be; and in some aspects it is even better. For, where- licity. The churches, whether orthodox or dissentas the latter places could not be intimately and im- ing, knew him not; he gave no entertainments, he partially treated of without risk of giving offense, made no calls, he visited London not more than once whether by flattery or disparagement, to their worthy | a month, and even then he was as likely to go afoot inhabitants, Byemoor, which may or may not be as by the train. There were living with him a lieither one of them, can be enlarged upon to the brary, a wife, and a couple of servants. He refullest extent with no danger of the kind. It is ceived a good many letters, and in return was in the pleasanter for all parties to be typical than to be pho- | habit of dropping an occasional large blue envelope tographic, and very likely there is more essential into the post-office box on the corner, which was betruth in the former way of looking at a thing than lieved to contain his contributions to literature. He in the latter. No detached specimen is complete; kept a revolver, a cat, and a monkey. He was said it needs to be rounded out with the lights and shad- to keep in-doors during the greater part of the day, ows of the entire species, if not of the genus and but after sundown, in rainy or fair weather, he was family, before it stands forth in full and recognizable often to be seen striding rapidly out into the counrelief. Epigrammatically, we must look through the try, clad in a roundabout pea-jacket and brandishing lens of the whole world in order truly to see a peb- a short, thick cane. Although not a subscriber to ble or a flower. I shall not attempt quite so much | Mudie's, he took in most of the leading weekly reas this in describing Byemoor, nor shall I engage in- views, and, when anything of especial interest in the variably to adhere to the typical method at all. The political or social world turned up, he generally sent reader, therefore, if he finds anything to agree with down an order for a daily paper. He was of a grave in the following chapters, will be at liberty to gen- and rather forbidding cast of countenance, yet when eralize its application; while objectionable passages spoken to he answered pleasantly enough, and in will kindly be ascribed to the writer's temporary re- pretty tolerable English. He was an inveterate lapse into particulars as exceptional as disagreeable. smoker, but drank less than a man of his apparent means and good health ought to do in a climate like that of England; he sat up terribly late o' nights, and was suspected of taking a cup of coffee and a cigar before arising in the morning. Although understood to have lived for many years in England, he did not appear to have profited as he might have done by his opportunities; for he was still a heretic in religion, a republican in politics, and the harshness of a Yankee accent was perceptible in his speech. His build, however, was rather English than American. He was somewhat under forty years of age, yet his hair and beard were already streaked here and there with gray. He was very fond of flowers, and his name was Jabez Hedgley. The reader has the best of it, for, unfortunately, the typifying process cannot be applied to real life; it is not easy to idealize a brick-and-plaster house, or to generalize a butcher's bill, except from the vantage-ground of pen and paper. There is an irritating awkwardness and rigidity about material objects which contrasts unfavorably with what may be termed their literary plasticity. By a stroke of my pen I can annihilate that square, ugly building across the way, and open up a charming view of brook and meadow and clustering trees, with perhaps a church-tower in the middle distance and a blue hill in the background. Such an arrangement might have existed without in the least violating the modesty of Nature or the local proprieties of Byemoor; yet to bring it about would be a job not lightly to be attempted by any giant less brawny than he of the imagination; and even his exploits, immeasurable though they are, are prone to dwindle into nothing beneath so seemingly harmless a test as ocular inspection. It is the writer's lot to endure things as they are; but he may take a sort of revenge upon them by representing them as he would have wished them to be-guarding himself only against overstepping the limits of a reasonable might-have-been. II. I HAVE incidentally alluded to a certain American gentleman of a literary turn, who was settled in a house nearly adjoining my own, and who, unknown to himself, had to some extent influenced me in selecting Byemoor as a residence. From such little information as I was able to pick up concerning him during the first week or two of my arrival, I should have judged him to be a person of more than English reserve and somewhat unconventional habits, who had tucked himself away in this secluded and yet suburban retreat for the sake of enjoying that choicest privacy which nestles upon the brink of pub I have been thus particular in describing Mr. Hedgley because we by-and-by became acquainted; and his conversation, being that of a typical AngloAmerican, interested me by its representative quite as much as by its intrinsic qualities; and it is my purpose in these essays largely to temper my own views and criticisms by exhibiting them side by side with his. I may stand for the raw Yankee, as yet unacclimated to the mother-country, and full of undigested prejudices, obnoxious or favorable, as to every novelty that I encounter. Mr. Hedgley, on the other hand, must answer for the resident whose opinions have had time to mature, who has been able to consider the insular manners and customs from a conservative as well as from a republican standpoint, and who has learned to be extreme neither in his likes nor dislikes. Probably his judgments may obtain more general acceptance than mine; nevertheless I am by no means sure that there is not sometimes a certain virtue in a first glance which is apt to be absent from a longer and more deliberate inspection. The mind becomes so quickly accustomed to new conditions as ere long to forget their novelty; and, though the insight may grow more penetrating, it abates something of its discrimination. I have now myself been for some years upon English soil, and opportunity has been afforded me to reconsider my first hasty prepossessions; yet I doubt whether ignorance, provided it be of a curious and receptive kind, may not have a useful mission in the world. It is a motor to put productive machinery agoing. I must not, however, seem to recommend my lucubrations to an intelligent public solely on the score of the ignorance displayed in them. My trust is in Hedgley; it shall go hard but he shall ever and anon strike out a judicious and respectable sentiment. But let it not be forgotten that my own levity may sometimes have been the provocation of his wisdom. It is by dint of such opposing yet mutually stimulating elements that the fire of life is made to burn. But for him my crudities might have lacked correction; and but for me the extent of his knowledge might have remained hidden even from himself. III. I HAVE little or nothing in palliation of the indis- | cretion-if such it be considered-of dragging my friendly interlocutor into print. I may observe, however, that my purpose so to do was known to him, and that he was indifferently acquiescent. "Nine people out of ten, he used to say, "will take me to be a fictitious character-an artistic foil for your own personality; and, as for the tenth fellow, who cares for him? Most likely he won't read the book at all! Moreover, there is a certain side to every man which is public property; no one has exclusive right to his own opinions; nay, if they be honestly formed, he himself will generally desire their publication. In the case of a woman it would be different; she does her thinking in her heart, and a woman's heart is a delicate matter to meddle with. But use me as much as you like, provided you can invent a decent anagram to cover my nakedness withal." I could scarcely have contrived a veil more impenetrable than that smoky one wherewith my friend would envelop himself the while he spoke. Jabez Hedgley is no longer, unless in the spiritual sense, my neighbor. It is not very many weeks since he gathered together his household-gods, and emigrated-of all places in the world-to Florida! He has built a lodge in the wilderness there, and writes me that he is cultivating oranges and bananas, and puffing cigarettes in a hammock swung beneath the shade of palm-trees. Meanwhile, his English dwelling stands deserted; but so soon as the lease of my own premises has expired I intend moving into it. It is a much more attractive place than mine; and besides, when I sit at nightfall in the study, before the candles are lighted, I shall sometimes peer doubtfully through the cloudy incense of my own tobacco-pipe, half fancying that I can discern the dark outlines of his figure sitting with one knee thrown across the other in yonder roomy easy-chair. What is Florida, and six thousand miles? I tell you he still sits there occasionally, and we converse together in our old strain. The house, as I first remember it, wore an aspect of quiet and cultured picturesqueness which distin guished it from most of the surrounding edifices. The latter were uniformly square, hip-roofed structures, with a clustered chimney rising from the centre of the ridge-pole, and a street-face washed with white or buff-colored plaster. They could not have been uglier without becoming grotesque, and therefore perversely agreeable. The bricks of which they were built were of the yellowish-brown hue which prevails in England, and which it seems impossible that a healthy mind should not detest. The houses, nearly a dozen in number, were ranged on opposite sides of a little private road, each one provided with a small rectangle of front-yard, a flight of steps up to the door, and a plaster fence on the street, made to misrepresent stone. They stood two and two, in a condition of so-called semi-detachment—a kind of relationship which, though common in England, is a device of petty economy unworthy of Englishmen. Seems to me I would rather openly live in the same house with a man, avowing my position, than cheat myself into a delusion of privacy by interposing a flimsy partition between his set of rooms and mine. The same roof still covers us both, and the smoke of the fires that warm us issue from the self-same chimney. "For the matter of that, however," as Hedgley once replied to me, "the same sky roofs all mankind, and they are shone upon by the same nebulous star we call the sun. It's nonsense attempting to be entirely independent of one another, and we might as well begin to draw our line at the semi-detached house as anywhere else." Nevertheless, the greater part of these particular semi-detached dwellings were unoccupied, and staid so in spite of the "To Let's" posted in every window, and the big sign-board at the head of the street which obtruded its weather-stained announcements upon the notice of all who walked upon the highway. The “Fairmount Estate" would have been more popular, I contended, had the builder been wise enough to keep his houses at a decent distance from one another. To be cheap is commonly to be extravagant. Fairmount, however, was thickly planted with trees, most of them of comparatively recent growth, but many-leaved and shady nevertheless. The little front-yards often contained hedges of laurel, which kept their greenness through the year; and in one or two instances the plaster fence was overshadowed by an embowering canopy of flowering ivy. Poplars flourished in this locality with especial luxuriance; I have not seen elsewhere specimens of this tree which would have formed a graceful and picturesque feature in a landscape. They grew, besides, with surprising rapidity; my landlord, Captain Sleasby, late of the Byemoor militia, still points out to me, at least once in the course of every conversation we have together, a certain well-grown poplar in the centre of his garden, which, he assures me, was brought thither on his son's shoulder only ten years ago. "Ha! I tell him," says the captain, taking snuff with a peculiarly knowing and humorous expression-“ I tell him-don't believe he could carry it out again to-morrow-or yesterday-ha, ha!" And the gal lant officer blows his nose and chuckles. And the joke grows better and better every day; the tree is sixty feet high already, and by the time it reaches a hundred the captain should pose as a second Joe Miller. This abundance of verdure, at least during the summer, goes far to conceal the architectural deficiencies of Fairmount even from itself. Houses in England are generally leasable at Michaelmas, which seems to me an ill-judged custom. In the early days of June any person of sensibility would be willing to pay double the rent that could be extorted from him in the leafless fall or winter months: for English foliage bears a charm which not all the practical and matter-of-fact spirit of the English people, operating | during a thousand years, has been able to dispel or scarcely to modify. "Do you imagine," demanded Hedgley, "that the English people wish to get rid of their foliage? On the contrary, they are particularly proud of it, and are at considerable pains and expense to make it as effective as possible." "Nevertheless," I replied, "the worker in brickand-mortar, or he who employs him, holds the first place; and afterward the landscape-gardener is at liberty to assist Nature as much as he may in the often successful attempt to hide the hideousness which he of the trowel has perpetrated.” I wonder, by-the-way, why it is that the utilitarians always have precedence of the disciples of natural beauty? If beauty is divine and ugliness only human, one would expect the supremacy to incline the other way. IV. HEDGLEY'S house-to return to the spot we started from-is neither semi-detached nor otherwise offensive. It stands in an inclosure by itself, and is screened from all observers (except those who look from the upper windows of the neighboring edifices) by high and compact hedges. It is situated at the very end of the short cul-de-sac of a street which bears the name of Fairmount, and its northern bedroom-windows overlook a meadow two or three acres in extent, sloping downward to a murmuring brook. The house is four-square, but its angularity is relieved by a wide, two-columned porch over the front-door; while a bow-window on one side lends a pleasing unevenness to the façade. A small conservatory is wedged in between the southern side of the house and the garden-wall; there are four chimneys, two of them much higher than the others; and they, as well as the rest of the structure, are built of sound, old-fashioned red bricks. putting it in, as you might suppose it would do. I like ivy; I sometimes think I would be willing to exchange our autumnal tints for it!" The whole front of the house, in fact-it is but two stories high-is draped in perennial green from base to eaves. The columns of the porch are bound about with hairy stems and shaggy with leaves. The windows show like dark, glistening pools embosomed in sedate verdure, and somehow prevailed upon to disregard the laws of gravitation. The bow-window is the only exception; it is a comparatively recent addition of Hedgley's, and is not yet entirely overgrown. On its northern end the house is bare; but the ruddy nakedness of time-worn brick is more picturesque than any dress it can put on, save one. The building is at least ten times as old as any other in Fairmount, which accounts for its not being yellow-brown and plaster-faced like the rest. On the southern side the outlines of the bricks are marked by green lines of moss; and an adventurous ivystem has climbed above the conservatory, and so on up the projection of the chimney, spreading fanlike, and seeming to hang its weight upon that which it helps to uphold. The sills of all the windows are fitted with trough-like boxes, in which grow dense little embankments of scarlet and white geraniums. The front lawn is perhaps half an acre in area, green and mossy and deep of turf. Along the borders of the path which skirts two sides of it grow a succession of crimson, standard roses, each in a little circular bed by itself. The other two sides are inclosed by a crumbling brick-wall, about seven feet in height, held together, as it were, by knotted bands of ivy, which, however, are nearly bare of leaves except along the top. Just inside of this wall is planted an impenetrable holly-hedge, rising about three feet above the outer barrier, and certainly offering a much more formidable defense against intrusion. It is kept carefully trimmed, and looks smooth, solid, and glistening all over. I am not sure that holly makes the handsomest hedge imaginable; but it seems to be more prized in England than any other; probably because it takes so many years to grow, and when grown it is so practically efficacious. In the angle of the wall is a little summer-house-a segment of roofing, merely, supported by a single column at the outer edge, and climbed over by a white and a pink rose-vine. The northern side of the garden-that toward the meadow already mentioned is without a hedge; and the wall has loopholes cut in it, through which you obtain glimpses of the prospect outside as you walk down the path. the base of this wall; and a couple of broader ones extend beneath the windows on either side of the porch. 'Captain Sleasby thought the red a disqualifica- | A flower-bed, narrow but rich in bloom, runs along tion," my friend once observed to me, "and I made him deduct ten pounds from the rent for the very feature of the house that most pleased me. I guess he added it on again, though, for the ivy, which he values quite as highly as I do. Englishmen like their homes to be ivy-covered, not so much because ivy makes them beautiful as on account of the assurance of antiquity it gives, and the presumption that the family of the occupant is antique, too. Another thing, it takes the damp out of the walls, instead of Such, to the outward view, is Ivyside, a very favorable specimen of a certain class of English houses. Its only fault-and that, to a man like Hedgley, is one of its main attractions-consists in its comparative remoteness. Fairmount is more than a mile beyond the village of Byemoor, which is itself about fifteen miles out of London, and Ivyside is at the last but I am tolerably safe in saying that there are more than a hundred. Any man who should start from at every tavern between that and Byemoor church, would never know how he finished his journey. It seems incredible that all of them should be able to command custom enough to pay their way, yet, as a matter of fact, the business is almost always profitable, and no one of these numberless beer-taps could run dry without making a great many people thirsty. extremity of Fairmount. The only callers there are the tradesmen-the butcher, the grocer, and the fishmonger, in the morning, and the baker in the after-"The Foive Oawks," and take his half-pint of beer noon. On Saturday evenings, also, a haggard woman, attired in dingy black, comes up the path, accompanied by a small, dingy boy; they lug between them, with short steps and outstretched arm, a huge basket piled high with some snow-white substance, whose spotlessness presents a remarkable contrast to their own impurity. On Monday afternoon, the same sombre pair again make their appearance, this time to bear away a nameless, shapeless something in a capacious black bag. Who are these mysterious persons, and what is the nature of the burden which they bear? They are the laundress and her little boy, and the basket and the bag contain the incoming and the outgoing wash. V. IF you alight at Byemoor station and ask for Fairmount, the porter (if he happens to know anything about the matter, and to be in a communicative mood besides) will tell you it is opposite "The Foive Oawks." If you ask where they are, he will look upon you as too ignorant for information to be of any use to you, and will saunter away. "The Foive Oawks" is, in fact, a public-house, and public-houses are a sort of guide-posts all over England. All distances, all localities are referred to them, and whoever shapes his course by them may be sure of arriving, sooner or later, at his destination. | If an epidemic were to occur among them, blotting them out from the face of the country, the greater part of the British populace would have great difficulty in finding their way home, or, being there, would hardly think it safe or worth while to venture abroad again. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and the other advocates of abstinence, do not seem to have given any heed to this aspect of the question, but it really deserves serious consideration. It would be of no avail to multiply milestones, guide-posts, and maps; such helps appeal only to the eye and the intellect; but the public-house is connected by vital ties with the British heart; and all moralists agree that it is by the heart, and not by the brain, that mankind is led. The number of these institutions throughout Britain is astounding; I have not counted up how many lie within a mile radius from Byemoor centre, It is not my present intention, however, to enter upon the great public-house question, but only to direct the reader the nearest and surest way to Fairmount, should he ever desire to verify my description of it for himself. As he comes along the asphalt sidewalk from the railway-station, he will observe that the land gradually trends upward, so that, by the time he reaches "The Foive Oawks," and stops in there for further directions, he will have ascended nearly to a level with Thompson's Hill, whence is obtained the finest prospect in the neighborhood. The country, nevertheless, has a somewhat wearisome appearance of flatness, which the multitude of trees and the minor irregularities of surface can do little to relieve. We must make up our minds to be satisfied with the beauties close around us, and not attempt to impress ourselves with the grander enchantments lent by distance. There are half a dozen quietly agreeable little walks within a few miles of Fairmount, but I cannot promise anything imposing in the way of scenery. As is inevitable in England, there are twenty spots near at hand which possess an artificial interest due to historic associations; but I shall not lay especial stress upon these, because that phase of England has been treated of too often and too exhaustively by other people. In short, I wish to conduct myself here very much as a native Englishman might, who had nothing particular to do, and concerned himself more with small affairs and homely interests than with what a stranger would consider more important things. Important things are so interesting that the sap very soon gets sucked out of them, and then they are no better than husks; whereas petty things are always cropping out in fresh, humorous, and piquant lights, and when we study them we feel as if we were at any rate learning something which not everybody knows. T CHIARO-OSCURO. HE garden, with its throngs of drowsy roses, White flower of womanhood, ah, how completely, You bind, you bend, immutably yet meetly, To me such hours as these I breathe are holy ! I kneel, I tremble, I am very lowly, A DAY AT DUTCH FLAT. BY ALBERT F. WEBSTER, HILE searching for places of interest to visit | just at this point that you unknowingly laid your WHILE hear, sooner or later, of Dutch Flat. The uncouthness of the name brings to mind at once the rough days of the State's history; and, with the hope of seeing at least a remnant of the original life and manners, one is easily induced to journey that way. The town is spoken of familiarly as a miningcamp, hydraulic mining being almost the sole industrial interest, and “camp” the old-time designation, though the early canvas has long since changed to timber. If one approaches the place in the evening, as he will in all likelihood if he starts from Sacramento, he will be deeply impressed, in spite of the surprising descriptions he has received, at the havoc that this peculiar method of mining has made with the face of the country. It is torn up everywhere. Pits and jagged holes appear on every hand, and where the fierce water has once been used not a spear of grass nor a trunk of a tree remains. Nothing but dreary acres of whitish gravel and ugly bowlders are left to show where fair regions once were; and these viewed in the twilight seem inexpressibly desolate. The town is situated upon the edge of one of these dismantled and deflowered regions, and the traveler dreads lest the settlement participate in the unhappy scene, and that a sojourn in it may be a day of discomfort. The wagon from the railway-station turns into a road behind the building, and goes rapidly and with fearful jolts down a long hill to the westward. You do not see the town at first; nothing but shorn hill- | sides of very red earth near by, and, in the distance, a broad, washed-out valley, with dark hills at the edge of the horizon. The air is cool and revivifying, and the general outlook has that ample breadth which permits the beholder to seem twice himself from sympathy. Some hundreds of feet lower down you come upon the Chinese quarter of the town, showing numberless lights at the windows, and a few lanterns tied upon poles at the corners of the alleys. Upon the porches and upon the door steps are seated the shaven, blue-clad inhabitants, chattering like blackbirds. High up upon a hill to the right you just catch by the failing light of the western sky a glimpse of a lofty roof supported by slender pillars, beneath which are two or three platforms decorated with inscriptions in gilt, and with long, sweeping banners of reddish cloth. It is the Chinese church. A little farther on and still down the hill you reach the outskirts of the town. Several gardens with low fences, a few white cottages surrounded with trees, a number of young men and young girls, clad mostly in white, strolling and laughing along the sidewalks, meet your gaze, and you afterward recall that it was A little farther still you see in the gathering dusk the square tower of a church whose long windows are aglow with yellow light. At the open door are a few lounging figures, those irresolutes who doubt whether appearing at the door of a sanctuary is not quite enough to ask of a man. Across the way is a schoolhouse three stories high, with some gold letters on the front which glisten upon their undersides with the light below. Beyond are a few more cottages; then the street narrows, and after a sudden plunge it ascends a steep incline amid a few trees whose overhanging branches make it dark. All at once you pass into a lighted thoroughfare filled with people, and stop at the porch of a two-storied public - house, whose chattels, to judge from the noise and hubbub that are going on within its offices, are in process of sale by auction. It is not until morning that it becomes at all clear how the land lies, for, no matter how far you wander after tea, a certain confusion that exists among the streets is not to be simplified; the ascents and descents are numerous and precipitous, and the ways are often blind alleys that lead you face to face with banks of earth. You breakfast with forty or fifty miners at six o'clock. Most of the men are exceedingly powerful --both physically and in the use of language. That one of these giants should in the name of all the terrors ask that his meat be well done, or that he call upon the devil and the Lord to witness the truth of his statement that last night was the hottest that he had experienced since he had been born, is not altogether surprising. And if among them is a man of tame demeanor, you determine that he is fictitious |—not a gold-hunter at heart. Upon a side-table is a large number of dinner-pails already packed with food. As each man goes out he grasps his own, seizes his shabby hat from a peg, and passes out-ofdoors with a noisy tread, as if giving notice that he is bent upon a fair day's work. At an early hour the little town is almost deserted. After seven o'clock few people are to be seen, and the dogs go out and play together unmolested in the street. This is the time to make your first excursion, for the heat of the sun is not yet oppressive, and there is a fresh, earthy odor in the air. The main street, you find, runs up and down a steep hill. It is lined with the ordinary village-shops on either hand, each abutter having a descending flight of steps at the end of his sidewalk to connect him with the premises below. Thus, going down-town is equivalent to a descent from the attic to the frontdoor. At the bottom of the street a road runs off to the right and left, and beyond is one of those torn and hapless expanses already spoken of. |