port of call. Operations had been going on for two or three days with a greatly enlarged force of workmen, as many as five being occupied at one time -a necessary increase when the manual part of the undertaking so nearly equaled the imaginative part of it. And it was the director of this little force who had sped those startling tidings to his master in his library at Neuchâtel.

On receipt of these tidings, the Governor lost no time. He shook off his dressing-gown, shrugged himself into his street-coat, called loudly for his hat and gloves and walkingstick, detached his chief disciple from a case of beetles, and with him sallied forth. His first impulse was to find his confrères at the college; his second led him in search of the Chatelaine. She would know, would feel, would sympathize. For when you possess a little foothold on a lake in western Switzerland, and when your men report that excavations have devel

oped rows of rotting piles deeply embedded in the slime and marl of the shore, it means one thing, and only one-lakedwellings. Let him but communicate this simple fact to his godchild, and her mind would start up into throbbing activity as had his; like a rocket her thought would rush forth over a hundred yards of narrow, spindling causeway to explode brilliantly far out above the water in all the coruscations that must envelop a newly discovered lake-village through the imagery instantly conjured up in the scientific mind when fired by fancy. She, too, would instantaneously drive down a hundred thousand tree-trunks-oak, beech, fir, all trussed and wattled, which would quickly become overspread with a broad acreage of rude planking, which in turn would be covered over with a layer of beaten earth and embedded gravel. From this platform a multitude of huts would rise, built of brush and saplings, smeared over with clay, and roofed with bark and straw and rushes. The cattle would be stabled between, and the freerunning pigs would feed their fatness on acorns and beechnuts. The women would grind their wheat and barley between their mealing-stones, and each would bake her cakes and boil her bison-meat on her

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