even sometimes vie with us when we are very prosperous, and jealously try to show us the superiority of their own happiness. Such a story, I think, is the outcome of the common groping of the imagination figuratively to look up to something more ideal than itself. The legend has become almost a part of me."

Carstie admitted that it was very pretty, and he determined to go home and repeat it to his little girls. The younger was just four years old. He had not told us before, but it was really because the elder, "Mabie," said she liked wild-duck that he waded through two entire marshes in order to bring these home to her.

"Then have your wife cook them in the new manner, Carstie," suggested Jacob, "the way the Joneses are making them.”

"That's a good idea. I can get their recipe on my way home tonight, can't I?"

Carstie looked over the water and thought a few moments. Finally he spoke up again.

"Jacob, I was thinking there is a lot of truth in what you said about the origin of that Indian legend-that the mind is always fashioning some ideal condition for itself. For example, take me. I have all my acres of cotton. I think from here I can almost see my thousands of head of cattle grazing along the river-bank, multiplying their numbers like real gold dollars for me. They rake me in fat profits every season, both the farm and the pastures. Next month I plan to broaden my wharf-landing and add a couple of stories to my business house, and I expect that to double the amount of my income. I say I have got all these and yet I keep picturing something still better before me, just like the Indians. I see the time coming when I will have gathered in all the profits of year after year and sit back in a sort of well-earned ease. My wife and I will be happy. My girls will be grown up daughters then, my little 'Mabie' and 'Olive,' and all my vast earnings will be only for their use. Then I will bring them wild-ducks again," and he laughed. He playfully let the head of one drag along the water-surface by the skiff.

"I only wish I were in my warm bed now," put in the schoolmaster. "How

much farther do we have to go, anyhow?" He twisted his head around and sighted the dark contour of a row-boat approaching in the distance.

Carstie passed round his bottle again and we all drank to "good spirits."

The boat meant home.

When it drew nearer the schoolmaster hallooed to the oarsman.

"Say, how far must we row yet—to the bend?"

The man stood up in his boat like a gloomy spirit, vague in the darkness. He looked at us, I thought, with a frown.

"Hay!" he laughed. "Where do you think you are?"

The schoolmaster merely repeated his question in a different form.
"How far are we from Carstie's wharf?"

"You mean to

"You don't know you are over it now?" replied the man. say you don't know the Mississippi broke her levies and has been overflowed twelve hours higher than the top of any bottom-land house in the vicinity? Carstie's wharf and Carstie's store are buried in a considerable depth of water." He had now come closer and recognized Carstie. He hesitated and then added: "Also Carstie's farm and his cattle and Carstie's wife and two daughters. The suddenest overflow since the sixties."

Carstie let his string of quail and his two pretty copperhead ducks sink into the stream-and they disappeared down the lonely current.

W. I. Cohn.

THE JANIŻARY.

A restless hoof, a clinking spur,

And the wild, wind-cleaving ride,—

With the glory of Osman as harbinger,

And the infidel Greek as guide.

Through the galloping shadows I ride, I ride,-
With ever the voice at my sabre-side,

And ever the touch on my heart.

A bleeding sword, a dented shield,
And the quickening whiff of the fray,
With never a thought, to save or yield,
And the infidel Greek to slay.

For the glory of Osman, the fray, the fray,-
With the low, sad voice at my side alway,
And the unknown song in my soul.

Hermann Hagedorn, Jr.

CHARACTERIZATION IN LITERATURE.

The highest aim of fiction, and the avowed aim of biography, is characterization. The object of the one is an exposition of some phase or some example of human nature; that of the other the portrayal of some actual person. For none will contend, in the case of fiction, that the mere telling of a story, or describing of a locality, is of greater import than the drawing of a character, or a series of characters, about which the whole story must revolve; or in the case of biography that the mere narrative of a man's life is tantamount in importance to the exhibition of his nature.

There are many writers who strive after success in this, but few who

For real characterization is

For a man with a sufficient

attain it; and those few could not tell us how. unreasoning. It cannot be properly called an art. bent in any direction can make himself an artist, using the word in its strictest sense, but the creator of real character is born, not made.

Does anyone suppose that characterization, in its best form, can be learned? But an art can be learned. The greatest examples of art are the results of art combined with genius, but a work purely of genius is in no sense a work of art. But art, nevertheless, can aid genius. Characterization is, then, a thing which art, without genius, can never accomplish, and it is so subtle that the successful creator of a character cannot say what his means were. But up to a certain point one can analyze characterization, just as the philosopher and the scientist can trace back the whence and wherefore of things, but can never reach first causes.

Of characterization there are two important divisions—that of biography, and that of fiction. The former is the exposition of the character of a real person, in such a way that a man of a later generation can read, and feel that that person has become real to him, truly a part of his life. The latter is the creation of an imaginary character, which will be as real to the sympathetic reader as if the creation were an actual person whom he had known. That biographical characterization is the more difficult of accomplishment is suggested by the fact that while the English language possesses many instances of successful fictitious characterization, examples of thorough biographical success are notably rare. And for this reason, if for no other, the characterization of fiction is of more general interest.

Of this characterization, which is not reproductive, but creative, there are several phases. There is the individual characterization of Shakespeare and Thackeray, the individualized type of Jane Austen and perhaps Fielding, and the mere exposition of characteristics of most of the lesser novelists, particularly of later years. Again, the characters of Dickens are most distinctly individuals, whereas Bunyan's, on the other hand, are types, and, of course, avowedly such.

The work of the writer who successfully creates individual men and

women, as well as of him who vivifies personified types, is from the inside, out; while that of the man who tries, by cleverly fitting together an assorted collection of characteristics, to create a life-like being, is from the outside, in. In other words, the one knows instinctively what his character is and is going to become as it develops, while the other knows only what he wants to make it. The former is eminently successful, the latter never quite so. And he only works from the outside in because he is incompetent to do otherwise. But the man who sets forth a personified type must not be given equal credit with the creator of an individual character; the one does but a work of crystalization, while the other does one of creation. The type already exists for him who has eyes to see, but the individual is the creation of genius. It is the work of the personifier of a type to observe, for the most part instinctively, the common characteristics and ideas which go to make up a type among men, and having arranged and mentally digested these, to set forth the most salient among them in the guise of an individual. The individual is then composed from material already in existence. But the creator of the individual character has merely a sympathetic comprehension of human nature to work on. The outcome of his work is only a reproduction in so far as every man is a reproduction of every other. It is no more an exposition of a type than every human being is.

Take, for example, two novelists, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Miss Austen individualizes types, Dickens creates men and women. We have all known many Mr. Bingleys and not a few Mrs. Bennets, nor is even Mr. Bennet without the pale of our experience. But will anyone say that he has known a living Sikes, or that he ever met with a Barnaby Rudge? Dickens surely created those characters.

But the author who individualizes a type also differs from him who undertakes to form a character by combining a given assortment of characteristics, in that the one, understanding his type thoroughly and instinctively, is qualified to do the work of individualizing somewhat as the creator of an individual does his. He has so far assimilated his material that it comes from within him, from the sub-consciousness of which we understand so little. But