hook. "Happy is the land that owns | hay; a man who farmed his own land, such men. "The land dothn't own me; I own the land. I shall be pleased to learn what your business is upon it." 66 Farmer Anerley hated chaff, as a good agriculturist should do. Moreover, he was vexed by many little griefs to-day, and had not been out long enough to work them off. He guessed pretty shrewdly that this sworded man was Moreducks" -as the leading wags of Flamborough were gradually calling him—and the sight of a sword upon his farm (unless of an officer bound to it) was already some disquietude to an English farmer's heart. That was a trifle; for fools would be fools, and might think it a grand thing to go about with tools they were never born to the handling of; but a fellow who was come to take up Robin Lyth's case, and strive to get him out of his abominable crime, had better go back to the rogue's highway, instead of coming down the private road to Anerley. "Upon my word I do believe," cried Mordacks, with a sprightly joy, "that I have the pleasure of meeting at last the well-known Captain Anerley! My dear sir, I can not help commending your prudence in guarding the entrance to your manor; but not in this employment of a bill-hook. From all that I hear, it is a Paradise indeed. What a haven in such weather as the present! Now, Captain Anerley, I entreat you to consider whether it is wise to take the thorn so from the rose. If I had so sweet a place, I would plant brambles, briers, blackthorn, furze, cratægus, every kind of spinous growth, inside my gates, and never let anybody lop them. Captain, you are too hospitable." Farmer Anerley gazed with wonder at this man, who could talk so fast for the first time of seeing a body. Then feeling as if his hospitality were challenged, and desiring more leisure for reflection, "You better come down the lane, sir," he said. "Am I to understand that you invite me to your house, or only to the gate where the dogs come out? Excuse me: I always am a most plain-spoken man." "Our dogs never bite nobody but rogues." "In that case, Captain Anerley, I may trust their moral estimate. I knew a farmer once who was a thorough thief in and trimmed his own hedges; a thoroughly respectable and solid agriculturist. But his trusses of hay were always six pounds short, and if ever anybody brought a sample truss to steelyard, he had got a little dog, just seven pounds weight, who slipped into the core of it, being just a good hay-color. He always delivered his hay in the twilight, and when it swung the beam, he used to say, Come, now, I must charge you for overweight.' Now, captain, have you got such an honest dog as that?" "I would have claimed him, that I would, if such a clever dog were weighed to me. But, sir, you have got the better of me. What a man for stories you be, for sure! Come in to our fire-place." Farmer Anerley was conquered by this tale, which he told fifty times every year he lived thereafter, never failing to finish with, "What rogues they be, up York way!" Master Mordacks was delighted with this piece of luck on his side. Many times he had been longing to get in at Anerley, not only from the reputation of good cheer there, but also from kind curiosity to see the charming Mary, who was now becoming an important element of business. Since Robin had given him the slip so sadly-a thing it was impossible to guard against-the best chance of hearing what became of him would be to get into the good graces of his sweetheart. "We have been very sadly for a long time now," said the farmer, as he knocked at his own porch door with the handle of his bill-hook. "There used to be one as was always welcome here; and a pleasure it was to see him make himself so pleasant, sir. But ever since the Lord took him home from his family, without a good-by, as a man might say, my wife hath taken to bar the doors whiles I am away and out of sight." Stephen Anerley knocked harder, as he thus explained the need of it; for it grieved him to have his house shut up. "Very wise of them all to bar out such weather," said Mordacks, who read the farmer's thoughts like print. "Don't relax your rules, sir, until the weather changes. Ah, that was a very sad thing about the captain. As gallant an officer, and as single-minded, as ever killed a Frenchman in the best days of our navy." "Single-minded is the very word to give him, sir. I sought about for it ever | since I heard of him coming to an end like that, and doing of his duty in the thick of it. If I could only get a gentleman to tell me, or an officer's wife would be better still, what the manners is when a poor lady gets her husband shot, I'll be blest if I wouldn't go straight and see her, though they make such a distance betwixt us and the regulars. Oh, then, ye've come at last! No thief, no thief." "My fate in life is to be overlooked," Mr. Mordacks answered, with a martial stride; "but not always, young lady, with such exquisite revenge. What I look at pays fiftyfold for being overlooked." "You are an impudent, conceited man," thought Mary to herself, with gross injustice; but she only blushed and said, "I beg your pardon, sir." "You see, sir," quoth the farmer, with some severity, tempered, however, with a smile of pride, "my daughter, Mary Anerley." "And I take off my hat," replied audacious Mordacks, among whose faults was no false shame, "not only to salute a lady, sir, but also to have a better look." "Well, well," said the farmer, as Mary ran away; "your city ways are high polite, no doubt, but my little lass is strange to them. And I like her better so, than to answer pert with pertness. Now come you in, and warm your feet a bit. None of us are younger than we used to be." This was not Master Anerley's general style of welcoming a guest, but he hated new-fangled Frenchified manners, as he told his good wife, when he boasted byand-by how finely he had put that old coxcomb down. "You never should have done it," was all the praise he got. "Mr. Mordacks is a business man, and business men always must relieve their minds." For no sooner now was the general factor introduced to Mistress Anerley than she perceived clearly that the object of his visit was not to make speeches to young chits of girls, but to seek the advice of a sensible person, who ought to have been con sulted a hundred times for once that she even had been allowed to open her mouth fairly. Sitting by the fire, he convinced her that the whole of the mischief had been caused by sheer neglect of her opinion. Everything she said was so exactly to the point that he could not conceive how it should have been so slighted, and she for her part begged him to stay and partake of their simple dinner. "Dear madam, it can not be," he replied; "alas! I must not think of it. My conscience reproaches me for indulging, as I have done, in what is far sweeter than even one of your dinners-a most sensible lady's society. I have a long bitter ride before me, to comfort the fatherless and the widow. My two legs of mutton will be thawed by this time in the genial warmth of your stable. I also am thawed, warmed, feasted I may say, by happy approximation to a mind so bright and congenial. Captain Anerley, madam, has shown true kindness in allowing me the privilege of exclusive speech with you. Little did I hope for such a piece of luck this morning. You have put so many things in a new and brilliant light, that my road becomes clear before me. Justice must be done; and you feel quite sure that Robin Lyth committed this atrocious murder because poor Carroway surprised him so when making clandestine love, at your brother Squire Popplewell's, to a beautiful young lady who shall be nameless. And deeply as you grieve for the loss of such a neighbor, the bravest officer of the British navy, who leaped from a strictly immeasurable height into a French ship, and scattered all her crew, and has since had a baby about three months old, as well as innumerable children, you feel that you have reason to be thankful sometimes that the young man's character has been so clearly shown, before he contrived to make his way into the bosom of respectable families in the neighborhood." "I never thought it out quite so clear as that, sir; for I feel so sorry for everybody, and especially those who have brought him up, and those he has made away with." Quite so, my dear madam; such are your fine feelings, springing from the goodness of your nature. Pardon my saying that you could have no other, according to my experience of a most benevolent countenance. Part of my duty, and in such a case as yours, one of the pleasantest parts of it, is to study the expression of a truly benevolent—” "I am not that old, sir, asking of your pardon, to pretend to be benevolent. All that I lay claim to is to look at things sensible." "Never upon our farm, sir. When he doth, it is a proof of his being crossed with wild-ducks. The same as they be round Flamborough." "Oh, now I see the truth. How slow I am! It improves their flavor, at the "Certainly, yet with a tincture of high expense of their behavior. But seriousfeeling. Now if it should happen that ly, madam, you are fit to take the lead. this poor young man were of very high What a pleasant visit I have had! I birth, perhaps the highest in the county, must brace myself up for a very sad one and the heir to very large landed proper-now-a poor lady, with none to walk bety, and a title, and all that sort of non-hind her." sense, you would look at him from the "Yes, to be sure! It is very fine of me very same point of view?" to talk. But if I was left without my husband, I should only care to walk after him. Please to give her my kind love, sir; though I have only seen her once. And if there is anything that we can do-" "That I would, sir, that I would. So long as he was proclaimed for hanging. But naturally bound, of course, to be more sorry for him." "Yes, from sense of all the good things he must lose. There seems, however, to be strong ground for believing-as I may tell you, in confidence, Dr. Upround does -that he had no more to do with it than you or I, ma'am. At first I concluded as you have done. I am going to see Mrs. Carroway now. Till then I suspend my judgment." "Now that is what nobody should do, Mr. Mordacks. I have tried, but never found good come of it. To change your mind is two words against yourself; and you go wrong both ways, before and after." "Undoubtedly you do, ma'am. I never thought of that before. But you must remember that we have not the gift of hitting-I might say of making-the truth with a flash or a dash, as you ladies have. May I be allowed to come again?" "If there is anything that we can do," said the farmer, coming out of his cornchamber, "we won't talk about it, but we'll do it, Mr. Moreducks." The factor quietly dispersed this rebuke, by waving his hand at his two legs of mutton and the cod, which had thawed in the stable. "I knew that I should be too late," he said; "her house will be full of such little things as these, so warm is the feeling of the neighborhood. I guessed as much, and arranged with my butcher to take them back in that case; and he said they would eat all the better for the ride. But as for the cod, perhaps you will accept him. I could never take him back to Flamborough." "Ride away, sir, ride away," said the farmer, who had better not have measured swords with Mordacks. "I were thinking of sending a cart over there, so soon as the weather should be opening of the roads up. But the children might be hankerin' after meat, the worse for all the snow-time." "To tell you the truth, sir, I am heartily sorry that you are going away at all. I could have talked to you all the afternoon; and how seldom I get the chance now, Lord knows. There is that in your "It is almost impossible to imagine conversation which makes one feel quite such a thing. Universally respected, sure of being understood; not so much in suddenly cut off, enormous, family with what you say, sir-if you understand my hereditary hunger, all the neighbors well meaning-as in the way you look, quite aware of straitened circumstances, the as if my meaning was not at all too quick kindest-hearted county in Great Britain for you. My good husband is of a great--sorrow and abundance must have cloyer mind than I am, being nine-and-for-ed their appetites, as at a wealthy man's ty inches round the chest; but his mind funeral. What a fool I must have been seems somehow to come after mine, the not to foresee all that!" same as the ducks do, going down to our pond." "Mistress Anerley, how thankful you should be! What a picture of conjugal felicity! But I thought that the drake always led the way?" "Better see than foresee," replied the farmer, who was crusty from remembering that he had done nothing. "Neighbors likes to wait for neighbors to go in; same as two cows staring at a new-mown meadow." WASHINGTON SQUARE.* I. conception, that he was not the least of a DURING a portion of the first half of charlatan tin was a thoroughly honest the present century, and more par- man-honest in a degree of which he had ticularly during the latter part of it, there perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the flourished and practiced in the city of New complete measure; and putting aside the York a physician who enjoyed perhaps great good-nature of the circle in which an exceptional share of the consideration he practiced, which was rather fond of which, in the United States, has always boasting that it possessed the "brightest" been bestowed upon distinguished mem- doctor in the country, he daily justified bers of the medical profession. This pro- his claim to the talents attributed to him fession in America has constantly been by the popular voice. He was an observheld in honor, and more successfully than er, even a philosopher, and to be bright elsewhere has put forward a claim to the was so natural to him, and (as the popular epithet of "liberal." In a country in voice said) came so easily, that he never which, to play a social part, you must aimed at mere effect, and had none of the either earn your income or make believe little tricks and pretensions of second-rate that you earn it, the healing art has ap- reputations. It must be confessed that peared in a high degree to combine two fortune had favored him, and that he had recognized sources of credit. It belongs found the path to prosperity very soft to to the realm of the practical, which in the his tread. He had married at the age of United States is a great recommendation; twenty-seven, for love, a very charming and it is touched by the light of science- girl, Miss Catherine Harrington, of New a merit appreciated in a community in York, who, in addition to her charms, had which the love of knowledge has not al- brought him a solid dowry. Mrs. Sloper ways been accompanied by leisure and op- was amiable, graceful, accomplished, eleportunity. It was an element in Doctor gant, and in 1820 she had been one of the Sloper's reputation that his learning and pretty girls of the small but promising his skill were very evenly balanced; he capital which clustered about the Battery was what you might call a scholarly doc- and overlooked the bay, and of which the tor, and yet there was nothing abstract in uppermost boundary was indicated by the his remedies-he always ordered you to grassy way-sides of Canal Street. Even at take something. Though he was felt to the age of twenty-seven Austin Sloper had be extremely thorough, he was not un-made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the comfortably theoretic; and if he some- anomaly of his having been chosen among times explained matters rather more mi-a dozen suitors by a young woman of high nutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners one had heard of) as to trust to the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which was, after all, the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a clever man; and this is really the reason why Doctor Sloper had become a local celebrity. At the time at which we are chiefly concerned with him he was some fifty years of age, and his popularity was at its height. He was very witty, and he passed in the best society of New York for a man of the world-which, indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I hasten to add, to anticipate possible mis * Copyright, 1880, by Henry James, Jun. fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income, and the most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan. These eyes, and some of their accompaniments, were for about five years a source of extreme satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich woman made no difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which on his father's death he had shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not been preponderatingly to make money-it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful-this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having ilies can not escape the more insidious an income appeared to him in no degree | It was observed that even medical famto modify the validity. He was fond of his practice, and of exercising a skill of which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he could be, that a doctor he persisted in being, in the best possible conditions. Of course his easy domestic situation saved him a good deal of drudgery, and his wife's affiliation to the "best people" brought him a good many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more interesting in themselves than those of the lower orders, at least more consistently displayed. He desired experience, and in the course of twenty years he got a great deal. It must be added that it came to him in some forms which, whatever might have been their intrinsic value, made it the reverse of welcome. His first child, a little boy of extraordinary promise, as the Doctor, who was not addicted to easy enthusiasm, firmly believed, died at three years of age, in spite of everything that the mother's tenderness and the father's science could invent to save him. Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to a second infant-an infant of a sex which rendered the poor child, to the Doctor's sense, an inadequate substitute for his lamented first-born, of whom he had promised himself to make an admirable man. The little girl was a disappoint-ly, comfortable, reasonable woman, and a ment; but this was not the worst. A week after her birth the young mother, who, as the phrase is, had been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, and before another week had elapsed Austin Sloper was a widower. For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done poorly in his own family; and a bright doctor who within three years loses his wife and his little boy should perhaps be prepared to see either his skill or his affection impugned. Our friend, however, escaped criticism; that is, he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much the most competent and most formidable. He walked under the weight of this very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore forever the scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he knew had treated him on the night that followed his wife's death. The world, which, as I have said, appreciated him, pitied him too much to be ironical; his misfortune made him more interesting, and even helped him to be the fashion. When the child was about ten years old, he invited his sister, Mrs. Penniman, to come and stay with him. The Misses Sloper had been but two in number, and both of them had married early in life. The younger, Mrs. Almond by name, was the wife of a prosperous merchant, and the mother of a blooming family. She bloomed herself, indeed, and was a come favorite with her clever brother, who, in the matter of women, even when they were nearly related to him, was a man of distinct preferences. He preferred Mrs. Almond to his sister Lavinia, who had married a poor clergyman, of a sickly constitution and a flowery style of eloquence; and then, at the age of thirtythree, had been left a widow, without children, without fortune-with nothing but the memory of Mr. Penniman's flowers of speech, a certain vague aroma of which hovered about her own conversation. Nevertheless, he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of Poughkeepsie. The Doctor had not proposed to Mrs. Penniman to come and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested that she should make an asylum of his house while she looked about for unfurnished lodgings. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever instituted a search for unfurnished |