call you back. ing late Oh, it was n't about be and such a hot day, too!" "No, I was n't bothered about that. It was about a sudden death, that happened just before I left. You may remember that officer in the far corner of the ward." "What, that nice young fellow, a mere boy! Oh, Ezra," she added, after a pause, "I sometimes thank God, in these war times, that I am not a mother! Do you think it's wrong to feel that way, brother?" 66 Nonsense, Ann! You might find enough to annoy yourself about, besides that. When some one comes for sister Ann you can begin to think about the matter. What's the use of settling theoretical cases? There's quite enough of real bother in life that one can't escape, and is forced to reason about.” Ann arose, her eyes filling. "Yes," she said, "yes-I dare say," her thoughts for a moment far off, recalling a time when, years before, she had been obliged to decide whether she should give up her life with her brother and father, and go to the West to share the love and wealthier surroundings of a man whose claim upon her was, she felt, an honest and loving one. Had he too been poor, and had she been called by him to bear a life of struggle, it is possible she might have yielded. As it was, habitual affection and some vague sense of her power to fill the wants of her brother's existence made the woman's craving for self-sacrifice, as a proof to herself of the quality of her love, sufficient to decide her, and she had turned away gently, but decisively, from a life of ease. Yet sometimes all the lost loveliness of a mother's duties overwhelmed her for a dreaming moment. "Yes," she said, at last, "you are right. It's always best to live in the day that is with us. But what I wanted to say was that you must not let such inevitable things as a death no one could have prevented overcome you so as to She saw that he was annoyed, and, knowing well the nature of the mood which possessed him, returned. "Ah, well, brother, we will buy another friend to-morrow, and age him as fast as possible. Bless me, it is ten o'clock!" and she began to move about the room, and to put things in the usual neat state in which she kept their sitting-room. The books were rearranged, the bits of thread or paper carefully picked up, a chair or two pushed back, a crooked table cover drawn into place. This was a small but regularly repeated torment to Wendell. He did not dislike a neat parlor,— nay, would have felt the want of neatness; but this little bustle and stir at the calmest time of the day disturbed him, while he knew that in this, as in some other matters, Ann was immovable, so that as a rule he had ceased to resist, as he usually did cease to resist where the opposition was positive and enduring. This time, however, he exclaimed, “I do wish, Ann, for once, you would go to bed quietly!" It soothed the man as the harp of the nine hundred and sixty-ninth birthday boy shepherd soothed the king. "What noble verse!" he said. "Read again, Ann, that part beginning, And the joy of mere living,' and humor the rhythm a little. I think it is a mistake of most readers to affect to follow the sense so as to make a poem seem in the reading like prose, as if the rhythm were not meant to be a kind of musical accompaniment of exalted thought and sentiment. How you hear the harp in it! I never knew anybody to speak of the pleasure a poet must have in writing such verse as that. It must sing to him as sweetly as to any one else, and more freshly." "Yes," said Ann. "I have seen somewhere that everybody who writes verse thinks his own delightful." "No doubt, as every woman's last baby is the most charming. But I should think that neither motherhood nor paternity of verse could quite make the critical faculty impossible. Shakespeare must have been able to appreciate Hamlet duly." "I don't know," said Ann. Her brother often got quite above her in his talk, and then she either gave up with a sort of gasp, as the air into which he rose became too thin for her intellectual lungs, or else she made more or less successful effort to follow his flights, or at least to deceive him into the belief that she did so. Her brother was fond of Hamlet, which has been, and ever will be, the favorite riddle of many thoughtful men. He liked to read it to her, and to have it read to him. She had suddenly now one of those brief inspirations which astonish us at times in unanalytic people. She said, "I sometimes think Hamlet was like you, a little like you, broth er!" Ezra looked up at his sister with amused surprise. Human nature, he reflected to himself, is inexhaustible, and we may rest sure that on Methuselah's he might have startled his family by some novelty of word or deed. "I hardly know if it be a compliment," he said aloud, with a little smile. "I should like to be sure of what Hamlet's sister would have said of him. Go to bed and think about it!" After Ann had left him, Wendell himself retired to what was known as his office, a back room with a southern outlook on the garden. Here were a few medical books, two or three metaphysical treatises, a mixture of others on the use of the microscope and on botany, with odd volumes of the older and less known dramatists, and a miscellaneous collection representing science and sentiment. On the table was a small microscope, and a glass dish or two, with minute water plants, making a nursery for some of the lesser forms of animal and vegetable life. In a few minutes Wendell, absorbed, was gazing into the microscope at the tiny dramas which the domestic life of a curious pseudopod presented. He soon began to draw it with much adroitness. It is possible for some men to pursue every object, their duties and their pleasures, with equal energy, nor is it always true that the Jack-of-alltrades is master of none; but it was true of this man that, however well he did things, and he did many things well, he did none with sufficient intensity of purpose, or with such steadiness of effort as to win high success in any one of them. CHESTER STREETS. If it be true, as some poets think, that every spot on earth is full of poetry, then it is certainly also true that each place has its own distinctive measure; an indigenous metre, so to speak, in which, and in which only, its poetry will be truly set or sung. The more one reflects on this, in connection with the spots and places he has known best in the world, the truer it seems. Memories and impressions group themselves in subtle coordinations to prove it. There are surely woods which are like stately sonnets, and others of which the truth would best be told in tender lyrics; brooks which are jocund songs, and mountains which are Odes to Immortality. Of cities and towns it is perhaps even truer than of woods and mountains; certainly, no less true. For instance, it would be a bold poet who should attempt to set pictures of Rome in any strain less solemn than the epic; and is it too strong a thing to say that only a foolish one would think of framing a Venice glimpse or memory in any thing save dreamy songs, with dreamiest refrains? Endless vistas of reverie open to the imagination once entered on the road of this sort of fancy, ies which play strange pranks with both time and place, endow the dreamer with a sort of post facto second sight, and leave him, when suddenly roused, as lost as if he had been asleep for a century. For sensations of this kind Chester is a "hede and chefe cyte." Simply to walk its streets is to step to time and tune of ballads; the very air about one's ears goes lilting with them; the walls ring; the gates echo; choruses rollick round corners, - ballads, always ballads, or, if not a ballad, a play, none the less lively; a play with pageants and delightful racket. rever day of "The Cyte of Legyons, that is Chestre in the marches of Englonde, towards Wales, betwegne two armes of the see, that bee named Dee and Mersee. Thys cyte in tyme of Britons was hede and chefe cyte of Venedocia, that is North Wales. Thys cyte in Brytyshe speech bete Carthleon, Chestre in Englyshe, and Cyte of Legyons also. For there laye a wynter, the legyons that Julius Cæsar sent to wyne Irlonde. And after, Claudius Cæsar sent legyons out of the cyte for to wynn the Islands that bee called Orcades. Thys cyte hath plenty of cyne land, of corn, of flesh, and specyally of samon. Thys cyte receyveth grate marchandyse and sendeth out also. Northumbres destroyed this cyte but Elfleda Lady of Mercia bylded it again and made it mouch more." This is what was written of Chester, more than six hundred years ago, by one Ranulph Higden, a Chester Abbey monk, him who wrote those old miracle plays, except for which we very like had never had such a thing as a play at all, and William Shakespeare had turned out no better than many another Stratford man. All good Americans who reach England go to Chester. They go to see the cathedral, and to buy old Queen Anne furniture. The cathedral is very good in its way, the way of all cathedrals, and the old Queen Anne furniture is now quite well made; but it is a marvel that either cathedral or shop can long hold a person away from Chester streets. One cannot go amiss in them; at each step he is, as it were, buttonholed by a gable, an arch, a pavement, a doorsill, a sign, or a gate with a story to tell. A story, indeed? A hundred, or more and if anybody doubts them, or has by reason of old age, or over-oc Such are the measure and metre to- cupation with other matters, got them confused in his mind, all he has to do is to step into a public library, which is kept in a very private way, in a bystreet, by two aged Cestrian citizens and a parish boy. Here, if he can convince these venerable Cestrians of his respectability, he may go a-junketing by himself in that delicious feast of an old book, the Vale-Royale of England, published in London in 1656, and written, I believe, a half century or so earlier. Never was any bit of country more praised than this beautiful Chester County, "pleasant and abounding in plenteousness of all things needful and necessary for man's use, insomuch that it merited and had the name of the Vale-Royale of England." "The ayr is very wholesome, insomuch that the people of the Country are seldome infected with Diseases or Sicknesses; neither do they use the help of the Physicians nothing so much as in other countries. For when any of them are sick they make him a Posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not amend him, then God be merciful to him!" says the old writer. And of the river Dee, — "To which water no man can express how much this ancient city hath been beholden; nay, I suppose if I should call it the Mother, the Nurse, the Maintainer, the Advancer and Preserver thereof, I should not greatly erre." And again, of the shifting" sands o' Dee," this ancient and devout man, taking quite another view than that of the thoughtless or pensive lyrists, later, says,— "The changing and shifting of the water gave some occasion to the Britons in that Infancy of the Christian Religion to attribute some divine honor and estimation to the said water: though I cannot believe that to be any cause of the name of it." His pious deduction from the exceeding beauty of the situation of the city is that it is "worthy, according to the Eye, to be called a city guarded with Watch of Holy and Religious men, and through the Mercy of our Saviour always fenced and fortified with the merciful assistance of the Almighty." To keep it thus guarded, the monks of Vale-Royale did their best. Witness the terms in which their grant was couched :— "All the mannours, churches, lands and tenements aforesaid, in free pure and perpetual alms forever; with Homages, Rents, Demesnes, Villenages, Services of Free Holders and Bond, with Villains and their Families, Advowsous, Wards, Reliefs, Escheates, Woods, Plains, Meadows, Pastures, Wayes, Pathes, Heaths, Turfs, Forests, Waters, Ponds, Parks, Fishing, Mills in Granges, Cottages within Borough and without, and in all other places with all Easments, Liberties, Franchises and Free Customs any way belonging to the aforesaid Mannours, Churches, lands and tenements." Plainly, if the devil or any of his followers were caught in the Vale-Royale, they could be legally ejected as trespas sers. He was not, however, without an eye to worldly state, this devout writer, for he speaks with evident pride of the fine show kept up by the mayor of Ches ter: "The Estate that the Mayor of Chester keepeth is great. For he hath both Sword Bearer and Mace Bearer Sergeants, with their silver maces, in as good and decent order as in any other city in England. His housekeeping accordingly; but not so chargeable as in all other cities, because all thing are better cheap there. . . . He remaineth, most part of the day at a place called the Pendice which is a brave place builded for the purpose at the high Crosse under St. Peters Church, and in the middest of the city, of such a sort that a man may stand therein and see into the markets or four principal streets of the city." Nevertheless, there was once a mayor of Chester who did not see all he ought to have seen in the principal streets of the city for his own daughter, out playing ball "with other maids, in the summer time, in Pepur Street," stole away from her companions, and ran off with her sweetheart, through one of the city gates, at the foot of that street, which gate the enraged mayor ordered closed up forever, as if that would do any good; and some sharp-tongued and sensible Cestrian immediately phrased the illogical action in a proverb: "When the daughter is stolen, shut the Pepur gate." This saying is to be heard in Chester to this day, and is no doubt lineal ancestor of our own broader apothegm, "When the mare's stolen, lock the stable." There are many lively stories about mayors of Chester. There was a mayor in 1617 who made a very learned speech to King James, when he rode in through East Gate, with all the train soldiers of the city standing in order, "each company with their ensigns in seemly sort," the array stretching up both sides of East Gate Street. This mayor's name was Charles Fitton. He delivered his speech to the king; presented to him a "standing cup with a cover double gilt, and therein a hundred jacobins of gold;" likewise delivered to him the city's sword, and afterward bore it before him, in the procession. But when King James proposed, in return for all these civilities, to make a knight of him, Charles Fitton sturdily refused; which was a thing so strange for its day and generation that one is instantly possessed by a fire of curiosity to know what Charles Fitton's reasons could have been for such contempt of a knight's title. No doubt there is a story hanging thereby, something to do with a lady-love, not unlikely; and a fine ballad it would make, if one but knew it. The records, however, state only the bare fact. Then there was, a hundred years later than this, a man who got to be mayor of Chester by a very strange chance. He was a ribbon weaver, in a small way, kept a shop in Shoemaker's Row, and lived in a little house backing on the Falcon Inn. All of a sudden he blössomed out into a rich silk mercer; bought a fine estate just outside the city, built a grand house, and generally assumed the airs and manners of a dignitary. As is the way of the world now, so then people soon took him at his surface showing, forgot all about the mystery of his sudden wealth, and presently made him mayor of Chester. Afterward it came out, though never in such fashion that anything was done about it, how the mayor got his money. Just before the mysterious rise in his fortunes, a great London banking house had been robbed of a large sum of money by one of its clerks, who ran away, came to Chester, and went into hiding at the Falcon Inn. He was tracked and overtaken late one night. Hearing his pursuers on the stairs, he sprang from his bed and threw the treasure bags out of the window, plump into the ribbon weaver's back yard; where the disappointed constables naturally never thought of looking, and went back to London much chagrined, carrying only the man, and no money. None of the money having been found on the robber, he escaped conviction, but subsequently, for another offense, was tried, convicted, and executed. I take it for granted that it must have been he who told in his last hours what he did with the money bags: for certainly no one else knew ; that is, no one else except Mr. Samuel Jarvis, the ribbon weaver, who, much astonished, had picked them up before daylight, the morning after they had been thrown into his back yard. It is certain that he kept his mouth shut, and proceeded to turn the money to the best possible account in the shortest possible time. But an evil fate seemed to attach to the dishonestly gotten riches ; |