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disbanding at Shelter Island after a most delightful outing. The association has been a success from the start, and has given the smallyachters opportunities which they never could have got in any other way, because the lack of uniformity in racing rules made it impossible for the boats of one club to race with those of another. Whether the racing rules of the association are technically perfect is a mooted question, but they certainly satisfy the yachters, and leave no room for those rancorous feelings which always grow out of a race sailed under "the rules with a plus in 'em," to which genial "Captain Joe" of Puritan fame once strongly objected, on the ground that they were not seamanlike, and that no two people could ever read them the same way.

A word should be said, before closing, of the homes of the yachters, for it is in these places that they spend much of their time when ashore, receive their friends, give their banquets, and "spin yarns" during the long winter evenings, while their boats are abandoned upon the shores, or in the snug hibernation of some quiet cove, awaiting the springtime revival and the bustle of preparation for the next summer's sailing. Every yacht-club has a home of some sort, if it be merely a small hut with a set of lockers and some chairs; but most clubs erect really useful houses, and take great pride in having them cozy and well furnished. Some of these buildings are expensive, well-designed structures. Such houses as those of the Atlantic and Brooklyn Clubs of Brooklyn; the Pavonia Club at the Atlantic Highlands of New Jersey; the Eastern Club at Marblehead, Massachusetts; the Larchmont and New Haven Clubs of the Sound; and the Minnetonka Club of Minneapolis, are admirably adapted for yachting purposes. These club-houses are, of course, constructed primarily with a view to the needs of the yacht-owners, and contain ample locker accommodations, sail-lofts, and store-rooms for small boats, oars, spars, etc.; but they also contain fine meeting-rooms, ladies' parlors, and quarters for the stewards, who prepare many a good dinner for the hungry sailors and their friends—and who ever saw a yachting man who was not hungry? Some of these club-houses also have sleeping-rooms in which one who desires to slumber on shore may pass the night, although the yachter himself generally prefers a bunk in his boat to any hotel, no matter how fine. Some clubs, in addition to their

regular club-houses, maintain "annexes" at favorite resorts, which they use as general meeting-places during the yachting season. The New York Yacht Club and the Pavonia and Jersey City Clubs of New Jersey have such buildings, and find them very convenient, the location of their homes not being near enough to the sea to meet the requirements of their sailing. These annex club-houses are plain and substantial.

Yachting in small yachts is, then, the real American yachting. The "big boat" has its place in the yachting world, but it is not the typical American yacht. It is the small-yachter who gives to the sport its wide popularity, and makes yachting so universally loved by men who are fond of aquatic pleasuring. The small-yachter is everywhere upon the waters. From the coast of Maine, from the shores of the harbor of the Golden Gate, from the beaches of the Atlantic seaboard, and from the borders of the inland lakes, he can be seen, all summer long, sailing about in his little vessel, and enjoying in all its fullness the excitement and delight of this most noble and health-giving sport. With a pluck and energy that mark the true lover of the sea, and a tact and skill that bespeak the real sailor, he handles his little craft, in fair weather and in foul, in a manner that leaves no room for doubt as to his fitness for the work which he is doing; for, whether he sail alone, or with the help of his friends, or that of a hired man to run his boat, he is always the master of his vessel,- which is seldom the case with the proprietor of the big boat,- and is in reality a" yachtsman" under all circumstances, at all times, and in all weathers. He must be cool-headed and calm in times of peril, affable and courteous on all social occasions, and generous and prompt to respond to all calls upon his courage-in brief, a gentleman; and, with rare exceptions, he comes up to that standard. There is no profit in yachting, and its trophies are, like those of the old Greek arena, always marks of merit and prowess, never the rewards of sharp practice and dishonest trickery. No race-winner among yachters expects his prizes to pay for his outlay, and this feature of its contests has always kept yachting from drawing to itself the kind of men who disgrace many other forms of sport. Yachting is a pastime that appeals only to those traits of character which are found in the manly man.

Frederic W. Pangborn.

M

A GRAY JACKET.

By the Author of “ Marse Chan,” “ Meh Lady,” “ Elsket,” etc.

Y meeting with him was accidental. I came across him passing through the square. I had seen him once or twice on the street, each time lurching along so drunk that he could scarcely stagger, so that I was surprised to hear what he said about the war. He was talking to some one who evidently had been in the army himself, but on the other side—a gentleman with the loyal legion button in his coat, and with a beautiful scar, a sabercut across his face; was telling of a charge in some battle or skirmish in which, he declared, his company-not himself; for I remember he said he was "No. 4," and was generally told off to hold the horses; and that that day he had had the ill luck to lose his horse and get a little scratch himself, so he was not in the charge-did the finest work he ever saw, and really, so he claimed, saved the day. It was this self-abnegation that first arrested my attention, for I had been accustomed all my life to hear the war talked of; it was one of the inspiring influences in my humdrum existence. But the speakers, although they generally boasted of their commands, not of themselves individually, usually admitted that they themselves had been in the active force, and thus tacitly shared in the credit. "No. 4," however, expressly disclaimed that he was entitled to any of the praise, declaring that he was safe behind the crest of the hill (which he said he "hugged mighty close"), and claimed the glory for the rest of the command.

It happened just as I have told you here," he said, in closing. "Old Joe saw the point as soon as the battery went to work, and sent Binford Terrell to the colonel to ask him to let him go over there and take it; and when Joe gave the word the boys went. They did n't go at a walk either, I tell you; it was n't any promenade: they went clipping. At first the guns shot over 'em; did n't catch 'em till the third fire; then they played the devil with 'em: but the boys were up there right in 'em before they could do much. They turned the guns on 'em as they went down the hill (oh, our boys could handle the tubes then as well as the artillery themselves), and in a little while the rest of the line came up, and we formed a line of battle right there on that crest, and held it till

nearly night. That's when I got jabbed. I picked up another horse, and with my foolishness went over there. That evening, you know, you all charged us-we were dismounted then. We lost more men then than we had done all day; there were forty-seven out of seventy-two killed or wounded. They walked all over us; two of 'em got hold of me (you see, I went to get our old flag some of you had got hold of), but I was too worthless to die. There were lots of 'em did go though, I tell you; old Joe in the lead. Yes, sir; the old company won that day, and old Joe led 'em. There ain't but a few of us left; but when you want us, colonel, you can get us. We 'll stand by you."

He paused in deep reflection; his mind evidently was back with his old company and its gallant commander "old Joe," whoever he might be, who was remembered so long after he passed away in the wind and smoke of that unnamed evening battle. I took a good look at him, at " No. 4," as he called himself. He was tall, but stooped a little; his features were good, at least his nose and brow were; his mouth and chin were weak. His mouth was too stained with the tobacco which he chewed to tell much about it,—and his chin was like so many American chins, not strong. His eyes looked weak. His clothes were very much worn, but they had once been good; they formerly had been black, and well made; the buttons were all on. His shirt was clean. I took note of this, for he had a dissipated look, and a rumpled shirt would have been natural. A man's linen tells on him before his other clothes do. His listener had evidently been impressed by him also, for he rose and said abruptly, " Let's go and take a drink." To my surprise" No. 4" declined. "No, I thank you," he said, with promptness. I instinctively looked at him again to see if I had not misjudged him; but I concluded not, that I was right, and that he was simply "not drinking." I was flattered at my discrimination when I heard him say that he had "sworn off." His friend said no more, but remained standing while "No. 4" expatiated on the difference between a man who is drinking and one who is not. I never heard a more striking exposition of it. He said he wondered that any man could be such a fool as to drink liquor; that he had determined never to touch another drop. He presently relapsed into silence, and the other reached out his hand

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to say good-by. Suddenly rising, he said: "Well, suppose we go and have just one for old times' sake. Just one now, mind you; for I have not touched a drop in-" He turned away, and I did not catch the length of the time mentioned; but I have reason to believe that "No. 4 overstated it.

The next time I saw him was in the police court. I happened to be there when he walked out of the pen among as miscellaneous a lot of chronic drunkards, thieves, and miscreants of both sexes and several colors as were ever gathered together. He still had on his old black suit, buttoned up; but his linen was rumpled and soiled like himself, and he was manifestly just getting over a debauch, the effects of which were still visible on him in every line of his perspiring face and thin figure. He walked with that exaggerated erectness which told his selfdeluded state as plainly as if he had pronounced it in words. He had evidently been there before, and more than once. The justice nodded to him familiarly:

he asked in a tone part

"Here again? pleasantry, part regret.

"Yes, your honor. Met an old soldier last night, and took a drop for good fellowship, and before I knew it—" A shrug of the shoulders completed the sentence, and the shoulders did not straighten any more.

The tall officer who had picked him up said something to the justice in a tone too low for me to catch; but "No. 4" heard it,—it was evidently a statement against him,- for he started to speak in a deprecating way. The judge interrupted him:

"I thought you told me last time that if I let you go you would not take another drink for a year."

"I forgot," said "No. 4" in a low voice. "This officer says you resisted him." The officer looked stolidly at the prisoner as if it were a matter of not the slightest interest to him personally. "Cursed me and abused me," he said, dropping the words slowly as if he were checking off a schedule.

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I did not, your honor; indeed, I did not," said "No. 4," quickly. "I swear I did not; he is mistaken. Your honor does not believe I would tell you a lie! Surely I have not got so low as that."

The justice turned his pencil in his hand doubtfully, and looked away. "No. 4" took in his position. He began again.

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trate took it doubtfully. He looked down at the prisoner half kindly, half humorously. "You'll just break it." He started to lay the book down.

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No; I want to take the pledge," said "No. 4," eagerly. "Did I ever break a pledge I made to your honor?"

"Did n't you promise me not to come back here?"

"I have not been here for nine months. Besides, I did not come of my own free will," said "No. 4," with a faint flicker of humor on his perspiring face.

"You promised not to take another drink." "I forgot that. I did not mean to break it; indeed, I did not. I fell in with—"

The justice looked away, considered a moment, and ordered him back into the pen with, "Thirty days under the hill, to cool off."

"No. 4" stood quite still till the officer motioned him to the gate, behind which the prisoners sat in stolid rows. Then he walked dejectedly back into the pen, and sat down by a drunken negro. His look touched me, and I went around and talked to the magistrate privately. But he was inexorable; he said he knew more of him than I did, and that thirty days in jail would "dry him out and be good for him." I told him the story of the battle. He knew it already, and said he knew more than that about him: that he had been one of the bravest soldiers in the whole army; did not know what fear was ; had once ridden into the enemy and torn a captured standard from its captors' hands, receiving two desperate bayonet-wounds in doing it; and had done other acts of conspicuous gallantry on many occasions. I pleaded this, but he was obdurate; hard, I thought at the time, and told him so; told him he had been a soldier himself, and ought to be easier. He looked troubled, not offended; for we were friends, and I think he liked to see me, who had been a boy during the war, take up for an old soldier on that ground. But he stood firm. I must do him the justice to say that I now think it would not have made any difference if he had done otherwise.

"No. 4" must have heard me trying to help him, for one day about a month after that he walked in on me quite sober, and looking somewhat as he did the first day I ever saw him; thanked me for what I had done for him; delivered one of the most impressive discourses on intemperance that I ever heard; and asked me to try to help him get work. He was willing to do anything, he said; that is, anything he could do. I got him a place with a friend of mine which he kept a week, then got drunk. We got hold of him, however, and sobered him up, and he escaped the police and the justice's

court. Being out of work, and very firm in his resolution never to drink again, we lent him some money-a very little-with which to keep along a few days, on which he got drunk immediately, and did fall into the hands of the police, and was sent to jail as before. This, in fact, was his regular round: into jail, out of jail; a little spell of sobriety, "an accidental fall," which occurred as soon as he could get a drop of liquor, and into jail again for thirty or sixty days according to the degree of resistance he gave the police, who always, by their own account, simply invited him politely to go home, and, by his, insulted him, and to the violence of the language he applied to them. In this he excelled; for although as quiet as possible when he was sober, when he was drunk he was a terror, so the police said, and his resources of vituperation were cyclopedic. He possessed in this particular department an eloquence which was incredible. His blasphemy was vast, illimitable, infinite. He told me once that he could not explain it; that when he was sober he abhorred profanity, and never uttered an oath; when he was in liquor his brain took this turn, and distilled blasphemy in volumes. He said that all of its energies were quickened and concentrated in this direction, and then he took not only pleasure, but pride in it. He felt inspired like one of the old prophets denouncing the sins of Israel.

He told me a good deal of his life. He had got very low at this time, much lower than he had been when I first knew him. He recognized this himself, and used to analyze and discuss himself in quite an impersonal way. This was when he had come out of jail, and after having the liquor" dried out " of him. In such a state he always referred to his condition in the past as being something that never would or could recur; while on the other hand, if he were just over a drunk, he frankly admitted his absolute slavery to his habit. When he was getting drunk he shamelessly maintained, and was ready to swear on all the Bibles in creation, that he had not touched a drop, and never expected to do so again,-indeed, could not be induced to do it,-when in fact he would at the very time be reeking with the fumes of liquor, and perhaps had his pocket then bulging with a bottle which he had just emptied, and would willingly have bartered his soul to refill. I never saw such absolute dominion as the love of liquor had over him. He was like a man in chains. He confessed it frankly and calmly. He said he had a disease, and gave me a history of it. It came on him, he said, in spells; that when he was over one he abhorred it, but when the fit seized him it came suddenly, and he was in absolute slavery to it. He said his father was a gentleman of convi

vial habits (I have heard that he was very dissipated, though not openly so, and “No. 4' never admitted it). He was killed at the battle of Bull Run. His mother-he always spoke of her with unvarying tenderness and reverence-had suffered enough, he said, to canonize her if she were not a saint already; she had brought him up to have a great horror of liquor, and he had never touched it till he went into the army. In the army he was in a convivial crowd, and they had hard marching and poor rations, often none, and drinking got to be held the proper thing. Liquor was scarce, and was regarded as a luxury; so although he was very much afraid of it, yet for good fellowship's sake, and because it was considered mannish, he used to drink it. Then he got to like it; and then got to feel the need of it, and took it to stimulate him when he was run down. This want brought with it a great depression when he did not have the means to satisfy it. He never liked the actual taste of it; he said few drunkards did. It was the effect that he was al-⚫ ways after. This increased on him, he said, until finally it was no longer a desire, but a passion, a necessity; he was obliged to have it. He felt then that he would commit murder for it. "Why, I dream about it," he said. “I will tell you what I have done. I have made the most solemn vows, and have gone to bed and gone to sleep, and waked up and dressed and walked miles through the rain and snow to get it. I believe I would have done it if I had known I was going next moment to hell." He said it had ruined him; said so quite calmly; did not appear to have any special remorse about it; at least, never professed any; said it used to trouble him, but he had got over it now. He had had a plantation,—that is, his mother had had,—and he had been quite successful for a while; but he said, "A man can't drink liquor and run a farm," and the farm had gone. I asked him how?

"I sold it," he said calmly; "that is, persuaded my mother to sell it. The stock that belonged to me had nearly all gone before. A man who is drinking will sell anything," he said. "I have sold everything in the world I had, or could lay my hands on. I have never got quite so low as to sell my old gray jacket that I used to wear when I rode behind old Joe. I mean to be buried in that—if I can keep it." He had been engaged to a nice girl; the wedding-day had been fixed; but she had broken off the engagement. She married another man. She was a mighty nice girl," he said quietly. “Her people did not like my drinking so much. I passed her not long ago on the street. She did not know me." He glanced down at himself quietly. "She looks older than she did." He said that he had had a place for some time,

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did not drink a drop for nearly a year, and then got with some of the old fellows, and they persuaded him to take a little. "I cannot touch it. I have either got to drink or let it alone one thing or the other," he said. "But I am all right now," he declared triumphantly, a little of the old fire lighting up in his face. "I never expect to touch a drop again."

He spoke so firmly that I was persuaded to make him a little loan, taking his due-bill for it, which he always insisted on giving. I have a pile of these valuable securities now filed away with a somewhat smaller number of pledges of various degrees of asseveration which he made from time to time. I had not then come to know him so well as I did afterward. That evening I saw him being dragged along by three policemen, and he was cursing like a demon. The maledictions of Ezekiel and Jeremiah mingled with the language of Billingsgate were being poured forth in the street in a resistless torrent.

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In the course of time he got so low that he spent much more than half his time in jail. He became a perfect vagabond, and with his clothes ragged and dirty might be seen reeling about, or standing around the street corners near disreputable bars, waiting for a chance drink, or sitting asleep in doorways of untenanted buildings. His companions would be one or two chronic drunkards like himself, with red noses, bloated faces, dry hair, and filthy clothes. Sometimes I would see him hurrying along with one of these as if they had a piece of the most important business in the world. An idea had struck their addled brains that by some means they could manage to secure a drink. Yet in some way he still held himself above these creatures, and once or twice I heard of him being under arrest for resenting what he deemed an impertinence from them.

Once he came very near being drowned. There was a flood in the river, and a large crowd was watching it from the bridge. Suddenly a little girl's dog fell in. It was pushed in by a ruffian. The child cried out, and there was a commotion. When it subsided a man was seen swimming for life after the little white head going down the stream. It was "No. 4." He had slapped the fellow in the face, and then had sprung in after the dog. He caught it, and got out himself, though in too exhausted a state to stand up. When he was praised for it, he said, "A member of old Joe's company who would not have done that could not have ridden behind old Joe." I had this story from eye-witnesses, and it was used shortly after with good effect; for he was arrested for burglary, breaking into a man's house one night. It looked at first like a serious case, for some money had been taken out of a drawer; but when the case

was investigated it transpired that the house was a bar-room over which the man lived,-he was the same man who had pitched the dog into the water,—and that " No. 4," after being given whisky enough to make him a madman, had been put out of the place, had broken into the bar during the night to get more, and was found fast asleep in a chair with an empty bottle beside him. I became satisfied that if any money had been taken the barkeeper, to make out a case against "No. 4," had taken it himself, and the jury thought so too. But there was a technical breaking, and it had to be got around; so his counsel appealed to the jury, telling them what he knew of "No. 4," together with the story of the child's dog, and “ No. 4's" reply. There were one or two old soldiers on the jury, and they acquitted him, on which he somehow managed to get whisky enough to land him back in jail in twenty-four hours.

IN May, 1890, there was a monument unveiled in Richmond. It was a great occasion, and not only all Virginia, but the whole South, participated in it with great fervor, much enthusiasm, and many tears. It was an occasion for sacred memories. The .newspapers talked about it for a good while beforehand; preparations were made for it as for the celebration of a great and general ceremony in which the whole South was interested. It was interested, because it was not only the unveiling of a monument for the old commander, the greatest and loftiest Southerner, and, as the South holds, man, of his time; it was an occasion consecrated to the whole South, now strongly and henceforth forever for the Union as it is; it was the embalming in precious memories, and laying away in the tomb of the Southern Confederacy, the apotheosis of the Southern people. As such all were interested in it, and all were prepared for it. It was known that all that remained of the Southern armies would be there: of the armies that fought at Shiloh, and Bull Run, and Fort Republic; at Seven Pines, Gaines's Mill, and Cold Harbor; at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, Atlanta, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga, Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, and Petersburg; and the whole South, Union as it is now to the core and ready to fight the nation's battles, gathered to glorify Lee, the old commander, and to see the survivors of those and other bloody fields in which the volunteer soldiers of the South had held the world at bay, and added to the glorious history of their race. Men came all the way from Oregon and California to be present. Old one-legged soldiers stumped it from West Virginia. Even " No. 4,” though in the gutter, caught the contagion, and shaped up and became sober. He got a good

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