don't seem just right, now, does it, but then, other folks must make a livin', too. Still, I should think they might take up suthin' else; and yet, they might say that about me. Understand, I don't mean to say that they actually do say so; I don't want to run down any man unless I know

"I can't stand this," said Eph to himself; "I don't wonder that they always used to put Joshua off at the first port, when he tried to go coasting. They said he talked them crazy with nothing.

"I'll go into the house and see Aunt Lyddy," he said, aloud. "I'm loafing this afternoon."

"All right! all right!" said Joshua. "Lyddy'll be glad to see ye, that is, as glad as she would be to see anybody," he added, reaching out for a pole. "Now, I don't s'pose that sounds very well; but still, you know how she is, she allus likes to hev folks to talk, and then she's allus sayin' talkin' wears on her; but I ought not to say that to you, because she allus likes to see you, that is, as much as she likes to see anybody, in fact, I think, on the whole "

"Well, I'll take my chances," said Eph, laughing, and he opened the gate and went in.

Joshua's wife, whom everybody called Aunt Lyddy, was oscillating in a rocking chair in the kitchen, and knitting. It was currently reported that Joshua's habit of endlessly retracting and qualifying every idea and modification of an idea which he advanced, so as to commit himself to nothing, was the effect of Aunt Lyddy's careful revision.

"I s'pose she thought 'twas fun to be talked deef when they was courtin'," Captain Seth had once sagely remarked. "Prob❜ly it sounded then like a putty piece on a seraphine; but I allers cal'lated she'd git her fill of it, sooner or later. You most gin'lly git your fill o' one tune."

"How are you this afternoon, Aunt Lyddy?" asked Eph, walking in without knocking, and sitting down near her.

"So as to be able to keep about," she replied. "It is a great mercy I aint afflicted with falling out of my chair, like Hepsy Jones, aint it?”

"I've brought you some oysters," he said. "I set the basket down on the doorstep. I just took them out of the water myself from the bed I planted to the west of the water-fence."

"I always heard you was a great fisher

man," said Aunt Lyddy, "but I had no idea you would ever come here and boast of being able to catch oysters. Poor things! How could they have got away? But why don't you bring them in? They wont be afraid of me, will they?"

He stepped to the door and brought in a peck basket full of large, black, twisted shells, and, with a heavy clasp-knife, proceeded to open one, and took out a great oyster, which he held up on the point of the blade.

66

Try it," he said; and then Aunt Lyddy, after she had swallowed it, laughed to think what a tableau they had made-a man who had been in the State-prison standing over her with a great knife! And then she laughed again.

"What are you laughing at?" he said.

"It popped into my head, supposing Susan should have looked in at the south window and Joshua into the door, when you was feeding out that oyster to me, what they would have thought!"

Eph laughed, too, and, surely enough, just then a stout, light-haired, rather plainlooking young woman came up to the south window and leaned in. She had on a sun-bonnet, which had not prevented her from securing a few choice freckles. She had been working with a trowel in her flower-garden.

"What's the matter?" she said, nodding easily to Eph. "What do you two always find to laugh about?"

"Ephraim was feeding me with spoonmeat," said Aunt Lyddy, pointing to the basket, which looked like a basket of anthracite coal.

"It looks like spoon-meat," said Susan, and then she laughed, too. "I'll roast some of them for supper," she added, a new way that I know."

66

Eph was not invited to stay to supper, but he staid, none the less: that was always understood.

"Well! Well! Well!" said Joshua, coming to the door-step, and washing his hands and arms just outside, in a tin basin. "I thought I see you set down a parcel of oysters, but there was sea-weed over 'em, and I don' know's I could hev said they was oysters; but then, if the square question hed been put to me, ' Mr. Carr, be them oysters or not?' I s'pose I should hev said they was; still, if they'd asked me how I knew

"Come, come, father!" said Aunt Lyddy, "do give poor Ephraim a little

Aunt Lyddy, with an air of mock resignation, gave up, while Joshua endeavored to fix, to a hair, the exact extent of his knowledge.

Eph smiled; but he remembered what would have made him pardon, a thousand times over, the old man's garrulousness. He remembered who alone had never failed, once a year, to visit a certain prisoner, at the cost of a long and tiresome journey, and who had written to that homesick prisoner kind and cheering letters, and had sent him baskets of simple dainties for holidays.

Susan bustled about, and made a fire of crackling sticks, and began to roast the oysters in a way that made a most savory smell. She set the table, and then sat down at the melodeon, while she was waiting, and sang a hymn, for she was of a musical turn, and was one of the choir. Then she jumped up, and took out the steaming oysters, and they all sat down.

"Well, well, well!" said her father; "these be good! I didn't s'pose you had any very good oysters in your bed, Ephraim. But there, now,-I don't s'pose I ought to have said that; that wasn't very polite; but what I meant was-I didn't s'pose you had any that was real goodthough I don' know but that I've said about the same thing, now. Well, anyway, these be splendid; they're full as good as those cohogs we had t'other night."

66

"Quahaugs!" said Susan. "The idea of comparing these oysters with quahaugs!" Well, well! that's so!" said her father. "I didn't say right, did I, when I said that? Of course, they aint no comparison, that is, no comparison-why, of course, they is a comparison between everything, but then, cohogs don't, really, compare with oysters! That's true!"

And then he paused to eat a few. He was silent so long at this occupation that they all laughed.

"Well, well!" said he, laying down his fork, and smiling innocently; "what be you all laughin' at? Not but what I allers like to hev folks laugh,-but then,-I didn't see nothin' to laugh at. Still, perhaps, they was suthin' to laugh at that I didn't see; sometimes one man'll be lookin' down into his plate, all taken up with his vittles, and

others, that's lookin' round the room, may see the kittens frolickin', or some such thing. 'Taint the fust time I've known all hands to laugh all to onct, when I didn't see nothin'."

Susan helped him again, and secured another brief respite.

"Ephraim," said he, after a while, "you aint skilled to cook oysters like this, I don't believe. You ought to git married! I was sayin' to Susan t'other day-well, now, mother, have I said an'thing out o' the way ?-well, I don't s'pose 'twas just my place to hev said an'thing about gittin' married, to Ephraim, seein's

"Come, come, father," said Aunt Lyddy, "that'll do, now. You must let Ephraim alone, and not joke him about such things."

Meanwhile, Susan had hastily gone into the pantry to look for a pie, which she seemed unable at once to find.

"Pie got adrift?" called out Joshua. "Seems to me you don't hook on to it very quick.-Now that looks good," he added, when she came out. "That looks like cookin'! All I meant was, 't Ephraim ought not to be doin' his own cookin',—that is,— if you can call it cookin',-but then, of course, 'tis cookin',-there's all kinds o' cookin'. I went cook, myself, when I was a boy."

After supper, Aunt Lyddy sat down to knit, and Joshua drew his chair up to an open window, to smoke his pipe. In this vice Aunt Lyddy encouraged him. The odor of Virginia tobacco was a sweet savor in her nostrils. No breezes from Araby ever awoke more grateful feelings than did the fragrance of Uncle Joshua's pipe. To Aunt Lyddy it meant quiet and peace.

Susan and Eph sat down on the broad flag door-stone, and talked quietly of the simple news of the neighborhood, and of the days when they used to go to school, and come home, always together.

"I didn't much think, then," said Eph, "that I should ever bring up where I have, and get ashore before I was fairly out to

sea!"

"Jehiel's schooner got ashore on the bar, years ago," said Susan, " and yet they towed her off, and I saw her this morning, from my chamber window, before sunrise, all sail set, going by to the eastward."

"I know what you mean," said Eph. "But here I got mad once, and I almost had a right to, and I can't get started again; I never shall. I can get a livin', of course; but I shall always be pointed

out as a jail-bird, and could no more get any footin' in the world than Portuguese Jim."

Portuguese Jim was the sole professional criminal of the town, a weak, good-natured, knock-kneed vagabond, who stole hens, and spent every winter in the House of Correction as an "idle and disorderly person." Susan laughed outright at the picture. Eph smiled, too, but a little bitterly.

"I suppose it was more ugliness than anything else," he said, "that made me come back here to live, where everybody knows I've been in jail and is down on

me."

66

"They are not down on you," said Susan. Nobody is down on you. It's all your own imagination. And if you had gone anywhere that you was a stranger, you know that the first thing that you would have done would have been to call a meetin' and tell all the people that you had burned down a man's barn, and been in the State's-prison, and that you wanted them all to know it at the start; and you wouldn't have told them why you did it, and how young you was then, and how Eliphalet treated your mother, and how you was going to pay him for all he lost. Here, everybody knows that side of it. In fact," she added, with a little twinkle in her eye, "I have sometimes had an idea that the main thing they don't like is to see you savin' every cent to pay to Eliphalet."

"And yet it was on your say that I took up that plan," said Eph. "I never thought of it till you asked me when I was goin' to begin to pay him up.”

"He

66 And you ought to,” said Susan. has a right to the money-and then you don't want to be under obligations to that man all your life. Now, what you want to do is to cheer up and go around among folks. Why, now, you're the only fishbuyer there is that the men don't watch when he's weighin' their fish. You'll own up to that, for one thing, wont you?"

'Well, they are good fellows that bring fish to me," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Take things just the way they are," said Susan," and show what can be done. Perhaps you'll stake a new channel out, for others to follow in that haven't half so much chance as you have. And that's what you will do, too," she added.

"Susan!" he said, "if there's anything I can ever do, in this world or the next, for you or your folks, that's all I ask for, the chance to do it. Your folks and you shall never want for anything while I'm alive."

"There's one thing sure," he added, rising. "I'll live by myself and be independent of everybody, and make my way all alone in the world; and if I can make 'em all finally own up and admit that I'm honest with 'em, I'm satisfied. That's all I'll ever ask of anybody. But there's one thing that worries me sometimes,—that is, whether I ought to come here so often. I'm afraid, sometimes, that it'll hinder your father from gettin' work, or-something-for you folks to be friends with me."

"I think such things take care of themselves," said Susan, quietly. "If a chip wont float, let it sink."

"Good-night," said Eph, and he walked off, and went home to his echoing house. After that, his visits to Joshua's became less frequent.

It was a bright day in March-one of those which almost redeem the reputation. of that desperado of a month. Eph was leaning on his fence, looking now down the bay and now to where the sun was sinking in the marshes. He knew that all the other men had gone to the town-meeting, where he had had no heart to intrude himself— that free democratic parliament where he had often gone with his father in childhood; where the boys, rejoicing in a general assembly of their own, had played ball outside, while the men debated gravely within. He recalled the time when he himself had so proudly given his first vote for President, and how his father had introduced him then to friends from distant parts of the town. He remembered how he had heard his father speak there, and how respectfully everybody had listened to him. That was in the long ago, when they had lived at the great farm. And then came the thought of the mortgage, and of Eliphalet's foreclosure, and

"I will not disturb him now," said the doctor.

One breezy afternoon, in the following summer, Captain Seth laid aside his easy every-day clothes, and transformed himself into a stiff broadcloth image, with a small silk hat and creaking boots. So attired, he set out in a high open buggy, with his wife, also in black, but with gold spectacles, to the funeral of an aunt. As they pursued their jog-trot journey along the Salt Hay Road, and came to Ephraim Morse's cottage, they saw Susan sitting in a shady little porch, at the front door, shelling peas, and looking down the bay.

"How is everything, Susan?" called out Captain Seth; "'bout time for Eph to be gitt'n' in ?”

"Yes," she answered, nodding and smil ing, and pointing with a pea-pod; "that's our boat, just coming up to the wharf, with her peak down."

The Bible Revision among the People. NOTWITHSTANDING the enormous numbers sold in England of the new revision of the New Testament, it has been stated repeatedly that it makes little headway among the people. We doubt the truth of the statement, because it does not agree with the fact of its wide distribution, and because it is next to impossible to get at the facts. It is undoubtedly true that in England, as well as in this country, certain forms of opposition will be engaged against its reception, but if the new revision is really better than the King James version, its ultimate reception is certain. To suppose otherwise is to accuse the Christian Church of incurable bigotry and wrong-headedness. To us the superiority of the new revision seems patent. The people, as well as ourselves, have every reason to believe in the men who have done this great work-in their candor, and scholarship, and fidelity. They have had better means for arriving at the exact meaning of the text than their predecessors, and we are sure that in the new revision we have the New Testament more perfectly represented in the English language than it has ever been before.

There are several classes which will naturally oppose the reception of the revision, both in this country and England, however, and it is well to take account of them. The conservative naturally dislikes change and innovation. It does not matter from what quarter change may come, or to what it may relate; he will oppose it. There are always a

number of men who, when a village outgrows the forms of village life and government, and seeks to be incorporated as a city, will oppose the change, though urgently needed. They get used to a set of forms of any kind, and cling to them with foolish fondness. They stand by a minister long after the period of his usefulness has expired, simply be cause they are used to him. They cling to a polit ical party long after the issues which called it into being have been left behind, simply because they dislike change. The new revision will meet with opposition from conservatives, as a matter of course. They prefer their truth in the old form, and the new form will be offensive to them.

Another class will oppose the new revision from motives very much less respectable. They are nec essarily ignorant people. To them, the King James version of the Bible is the inspired Word of God, in all its language. They regard a revision as a tampering with the sacred text, and as essential profana. tion. The forms of language in which sacred truth has been presented to them are quite as sacred as the truth itself. These people cannot be reasoned with, because they do not know enough to use their reason. To this class belonged the bigoted fool who declared, in the presence of many by standers, that the new revision would make more infidels than all the Bob Ingersolls living, simply by its admissions that there had been some mistakes in the English Bible hitherto preached to the world. The unchristian dishonesty of such an attitude as this is only equaled by its foolishness. We fear

that there is a leaven of this kind of dishonesty pretty widely scattered throughout the church-a feeling, or a fear, at least, that the exact truth, in a new revision, will remove some of the props from under old dogmas that had become precious, or are regarded as fundamental in their accepted schemes of belief. Some of these people make a sort of fetich of the Bible. They carry it in their pockets as a charm. No heathen ever gave the objects of his worship more superstitious reverence than these ignorant Christians do the Bible. course they would oppose any change in it.

Of

Then, of course, there is a critical class, not large in numbers, but naturally and rightfully influential. The most of us are obliged to take the work of the revisers on trust, and it is not to be disputed, even by the critics themselves, that the men who have done this work are worthy of the public confidence. They are all well-known scholars, and men not likely to make mistakes. The numbers engaged in the work who, while likely to make some compromises necessary that would be prejudicial to the best unfolding of the meaning of a passage, would guard against all wide departures from the most perfect rendering. Still, their work is the legitimate subject of competent criticism, and this it will undoubtedly receive. The question, however, which the critics are to decide for themselves, and to help the people to decide, is not whether this verse in Matthew and that verse in John has been improved or harmed by the new rendering, but whether the New Testament, as a whole, is better or worse than the King James version, and whether, as a whole, the people will get at the truth in it easier than they will in the old form. We cannot for a moment doubt what their answer must be. It is impossible that, with the great advance of knowledge relating to the original Greek text that has been made since the King James version, and with the substitution of familiar words and phrases for those grown strange or obsolete, not to speak of corrected grammar, the new version should not be better, as a whole, than the old. This should settle the whole question of its universal acceptance. It is the best thing we have. It was made under circumstances which assure us that it is the best we can get.

We should all remember that there is only one thing sacred about the Bible, viz.: the truth there is in it. The language is the vehicle on or through which that truth is conveyed to our minds, and that version is best which most faithfully and forcibly conveys that truth. It would be a real benefit to Christendom to break up the idea that there is anything sacred and not to be touched in the language of the old English Bible-to kill out the reverence for the old forms in which truth has been conveyed. The only fault we have to find with the revision is that it is a revision at all. Wherever in the new revision the revisers have found it necessary to translate anew and present a new version, we find the most interesting and refreshing passages. The truth is that the new revision is a concession to the prejudices of all the classes of objectors to which we have alluded. It has been presented, VOL. XXII.-49.

as far as possible, in the old form, to conciliate the conservative, the bigot, the fetich-worshiper, and the critic, and in that fact abides what seems to us its only weakness. A fresh translation would have given to Bible study a tremendous impetus. For, fond as we may become of old forms of language, those forms wear out and become powerless by mere reiteration. We have no question that a retranslation would be stronger to-day before the people than the revision is, and would have before it a more splendid future.

Bossism.

POLITICAL parties naturally and necessarily have leaders, like all voluntary organizations and combinations of men. In England, leadership in a party is a matter of quite formal acknowledgment. Here it is otherwise, and it is very rare that any one man is regarded as the leader of his party. Here, however, as in England, the true political leader is one who unites with acknowledged ability the representation, in his own ideas and principles, of the ideas and principles of his party. Mr. Gladstone is not only highest in office: he is a political leader. He represents in his principles and opinions the liberals of England. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, of the old Whig party, were political leaders. William H. Seward was a political leader. Charles Sumner, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Thurlow Weed, Silas Wright, Horace Greeley, and others easily recalled and named. All these men were political leaders because they represented in themselves the opinions, sentiments, principles, and policy of the parties to which they were attached, and were men of power and foresight, whom the people trusted.

So were

William M. Tweed was not a man who could legitimately be called a political leader. He was a man without principle, and, although he wielded great power at one period of his life, it was not through the force of political ideas, or because he was recognized as representing popular political principles. He was simply a "boss," according to the meaning now attached to that word among political men. He got the machinery of office into his hands and used it solely to buy and perpetuate power. It is true that he was corrupt, and used office to win money for himself and his friends, as well as power, but he represented no idea in politics, and was never a leader. Mr. Conkling, though less gross and less corrupt in his methods, has been never a political leader, but always essentially,a "boss." He has never deserved any higher or better name than this, and his reputation as a man of great political power is as unreal a thing as ever existed in the realms of myth and moonshine. He has never been a man of ideas. He has shown a good deal of skill in manipulating the machinery of politics, in managing appointments to office, in working up the details of a campaign; but he has never led the people in political ideas, or taught them anything. By force of a strong will and an aggressive self-conceit, he has managed to make a good many