Half of his short life was spent in
editorial connection with that paper.
editorial connection with that paper.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
Whither should they fly?
Some, antici-
pating a second earthquake, hastened to their homes to load
themselves with their more costly goods and escape while it was
yet time; others, dreading the showers of ashes that now fell
fast, torrent upon torrent, over the streets, rushed under the
roofs of the nearest houses, or temples, or sheds — shelter of any
kind - for protection from the terrors of the open air. But
darker, and larger, and mightier, spread the cloud above them.
It was a sudden and more ghastly Night rushing upon the realm
of Noon!
KENELM AND LILY
From Kenelm Chillingly)
THE
he children have come,- some thirty of them, pretty as Eng-
lish children generally are, happy in the joy of the summer
sunshine, and the flower lawns, and the feast under cover
of an awning suspended between chestnut-trees and carpeted
with sward.
No doubt Kenelm held his own at the banquet, and did his
best to increase the general gayety, for whenever he spoke the
children listened eagerly, and when he had done they laughed
mirthfully.
“The fair face I promised you,” whispered Mrs. Braefield, is
not here yet.
I have a little note from the young lady to say
that Mrs. Cameron does not feel very well this morning, but
hopes to recover sufficiently to come later in the afternoon. ”
And
pray
who is Mrs. Cameron ? »
"Ah! I forgot that you are a stranger to the place. Mrs.
Cameron is the aunt with whom Lily resides. Is it not a pretty
name, Lily ? »
“Very! emblematic of a spinster that does not spin, with a
white head and a thin stalk. "
« Then the name belies my Lily; as you will see. ”
## p. 2724 (#288) ###########################################
2724
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The children now finished their feast and betook themselves
to dancing, in an alley smoothed for a croquet-ground and to
the sound of a violin played by the old grandfather of one of the
party. While Mrs. Braefield was busying herself with forming
the dance, Kenelm seized the occasion to escape from a young
nymph of the age of twelve, who had sat next to him at the
banquet and taken so great a fancy to him that he began to
fear she would vow never to forsake his side, — and stole away
undetected.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us,
especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our
own quiet mood. Gliding through a dense shrubbery, in which,
though the lilacs were faded, the laburnum still retained here
and there the waning gold of its clusters, Kenelm came into a
recess which bounded his steps and invited him to repose. It
was a circle, so formed artificially by slight trellises, to which
clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and flowers. In the midst
played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring sound; at the
background, dominating the place, rose the crests of stately trees,
on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out all
horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant pas-
sions - love, ambition, desire of power, or gold, or fame, or
knowledge — form the proud background to the brief-lived flow-
erets of our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom,
catch the glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet - and yet - exclude
our sight from the lengths and the widths of the space which
extends behind and beyond them.
Kenelm threw himself on the turf beside the fountain. Froin
afar came the whoop and the laugh of the children in their
sports or their dance. At the distance their joy did not sadden
him - he marveled why; and thus, in musing reverie, thought to
explain the why to himself.
"The poet,” so ran his lazy thinking, has told us that dis-
tance lends enchantment to the view,' and thus compares to the
charm of distance the illusion of hope. But the poet narrow's
the scope of his own illustration. Distance lends enchantment to
the ear as well as to the sight; nor to these bodily senses alone.
Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to the far away. '
"I cannot imagine myself again a child when I am in the
midst of yon noisy children. But as their noise reaches me here,
subdued and mellowed; and knowing, thank Heaven! that the
## p. 2725 (#289) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2725
urchins are not within reach of me, I could readily dream myself
back into childhood and into sympathy with the lost playfields of
school.
« So surely it must be with grief: how different the terrible
agony for a beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret
for one who disappeared into heaven years ago! So with the art
of poetry: how imperatively, when it deals with the great emo-
tions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in propor-
tion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please
us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to
place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined
yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and
married his mother. But when Edipus commits those unhappy
mistakes nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth century is
a long way off from Thebes three thousand or four thousand
years ago.
"And,” continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of
metaphysical criticism, “even where the poet deals with persons
and things close upon our daily sight - if he would give them
poetic charm he must resort to a sort of moral or psychological
distance; the nearer they are to us in external circumstance, the
farther they must be in some internal peculiarities. Werter and
Clarissa Harlowe are described as contemporaries of their artistic
creation, and with the minutest details of an apparent realism;
yet they are at once removed from our daily lives by their idio-
syncrasies and their fates. We know that while Werter and Clar-
issa are so near to us in much that we sympathize with them as
friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us in
the poetic and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged
to the age of Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the
very pain which their fate inflicts on Thus, I suppose, it
must be in love. If the love we feel is to have the glamor of
poetry, it must be love for some one morally at a distance from
our ordinary habitual selves; in short, differing from us in at-
tributes which, however near we draw to the possessor, we can
never approach, never blend, in attributes of our own; so that
there is something in the loved one that always remains an
ideal -a mystery -'a sun-bright summit mingling with the
sky! )
From this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was
roused slowly, reluctantly. Something struck softly on his cheek
us.
## p. 2726 (#290) ###########################################
2726
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
- again a little less softly; he opened his eyes — they fell first
upon two tiny rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen
on his breast; and then looking up, he saw before him, in an
opening of the trellised circle, a female child's laughing face.
Her hand was still uplifted, charged with another rosebud; but
behind the child's figure, looking over her shoulder and holding
back the menacing arm, was a face as innocent but lovelier far
the face of a girl in her first youth, framed round with the
blossoms that festooned the trellis. How the face became the
flowers! It seemed the fairy spirit of them.
Kenelm started and rose to his feet. The child, the one
whom he had so ungallantly escaped from, ran towards him
through a wicket in the circle. Her companion disappeared.
"Is it you ? ” said Kenelm to the child - "you who pelted me
so cruelly ? Ungrateful creature! Did I not give you the best
strawberries in the dish, and all my own cream ? ”
« But why did you run away and hide yourself when you
ought to be dancing with me? ” replied the young lady, evading,
with the instinct of her sex, all answer to the reproach she had
deserved.
"I did not run away; and it is clear that I did not mean to
hide myself, since you so easily found me out. But who was the
young lady with you? I suspect she pelted me too, for she
seems to have run away to hide herself. ”
“No, she did not pelt you; she wanted to stop me, and you
would have had another rosebud – oh, so much bigger! - if she
had not held back my arm. Don't you know her — don't you
know Lily? ”
“No; so that is Lily? You shall introduce me to her. ”
By this time they had passed out of the circle through the
little wicket opposite the path by which Kenelm had entered,
and opening at once on the lawn. Here at some distance the
children were grouped; some reclined on the grass, some walking
to and fro, in the interval of the dance.
Before he had reached the place, Mrs. Brae field met him.
Lily is come! ”
“I know it-I have seen her. ”
“Is not she beautiful ? »
"I must see more of her if I am to answer critically; but
before you introduce me, may I be permitted to ask who and
what is Lily? ”
## p. 2727 (#291) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2727
« Did you
Mrs. Braefield paused a moment before she answered, and yet
the answer was brief enough not to need much consideration:
«She is a Miss Mordaunt, an orphan; and as I before told you,
resides with her aunt, Mrs. Cameron, a widow. They have the
prettiest cottage you ever saw on the banks of the river, or rather
rivulet, about a mile from this place. Mrs. Cameron is a very
good, simple-hearted woman. As to Lily, I can praise her beauty
only with safe conscience, for as yet she is a mere child — her
mind quite unformed. ”
ver meet any man, much less any woman, whose
mind was formed ? » muttered Kenelm. "I am sure mine is not,
and never will be on this earth. ”
Mrs. Braefield did not hear this low-voiced observation. She
was looking about for Lily; and perceiving her at last as the
children who surrounded her were dispersing to renew the dance,
she took Kenelm's arm, led him to the young lady, and a formal
introduction took place.
Formal as it could be on those sunlit swards, amidst the joy
of summer and the laugh of children. In such scene and such
circumstance, formality does not last long. I know not how it
was, but in a very few minutes Kenelm and Lily had ceased to
be strangers to each other. They found themselves seated apart
from the rest of the merry-makers, on the bank shadowed by
lime-trees; the man listening with downcast eyes, the girl with
mobile shifting glances, now on earth, now on heaven, and talking
freely, gayly - like the babble of a happy stream, with a silvery
dulcet voice and a sparkle of rippling smiles.
No doubt this is a reversal of the formalities of well-bred
life and conventional narrating thereof. According to them, no
doubt, it is for the man to talk and the maid to listen; but I
state the facts as they were, honestly. And Lily knew no more
of the formalities of drawing-room life than a skylark fresh from
its nest knows of the song-teacher and the cage. She was still
so much of a child. Mrs. Braefield was right — her mind was
still so unformed.
What she did talk about in that first talk between them that
could make the meditative Kenelm listen so mutely, so intently,
I know not; at least I could not jot it down on paper. I fear
it was very egotistical, as the talk of children generally is -
about herself and her aunt and her home and her friends all
her friends seemed children like herself, though younger -
## p. 2728 (#292) ###########################################
2728
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
soon
Clemmy the chief of them. Clemmy was the one who had taken
a fancy to Kenelm. And amidst all the ingenuous prattle there
came flashes of a quick intellect, a lively fancy — nay, even
poetry of expression or of sentiment. It might be the talk of a
child, but certainly not of a silly child.
But as
as the dance was over, the little ones again
gathered round Lily. Evidently she was the prime favorite of
them all; and as her companions had now become tired of dan-
cing, new sports were proposed, and Lily was carried off to
“Prisoner's Base. ”
“I am very happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Chillingly,”
said a frank, pleasant voice; and a well-dressed, good-looking
man held out his hand to Kenelm.
“My husband,” said Mrs. Braefield with a certain pride in
her look.
Kenelm responded cordially to the civilities of the master
of the house, who had just returned from his city office, and
left all its cares behind him. You had only to look at him to
see that he was prosperous and deserved to be so. There were
in his countenance the signs of strong sense, of good-humor-
above all, of an active, energetic temperament. A man of broad
smooth forehead, keen hazel eyes, firm lips and jaw; with a
happy contentment in himself, his house, the world in general,
mantling over his genial smile, and outspoken in the metallic
ring of his voice.
“You will stay and dine with us, of course,” said Mr. Brae-
field; “and unless you want very much to be in town to-night, I
hope you will take a bed here. ”
Kenelm hesitated.
"Do stay at least till to-morrow," said Mrs. Braefield. Kenelm
hesitated still; and while hesitating, his eyes rested on Lily,
leaning on the arm of a middle-aged lady, and approaching the
hostess — evidently to take leave.
“I cannot resist so tempting an invitation,” said Kenelm, and
he fell back a little behind Lily and her companion.
“Thank you much for so pleasant a day,” said Mrs. Cameron
to the hostess. Lily has enjoyed herself extremely. I only
regret we could not come earlier. "
If you are walking home,” said Mr. Braefield, «let me
accompany you. I want to speak to your gardener about his
heart's-ease -it is much finer than mine. "
## p. 2729 (#293) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2729
“If so,” said Kenelm to Lily, “may I come too ? Of all
flowers that grow, heart's-ease is the one I most prize. ”
A few minutes afterward Kenelm was walking by the side of
Lily along the banks of a little stream tributary to the Thames;
Mrs. Cameron and Mr. Braefield in advance, for the path only
held two abreast.
Suddenly Lily left his side, allured by a rare butterfly -- I
think it is called the Emperor of Morocco — that was sunning its
yellow wings upon a group of wild reeds. She succeeded in
capturing this wanderer in her straw hat, over which she drew
her sun-veil. After this notable capture she returned demurely
to Kenelm's side.
“Do you collect insects ? ” said that philosopher, as much sur-
prised as it was his nature to be at anything.
Only butterflies,” answered Lily; "they are not insects, you
know; they are souls. ”
“Emblems of souls, you mean at least so the Greeks prettily
represented them to be. ”
“No, real souls the souls of infants that die in their cradles
unbaptized; and if they are taken care of, and not eaten by birds,
and live a year, then they pass into fairies. ”
"It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on
evidence quite as rational as other assertions of the metamor-
phosis of one creature into another. Perhaps you can do what
the philosophers cannot - tell me how you learned a new idea to
be an incontestable fact ? »
“I don't know,” replied Lily, looking very much puzzled :
“perhaps I learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it. ”
« You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philoso-
pher. But you talk of taking care of butterflies: how do you do
that ? Do you impale them on pins stuck into a glass case ? ”
“Impale them! How can you talk so cruelly? You deserve
to be pinched by the fairies. ”
"I am afraid,” thought Kenelm, compassionately, “that my
companion has no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously
called (an innocent. )
He shook his head and remained silent.
Lily resumed — "I will show you my collection when we get
home — they seem so happy. I am sure there are some of them
who know me — - they will feed from my hand. I have only had
one die since I began to collect them last summer. ”
)))
## p. 2730 (#294) ###########################################
2730
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
« Then you have kept them a year; they ought to have turned
into fairies. ”
"I suppose many of them have. Of course I let out all those
that had been with me twelve months — they don't turn to fairies
in the cage, you know. Now I have only those I caught this
year, or last autumn; the prettiest don't appear till the autumn. ”
The girl here bent her uncovered head over the straw hat,
her tresses shadowing it, and uttered loving words to the pris-
Then again she looked up and around her, and abruptly
stopped and exclaimed:-
“How can people live in towns – how can people say they are
ever dull in the country? Look,” she continued, gravely and
earnestly — "look at that tall pine-tree, with its long branch
sweeping over the water; see how, as the breeze catches it, it
changes its shadow, and how the shadow changes the play of the
sunlight on the brook:-
oner.
This «
(Wave your tops, ye pines;
With every plant, in sign of worship wave. '
What an interchange of music there must be between Nature
and a poet! ”
Kenelm was startled.
an innocent! »
» — this a girl who
had no mind to be formed! In that presence he could not be
cynical; could not speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying hum-
bug, as he had done to the man poet. He replied gravely:-
“The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language,
but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to
whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care
and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously
from the lips of the great mother. To them the butterfly's wing
may well buoy into heaven a fairy's soul! »
When he had thus said, Lily turned, and for the first time
attentively looked into his dark soft eyes; then instinctively she
laid her light hand on his arm, and said in a low voice, “Talk
on — talk thus; I like to hear you. ”
But Kenelm did not talk on. They had now arrived at the
garden-gate of Mrs. Cameron's cottage, and the elder persons in
advance paused at the gate and walked with them to the house.
## p. 2731 (#295) ###########################################
2731
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
(1855-1896)
pass.
HE position which Henry Cuyler Bunner has come to occupy
in the literary annals of our time strengthens as the days
If the stream of his genius flowed in gentle rivulets,
it traveled as far and spread its fruitful influence as wide as many a
statelier river. He was above all things a poet. In his prose as in
his verse he has revealed the essential qualities of a poet's nature:
he dealt with the life which he saw about him in a spirit of broad
humanity and with genial sympathy. When he fashioned the tender
triolet on the pitcher of mignonette, or
sang of the little red box at Vesey Street,
he wrote of what he knew; and his stories,
even when embroidered with quaint fancies,
tread firmly the American soil of the nine-
teenth century. But Bunner's realism never
concerned itself with the record of triviali-
ties for their own sake. When he portrayed
the lower phases of city life, it was the
humor of that life he caught, and not its
sordidness; its kindliness, and not its bru-
tality. His mind was healthy, and since
it was a poet's mind, the point upon ch
HENRY C. BUNNER
it was so nicely balanced was love: love of
the trees and flowers, love of his little brothers in wood and field,
love of his country home, love of the vast city in its innumerable
aspects; above all, love of his wife, his family, and his friends; and
all these outgoings of his heart have found touching expression in
his verse. Indeed, this attitude of affectionate kinship with the
world has colored all his work; it has made his satire sweet-tem-
pered, given his tales their winning grace, and lent to his poetry its
abiding power.
The work upon which Bunner's fame must rest was all produced
within a period of less than fifteen years. He was born in 1855 at
Oswego, New York. He came to the city of New York when very
young, and received his education there. A brief experience of busi-
ness life sufficed to make his true vocation clear, and at the age of
eighteen he began his literary apprenticeship on the Arcadian.
When that periodical passed away, Puck was just struggling into
## p. 2732 (#296) ###########################################
2732
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
existence, and for the English edition, which was started in 1877,
Bunner's services were secured.
Half of his short life was spent in
editorial connection with that paper. To his wisdom and literary
abilities is due in large measure the success which has always
attended the enterprise. Bunner had an intimate knowledge of
American character and understood the foibles of his countrymen;
but he was never cynical, and his satire was without hostility.
He despised opportune journalism. His editorials were clear and
vigorous; free not from partisanship, but from partisan rancor, and
they made for honesty and independence. His firm stand against poli-
tical corruption, socialistic vagaries, the misguided and often criminal
efforts of labor agitators, and all the visionary schemes of diseased
minds, has contributed to the stability of sound and self-respecting
American citizenship.
Bunner's first decided success in story-telling was The Midge,'
which appeared in 1886. It is a tale of New York life in the inter-
esting old French quarter of South Fifth Avenue. Again, in “The
Story of a New York House,' he displayed the same quick feeling
for the spirit of the place, as it was and is. This tale first appeared
in the newly founded Scribner's Magazine, to which he has since
been a constant contributor. Here some of his best short stories
have been published, including the excellent (Zadoc Pine, with its
healthy presentation of independent manhood in contest with the
oppressive exactions of labor organizations. But Bunner was no be-
liever in stories with a tendency; the conditions which lie at the root
of great sociological questions he used as artistic material, never as
texts. His stories are distinguished by simplicity of motive; each is
related with fine unobtrusive humor and with an underlying pathos,
never unduly emphasized. The most popular of his collections of
tales is that entitled Short Sixes, which, having first appeared in
Puck, were published in book form in 1891. A second volume came
out three years later. When the shadow of death had already fallen
upon Bunner, a new collection of his sketches was in process of
publication: Jersey Street and Jersey Lane. ' In these, as in the
still more recent Suburban Sage,' is revealed the same fineness of
sympathetic observation in town and country that we have come to
associate with Bunner's name. Among his prose writings there re-
mains to be mentioned the series from Puck entitled Made in
France. These are an application of the methods of Maupassant to
American subjects; they display that wonderful facility in reprodu-
cing the flavor of another's style which is exhibited in Bunner's verse
in a still more eminent degree. His prose style never attained the
perfection of literary finish, but it is easy and direct, free from senti-
mentality and rhetoric; in the simplicity of his conceptions and the
delicacy of his treatment lies its chief charm.
## p. 2733 (#297) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2733
Bunner's verse, on the other hand, shows a complete mastery of
form. He was a close student of Horace; he tried successfully the
most exacting of exotic verse-forms, and enjoyed the distinction of
having written the only English example of the difficult Chant-
Royal. Graceful vers de société and bits of witty epigram flowed from
him without effort. But it was not to this often dangerous facility
that Bunner owed his poetic fame. His tenderness, his quick sym-
pathy with nature, his insight into the human heart, above all, the
love and longing that filled his soul, have infused into his perfected
rhythms the spirit of universal brotherhood that underlies all genu-
ine poetry. His Airs from Arcady' (1884) achieved a success unusual
for a volume of poems; and the love lyrics and patriotic songs of
his later volume, (Rowen, maintain the high level of the earlier
book. The great mass of his poems is still buried in the back num-
bers of the magazines, from which the best are to be rescued in a
new volume. If his place is not among the greatest of our time,
he has produced a sufficient body of fine verse to rescue his name
from oblivion and render his memory dear to all who value the
legacy of a sincere and genuine poet. He died on May uth, 1896, at
the age of forty-one.
TRIOLET
A
PITCHER of mignonette,
In a tenement's highest casement:
Queer sort of flower-pot - yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement's highest casement.
Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.
THE LOVE-LETTERS OF SMITH
From (Short Sixes )
HEN the little seamstress had climbed to her room in the
story over the top story of the great brick tenement
house in which she lived, she was quite tired out. If
you do not understand what a story over a top story is, you
must remember that there are no limits to human greed, and
## p. 2734 (#298) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2734
hardly any to the height of tenement houses. When the man
who owned that seven-story tenement found that he could rent
another floor, he found no difficulty in persuading the guardians
of our building laws to let him clap another story on the roof,
like a cabin on the deck of a ship; and in the southeasterly of
the four apartments on this floor the little seamstress lived.
You could just see the top of her window from the street — the
huge cornice that had capped the original front, and that served
as her window-sill now, quite hid all the lower part of the story
on top of the top story.
The little seamstress was scarcely thirty years old, but she
was such an old-fashioned little body in so many of her looks
and ways that I had almost spelled her “sempstress,” after the
fashion of our grandmothers. She had been a comely body,
too; and would have been still, if she had not been thin and
pale and anxious-eyed.
She was tired out to-night, because she had been working
hard all day for a lady who lived far up in the New Wards”
beyond Harlem River, and after the long journey home she had
to climb seven flights of tenement-house stairs. She was too
tired, both in body and in mind, to cook the two little chops
she had brought home. She would save them for breakfast, she
thought. So she made herself a cup of tea on the miniature
stove, and ate a slice of dry bread with it. It was too much
trouble to make toast.
But after dinner she watered her flowers. She was never too
tired for that, and the six pots of geraniums that caught the
south sun on the top of the cornice did their best to repay her.
Then she sat down in her rocking-chair by the window and
looked out. Her eyry was high above all the other buildings,
and she could look across some low roofs opposite and see the
further end of Tompkins Square, with its sparse spring green
showing faintly through the dusk. The eternal roar of the city
floated up to her and vaguely troubled her. She was a country
girl; and although she had lived for ten years in New York,
she had never grown used to that ceaseless murmur. To-night
she felt the languor of the new season, as well as the heavi-
ness of physical exhaustion. She was almost too tired to go to
bed.
She thought of the hard day done and the hard day to be
begun after the night spent on the hard little bed. She thought
## p. 2735 (#299) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2735
of the peaceful days in the country, when she taught school in
the Massachusetts village where she was born. She thought of a
hundred small slights that she had to bear from people better
fed than bred. She thought of the sweet green fields that she
rarely saw nowadays. She thought of the long journey forth and
back that must begin and end her morrow's work, and she won-
dered if her employer would think to offer to pay her fare.
Then she pulled herself together. She must think of more
agreeable things or she could not sleep. And as the only agree-
able things she had to think about were her flowers, she looked
at the garden on top of the cornice.
A peculiar gritting noise made her look down, and she saw a
cylindrical object that glittered in the twilight, advancing in an
irregular and uncertain manner toward her flower-pots. Looking
closer, she saw that it was a pewter beer-mug, which somebody
in the next apartment was pushing with a two-foot rule. On top
of the beer-mug was a piece of paper, and on this paper was
written, in a sprawling, half-formed hand:-
porter
pleas excuse the libberty And
drink it
The seamstress started up in terror and shut the window. She
remembered that there was a man in the next apartment. She
had seen him on the stairs on Sundays. He seemed a grave,
decent person; but — he must be drunk. She sat down on her
bed all a-tremble. Then she reasoned with herself.
The man
was drunk, that was all. He probably would not annoy her fur-
ther. And if he did, she had only to retreat to Mrs. Mulvaney's
apartment in the rear, and Mr. Mulvaney, who was a highly
respectable man and worked in a boiler-shop, would protect her.
So, being a poor woman who had already had occasion to excuse
- and refuse — two or three “libberties” of like sort, she made
up her mind to go to bed like a reasonable seamstress, and she
did. She was rewarded, for when her light was out, she could see
in the moonlight that the two-foot rule appeared again with one
joint bent back, hitched itself into the mug-handle, and withdrew
the mug.
The next day was a hard one for the little seamstress, and
she hardly thought of the affair of the night before until the
same hour had come around again, and she sat once more by
## p. 2736 (#300) ###########################################
2736
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
her window. Then she smiled at the remembrance. « Poor fel-
low," she said in her charitable heart, "I've no doubt he's
awfully ashamed of it now. Perhaps he was never tipsy before.
Perhaps he didn't know there was a lone woman in here to be
frightened. ”
Just then she heard a gritting sound. She looked down. The
pewter pot was in front of her, and the two-foot rule was slowly
retiring. On the pot was a piece of paper, and on the paper
was
porter
good for the helth
it makes meet
This time the little seamstress shut her window with a bang
of indignation. The color rose to her pale cheeks. She thought
that she would go down to see the janitor at once. Then she
remembered the seven fights of stairs; and she resolved to see
the janitor in the morning. Then she went to bed, and saw the
mug drawn back just as it had been drawn back the night before.
The morning came, but somehow the seamstress did not care
to complain to the janitor. She hated to make trouble - and the
janitor might think — and — and — well, if the wretch did it again
she would speak to him herself, and that would settle it. And
so on the next night, which was a Thursday, the little seamstress
sat down by her window, resolved to settle the matter. And she
had not sat there long, rocking in the creaking little rocking-
chair which she had brought with her from her old home, when the
pewter pot hove in sight, with a piece of paper on the top.
time the legend read:
Perhaps you are afrade i will
adress you
i am not that kind
The seamstress did not quite know whether to laugh or to
cry. But she felt that the time had come for speech. She leaned
out of her window and addressed the twilight heaven.
“Mr. — Mr. — sir —1— will you please put your head out of
the window so that I can speak to you ? ”
The silence of the other room was undisturbed.
The seam-
stress drew back, blushing. But before she could nerve herself
for another attack, a piece of paper appeared on the end of the
two-foot rule.
## p. 2737 (#301) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2737
when i Say a thing i
mene it
i have Sed i would not
Adress you and i
Will not
What was the little seamstress to do? She stood by the win-
dow and thought hard about it. Should she complain to the
janitor ? But the creature was perfectly respectful. No doubt he
meant to be kind. He certainly was kind, to waste these pots
of porter on her. She remembered the last time - and the first-
that she had drunk porter. It was at home, when she was a
young girl, after she had the diphtheria. She remembered how
good it was, and how it had given her back her strength. And
without one thought of what she was doing, she lifted the pot of
porter and took one little reminiscent sip-two little reminiscent
sips—and became aware of her utter fall and defeat. She blushed
now as she had never blushed before, put the pot down, closed
the window, and fled to her bed like a deer to the woods.
And when the porter arrived the next night, bearing the sim-
ple appeal
Dont be afrade of it
drink it all
the little seamstress arose and grasped the pot firmly by the
handle, and poured its contents over the earth around her largest
geranium. She poured the contents out to the last drop, and
then she dropped the pot, and ran back and sat on her bed and
cried, with her face hid in her hands.
“Now,” she said to herself, you've done it! And you're
just as nasty and hard-hearted and suspicious and mean as — as
pusley! ” And she wept to think of her hardness of heart. ~ He
will never give me a chance to say I am sorry,'
) » she thought.
And really, she might have spoken kindly to the poor man, and
told him that she was much obliged to him, but that he really
must not ask her to drink porter with him.
“But it's all over and done now,” she said to herself as she
sat at her window on Saturday night. And then she looked at
the cornice, and saw the faithful little pewter pot traveling
slowly toward her.
She was conquered. This act of Christian forbearance was too
much for her kindly spirit. She read the inscription on the paper,
porter is good for Flours
but better for Fokes
V-172
## p. 2738 (#302) ###########################################
2738
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
and she lifted the pot to her lips, which were not half so red as
her cheeks, and took a good, hearty, grateful draught.
She sipped in thoughtful silence after this first plunge, and
presently she was surprised to find the bottom of the pot in full
view. On the table at her side a few pearl buttons were
screwed up in a bit of white paper. She untwisted the paper
and smoothed it out, and wrote in a tremulous hand — she could
write a very neat hand
Thanks.
This she laid on the top of the pot, and in a moment the bent
two-foot rule appeared and drew the mail-carriage home. Then
she sat still, enjoying the warm glow of the porter, which seemed
to have permeated her entire being with a heat that was not at
all like the unpleasant and oppressive heat of the atmosphere, an
atmosphere heavy with the spring damp. A gritting on the tin
aroused her. A piece of paper lay under her eyes.
fine groing weather
Smith
Now it is unlikely that in the whole round and range of
conversational commonplaces there was one other greeting that
could have induced the seamstress to continue the exchange of
communications. But this simple and homely phrase touched her
country heart. What did “groing weather” matter to the toilers
in this waste of brick and mortar? This stranger must be, like
herself, a country-bred soul, longing for the new green and the
upturned brown mold of the country fields. She took up the
paper, and wrote under the first message: -
Fine
But that seemed curt: ”for” she added; for what? She did
not know. At last in desperation she put down "potatoes. ” The
piece of paper was withdrawn, and came back with an addition:
Toomist for potatos
And when the little seamstress had read this, and grasped the
fact that “m-i-s-t” represented the writer's pronunciation of
"moist,” she laughed softly to herself. A man whose mind at
such a time was seriously bent upon potatoes was not a man to
be feared. She found a half-sheet of note-paper, and wrote:
## p. 2739 (#303) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2739
I lived in a small village before I came to New York,
but I am afraid I do not know much about farming. Are
you a farmer!
The answer came:
have ben most Every thing
farmed a Spel in Maine
Smith
As she read this, the seamstress heard the church clock strike
nine.
« Bless me, is it so late ? ” she cried, and she hurriedly pen-
ciled Good Night, thrust the paper out, and closed the window.
But a few minutes later, passing by, she saw yet another bit of
paper on the cornice, fluttering in the evening breeze. It said
only good nite, and after a moment's hesitation, the little seam-
stress took it in and gave it shelter.
After this they were the best of friends. Every evening the
pot appeared, and while the seamstress drank from it at her
window, Mr. Smith drank from its twin at his; and notes were
exchanged as rapidly as Mr. Smith's early education permitted.
They told each other their histories, and Mr. Smith's was one of
travel and variety, which he seemed to consider quite a matter
of course. He had followed the sea, he had farmed, he had
been a logger and a hunter in the Maine woods. Now he was
foreman of an East River lumber-yard, and he was prospering.
In a year or two he would have enough laid by to go home to
Bucksport and buy a share in a ship-building business. All this
dribbled out in the course of a jerky but variegated correspond-
ence, in which autobiographic details were mixed with reflections
moral and philosophical.
A few samples will give an idea of Mr. Smith's style:-
i was one trip to van demens
land
To which the seamstress replied:-
It must have been very interesting.
But Mr. Smith disposed of this subject very briefly:-
it wornt
## p. 2740 (#304) ###########################################
2740
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
Further he vouchsafed:
i seen a chinese cook in
hong kong could cook flapjacks
like your mother
a mishnery that sells Rum
is the menest of Gods crechers
a bulfite is not what it is
cract up to Be
the dagos are wussen the
brutes
i am 6 134
but my Father was 6 foot 4
The seamstress had taught school one winter, and she could
not refrain from making an attempt to reform Mr. Smith's or-
thography. One evening, in answer to this communication,
i killd a Bare in Maine 600
lbs waight
she wrote:
Isn't it generally spelled Bear?
but she gave up the attempt when he responded :-
a bare is a mene animle any
way you spel him
The spring wore on, and the summer came, and still the
evening drink and the evening correspondence brightened the
close of each day for the little seamstress. And the draught of
porter put her to sleep each night, giving her a calmer rest than
she had ever known during her stay in the noisy city; and it
began, moreover, to make a little “meet» for her. And then
the thought that she was going to have an hour of pleasant
companionship somehow gave her courage to cook and eat her
little dinner, however tired she was. The seamstress's cheeks
began to blossom with the June roses.
And all this time Mr. Smith kept his vow of silence unbroken,
though the seamstress sometimes tempted him with little ejacu-
lations and exclamations to which he might have responded. He
was silent and invisible. Only the smoke of his pipe, and the
## p. 2741 (#305) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2741
clink of his mug as he set it down on the cornice, told her that
a living, material Smith was her correspondent. They never met
on the stairs, for their hours of coming and going did not co-
incide. Once or twice they passed each other in the street — but
Mr. Smith looked straight ahead of him about a foot over her
head. The little seamstress thought he was a very fine-looking
man, with his six feet one and three-quarters and his thick brown
beard. Most people would have called him plain.
Once she spoke to him. She was coming home one summer
evening, and a gang of corner-loafers stopped her and demanded
money to buy beer, as is their custom. Before she had time to
be frightened, Mr. Smith appeared, - whence, she knew not, -
scattered the gang like chaff, and collaring two of the human
hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate, ponderous, alternate kicks,
until they writhed in ineffable agony. When he let them crawl
away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly, looking
very pretty now, with the color in her cheeks. But Mr. Smith
answered no word. He stared over her head, grew red in the
face, fidgeted nervously, but held his peace until his eyes fell on
a rotund Teuton passing by.
“Say, Dutchy! ” he roared. The German stood aghast. « I
ain't got nothing to write with! ” thundered Mr. Smith, looking
him in the eye. And then the man of his word passed on his
way.
And so the summer went on, and the two correspondents
chatted silently from window to window, hid from sight of all
the world below by the friendly cornice. And they looked out
over the roof and saw the green of Tompkins Square grow
darker and dustier as the months went on.
Mr.
pating a second earthquake, hastened to their homes to load
themselves with their more costly goods and escape while it was
yet time; others, dreading the showers of ashes that now fell
fast, torrent upon torrent, over the streets, rushed under the
roofs of the nearest houses, or temples, or sheds — shelter of any
kind - for protection from the terrors of the open air. But
darker, and larger, and mightier, spread the cloud above them.
It was a sudden and more ghastly Night rushing upon the realm
of Noon!
KENELM AND LILY
From Kenelm Chillingly)
THE
he children have come,- some thirty of them, pretty as Eng-
lish children generally are, happy in the joy of the summer
sunshine, and the flower lawns, and the feast under cover
of an awning suspended between chestnut-trees and carpeted
with sward.
No doubt Kenelm held his own at the banquet, and did his
best to increase the general gayety, for whenever he spoke the
children listened eagerly, and when he had done they laughed
mirthfully.
“The fair face I promised you,” whispered Mrs. Braefield, is
not here yet.
I have a little note from the young lady to say
that Mrs. Cameron does not feel very well this morning, but
hopes to recover sufficiently to come later in the afternoon. ”
And
pray
who is Mrs. Cameron ? »
"Ah! I forgot that you are a stranger to the place. Mrs.
Cameron is the aunt with whom Lily resides. Is it not a pretty
name, Lily ? »
“Very! emblematic of a spinster that does not spin, with a
white head and a thin stalk. "
« Then the name belies my Lily; as you will see. ”
## p. 2724 (#288) ###########################################
2724
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The children now finished their feast and betook themselves
to dancing, in an alley smoothed for a croquet-ground and to
the sound of a violin played by the old grandfather of one of the
party. While Mrs. Braefield was busying herself with forming
the dance, Kenelm seized the occasion to escape from a young
nymph of the age of twelve, who had sat next to him at the
banquet and taken so great a fancy to him that he began to
fear she would vow never to forsake his side, — and stole away
undetected.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us,
especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our
own quiet mood. Gliding through a dense shrubbery, in which,
though the lilacs were faded, the laburnum still retained here
and there the waning gold of its clusters, Kenelm came into a
recess which bounded his steps and invited him to repose. It
was a circle, so formed artificially by slight trellises, to which
clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and flowers. In the midst
played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring sound; at the
background, dominating the place, rose the crests of stately trees,
on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out all
horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant pas-
sions - love, ambition, desire of power, or gold, or fame, or
knowledge — form the proud background to the brief-lived flow-
erets of our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom,
catch the glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet - and yet - exclude
our sight from the lengths and the widths of the space which
extends behind and beyond them.
Kenelm threw himself on the turf beside the fountain. Froin
afar came the whoop and the laugh of the children in their
sports or their dance. At the distance their joy did not sadden
him - he marveled why; and thus, in musing reverie, thought to
explain the why to himself.
"The poet,” so ran his lazy thinking, has told us that dis-
tance lends enchantment to the view,' and thus compares to the
charm of distance the illusion of hope. But the poet narrow's
the scope of his own illustration. Distance lends enchantment to
the ear as well as to the sight; nor to these bodily senses alone.
Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to the far away. '
"I cannot imagine myself again a child when I am in the
midst of yon noisy children. But as their noise reaches me here,
subdued and mellowed; and knowing, thank Heaven! that the
## p. 2725 (#289) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2725
urchins are not within reach of me, I could readily dream myself
back into childhood and into sympathy with the lost playfields of
school.
« So surely it must be with grief: how different the terrible
agony for a beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret
for one who disappeared into heaven years ago! So with the art
of poetry: how imperatively, when it deals with the great emo-
tions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in propor-
tion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please
us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to
place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined
yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and
married his mother. But when Edipus commits those unhappy
mistakes nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth century is
a long way off from Thebes three thousand or four thousand
years ago.
"And,” continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of
metaphysical criticism, “even where the poet deals with persons
and things close upon our daily sight - if he would give them
poetic charm he must resort to a sort of moral or psychological
distance; the nearer they are to us in external circumstance, the
farther they must be in some internal peculiarities. Werter and
Clarissa Harlowe are described as contemporaries of their artistic
creation, and with the minutest details of an apparent realism;
yet they are at once removed from our daily lives by their idio-
syncrasies and their fates. We know that while Werter and Clar-
issa are so near to us in much that we sympathize with them as
friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us in
the poetic and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged
to the age of Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the
very pain which their fate inflicts on Thus, I suppose, it
must be in love. If the love we feel is to have the glamor of
poetry, it must be love for some one morally at a distance from
our ordinary habitual selves; in short, differing from us in at-
tributes which, however near we draw to the possessor, we can
never approach, never blend, in attributes of our own; so that
there is something in the loved one that always remains an
ideal -a mystery -'a sun-bright summit mingling with the
sky! )
From this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was
roused slowly, reluctantly. Something struck softly on his cheek
us.
## p. 2726 (#290) ###########################################
2726
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
- again a little less softly; he opened his eyes — they fell first
upon two tiny rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen
on his breast; and then looking up, he saw before him, in an
opening of the trellised circle, a female child's laughing face.
Her hand was still uplifted, charged with another rosebud; but
behind the child's figure, looking over her shoulder and holding
back the menacing arm, was a face as innocent but lovelier far
the face of a girl in her first youth, framed round with the
blossoms that festooned the trellis. How the face became the
flowers! It seemed the fairy spirit of them.
Kenelm started and rose to his feet. The child, the one
whom he had so ungallantly escaped from, ran towards him
through a wicket in the circle. Her companion disappeared.
"Is it you ? ” said Kenelm to the child - "you who pelted me
so cruelly ? Ungrateful creature! Did I not give you the best
strawberries in the dish, and all my own cream ? ”
« But why did you run away and hide yourself when you
ought to be dancing with me? ” replied the young lady, evading,
with the instinct of her sex, all answer to the reproach she had
deserved.
"I did not run away; and it is clear that I did not mean to
hide myself, since you so easily found me out. But who was the
young lady with you? I suspect she pelted me too, for she
seems to have run away to hide herself. ”
“No, she did not pelt you; she wanted to stop me, and you
would have had another rosebud – oh, so much bigger! - if she
had not held back my arm. Don't you know her — don't you
know Lily? ”
“No; so that is Lily? You shall introduce me to her. ”
By this time they had passed out of the circle through the
little wicket opposite the path by which Kenelm had entered,
and opening at once on the lawn. Here at some distance the
children were grouped; some reclined on the grass, some walking
to and fro, in the interval of the dance.
Before he had reached the place, Mrs. Brae field met him.
Lily is come! ”
“I know it-I have seen her. ”
“Is not she beautiful ? »
"I must see more of her if I am to answer critically; but
before you introduce me, may I be permitted to ask who and
what is Lily? ”
## p. 2727 (#291) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2727
« Did you
Mrs. Braefield paused a moment before she answered, and yet
the answer was brief enough not to need much consideration:
«She is a Miss Mordaunt, an orphan; and as I before told you,
resides with her aunt, Mrs. Cameron, a widow. They have the
prettiest cottage you ever saw on the banks of the river, or rather
rivulet, about a mile from this place. Mrs. Cameron is a very
good, simple-hearted woman. As to Lily, I can praise her beauty
only with safe conscience, for as yet she is a mere child — her
mind quite unformed. ”
ver meet any man, much less any woman, whose
mind was formed ? » muttered Kenelm. "I am sure mine is not,
and never will be on this earth. ”
Mrs. Braefield did not hear this low-voiced observation. She
was looking about for Lily; and perceiving her at last as the
children who surrounded her were dispersing to renew the dance,
she took Kenelm's arm, led him to the young lady, and a formal
introduction took place.
Formal as it could be on those sunlit swards, amidst the joy
of summer and the laugh of children. In such scene and such
circumstance, formality does not last long. I know not how it
was, but in a very few minutes Kenelm and Lily had ceased to
be strangers to each other. They found themselves seated apart
from the rest of the merry-makers, on the bank shadowed by
lime-trees; the man listening with downcast eyes, the girl with
mobile shifting glances, now on earth, now on heaven, and talking
freely, gayly - like the babble of a happy stream, with a silvery
dulcet voice and a sparkle of rippling smiles.
No doubt this is a reversal of the formalities of well-bred
life and conventional narrating thereof. According to them, no
doubt, it is for the man to talk and the maid to listen; but I
state the facts as they were, honestly. And Lily knew no more
of the formalities of drawing-room life than a skylark fresh from
its nest knows of the song-teacher and the cage. She was still
so much of a child. Mrs. Braefield was right — her mind was
still so unformed.
What she did talk about in that first talk between them that
could make the meditative Kenelm listen so mutely, so intently,
I know not; at least I could not jot it down on paper. I fear
it was very egotistical, as the talk of children generally is -
about herself and her aunt and her home and her friends all
her friends seemed children like herself, though younger -
## p. 2728 (#292) ###########################################
2728
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
soon
Clemmy the chief of them. Clemmy was the one who had taken
a fancy to Kenelm. And amidst all the ingenuous prattle there
came flashes of a quick intellect, a lively fancy — nay, even
poetry of expression or of sentiment. It might be the talk of a
child, but certainly not of a silly child.
But as
as the dance was over, the little ones again
gathered round Lily. Evidently she was the prime favorite of
them all; and as her companions had now become tired of dan-
cing, new sports were proposed, and Lily was carried off to
“Prisoner's Base. ”
“I am very happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Chillingly,”
said a frank, pleasant voice; and a well-dressed, good-looking
man held out his hand to Kenelm.
“My husband,” said Mrs. Braefield with a certain pride in
her look.
Kenelm responded cordially to the civilities of the master
of the house, who had just returned from his city office, and
left all its cares behind him. You had only to look at him to
see that he was prosperous and deserved to be so. There were
in his countenance the signs of strong sense, of good-humor-
above all, of an active, energetic temperament. A man of broad
smooth forehead, keen hazel eyes, firm lips and jaw; with a
happy contentment in himself, his house, the world in general,
mantling over his genial smile, and outspoken in the metallic
ring of his voice.
“You will stay and dine with us, of course,” said Mr. Brae-
field; “and unless you want very much to be in town to-night, I
hope you will take a bed here. ”
Kenelm hesitated.
"Do stay at least till to-morrow," said Mrs. Braefield. Kenelm
hesitated still; and while hesitating, his eyes rested on Lily,
leaning on the arm of a middle-aged lady, and approaching the
hostess — evidently to take leave.
“I cannot resist so tempting an invitation,” said Kenelm, and
he fell back a little behind Lily and her companion.
“Thank you much for so pleasant a day,” said Mrs. Cameron
to the hostess. Lily has enjoyed herself extremely. I only
regret we could not come earlier. "
If you are walking home,” said Mr. Braefield, «let me
accompany you. I want to speak to your gardener about his
heart's-ease -it is much finer than mine. "
## p. 2729 (#293) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2729
“If so,” said Kenelm to Lily, “may I come too ? Of all
flowers that grow, heart's-ease is the one I most prize. ”
A few minutes afterward Kenelm was walking by the side of
Lily along the banks of a little stream tributary to the Thames;
Mrs. Cameron and Mr. Braefield in advance, for the path only
held two abreast.
Suddenly Lily left his side, allured by a rare butterfly -- I
think it is called the Emperor of Morocco — that was sunning its
yellow wings upon a group of wild reeds. She succeeded in
capturing this wanderer in her straw hat, over which she drew
her sun-veil. After this notable capture she returned demurely
to Kenelm's side.
“Do you collect insects ? ” said that philosopher, as much sur-
prised as it was his nature to be at anything.
Only butterflies,” answered Lily; "they are not insects, you
know; they are souls. ”
“Emblems of souls, you mean at least so the Greeks prettily
represented them to be. ”
“No, real souls the souls of infants that die in their cradles
unbaptized; and if they are taken care of, and not eaten by birds,
and live a year, then they pass into fairies. ”
"It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on
evidence quite as rational as other assertions of the metamor-
phosis of one creature into another. Perhaps you can do what
the philosophers cannot - tell me how you learned a new idea to
be an incontestable fact ? »
“I don't know,” replied Lily, looking very much puzzled :
“perhaps I learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it. ”
« You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philoso-
pher. But you talk of taking care of butterflies: how do you do
that ? Do you impale them on pins stuck into a glass case ? ”
“Impale them! How can you talk so cruelly? You deserve
to be pinched by the fairies. ”
"I am afraid,” thought Kenelm, compassionately, “that my
companion has no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously
called (an innocent. )
He shook his head and remained silent.
Lily resumed — "I will show you my collection when we get
home — they seem so happy. I am sure there are some of them
who know me — - they will feed from my hand. I have only had
one die since I began to collect them last summer. ”
)))
## p. 2730 (#294) ###########################################
2730
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
« Then you have kept them a year; they ought to have turned
into fairies. ”
"I suppose many of them have. Of course I let out all those
that had been with me twelve months — they don't turn to fairies
in the cage, you know. Now I have only those I caught this
year, or last autumn; the prettiest don't appear till the autumn. ”
The girl here bent her uncovered head over the straw hat,
her tresses shadowing it, and uttered loving words to the pris-
Then again she looked up and around her, and abruptly
stopped and exclaimed:-
“How can people live in towns – how can people say they are
ever dull in the country? Look,” she continued, gravely and
earnestly — "look at that tall pine-tree, with its long branch
sweeping over the water; see how, as the breeze catches it, it
changes its shadow, and how the shadow changes the play of the
sunlight on the brook:-
oner.
This «
(Wave your tops, ye pines;
With every plant, in sign of worship wave. '
What an interchange of music there must be between Nature
and a poet! ”
Kenelm was startled.
an innocent! »
» — this a girl who
had no mind to be formed! In that presence he could not be
cynical; could not speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying hum-
bug, as he had done to the man poet. He replied gravely:-
“The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language,
but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to
whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care
and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously
from the lips of the great mother. To them the butterfly's wing
may well buoy into heaven a fairy's soul! »
When he had thus said, Lily turned, and for the first time
attentively looked into his dark soft eyes; then instinctively she
laid her light hand on his arm, and said in a low voice, “Talk
on — talk thus; I like to hear you. ”
But Kenelm did not talk on. They had now arrived at the
garden-gate of Mrs. Cameron's cottage, and the elder persons in
advance paused at the gate and walked with them to the house.
## p. 2731 (#295) ###########################################
2731
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
(1855-1896)
pass.
HE position which Henry Cuyler Bunner has come to occupy
in the literary annals of our time strengthens as the days
If the stream of his genius flowed in gentle rivulets,
it traveled as far and spread its fruitful influence as wide as many a
statelier river. He was above all things a poet. In his prose as in
his verse he has revealed the essential qualities of a poet's nature:
he dealt with the life which he saw about him in a spirit of broad
humanity and with genial sympathy. When he fashioned the tender
triolet on the pitcher of mignonette, or
sang of the little red box at Vesey Street,
he wrote of what he knew; and his stories,
even when embroidered with quaint fancies,
tread firmly the American soil of the nine-
teenth century. But Bunner's realism never
concerned itself with the record of triviali-
ties for their own sake. When he portrayed
the lower phases of city life, it was the
humor of that life he caught, and not its
sordidness; its kindliness, and not its bru-
tality. His mind was healthy, and since
it was a poet's mind, the point upon ch
HENRY C. BUNNER
it was so nicely balanced was love: love of
the trees and flowers, love of his little brothers in wood and field,
love of his country home, love of the vast city in its innumerable
aspects; above all, love of his wife, his family, and his friends; and
all these outgoings of his heart have found touching expression in
his verse. Indeed, this attitude of affectionate kinship with the
world has colored all his work; it has made his satire sweet-tem-
pered, given his tales their winning grace, and lent to his poetry its
abiding power.
The work upon which Bunner's fame must rest was all produced
within a period of less than fifteen years. He was born in 1855 at
Oswego, New York. He came to the city of New York when very
young, and received his education there. A brief experience of busi-
ness life sufficed to make his true vocation clear, and at the age of
eighteen he began his literary apprenticeship on the Arcadian.
When that periodical passed away, Puck was just struggling into
## p. 2732 (#296) ###########################################
2732
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
existence, and for the English edition, which was started in 1877,
Bunner's services were secured.
Half of his short life was spent in
editorial connection with that paper. To his wisdom and literary
abilities is due in large measure the success which has always
attended the enterprise. Bunner had an intimate knowledge of
American character and understood the foibles of his countrymen;
but he was never cynical, and his satire was without hostility.
He despised opportune journalism. His editorials were clear and
vigorous; free not from partisanship, but from partisan rancor, and
they made for honesty and independence. His firm stand against poli-
tical corruption, socialistic vagaries, the misguided and often criminal
efforts of labor agitators, and all the visionary schemes of diseased
minds, has contributed to the stability of sound and self-respecting
American citizenship.
Bunner's first decided success in story-telling was The Midge,'
which appeared in 1886. It is a tale of New York life in the inter-
esting old French quarter of South Fifth Avenue. Again, in “The
Story of a New York House,' he displayed the same quick feeling
for the spirit of the place, as it was and is. This tale first appeared
in the newly founded Scribner's Magazine, to which he has since
been a constant contributor. Here some of his best short stories
have been published, including the excellent (Zadoc Pine, with its
healthy presentation of independent manhood in contest with the
oppressive exactions of labor organizations. But Bunner was no be-
liever in stories with a tendency; the conditions which lie at the root
of great sociological questions he used as artistic material, never as
texts. His stories are distinguished by simplicity of motive; each is
related with fine unobtrusive humor and with an underlying pathos,
never unduly emphasized. The most popular of his collections of
tales is that entitled Short Sixes, which, having first appeared in
Puck, were published in book form in 1891. A second volume came
out three years later. When the shadow of death had already fallen
upon Bunner, a new collection of his sketches was in process of
publication: Jersey Street and Jersey Lane. ' In these, as in the
still more recent Suburban Sage,' is revealed the same fineness of
sympathetic observation in town and country that we have come to
associate with Bunner's name. Among his prose writings there re-
mains to be mentioned the series from Puck entitled Made in
France. These are an application of the methods of Maupassant to
American subjects; they display that wonderful facility in reprodu-
cing the flavor of another's style which is exhibited in Bunner's verse
in a still more eminent degree. His prose style never attained the
perfection of literary finish, but it is easy and direct, free from senti-
mentality and rhetoric; in the simplicity of his conceptions and the
delicacy of his treatment lies its chief charm.
## p. 2733 (#297) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2733
Bunner's verse, on the other hand, shows a complete mastery of
form. He was a close student of Horace; he tried successfully the
most exacting of exotic verse-forms, and enjoyed the distinction of
having written the only English example of the difficult Chant-
Royal. Graceful vers de société and bits of witty epigram flowed from
him without effort. But it was not to this often dangerous facility
that Bunner owed his poetic fame. His tenderness, his quick sym-
pathy with nature, his insight into the human heart, above all, the
love and longing that filled his soul, have infused into his perfected
rhythms the spirit of universal brotherhood that underlies all genu-
ine poetry. His Airs from Arcady' (1884) achieved a success unusual
for a volume of poems; and the love lyrics and patriotic songs of
his later volume, (Rowen, maintain the high level of the earlier
book. The great mass of his poems is still buried in the back num-
bers of the magazines, from which the best are to be rescued in a
new volume. If his place is not among the greatest of our time,
he has produced a sufficient body of fine verse to rescue his name
from oblivion and render his memory dear to all who value the
legacy of a sincere and genuine poet. He died on May uth, 1896, at
the age of forty-one.
TRIOLET
A
PITCHER of mignonette,
In a tenement's highest casement:
Queer sort of flower-pot - yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement's highest casement.
Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.
THE LOVE-LETTERS OF SMITH
From (Short Sixes )
HEN the little seamstress had climbed to her room in the
story over the top story of the great brick tenement
house in which she lived, she was quite tired out. If
you do not understand what a story over a top story is, you
must remember that there are no limits to human greed, and
## p. 2734 (#298) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2734
hardly any to the height of tenement houses. When the man
who owned that seven-story tenement found that he could rent
another floor, he found no difficulty in persuading the guardians
of our building laws to let him clap another story on the roof,
like a cabin on the deck of a ship; and in the southeasterly of
the four apartments on this floor the little seamstress lived.
You could just see the top of her window from the street — the
huge cornice that had capped the original front, and that served
as her window-sill now, quite hid all the lower part of the story
on top of the top story.
The little seamstress was scarcely thirty years old, but she
was such an old-fashioned little body in so many of her looks
and ways that I had almost spelled her “sempstress,” after the
fashion of our grandmothers. She had been a comely body,
too; and would have been still, if she had not been thin and
pale and anxious-eyed.
She was tired out to-night, because she had been working
hard all day for a lady who lived far up in the New Wards”
beyond Harlem River, and after the long journey home she had
to climb seven flights of tenement-house stairs. She was too
tired, both in body and in mind, to cook the two little chops
she had brought home. She would save them for breakfast, she
thought. So she made herself a cup of tea on the miniature
stove, and ate a slice of dry bread with it. It was too much
trouble to make toast.
But after dinner she watered her flowers. She was never too
tired for that, and the six pots of geraniums that caught the
south sun on the top of the cornice did their best to repay her.
Then she sat down in her rocking-chair by the window and
looked out. Her eyry was high above all the other buildings,
and she could look across some low roofs opposite and see the
further end of Tompkins Square, with its sparse spring green
showing faintly through the dusk. The eternal roar of the city
floated up to her and vaguely troubled her. She was a country
girl; and although she had lived for ten years in New York,
she had never grown used to that ceaseless murmur. To-night
she felt the languor of the new season, as well as the heavi-
ness of physical exhaustion. She was almost too tired to go to
bed.
She thought of the hard day done and the hard day to be
begun after the night spent on the hard little bed. She thought
## p. 2735 (#299) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2735
of the peaceful days in the country, when she taught school in
the Massachusetts village where she was born. She thought of a
hundred small slights that she had to bear from people better
fed than bred. She thought of the sweet green fields that she
rarely saw nowadays. She thought of the long journey forth and
back that must begin and end her morrow's work, and she won-
dered if her employer would think to offer to pay her fare.
Then she pulled herself together. She must think of more
agreeable things or she could not sleep. And as the only agree-
able things she had to think about were her flowers, she looked
at the garden on top of the cornice.
A peculiar gritting noise made her look down, and she saw a
cylindrical object that glittered in the twilight, advancing in an
irregular and uncertain manner toward her flower-pots. Looking
closer, she saw that it was a pewter beer-mug, which somebody
in the next apartment was pushing with a two-foot rule. On top
of the beer-mug was a piece of paper, and on this paper was
written, in a sprawling, half-formed hand:-
porter
pleas excuse the libberty And
drink it
The seamstress started up in terror and shut the window. She
remembered that there was a man in the next apartment. She
had seen him on the stairs on Sundays. He seemed a grave,
decent person; but — he must be drunk. She sat down on her
bed all a-tremble. Then she reasoned with herself.
The man
was drunk, that was all. He probably would not annoy her fur-
ther. And if he did, she had only to retreat to Mrs. Mulvaney's
apartment in the rear, and Mr. Mulvaney, who was a highly
respectable man and worked in a boiler-shop, would protect her.
So, being a poor woman who had already had occasion to excuse
- and refuse — two or three “libberties” of like sort, she made
up her mind to go to bed like a reasonable seamstress, and she
did. She was rewarded, for when her light was out, she could see
in the moonlight that the two-foot rule appeared again with one
joint bent back, hitched itself into the mug-handle, and withdrew
the mug.
The next day was a hard one for the little seamstress, and
she hardly thought of the affair of the night before until the
same hour had come around again, and she sat once more by
## p. 2736 (#300) ###########################################
2736
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
her window. Then she smiled at the remembrance. « Poor fel-
low," she said in her charitable heart, "I've no doubt he's
awfully ashamed of it now. Perhaps he was never tipsy before.
Perhaps he didn't know there was a lone woman in here to be
frightened. ”
Just then she heard a gritting sound. She looked down. The
pewter pot was in front of her, and the two-foot rule was slowly
retiring. On the pot was a piece of paper, and on the paper
was
porter
good for the helth
it makes meet
This time the little seamstress shut her window with a bang
of indignation. The color rose to her pale cheeks. She thought
that she would go down to see the janitor at once. Then she
remembered the seven fights of stairs; and she resolved to see
the janitor in the morning. Then she went to bed, and saw the
mug drawn back just as it had been drawn back the night before.
The morning came, but somehow the seamstress did not care
to complain to the janitor. She hated to make trouble - and the
janitor might think — and — and — well, if the wretch did it again
she would speak to him herself, and that would settle it. And
so on the next night, which was a Thursday, the little seamstress
sat down by her window, resolved to settle the matter. And she
had not sat there long, rocking in the creaking little rocking-
chair which she had brought with her from her old home, when the
pewter pot hove in sight, with a piece of paper on the top.
time the legend read:
Perhaps you are afrade i will
adress you
i am not that kind
The seamstress did not quite know whether to laugh or to
cry. But she felt that the time had come for speech. She leaned
out of her window and addressed the twilight heaven.
“Mr. — Mr. — sir —1— will you please put your head out of
the window so that I can speak to you ? ”
The silence of the other room was undisturbed.
The seam-
stress drew back, blushing. But before she could nerve herself
for another attack, a piece of paper appeared on the end of the
two-foot rule.
## p. 2737 (#301) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2737
when i Say a thing i
mene it
i have Sed i would not
Adress you and i
Will not
What was the little seamstress to do? She stood by the win-
dow and thought hard about it. Should she complain to the
janitor ? But the creature was perfectly respectful. No doubt he
meant to be kind. He certainly was kind, to waste these pots
of porter on her. She remembered the last time - and the first-
that she had drunk porter. It was at home, when she was a
young girl, after she had the diphtheria. She remembered how
good it was, and how it had given her back her strength. And
without one thought of what she was doing, she lifted the pot of
porter and took one little reminiscent sip-two little reminiscent
sips—and became aware of her utter fall and defeat. She blushed
now as she had never blushed before, put the pot down, closed
the window, and fled to her bed like a deer to the woods.
And when the porter arrived the next night, bearing the sim-
ple appeal
Dont be afrade of it
drink it all
the little seamstress arose and grasped the pot firmly by the
handle, and poured its contents over the earth around her largest
geranium. She poured the contents out to the last drop, and
then she dropped the pot, and ran back and sat on her bed and
cried, with her face hid in her hands.
“Now,” she said to herself, you've done it! And you're
just as nasty and hard-hearted and suspicious and mean as — as
pusley! ” And she wept to think of her hardness of heart. ~ He
will never give me a chance to say I am sorry,'
) » she thought.
And really, she might have spoken kindly to the poor man, and
told him that she was much obliged to him, but that he really
must not ask her to drink porter with him.
“But it's all over and done now,” she said to herself as she
sat at her window on Saturday night. And then she looked at
the cornice, and saw the faithful little pewter pot traveling
slowly toward her.
She was conquered. This act of Christian forbearance was too
much for her kindly spirit. She read the inscription on the paper,
porter is good for Flours
but better for Fokes
V-172
## p. 2738 (#302) ###########################################
2738
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
and she lifted the pot to her lips, which were not half so red as
her cheeks, and took a good, hearty, grateful draught.
She sipped in thoughtful silence after this first plunge, and
presently she was surprised to find the bottom of the pot in full
view. On the table at her side a few pearl buttons were
screwed up in a bit of white paper. She untwisted the paper
and smoothed it out, and wrote in a tremulous hand — she could
write a very neat hand
Thanks.
This she laid on the top of the pot, and in a moment the bent
two-foot rule appeared and drew the mail-carriage home. Then
she sat still, enjoying the warm glow of the porter, which seemed
to have permeated her entire being with a heat that was not at
all like the unpleasant and oppressive heat of the atmosphere, an
atmosphere heavy with the spring damp. A gritting on the tin
aroused her. A piece of paper lay under her eyes.
fine groing weather
Smith
Now it is unlikely that in the whole round and range of
conversational commonplaces there was one other greeting that
could have induced the seamstress to continue the exchange of
communications. But this simple and homely phrase touched her
country heart. What did “groing weather” matter to the toilers
in this waste of brick and mortar? This stranger must be, like
herself, a country-bred soul, longing for the new green and the
upturned brown mold of the country fields. She took up the
paper, and wrote under the first message: -
Fine
But that seemed curt: ”for” she added; for what? She did
not know. At last in desperation she put down "potatoes. ” The
piece of paper was withdrawn, and came back with an addition:
Toomist for potatos
And when the little seamstress had read this, and grasped the
fact that “m-i-s-t” represented the writer's pronunciation of
"moist,” she laughed softly to herself. A man whose mind at
such a time was seriously bent upon potatoes was not a man to
be feared. She found a half-sheet of note-paper, and wrote:
## p. 2739 (#303) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2739
I lived in a small village before I came to New York,
but I am afraid I do not know much about farming. Are
you a farmer!
The answer came:
have ben most Every thing
farmed a Spel in Maine
Smith
As she read this, the seamstress heard the church clock strike
nine.
« Bless me, is it so late ? ” she cried, and she hurriedly pen-
ciled Good Night, thrust the paper out, and closed the window.
But a few minutes later, passing by, she saw yet another bit of
paper on the cornice, fluttering in the evening breeze. It said
only good nite, and after a moment's hesitation, the little seam-
stress took it in and gave it shelter.
After this they were the best of friends. Every evening the
pot appeared, and while the seamstress drank from it at her
window, Mr. Smith drank from its twin at his; and notes were
exchanged as rapidly as Mr. Smith's early education permitted.
They told each other their histories, and Mr. Smith's was one of
travel and variety, which he seemed to consider quite a matter
of course. He had followed the sea, he had farmed, he had
been a logger and a hunter in the Maine woods. Now he was
foreman of an East River lumber-yard, and he was prospering.
In a year or two he would have enough laid by to go home to
Bucksport and buy a share in a ship-building business. All this
dribbled out in the course of a jerky but variegated correspond-
ence, in which autobiographic details were mixed with reflections
moral and philosophical.
A few samples will give an idea of Mr. Smith's style:-
i was one trip to van demens
land
To which the seamstress replied:-
It must have been very interesting.
But Mr. Smith disposed of this subject very briefly:-
it wornt
## p. 2740 (#304) ###########################################
2740
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
Further he vouchsafed:
i seen a chinese cook in
hong kong could cook flapjacks
like your mother
a mishnery that sells Rum
is the menest of Gods crechers
a bulfite is not what it is
cract up to Be
the dagos are wussen the
brutes
i am 6 134
but my Father was 6 foot 4
The seamstress had taught school one winter, and she could
not refrain from making an attempt to reform Mr. Smith's or-
thography. One evening, in answer to this communication,
i killd a Bare in Maine 600
lbs waight
she wrote:
Isn't it generally spelled Bear?
but she gave up the attempt when he responded :-
a bare is a mene animle any
way you spel him
The spring wore on, and the summer came, and still the
evening drink and the evening correspondence brightened the
close of each day for the little seamstress. And the draught of
porter put her to sleep each night, giving her a calmer rest than
she had ever known during her stay in the noisy city; and it
began, moreover, to make a little “meet» for her. And then
the thought that she was going to have an hour of pleasant
companionship somehow gave her courage to cook and eat her
little dinner, however tired she was. The seamstress's cheeks
began to blossom with the June roses.
And all this time Mr. Smith kept his vow of silence unbroken,
though the seamstress sometimes tempted him with little ejacu-
lations and exclamations to which he might have responded. He
was silent and invisible. Only the smoke of his pipe, and the
## p. 2741 (#305) ###########################################
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
2741
clink of his mug as he set it down on the cornice, told her that
a living, material Smith was her correspondent. They never met
on the stairs, for their hours of coming and going did not co-
incide. Once or twice they passed each other in the street — but
Mr. Smith looked straight ahead of him about a foot over her
head. The little seamstress thought he was a very fine-looking
man, with his six feet one and three-quarters and his thick brown
beard. Most people would have called him plain.
Once she spoke to him. She was coming home one summer
evening, and a gang of corner-loafers stopped her and demanded
money to buy beer, as is their custom. Before she had time to
be frightened, Mr. Smith appeared, - whence, she knew not, -
scattered the gang like chaff, and collaring two of the human
hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate, ponderous, alternate kicks,
until they writhed in ineffable agony. When he let them crawl
away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly, looking
very pretty now, with the color in her cheeks. But Mr. Smith
answered no word. He stared over her head, grew red in the
face, fidgeted nervously, but held his peace until his eyes fell on
a rotund Teuton passing by.
“Say, Dutchy! ” he roared. The German stood aghast. « I
ain't got nothing to write with! ” thundered Mr. Smith, looking
him in the eye. And then the man of his word passed on his
way.
And so the summer went on, and the two correspondents
chatted silently from window to window, hid from sight of all
the world below by the friendly cornice. And they looked out
over the roof and saw the green of Tompkins Square grow
darker and dustier as the months went on.
Mr.
