A baby, alone, in a lowly door, Which climbing woodbine made stili lower, The lilies grew high, and she reached up And laughed aloud, and talked, and clapped snapped, And flowers fell till the broad hearthstone Was covered, and only the topmost one Of the lilies left. In sobered glee She said to herself, "That's older than me!" II. Two strong men through the lowly door, ALBANO DAYS · FROM BITS OF TRAVEL. There are but seven in a week. That is their only fault. How clever those gentlemanly fellows, Pompey and Domitian, were, to put their villas on this hill; and as for the cruelties said to have been committed in Domitian's amphitheatre, a few rods from our hotel, we have decided that there is some mistake about that. In Rome one can believe in all tales of old tortures and new ones too, for that matter. Even when the larks sing loudest in the Coliseum the stones cry out louder; the air reeks with sirocco vapors, and seems not yet purged from the odor of blood. But in the pure, sun-flooded air of this hill, which must always have been full of marvellous delights, it is impossible to believe that bad men ever did bad deeds. Whatever they might have been in Rome, they were virtuous as soon as they got here. I cannot fancy Domitian's ever doing anything worse than having a few larks killed for supper; and I am sure he spent most of his afternoons lying on purple thyme on the shores of the Alban Lake (as we lay yesterday), perhaps slyly reading the good sayings of the poor Epictetus whom he had banished. We read yesterday what Epictetus said "concerning those who seek preferment in Rome"; and, as we looked over at the hot, smoky domes and spires, it seemed hard to believe that any one going thither, even if he were "met by a billet from Cæsar," could choose to stay. Albano is 1,250 feet above the sea, says Murray. That may be true, say we; but we know it is much more than that above Rome. Have we not been looking longingly at it for months, set high on the side of the Alban Hills? From every height in Rome to which we wearily climbed we saw it, triumphant with banners of clouds, and crowned with green of forests, saying as plainly as tower could say, "Come up here, and I will do you good." When the watchmen in the old Saracen towers saw the pirate-ships coming over the Mediterranean, they sounded the alarm, and all the people in the plains fled into the mountains for safety. To-day the towers are in ruins, and no corsairs sail from Africa across the sea; but the sirocco, a more deadly foe, comes in their stead, hotter and hotter with each day of May, and wise souls escape to high places. Of all those within easy reach of Rome, Albano is best. It is only an hour off by the cars. And even at the railroad station you are met by beauty and good cheer-a garden full of roses, and white thorns, and wall-flowers, and ranunculus; and a station-master who, if he treats you as well as he treated us, will give you a big bunch of all, and look hurt and angry when you offer to pay him. From this garden to the village of Albano, two miles and a half, over a good road, up, up, up! the air grows purer minute by minute; the Campagna behind sinks and stretches and fades, and becomes only another sea, purpler and more restless-looking than the broad band of the Mediterranean into which it melts. On each side are vineyards, looking now like miniature military encampments with play-guns of cane stacked by fives and threes, and little soldiers in green going in and out and playing leap-frog among them, so fantastic are the baby-vines in their first creeping. Olives, gray and solemn, sharing none of the life and joy, most pathetic of trees. The first man who saw an olive-tree must have known that there had been Gethsemane. Never else could such pathos have been put into mere color; they could never have been so gray before that night. up and up! It is a long two and a half miles. The bells tinkle slowly at the horse's head. The driver's neck bends suspiciously to one side; he is half asleep. You would not be sorry if the horse and he dozed off together, and you stood still for an hour to look. On the right hand is a valley garden, an old lake-bed, set full of vines and fig-trees and fruit-trees in full flower, and wheat, and all the numberless and exquisiteleaved "greens which Italy boils, eats, and manages to grow fat on. We find them beautiful everywhere but on the dinner-table. High on the crater-like side of this garden is the tower of Ariccia, looking like a gray bird which had just lit on its way up to Monte Cavo. Between Ariccia and Albano is a sharp ravine; and the sensible Pius IX., some twenty years ago, built a fine stone viaduct across it, toward the cost of which we pay half a franc each time we drive over. But only blind men could grudge the money. From every point it is a most beautiful feature in the landscape, with its three tiers of arches; and from its top you look down two hundred feet into the valley garden on one side, and two hundred feet into the tops of a forest of trees on the other. Still You follow the valley garden till it loses itself in the Campagna; the Campagna, till it loses itself in the Mediterranean, which glistens in the sun twelve miles off; and you hear coming up from the forest the voices of thrushes and nightingales and cuckoos and larks, till you believe that there must be a bird-fancier's shop in one of the old gray houses joining the bridge. To stand on this bridge for an hour is to see Italian country-life in drama. The donkeys, the men, and the women of Albano and Ariccia and Gensano act their little parts, and are gone. We stayed late at this play last night. The wardrobes were poor, but the acting was nature itself; such pantomime, such chorus! Priests in black, looking always like a sort of ecclesiastical crow, such silly solemnity in their faces, so much slow flap to their petticoats and the brims of their hats; barefooted monks, rolled up in cloaks of faded brown-they also have their similitude, and look as the olive-trees might if they gathered their rusty skirts around them and hobbled out for a walk; workmen, going home from the fields, with old hoes and pickaxes over their shoulders; women, with the same hoes and pickaxes, going home from the same work in the same fields, and carrying also, firm-set on their heads, bundles, loads of wood, little winebarrels or water-jars, or anything else which it can happen to an Albanese woman to need to carry. No one gives herself any more trouble about her barrel, or jar, or load of wood, than if it were a second head, which she had worn all her life. They talked and laughed as if it were morning instead of night. They were not tired. Watch them at what they call work, and you will see why. As the sun sank lower the crowd of laborers thinned; the farmers, one degree better off, came riding on donkeys. Two men and a boy on one donkey; four large bundles of wood and one woman on one donkey; four large casks of wine, a bundle of hay, two chairs, some iron utensils, and two small children on one donkey. Oh the comic tragedy of donkey! the hopeless arch of their eyebrows, the abjectness of their tails, and the vicious twist of their ankles! Nobody can watch them long without becoming wretched. Israelites, coolies, and negroes, all they have died of misfortunes; but the donkey is the Wandering Jew of misery among animals, and Italy, I think, must be his Ghetto. Before we reached the hotel we had come upon another drama, in the street, a lottery drawing; prize, two hens. If it had been two thousand scudi, there could not have been much more excitement. Fifty chances had been sold. The street held its breath, while a store-keeper dropped the counters one by one into a box, held by a rosy boy, mischievous enough, but too young to cheat. Then the boy put in his little brown. fingers, and drew out one: Thirty!" Then the street broke out into chatter for an instant, guessing and betting what would come next; then held its breath stiller than ever. Thirty-one!" Thirty-one! No "Thirty-one' answered. Thirty-one" was sick at home, or had married a wife, and could not come: and the street grudged him his two hens all the more that he was not on hand to carry them off. The hens screamed and scuffled; the storekeeper crammed them back into a coop on his window; and the street went back to its work, i. e. to sitting about, smoking, and knitting, and selling saddles and fish and shoes and salad and handkerchiefs and donkeys and calico and wine all along its doorsteps, never by any chance being under roof, so long as there is daylight. We took our sunsetting at the Villa Doria. It is a princely thing of the rich Romans to throw their beautiful villas open to the public. Could it be safely done in America ? I fear our people are not gentle enough, and have too much money to spend on cake and peanuts. Here no harm comes of it. In the Villa Doria are ilex-trees which are a kingdom in themselves. It would not seem unnatural to make obeisance to them. They stand in groups, making long vistas, high arches, locking and interlocking their branches, their trunks looking as old as the masses of ruins. among them; and the ruins belonged to Pompey's walls. At sunset the sun slants under and through these ilexes; the purple and wine-colored bands of the Campagna and sky beyond seem to narrow closer and closer round the hill, and flocks of birds wheel and sing. In the Villa Barberini, higher up, is a great field of stone-pines, stately as a council of gods. No wonder that Theodore Parker, when he saw a stone-pine, asked that one be set on his grave. No tree grows which has such bearing of a solemn purpose. Such morning and evening as this make a day in Albano. Words give but glimpse and no color. For other days there are other villas, and fields, and ruins, tombs of Pompey and of Aruns, Lake Nemy and its village, Gensano, and Marino, and Rocca di Papa, all within easy reach and always in sight. There are four lovely winding avenues of trees, called Gallerie, where you drive for miles under arches of gray ilex as grand as stone, and where the oldest trees are propped by pillars to save their strength and keep them alive. There is Monte Cavo, the highest of the Alban Hills, one thousand feet above Albano, where there used to be a temple, and Julius Cæsar went up to be crowned one day. To think that an English cardinal dared to pull down the ruined temple, and build a convent and church in its stead! Some of the roads are very smooth and good, others are rough and narrow. For these you must take donkeys, and go perhaps two miles an hour; but, going so slowly, you will have great reward in learning the faces of the wayside flowers and getting into fellowship with the lizards. Fifty different kinds of flowers I counted in one afternoon, all growing wild by the road; and the other day, on the road to Marino, I made acquaintance with two lizards, who were finer than Solomon in all his glory, and had a villa with a better view than the Barberini. THE AWKWARD AGE FROM BITS OF TALK. The expression defines itself. At the first sound of the words, we all think of some one unhappy soul we know just now, whom they suggest. Nobody is ever without at least one brother, sister, cousin, or friend on hand, who is struggling through this social slough of despond; and nobody ever will be, so long as the world goes on taking it for granted that the slough is a necessity, and that the road must go through it. Nature never meant any such thing. Now and then she blunders or gets thwarted of her intent, and turns out a person who is awkward, hopelessly and forever awkward; body and soul are clumsy together, and it is hard to fancy them translated to the spiritual world without too much elbow and ankle. However, these are rare cases, and come in under the law of variation. But an awkward age, -a necessary crisis or stage of uncoutnness, through which all human beings must pass, Nature was incapable of such a conception; law has no place for it; development does not know it; instinct revolts from it; and man is the only animal who has been silly and wrong-headed enough to stumble into it. The explanation and the remedy are so simple, so close at hand, that we have not seen them. The whole thing lies in a nutshell. Where does this abnormal, uncomfortable period come in? Between childhood, we say, and maturity; it is the transition from one to the other. When human beings, then, are neither boys nor men, girls nor women, they must be for a few years anomalous creatures, must they? We might, perhaps, find a name for the individual in this condition as well as for the condition. We must look to Du Chaillu for it, if we do; but it is too serious a distress to make light of, even for a moment. We have all felt it, and we know how it feels; we all see it every day, and we know how it looks. What is it which the child has and the adult loses, from the loss of which comes this total change of behavior? Or is it something which the adult has and the child had not? It is both; and until the loss and the gain, the new and the old, are permanently separated and balanced, the awkward age lasts. The child was overlooked, contradicted, thwarted, snubbed, insulted, whipped; not constantly, not often, in many cases, thank God, very seldom. But the liability was there, and he knew it; he never forgot it, if you did. One burn is enough to make fire dreaded. The adult, once fairly recognized as adult, is not overlooked, contradicted, thwarted, snubbed, insulted, whipped; at least not with impunity. To this gratifying freedom, these comfortable exemptions, when they are once established in our belief, we adjust ourselves, and grow contentedly good-mannered. To the other régime, while we were yet children, we also somewhat adjusted ourselves, were tolerably well behaved, and made the best of it. But who could bear a mixture of both? What genius could rise superior to it, could be itself, surrounded by such uncertainties? No wonder that your son comes into the room with a confused expression of uncomfortable pain on every feature, when he does not in the least know whether he will be recognized as a gentleman, or overlooked as a little boy. No wonder he sits down in his chair with movements suggestive of nothing but rheumatism and jack-knives, when he is thinking that perhaps there may be some reason why he should not take that particular chair, and that, if there is, he will be ordered up. No wonder that your tall daughter turns red, stammers and says foolish things on being courteously spoken to by strangers at dinner, when she is afraid that she may be sharply contradicted or interrupted, and remembers that day before yesterday she was told that children should be seen and not heard. I knew a very clever girl, who had the misfortune to look at fourteen as if she were twenty. At home, she was the shyest and most awkward of creatures; away from her mother and sisters, she was self-possessed and charming. She said to me, once, 56 Oh! I have such a splendid time away from home. I'm so tall, everybody thinks I am grown up, and everybody is civil to me." I know, also, a man of superb physique, charming temperament, and uncommon talent, who is to this day- and he is twenty-five years old nervous and ill at ease in talking with strangers, in the presence of his own family. He hesitates, stammers, and never does justice to his thoughts. He says that he believes he shall never be free from this distress; he cannot escape from the recollections of the years between fourteen and twenty, during which he was so systematically snubbed that his mother's parlor was to. him worse than the chambers of the Inquisition. knows that he is now sure of courteous treatment; that his friends are all proud of him; but the old cloud will never entirely disappear. Something has been lost which can never be regained. And the loss is not his alone, it is theirs too; they are He all poorer for life, by reason of the unkind days which are gone. This is part of the kingdom that cometh unobserved. In this kingdom we are all to be kings and priests, if we choose; and all its ways are pleasantness. But we are not ready for it till we have become peaceable and easy to be entreated, and have learned to understand why it was that one day, when Jesus called his disciples together, he set a little child in their midst. A COMPANION FOR THE WINTER FROM BITS I have engaged a companion for the winter. It would be simply a superfluous egotism to say this to the public, except that I have a philanthropic people who are in need of a companion possessmotive for doing so. There are many lonely ing just such qualities as his; and he has brothers singularly like himself, whose services can be secured. I despair of doing justice to him by any In fact, thus far, I discover new perfections in him daily, and believe that I am yet only on the threshold of our friendship. In conversation he is more suggestive than any person I have ever known. After two or three hours alone with him, I am sometimes almost startled to look back and see through what a marvellous train of fancy and reflection he has led me. Yet he is never wordy, and often conveys his subtlest meaning by a look. This, then, is the explanation of the awkward age. I am not afraid of any dissent from my definition of the source whence its misery springs. Everybody's consciousness bears witness. Every-description. body knows, in the bottom of his heart, that, however much may be said about the change of voice, the thinness of cheeks, the sharpness of arms, the sudden length in legs and lack of length in trowsers and frocks, all these had nothing to do with the real misery. The real misery was simply and solely the horrible feeling of not belonging anywhere; not knowing what a moment might bring forth in the way of treatment from others; never being sure which impulse it would be safer to follow, to retreat or to advance, to speak or to be silent, and often overwhelmned with unspeakable mortification at the rebuff of the one or the censure of the other. Oh! how dreadful it all was! How dreadful it all is, even to remember! It would be malicious even to refer to it, except to point out the cure. The cure is plain. It needs no experiment to test it. Merely to mention it ought to be enough. If human beings are so awkward at this unhappy age, and so unhappy at this awkward age, simply because they do not know whether they are to be treated as children or as adults, suppose we make a rule that children are always to be treated, in point of courtesy, as if they were adults? Then this awkward age- this period of transition from an atmosphere of, to say the least, negative rudeness to one of gracious politeness-disappears. There cannot be a crisis of readjustment of social relations: there is no possibility of such a feeling; it would be hard to explain to a young person what it meant. Now and then we see a young man or young woman who has never known it. They are usually only children, and are commonly spoken of as wonders. I know such a boy to-day. At seventeen he measures six feet in height; he has the feet and the hands of a still larger man; and he comes of a blood which had far more strength than grace. But his manner is, and always has been, sweet, gentle, composed,· the very ideal of grave, tender, frank young manhood. People say, People say, "How strange! He never seemed to have any awkward age at all." It would have been stranger if he had. Neither his father nor his mother ever departed for an instant, in their relations with him, from the laws of courtesy and kindliness of demeanor which governed their relations with others. He knew but one atmosphere, and that a genial one, from his babyhood up; and in and of this atmosphere has grown up a sweet, strong, pure soul, for which the quiet, self-possessed manner is but the fitting garb. He is an artist, too, of the rarest sort. You watch the process under which his pictures grow with incredulous wonder. The Eastern magic which drops the seed in the mould, and bids it shoot up before your eyes, blossom, and bear its fruit in an hour, is tardy and clumsy by side of the creative genius of my companion. His touch is swift as air; his coloring is vivid as light; he has learned, I know not how, the secrets of hidden places in all lands; and he paints, now a tufted clump of soft cocoa palms; now the spires and walls of an iceberg, glittering in yellow sunlight; now a desolate, sandy waste, where black rocks and a few crumbling ruins are lit up by a lurid glow; then a cathedral front, with carvings like lace; then the skeleton of a wrecked ship, with bare ribs and broken masts, and all so exact, so minute, so life-like, that you believe no man could paint thus any thing which he had not seen. He has a special love for mosaics, and a marvellous faculty for making drawings of curious old patterns. Nothing is too complicated for his memory, and he revels in the most fantastic and intricate shapes. I have known him in a single evening throw off a score of designs, all beautiful, and many of them rare: fiery scorpions on a black ground; pale lavender filagrees over scarlet; white and black squares blocked out as for tiles of a pavement, and crimson and yellow threads interlaced over them; odd Chinese patterns in brilliant colors, all angles and surprises, with no likeness to any thing in nature; and exquisite little bits of landscapes in soft grays and whites. Last night was one of his nights of reminiscences. of the mosaic-workers. A furious snow-storm was raging, and, as the flaky crystals piled up in drifts on the window-ledges, he seemed to catch the inspiration of their law of structure, and drew sheet after sheet of crystalline shapes; some so delicate and filmy that it seemed as if a jar might obliterate them; some massive and strong, like those in which the earth keeps her mineral treasures; then, at last, on a round charcoal disk, he traced out a perfect rose, in a fragrant white powder, which piled up under his fingers, petal after petal, circle after circle, till the feathery stamens were buried out of sight. Then, as we held our breath for fear of disturbing it, with a good-natured little chuckie, he shook it off into the fire, and by a few quick strokes of red turned the black charcoal disk into a shield gay enough for a tournament, He has talent for modelling, but this he exercises more rarely. Usually, his figures are grotesque rather than beautiful, and he never allows them to remain longer than for a few moments, often changing them so rapidly under your eye that it seems like jugglery. He is fondest of doing this at twilight, and loves the darkest corner of the room. From the half-light he will suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile's mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are ready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reached this limit, and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, like the wind through pines, sometimes almost like an Eolian harp; then he rouses you from your dreams by what you are sure is a tap at the door. You turn, speak, listen; no one enters; the tap again. Ah! it is only a little more of the ventriloquism of this wonderful creature. You are alone with him, and there was no tap at the door. But when there is, and the friend comes in, then my companion's genius shines out. Almost always in life the third person is a discord, or at least a burden; but he is so genial, so diffusive, so sympathetic, that, like some tints by which painters know how to bring out all the other colors in a picture, he forces every one to do his best. I am indebted to him already for a better knowledge of some men and women with whom I had talked for years before to little purpose. It is most wonderful that he produces this effect, because he himself is so silent; but there is some secret charm in his very smile which puts people en rapport with each other, and with him at once. I am almost afraid to go on with the list of the things my companion can do. I have not yet told the half, nor the most wonderful; and I believe I have already overtaxed credulity. I will mention only one more, - but that is to me far more inexplicable than all the rest. I am sure that it belongs, with mesmerism and clairvoyance, to the domain of the higher psychological mysteries. He has in rare hours the power of producing the portraits of persons whom you have loved, but whom he has never seen. For this it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention on him, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power. It must also be late and still. In the day, or in a storm, I have never known him to succeed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowy gray tints. He begins with a hesitating outline. If you are not tenderly and closely in attention, he throws it nside; he can do nothing. But if you are with him, heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, he will presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and wearing a smile, which makes you sure that they too must have been summoned A But I delay too long the telling of his name. strange hesitancy seizes me. I shall never be believed by any one who has not sat as I have by his side. But, if I can only give to one soul the good-cheer and strength of such a presence, I shall be rewarded. His name is Maple Wood-fire, and his terms are from eight to twelve dollars a month, according to the amount of time he gives. This price is ridiculously low, but it is all that any member of the family asks; in fact, in some parts of the country, they can be hired for much less. They have connections by the name of Hickory, whose terms are higher; but I cannot find out that they are any more satisfactory. There are also some distant relations, named Chestnut and Pine, who can be employed in the same way, at a much lower rate; but they are all snappish and uncertain in temper. To the whole world I commend the good brotherhood of Maple, and pass on the emphatic endorsement of a blessed old black woman who came to my room the other day, and, standing before the rollicking blaze on my hearth, said, "Bless yer, honey, yer's got a wood-fire. I'se allers said that, if yer's got a wood-fire, yer's got meat, an' drink, an' clo'es." ** MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY WAS born at his father's country residence in Stafford county, Virginia, March 17, 1832. His father, Walker Peyton Conway, was long a magistrate of Stafford county, and some time member of the Virginia Legislature. His mother, Margaret Eleanor Conway, is a daughter of John Moncure Daniel, M.D., a graduate of Edinburgh, and Surgeon-General of the U. S. Army under President Monroe. She is also granddaughter of Thomas Stone, of Maryland, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. M. D. Conway was sent to Dickinson College, Carlisle, Penna., in 1847, where he was graduated in 1849, and from which he received subsequently the degree of M. A. At this college he became a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. On returning to Virginia, he began the study of law in the office of W. F. Phillips, of Warrenton, contributing, meanwhile, to the Southern Literary Messenger, and also to the Richmond Examiner, then edited by his cousin, the late John M. Daniel, afterward Charge d' Affaires in Sardinia. Here he also wrote a pamphlet, entitled Free Schools in Virginia, warmly advocating the New England system. In 1851 Mr. Conway resolved to enter upon the Methodist ministry, and having been received into the Baltimore Conference, he was appointed to Rockville circuit, Maryland. Up to this time he had held ardent Southern opinions, and had been secretary of a Southern Rights Club in Warrenton. But his views began to change under the awakening influences of an antislavery settlement of Quakers, as he has described in a work entitled Testimonies Concerning Slavery, published in London, 1865. |