A vast number of things he must have said to Jane, for so many of them to remain in her placid and literal memory. He must have maintained long sentimental monologues, while the great full moon came up and looked at them over the wood's edge. Something about Jane must have pleased him, her serenity, perhaps, her uncritical acceptance.

"I like you, Jane, you and Prudence," he said, "for you are sisters in soul. You never ask 'Why?' You and I, Jane, are also alike. I, too, object to the angles of this world. Its injustice disagrees with me. I think its ugliness not appropriate. Now, over such as you and me strange influences have power, which carry us whither we know not. We become minions of the moon, squires of the night's body, pensioners of nature. Infinity is our patron. In the fashion of common speech, what are we now? Such stuff as dreams are made of, occupants of a sleep." What he was saying when Jane fell asleep, or for some time back, she did not know. His voice died away gradually in her ears, a monotonous murmur.

When Abdullah noticed this, he must have risen, and plucked armfuls of fern and other weeds, and softly covered her, for so covered she found herself in the morning. It may have been then - it was probably at least long before dawn that he took a blank sheet of paper, perhaps from his pocket, and on it printed in large letters, that Jane might read, supposing her facility small, as follows:

JANE

Take the road to the right. It leads to Salem. There are witches in Salem. They will tell you how to get to Hagar. Prudence was translated to Shinar. ABDULLAH.

He thrust a stick through the paper, and the stick upright in front of Jane. Still she slept under her coverlet of weeds. Did he linger to look at her face, pleasure-loving Jane, round-faced, guileless, dreaming Jane, Jane with the moonlight

on her eyelashes, Jane watched and wondered at by the stars? Certainly he milked Prudence somewhat, for he left the tin cup full, and on a stone hard by, against Jane's awakening. Certainly he departed, driving Prudence before him, down the open to the highroad. There he must have turned her to the left, and vanished from the moonlight in the woods.

He was seen no more, nor Prudence. The land below had many roads. Whither such roads led, or what would happen to one who set himself to follow them earnestly, was always a mooted point with the children of Hagar.

Orphan Jane found her way back to Hagar, with the tin cup in her hand. Mrs. Jerolamon wavered in mind between weeping over Jane and putting her in the coal shed again, but wept in the end, and let the coal shed go. Prudence was never found. Reddish brown cows are not distinct and memorable, except to their intimates. Was she sold to some migrant cattle dealer? Who knows?

But the adventure of Orphan Jane became one of the possessions in legendry of the children of Hagar. Her shadowy wanderings, the meeting with Abdullah, both came to us only through Jane's confused report. There was Abdullah's letter, besides, which spoke of the translation of Prudence, but no more. Jane did not know how she got to Salem, except that she followed a road. She remembered no directions. Like "Kilmeny," she "had been she knew not where," save that it was on, or beyond, the Cattle Ridge; nor how, except that Abdullah called it enchantment; nor why, which, Abdullah said, was a word that wise persons would have nothing to do with.

Abdullah suffered a change as the myth grew in our minds. Sometimes we thought of him with Prudence in rose gardens of Shinar, but mainly we saw him forever going behind her, through moonlight and shadow, on endless but hopeful roads, on the Cattle Ridge, or the land beyond. The smoke of his pipe clothed the Cattle

But you, O Abdullah, walk with Prudence. Out of your iniquities, which were doubtless many, out of your touch of kindness which was perhaps but casual, came a benefit unforgotten, the fine gift of a fruitful legend. It may well be that you were in fact a man whom some taint or degenerate tendency had driven out to be a pariah among men. It may have been but an odd incident in your singular life, in the course of your adventurous, and no doubt reproachful, career. We never knew, for you out of the unknown came, and went back, much as every soul in this world comes out of the unknown and goes back.

AFTER a long era of close secrecy, the manuscript collections of two great Democratic chieftains, presidents in succession, have been almost simultaneously donated to the government, and their contents now lie open to exploration in the Library of Congress.

These collections show somewhat in contrast the idiosyncrasies of the two leaders they severally represent. That of Jackson, consigned to his editorial friend, Francis P. Blair, whether in trust or in beneficial ownership, and passing to the children and grandchildren of the latter in lumbering condition, makes rather a chaotic mass. It contains few letters which Jackson himself wrote, aside from those already familiar; while it preserves, equally with the correspondence of great contemporaries like McLean, Taney, Kendall, Blair, and Benton, a quantity of trivial military material, and of insignificant letters from humble admirers, who, from one cause or another, seem to have touched the general's lingering concern. The Van Buren collection, on

the other hand, though seemingly smaller, is choice and valuable, and shows a fine selecting skill in the retrospect. It is full of letters worth preserving permanently, from James Madison and Rufus King downward; it exhibits much of Van Buren's own composition; and it contains the fresh and interesting correspondence which Van Buren himself kept up with Jackson from 1831 to 1845, here (to the loss of the Jackson collection) presented in full, with the letters as they passed on either side. Van Buren lived many years in placid retirement after his presidency, and probably assorted and reassorted his papers, preparing from them some personal memoirs toward the close. His heirs, too, have shown a pious solicitude, as custodians, for his posthumous fame.

While, on the whole, posterity's judgment upon the character and public acts of these distinguished Americans is not likely to be changed by the new revelations of either collection, some side lights are furnished, upon the imperturbable

humor and amiability which characterized Van Buren, as well as upon the best fibre of his qualities as a statesman and politician. For Van Buren, when a young man, took sage counsel from some of the soundest statesmen who founded the Union; he enjoyed, in the leisure hours of his prime, the companionship of men famous in our literature, such as Irving and Paulding; and when we speak of the "Albany regency" in his native state, which owned in politics his skillful direction, we must not forget that it comprised public men like Marcy, Silas Wright, Azariah Flagg, John A. Dix, and Van Buren's law partner, Butler, — all men of high talent and character, and useful in their day to the republic. Whatever writings might once have existed that showed the deft and cunning hand of our "little magician" in placing or displacing for political discipline have certainly been weeded out of the Van Buren correspondence as it now reaches us. Only such letters are here discoverable as support that leader's claim to a higher posthumous distinction.

Jackson, on the other hand, was somewhat careless and indiscreet in preserving his own papers; and to these papers, it will be recalled, Benton found access when preparing his Thirty Years' View, so that whatever vindication Jackson might have needed has long been sufficiently afforded. A careful study and comparison of the contents of these two collections will not essentially change the historical estimate of either president. And yet, while Jackson remains the same earnest, impetuous, willful, quarrelsome leader of men as before, devoted to his country though with a shade of dissimulation in dealing with those he uses for his ends, Van Buren rises to a higher level, perhaps, than his countrymen and contemporaries ever accorded to him, and shows, despite all politic and time-serving propensities while seeking the presidency, a real courage and statesmanship and withal a notable breadth of public conception, while in consummate station and after his defeat

in 1840. So, too, as an adviser during Jackson's presidency, though suave and deferential, he gave some good restraining counsel, and showed a judicious tempera

ment.

A few notes, taken from these two valuable sets of papers, may be of interest to present students of American history. And first, with reference to the War of 1812. It is known that our government at Washington received, December 9, and promptly transmitted, the news of the intended British invasion of New Orleans from the West Indies, warning not Jackson alone, but the executives of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, whose militia were hastened forward. Jackson claims in these papers that the Washington dispatch did not reach him until the 18th of the following February, long after the battle of New Orleans had been fought; and that he hastened his preparations upon other information of the British designs which came to him, December 5, from a surgeon at Pensacola. Yet apprehensive letters, based upon information less certain, must have reached him seasonably from the War Department, and aroused his vigilance.

Gratitude toward benefactors was a sentiment not cherished in this warrior's breast, and those who had shown him repeated favors when he stood in need of friends he disparaged and disdained in the day of his strength. Gratitude or gratulation he claimed rather for himself; and as friends were those who might subserve his immediate ambition, friends and foes changed places often in his estimation. Recalling that strange taint of duplicity with which the Rhea correspondence with ex- President Monroe seemed flavored, I have often wondered whether a closer acquaintance with Jackson's private papers would confirm his own personal connection with that controversy. Aside, indeed, from the exPresident's solemn denial on his deathbed, which Cabinet advisers like Wirt, Calhoun, and John Quincy Adams, honorable like himself, confirmed, there were

political circumstances of 1818-19 which made it inherently impossible that Monroe should have issued the secret order through Rhea, which President Jackson claimed by 1831 to have acted upon in seizing Pensacola and afterwards to have stealthily burnt at Monroe's special request, sent orally through Rhea. Was

it possible that Rhea himself deceived the general in 1818-19, by twice pretending an authority from the White House which he did not possess, and whose falsehood might have been exposed at any moment? Rhea had neither the nerve nor the cunning to play the Iago, and, in his prime at least, cherished the regard of his constituents, while personally devoted to Jackson. Yet the whole tale must have been a fabrication; and that fabrication dates assuredly from 1831. A few months before exploring these Jackson papers, I received through the mail from one of John Rhea's descendants a Tennessee paper, which printed Rhea's retained copy of the letter which he sent to Monroe in June, 1831; and that copy bore the signature of two witnesses, one of whom was Jackson's adopted son, Andrew J. Donelson. This brought the fabrication close to Jackson's own door, and the Jackson papers, as still preserved, complete the evidence. Here several letters from Rhea to the general are seen during the period of the Seminole War, but not in one of them, nor in any other correspondence of the next ten years, is there the least allusion to the order which Jackson claimed later to have burnt. But when the Seminole controversy raged hot with Calhoun in 1831, and Jackson's reëlection to the presidency was at stake, with his quondam friend Calhoun thrust from confidence, this story leaped into life, full clad, and Jackson must have been its responsible author. For to John Rhea (then seventy-eight years old and at home in Tennessee) he wrote, early in the year,

1 See this writer's article on "Monroe and the Rhea Letter," Historical Briefs, p. 97; History of the United States, vol. iv, p. 38.

suggesting the statement he desired from him; and Rhea, all tremulous and as though forgetful, asked to see a copy of Jackson's letter of January, 1818, to President Monroe, which had mentioned his name. He promises to come to Washington to make the statement; he will help all he can, since Jackson is on the defensive, but he wants everything brought to his recollection. "Say nothing of me in the business," he entreats, "until I speak out as fully as I can, and therefore this letter is so far confidential, CONFIDENTIAL.' This was in February. In June, at Washington, President Jackson wrote out a full statement to Rhea of the story as agreed upon (his personal friend, General Eaton, late of the Cabinet, attesting the copy), and thereupon Rhea at once wrote Monroe. Was it thought that the ex-President was too old, too feeble, too near to death, to arouse himself for such a controversy? For a few months, Jackson wrote to personal friends, here and there, giving these same details concerning the "confidential order" he had received in 1818. But Monroe died July 4; Rhea's letter had been retained, unanswered; and presently it became known in Jackson's circle that a solemn denial, made by the ex-President in extremis, was in possession of the family. Jackson made secret inquiry; and in October, 1832, a discreet friend in New York city informed him confidentially that the Rhea letter had been read over and over again, paragraph by paragraph, to the dying Monroe, whose reply was then reduced to writing and signed in the

presence of friends. After this, from one cause or another, Jackson dropped the tale; and when, shortly before his final retirement from office, Gouverneur, Monroe's son-in-law, wrote, January 6, 1837, transmitting to him a copy of Rhea's letter of June, 1831, denouncing the production as an impudent falsehood, a singular epistle on its face in matter and manner, and stated further that the ex-President had left a record of his own views on the subject, made in the

most solemn manner, Jackson formally acknowledged the receipt of the communication, as requested, and made no other reply. Rhea, we may observe, had died in May, 1832, less than a year after he penned that falsehood.

Jackson, in July, 1843, long after his presidency, received a letter from Anthony Butler, referring to charges just made against him in a Whig pamphlet, and asking the general to sustain him. Butler had been Jackson's minister to Mexico, where, in 1834, he made special effort to procure a peaceable transfer of Texas to the United States, for $5,000,000, advising that out of this fund a certain part should be devoted to bribing Mexican officials (notably Santa Anna) to sign a treaty of cession. Butler now claimed that President Jackson had sanctioned and then angrily denounced the proposed bribery, and then in an oral conversation had signified his willingness, provided the affair was managed without his own cognizance. Jackson in reply roundly denounced Butler as a scamp, and his statement as a tissue of falsehoods. Jackson's disapproval of bribery by his minister may well be believed; but sure it is that Butler's dispatches from Mexico, proposing in a translated cipher precisely such a course, were duly read by the President and placed among his private papers instead of the public archives, and that Butler continued the negotiation, though in vain. Jackson was always strong and sweeping in his asseverations, but in the concentration of immediate purpose he sometimes forgot past facts.

cause she was ambitious, and ambition for a woman lay mainly in the marriage direction; next, because she wished to make her hero happy in his declining years. Her own age was stated at thirtythree. Pleading with Van Buren to advance her suit, if possible, she expressed a few flowery sentiments, and ended her epistle with a verse of poetry. Van Buren transmitted the letter to the President. who, without a word of coarse or jocular comment, returned his written reply for the young lady to peruse, meeting her unconventional proposal with a tender seriousness. He felt honored by her interest in him; but his only answer to such a letter would be, that his heart was in the grave of his dear, departed wife, from which sacred spot no living being could recall it. The sequel to this episode was a curious one. The woman wrote once more to the Vice President, this time over her full signature, to say that a man of her acquaintance had out of revenge written the previous letter, imitating her She besought

style and chirography. style and chirography.

Van Buren to destroy that "forged" epistle and consign all remembrance of it "to the tomb of the Capulets." As usually happens with such injunctions, the custodian of the correspondence preserved it carefully.

Once clearly associated with Andrew Jackson, by aiding his election in 1828, and entering the Cabinet as Secretary of State, Van Buren, only recently a supporter at all, became a most influential adviser of the long eight years' administration. Jackson in those times sought constantly his advice, and, though not yielding to it, he showed a strong anxiety to learn his associate's point of view, and gain the soothing corrective most needed for his own vigorous plans. For in this aspect, and moreover as a Northern ally of influence, Van Buren was indispensable. The proof of all this is found in the Van Buren collection, where the many autograph letters that passed between himself and his chief, during that period, are brought so happily together, with,