saw him and quietly spoke to him. He always ran away, but he was not very much frightened. He followed his mother's habit of dining at six, and of beginning either at the pond or at the river-bank. George was cooking while I was tidying the camp one evening, when suddenly Thomas came tearing up the trail from the river. He passed between us, rushing on in blind terror, but at the edge of the timber-opening he stopped and whistled. George is good at repartee, perhaps because his mind is not confused with abundance. "Your rifle. him!" forward and with nerve-shattering sounds he drove poor Thomas to deep water, where I caught him with the boat. He was unexpectedly quiet while I decorated his ear, but he ran recklessly a long distance when he was set free. It is in July and August that brook trout love to leave the river-bed and idle at the mouth of a spring brook, where the water is colder, and where larvæ, worms, and other dainties are washed down from the mountain-side brought to their noses. It is the "springhole season," and it is oftenest at evening that trout are tempted to the surface Somethin's follerin' by the skimming flies, and are apt to look for higher things. There was no need to hurry. I sat tight. The fox came cautiously, and made the last mistake of his life when he stopped on the trail and sat up on his haunches to look at us. Thomas disappeared at the sound of the firing, but he circled our clearing and whistled for a while. I tried to believe that he was thinking of me as his savior, but it was not quite clear. I had become distinctly fond of him, and he was as my summer girl. I wanted him to be more than that, to be a joy for more than one summer, but there are a good many deer in the woods, and the possibility of a changeling was distasteful. If he were a grown-up deer I could easily remember his face, for no one is like another, but he was grow ing and changing, and although a child is father of the man, nevertheless they may not look alike. Thomas should be marked, and I provided a silver-plated key-ring-not a split ring, but one whose spring held the ends together, and this was to be slipped through a hole pierced in the rim of his ear, after I had captured him. Success came by accident. After a week of failures I sent George out for more supplies, and appointed to meet him with the boat at the landing opposite our camp. Thomas happened along there before either of us, and George, coming up the trail, still as an Indian, saw his opportunity. With infinite skill and patience he stole up to his quarry, while I was watching from the opposite bank. When Thomas finally heard him, or smelled him, George was quite near. By a dash and We needed food in camp, and I was standing on the gravel bar casting the flies where the brook water mingled with the river. The bank was fringed with bushes, and the back cast was safest from fouling in them when it was sent back up the brook. The brook mouth was wide enough, but it was overhung with alders. This way of fishing needed some accuracy, and after a time I looked over my shoulder to see that I was still lining out safely. Thomas appeared. I had not heard him come, and he was not looking at me. His eyes and the direction of his nose were intently following my flies as they were recovered from the water and shot back high in the air, nearly over his head, then hovering down in a graceful curve, to be snapped forward again to the spring-hole. Little by little I paid out more line and lowered the back cast, hoping to touch the little friend, whom I was watching, with the head turned half around over my shoulders. When the tail fly swept close to his face he bounded high in the air and then stood rigid, more than ever interested. The next cast was still more successful. It slightly hooked him, and he leaped up the bank and whistled earnestly for a few minutes. It was our last meeting of the season. A summer outing needs an object, and during the long, tiresome winter and spring I looked forward eagerly to another meeting with Thomas, but when I hunted for him he had forsaken the scenes of his childhood and could not be found. It was a sad time. season the glorious news Later in the came that a spike-horn buck with a ring in his ear had been seen five miles from Thomas camp. All the woodsmen knew of Thomas and his ring. It was in September, and I was sitting among the rocks where the river tears its way through a gorge, when a little buck broke out from the woods, running low, and dashed into the stream a few hundred yards above me. He drank long, and often looked back over his shoulder. Then he came toward me, sometimes wading and sometimes spraying out his little legs and swimming low in absurdly shallow water. This seemed to be his idea of hiding himself. When he was opposite, he stopped and gazed intently at me. His ring was brightly polished, and the small cut made by my knife had healed to a smooth round hole. He was still trembling with fear, not of me, but of the dog which was chasing him, and I hoped that he was remembering the incident of the fox. He did not remember it, or else age had brought mistrust, for he started down stream, and a few rods below he leaped out into the woods. When the dog came, and lost the scent at the stream, he stopped baying and swam across. He ran silently with his nose to the ground, up the stream a long distance, and then down along the bank nearly to me. I hoped that he was baffled, and I was somewhat relieved when he swam back across the river. But he had not given up his fiendish chase. A hound is full of theories. The deer might have tried to trick him by coming out of water on the same side he went in, so he swiftly nosed along the bank for rods above and below. His noiseless persistence became hideous, and my heart hardened as I saw him abandon the theory of the farther bank, and start to swim across in the direction of Thomas. My rifle was dear to me then, and the dog did not leave the river. Thomas was reported again last season, and I hope that you will not shoot him by mistake for an ordinary deer. The surest way to save him is to avoid killing any deer unless you are quite certain that he has no ring in his ear. BY VIRGINIA FRAZER BOYLE HEY said that Love was blind,—alackaday !— TH Then strung the lute with heartstrings, soft with tears; They said that Love was blind, and let him play Editor's Easy Chair. I HE reader who finds his pleasure not prompt it to pronounce full of novel in high reasoning of high things and fruitful suggestion. can hardly entertain himself better than in that recent book of Professor N. S. Shaler's which he calls The Individual: A Study of Life and Death. It is a purely scientific treatment of the greatest theme that can engage the curiosity of man; and Professor Shaler justifies himself for leaving the religious view to others when he reminds us how profitless the attempts to approach it from both directions have always been. The very importance of his admirable work is that without being for a moment irreligious, it is so entirely unreligious. It is the naturalist's "protest against the idea, bred of many natural misconceptions, that a human being is something apart from its fellows: that it is born into the world and dies out of it into the loneliness of a supernatural realm;" and in the wish to show this being essentially at one with its temporal environment, the author argues that "we may work toward a reconciliation of our death with the order in which we find ourselves placed." He gives the chief place in his essay to the study of death, as the "problem beyond all others momentous," but in close relation to this question of immortality he considers "The Period of Old Age" and "The Utilization of Old Age," in two chapters which the Easy Chair is sure that its Own consciousness of senescence does Even a very new Easy Chair might willingly learn from this wise and uplifting book that the enlargement of human life in a term of constantly increasing years beyond the period of its productive activities is the effect of civilization. A prolonged old age, in fact, not only distinguishes man from the lower animals, or the ancestral animals, (to put it a little more considerately,) but it is one of the things that mainly difference the civilized man from the savage man. We no longer knock our parents or grandparents on the head because their usefulness seems to be past; even uncles and great-uncles are not thus sacrificed to a mistaken sense of the common good; and old age in turn has not shown itself ungrateful to the humanity which, from sparing it, has advanced to cherishing and tenderly caring for it. If any debt was due from it to the community for such favor, it has more than repaid the debt. Its stores of experience are freely at the public service; and Professor Shaler shows how, in the late war with Spain, the generation which has grown up since our great civil contest had so utterly failed to profit by the abundant records of that struggle that, but for its survivors, we should have rushed into hostilities wholly ignorant and reckless of their demands. It was, he says, the practical knowledge of the old soldiers that saved the nation from terrible disaster; and he adds the belief, yet more important to humanity, that if the declaration of that war, whose Dead Sea fruit is still turning to ashes on our lips, “could have been left to those men and women who had a knowledge of its real nature, it would not have been undertaken." Whenever he touches upon that dreadful madness to which the peoples deliver themselves from time to time, he speaks words of beneficent wisdom with the authority of one who has known war at first hand, and has seen man in those infernal transports when dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with him. Once for all he demolishes the superstition that war makes for manliness by teaching that to be a good soldier a man must first have acquired the soldierly virtues in the tasks and ordeals of peace. If he goes into the field without them, he will never get them there: the French with their constant wars are of a failing soldiership; but the Swiss, who have not had a war for two hundred years, are the most soldierly people in Europe. II If this opinion seems to contradict the other opinion that success in war results from experience, it is an appearance only, for it is to the morale of the Swiss that the author refers in his praise of them as military material. In fact war has got all the things that make it tolerable as well as all the things that make it glorious from the training of peace; and even in the American Military Academy, where the art is taught more thoroughly than anywhere else in the world, the students have just been obliged to borrow one of the modern decencies of civil life. Long after prize-fighting was out lawed in the world, it flourished at West Point as a form of hazing, but under the lesson of a Congressional exposure the cadets have renounced their fist-fights together with all the other forms of hazing. They were not greatly to blame; youth is the sanctuary of tradition; and the fist-fight was simply a survival of some savager aforetime when it was thought essential to the education of an officer, as once it was everywhere thought essential to the training of a gentleman. But the cadets have done well to abandon it, with its imagined advantages, in deference to public opinion; for the study of the art of war cannot be guarded with too many refinements. The military character needs all the ameliorations it can borrow from civil life, and the vivisection of men in battle must be inculcated in a strictly scientific spirit. Especially those who are educated to the stern duty of directing others in the work of human vivisection must be above the suspicion of a brutal pleasure in it, such as might come from the practices of the prize-ring. With every elegant alleviation, with all the possible delicacy and urbanity in the officers, and every gentle instinct in the men, there is still a danger that war will look like the hell which General Sherman said it was; and we must encourage each advance that promises to make it look a little less like hell. Among the authorities of West Point there were no doubt some who could testify from their own experience in battle that fist-fighting had done little to qualify them for military leadership. But one of the most curious limitations to the usefulness of age is that which bars it from imparting its wisdom to youth concerning customs. Boys of twelve have customs which as they grow older they abandon to other boys of twelve; boys of fifteen have other customs which they leave to those becoming fifteen after them; and so on. The boys of twelve and fifteen never give up their customs while they are twelve and fifteen; they must outgrow them; and probably if all the old soldiers of West Point had joined in assuring the cadets that it would not make for soldiership in the fourth-class men to pound the faces of the first-class men to pulp, they would not have been regarded. Something cataclysmal, like the death of a victim, was necessary; for here, as in so many other cases, without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. The wisdom of those who had lived through the Civil War could not save this generation from the Spanish War. III Age can transmit civilization in its general terms, and perhaps this is enough; but apparently it cannot prevent lapses into barbarism. We were at one time growing out of the baseness of snobbery, and with much pains and great wit and indefinite illustration, it did seem some fifty years ago as if we had passed the danger of that degradation of the soul. When the fine moralist who once filled this seat was writing the "Potiphar Papers," the friend of man might well have believed that the human spirit would hardly crawl before any image of worldly greatness again. Thackeray had fought his fight against that hateful dishonor, and people seemed really trying for a decent self-respect. The mood lasted so long that when society journalism first began to rear its shameless front among us we nicknamed it "Jenkins," and blushed for it. Who of the present generation ever heard of Jenkins? and who blushes now to read the last detail of every "society event," or to pore upon the portraits, instantaneous and dramatic, of the chief actors and spectators, and all their kindred and acquaintance? To witness the newspaper hysterics a few weeks ago in view of the marriage of two amiable young people who had nothing in the world to distinguish them but their money, was to doubt if we had come far since eighteen-fifty. The vulgarity of the exhibition was bad enough; wealth-worship is the vulgarest thing in the world; far vulgarer than rank-worship, for wealth lacks historic grace, and the mystical charm of the supremacy that comes by birth and seems of divine ordinance. Everybody knows how money is made; that dark secret is open; and the great fortunes are of such recent and rapid growth that it does not need the experience of old age to antedate them. The splendor of what money can buy is the splendor that dazzles the eye and corrupts the heart, when graced with the literature and art of society journalism. It is hard for the severest moralist to refuse being a millionaire in the august presence (so vividly reported by pen and pencil) of the trousseau, of the weddinggifts, of the church where the "nuptial rite" is celebrated, of the mansion in which the pair are to live, of the carriage in which they are to drive to the private car (their only privacy) for their wedding journey; of their flunkies at the carriage door, and of their flunkies' calves. When it comes to the names of "those present," ah, then it is that the moralist feels the subtlest temptation, and realizes in his soul how sweet and fitting it would have been to have his name among them, and perhaps leading them! If it is so with the moralist, how must not it be with the woman ready to break into society with an axe, with the type-writer, the shopgirl, the matinée girl, the ice-cream-soda girl, and all the poor, thrilling, longing, ambitious maids and matrons, who gloat upon the gorgeous details wherever society journalism reports them! The simplest village, the loneliest farm, the farthest frontier, is no safer from the infection than the metropolis. Our only hope must be that the infection is not so deadly as it seems to the moralist, who may, indeed, be its chief victim. It may be that most of those who behold that far splendor are too busy, if not too wise, to do more than give it a glance, a sigh, and then turn to their work again and try to make the most of their humble lot. The worst would be trying to change their humble lot, or to illustrate their simple circumstance with the reflected glories of wealth and fashion. That would really be vulgar, and yet probably it would not last. Even if it lasted, still it would not be the worst thing in the world. IV Wealth-worship is bad, but it is very imaginably only a phase of our development, and will cease as we become more accustomed to our millionaires; or it may pass into rank-worship, as the Republic eventuates, upon strictly American principles, in an Empire with hereditary dignities and titles. No one can forecast the end from these beginnings, and mortifying as they are to the moralist who has not yet found himself among those present," he himself must own that the thousand and odd people who burnt a negro at the stake in Kansas lately might have been far less harm 66 |