held not fit to eat, because they had grown and ripened underground.

"Underground," said father, who was eating everything before him with savage rapacity, "underground ain't such a bad place. I've often thought I'd better go there myself and settle down.” That afternoon Rhoda said she really believed he would die. The turnips and carrots seemed to disagree with him. She made him drink cup after cup of hot water, just as near the boiling point as he could bear it. I ran over with ginger and mustard, which I use only in case of sickness, and heard his feeble voice refusing the seventh cup of hot water. "No, thank ye, Rhody," he said, "my stomach can stand a good deal; it can stand to be flattened out with chicken feed and greens, but it hain't no mind to be drowned out nor scalded out."

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"It's

"I knew those underground vegetables were bad for you," said my sister. a solemn example."

"Is it?" said father. "Well, I tell you what it is, girls, I want some beefsteak for my supper to-night, tender and juicy, and plenty of it. That's what I want."

Rhoda uttered a shriek, and sat down and shuddered. "Never in this house," she exclaimed.

"I'm afraid to, father," I said. "You might over-eat again, and you would then surely die. Meat of any sort fires the blood."

The old man looked first at Rhoda, then at me, saying things which I will not repeat. It distressed us to be spoken to in this way, but allowance must always be made for the fretfulness of old age. The poor man never seemed wholly to recover from the raw potatoes and turnips. He grew weaker and weaker till he took to his bed altogether. During his illness he maintained a curious aversion for anything in the shape of gruel or fruit, and astounded one good lady who brought him a basket of delicious grapes by stripping bunch after bunch, and throwing them, three or four at a time, hard at her, now at my sister or myself, now at the walls and windows. He called it "grape shot," I remember, and laughed in demoniac glee at our

protests. After this he sank into unnatural calm, and thinking that his end was approaching we sent for the minister. A portion of Scripture was read, and prayer offered. Then the good man approached his bedside, and asked him what would satisfy the deepest desire of his nature.

"Pork and beans!" exclaimed father, with sudden force.

"I was not alluding to creature comforts," said the minister confused.

"But I am," was the tart response, "and I intend to allude to 'em till I get 'em." The glitter of delirium reappeared in his eye, and the house re-echoed with shrieking demands for pork and beans. Our nearest neighbor, whose sleep was disturbed by this strange outcry, came in next day with a dish containing the loathsome viands. "Oh, you'll kill him,” said Rhoda.

"He'll kill himself," said she, "with this awful shrieking. If he's going to die anyway, he'd better die in peace. She went into the sick room with her pork and beans, and a slice of homemade bread and butter, and came back presently with an empty plate. A great stillness brooded over the house. I looked in at the invalid half an hour later, and found him peacefully sleeping, with a sweet smile on his face.

From this moment, incredible as it may seem, father steadily improved. Of course the mind has a great influence over the body, but I did not suppose that a masculine love of having his own way could triumph over the pernicious effects of the most abhorred of culinary products.

As soon as he was able to walk, father came back to our house, making some unpleasant remark, as he came, about jumping from the fire back into the frying pan. But convalescents are proverbially irritable, and I took no notice. "What you need now, in your present weak condition," I said, "is a liberal supply of all the elements necessary to renovate the system." And for supper that night I provided him with a generous slice of brown bread, made of the whole grain, and a large sauce dish of dried apples. He began to eat in silence.

I could see he was weak yet from his sickness, for presently a tear trickled down his cheek, and moistened the bread. "You are thinking of mother," I said, "but you should not grieve after her. Death is common to all. It is a wise provision of Nature."

"Don't talk to me about provisions, Jane," said he.

At that moment the door was softly pushed open, and a rosy-cheeked young woman looked in and made a rush across the room at father. "Dear old dad," she cried, throwing her arms around him; "dear, blessed, old dad, you will forgive me, won't you? Oh, you must forgive me. I'll not let go of you till you

do."

"Why, Cordely," said father, "is that you?" He was so weak he could only sit still and look at her, while his lip quivered. "Of course, if you're happy," he added, "I hain't a word to say agin' the match."

"I

"Do I look very miserable?" she asked, a smile playing among the dimples in her red cheeks. Then she crossed and shook hands with me, and kissed me, looking a little shy and frightened. Suddenly her face grew grave and sad. She took a chair by father's side. didn't hear of mother's death till after it was all over," she said, "and then my baby wasn't expected to live and couldn't leave the little fellow. But when I heard you were sick I told Ed I couldn't stand it to be estranged from you any longer. And so we've come back here to live, father, and I'm going to try and make amends for all the pain I've caused you." She took his wrinkled old hand between both of her's, and kissed it and cried over it. Then she jumped up. "Why," she exclaimed, "I've brought you over a little chicken broth, piping hot, - and I nearly forgot all about it." She brought in a small covered tin pail, whisked the dried apples and brown bread off the table, without so much as by your leave, and the next moment that poor sick man, who had no more

craving for food than a canary, was stimulating an artificial appetite on a stew made of the most gross of animal substances (a chicken will eat what a pig will not) with bits of toasted white bread floating in it!

But this was nothing to what followed. Two days later was Thanksgiving, and Cordelia invited father, Rhoda, Jake, Joe, and myself over to her place for dinner. Of course, we did not wish to disoblige her by not going. Jake and Joe promised to be very careful what they ate. Rhoda said if it wouldn't offend Cordelia she'd like to take a little ground wheat over, which she could eat with cranberry or apple sauce; but I persuaded her it would be best to conform a little more than that, and we decided to eat a very little of one vegetable, choosing one with no pepper nor butter in it, and afterwards some nuts and raisins. Father seemed a good deal excited over the affair, but he didn't say anything till we got there. The air in the dining-room was simply nauseating with odors of sage and onions, nutmeg, allspice, and lemon, roast goose, and mince pies.

"Now, Ed," said Cordelia to her big blacksmith husband, "be sure and give father the upper part of the leg, a wing, and part of the breast, with plenty of dressing. I'll help the gravy and vegetables."

"Father," said Rhoda, "it may be well to remember that none of those things contain the elements of — "

"I don't want no elements," roared father. "Curse the elements! What I want is a square meal."

"And that's just what we calculate to give you," said the blacksmith with a loud laugh. The wild excess and wanton extravagance of the meal were talked over by Rhoda and me for many a day. As for father, he continues to live with Cordelia and her husband. We expected he would go into a decline, but he appears marvellously well and cheerful. It's wonderful what a man of naturally strong constitution will survive.

WRITE of Freeman as one of the historical and political authors whose works have had a prominent place in my own education, and to whom I am deeply indebted; and yet I trust I can write of him impartially.

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the

It cannot justly be said that Freeman He was was a profound thinker. thorough Englishman, with some of the characteristic limitations of the English mind. He was not a philosopher, nor an idealist, but "a plain, blunt man," on whose original nature was grafted a splendid classical and historical culture. He rebuked young Oxford, when professor there, for the "chatter about Shelley," which to him was but poor stuff when compared with such themes as dominion of the great Karl, the invasion of Duke William, the position of the Burgundian kingdom, or the forgotten conquests of Carthage. We may well doubt whether Mr. Freeman ever read Shelley in his life; and we may be morally certain that the "Epipsychidion" or the "Lines written in the Euganean Hills" would have been as absolutely unintelligible to him as the theory of quaternions to a non-mathematical mind like my own. It is useless to argue these points. There will, let us hope, be people like Freeman and others like Shelley so long as the world stands. But there is no reason why the one set should quarrel with the other. In the world of letters there are many mansions.

The first time I ever saw Freeman was at Cambridge (the English Cambridge), on a fine day of May in 1872. He had come to deliver the Rede Lecture before the University, on "The Unity of History"; and as I had always had from my earliest days a passion for seeing any celebrated man, I made my way into the Senate House, where the great man was welcomed by a crowd of black-gowned university

men and by a considerable gathering of the ladies who grace Cambridge with their presence in what has been conventionally termed the "merry month of May." I was particularly struck with Freeman's massive head, leonine aspect, and deep, full voice, which resounded in sonorous periods through that ugly, pseudo-classic building. I afterwards saw him, when the lecture was over, walking through the courts of St. John's College with his friend Professor Babington, the venerable Professor of Botany, and was irreverently amused at the shortness of the historian's legs, which rendered his walking not very unlike the waddling of a duck, while he was pointing all the time at the red brick gables of one of the older courts and probably gesticulating on architec

ture.

The qualities which Freeman showed most conspicuously throughout his lifetime were solidity and thoroughness of work and the most extraordinary industry. If genius consists in an infinite capacity for taking pains (which it doesn't), then was Freeman one of the most striking men of genius of the century. The mere amount of work he got through fills one with amazement. His writings fill no fewer than thirty-seven volumes; and while some of these, like the little book on "William the Conqueror" or that on "The Growth of the English Constitution," are small, the five large tomes of the "Norman Conquest," the fragmentary "History of Federal Government," and the "Historical Geography of Europe " involve an amount of hard toil in the actual making, quite apart from the preparation in reading and research, which only those who have themselves done a fair measure of writing can possibly appreciate. It is, I believe, the case that Freeman at one time actually lost the use of his righthand fingers through sheer overwork. No typical German professor ever did more severe tasks. He could "toil terribly," it was said of Sir Walter Raleigh;

the same verdict might be passed on Freeman.

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But Freeman's work was not only heavy, it was thorough and exact. distinguished historical scholar once said to me of Freeman's friend, Bishop Stubbs, whose great "Constitutional History" is one of the opera magna of our time, that he had never made a single mistake. I believe the same thing might be said of Freeman himself. He had the instinct for facts and the perfect sense of accuracy. I am not prepared to assert that there is not a single error in any one of Freeman's thirty-seven volumes; but I never came across or heard of one. His observation, whether of old manuscripts or of ancient buildings, was as painstaking and exact in every detail as was the observation of Darwin of the facts of natural history. Freeman had, therefore, the first qualification for a historian - accuracy—a quality in which his old rival and now successor in the chair of Modern History at Oxford is singularly deficient. It would, indeed, have added a pang to death had Freeman known that James Anthony Froude was to be his successor.

Another great quality which marks Freeman out as belonging to the newer school of historians is his impartiality and rigid reverence for truth. Gibbon, of course, stands alone in solitary grandeur - the greatest historian by far that England, or perhaps the modern world, ever produced. But the other wellknown English historians, until the new historical school arose at Oxford, are mostly vehement partisans. Macaulay's brilliant and ever-charming narrative is at glorification of whiggism. Mitford wrote a history of Greece (to be had now at second-hand book-shops) from the point of view of an English Tory. Grote answered it from the point of view of a philosophical Radical, in what has been described as "the most gigantic party pamphlet ever produced." Hume's "History of England" is a piece of sceptical eighteenth century Toryism; while Robertson, now little read, was Whiggish in his tendenz. Godwin's "History of the Commonwealth" was the attempt of an English Republican to set forth the case

for Martyn and Vane against that for Cromwell. Carlyle, on the other hand, produced a splendid Cromwelliad, nearer the truth, it may be, than Godwin, but obviously biased by the writer's anti-democratic sentiment. Mr. Froude devoted a picturesque style and no little energy to a glowing romance, in which the halo of heroism, if not of saintship, was cast round the figure of Henry VIII. This romance he humorously named a "History of England." He also produced another work on Irish history, crammed with inaccuracies and wrong inferences from beginning to end, which Mr. Lecky, with his cold, rigid devotion to truth, has riddled through and through with the redhot shot of historical criticism.

It has been much the same in modern France. Take up any French history of the Revolution, with the exception of Mignet's succinct narrative, and you find a party pamphlet. Thiers glorified Napoleon, and Louis Blanc the democratic Rousseau tradition; while M. Taine, under a cloak of impartiality and philosophic method, has obviously delved into the Revolutionary documents with the distinct intention of proving that the leaders of the Revolution were among the most ignoble scoundrels whom the stirring of the social scum ever brought to the surface. Tocqueville's calm and lucid survey of the Ancien Régime suggests that the great author of La Democratie en Amérique ought to have been the historian of the French Revolution. It has been reserved for an English writer, Mr. H. Morse Stephens, to produce a work on that great theme which, though not brilliant, is most painstaking and accurate, full of information as to the events in the provinces as well as the doings in Paris, characterized all through (so far as it has yet gone) by excellent judgment and by genuine impartiality.

Although I should be far from desiring that a historian should never write as an avowed Conservative, like Hume or Mitford, or should write as an avowed Radical or Democrat, like Grote or Freeman, yet I am persuaded that no historian can produce a work of permanent value unless his intellectual sympathies are fairly progressive. For history is not

a narrative of events, but a rationale of the process of growth. Now we see that in biology the men who were dead set against the evolutionary conception of life, men like Cuvier, e. g., although they may have done excellent work in observation and classification, have yet lost their hold on the scientific mind. Their influence is dead, because they were on the wrong track. It is the men like Goethe, St. Hilaire, Wallace, Darwin, who had a fruitful idea, who had grasped the conception of orderly progress through the interaction of forces inherent in organisms themselves apart from external mechanical agencies - it is these great naturalists who have really given the vast impetus to the science of the nineteenth century. And in the same way, I conceive, no man who is boggling over antediluvian politics, or who fails to conceive that what we call the democratic movement is inevitable, or who fails to realize that there is a movement at all no such man can be a great historian. We shall relegate the writings of such an one to the dusty top shelf where those uncut volumes of Hume are placidly reposing.

I may bereminded of Gibbon's Toryism, of Gibbon who supported George III. against the American Colonies, and who sat for brief time among the Tory squires in the old unreformed House of Commons. It will be remembered that Gibbon threw over, in obedience to his father's wishes, a lady whom he desired to marry. "I sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son," he says in his autobiography. So there was, I venture to think, a Gibbon the Tory and a Gibbon the philosophic historian, and the first never intruded into the domain of the second. All through Gibbon's great work we have the sense of the inevitable destiny of the great fabric of the Roman Empire, the growing weakness of the vital organs, the birth of new ideas, the ever-growing, resistless might of the barbarous tribes, the sense of dissolution. The historian who built the great "bridge between the old world and the new" cannot be accused of any lack of the sense of inevitable movement.

Now Mr. Freeman as a historian had the twofold advantage of being strictly

accurate and impartial, while yet sympathizing with the general world-movement. His sympathy does not go the length of believing that everything which has happened was, as a matter of fact, the very best thing that could conceivably have happened. Perhaps no one really does hold such a creed, although some optimists occasionally speak as if they did. Mr. Freeman holds, e. g., that it would have been a very happy thing for Europe had the old Burgundian kingdom remained intact as a bulwark between Germany and a France much smaller than we know it to-day. In such a case there would have been no wars of the Grand Monarque, no Franco-German war, no possibility of that coming Franco-German war which Europe dreads to-day. If a man believes that every historical event was absolutely the very best that could have taken place, it is hard to see where he gets his incentive to reform. What I claim for Freeman is that he is reasonably sympathetic with democratic progress, and that he is conscious that historical events are not isolated phenomena, but are woven into the texture of the world of man.

The danger, of course, in holding this view is that of counting individuals as nothing, and the movement (conceived of as a sort of distinct entity) everything. It is the opposite error to Carlyle's heroworship, where great and wonderful individuals are made to do and be everything. Freeman appears to me to hold a very even balance between these two extremes. He can see the immense value of the personal contributions of such statesmen as Perikles, Karl the Great, Simon of Montfort, Washington, and yet he invariably subordinates even these to the organic life of which they were but a part, however necessary and imposing. Surely this is the true view. The Carlylean view is merely a traditional relic of the early Pagan legends of God-descended heroes, a Herakles, a Curtius, a Thor, who could perform by a divine magic what ordinary human beings could not do. It is a notion quite fatal to democracy, fatal to humanity, as Mazzini showed in his searching criticism of Carlyle. If we are incapable of self-government and