want to think I needn't think. I don't care for anything but you, and that is enough for the present. It will last a little yet. Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I am happier than I have been for a long time. And I want you to be happy-not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I am near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That is not the deepest thing; there is something deeper."

Ralph evidently found, from moment to moment, greater difficulty in speaking; he had to wait longer to collect himself. At first he appeared to make no response to these last words; he let a long time elapse. Then he murmured simply:

66

"You must stay here."

66

I should like to stay, as long as seems right."

"As seems right-as seems right?" He repeated her words. "Yes, you think a great deal about that."

"Of course one must. You are very tired," said Isabel.

"I am very tired. You said just now that pain is not the deepest thing. No-no. But it is very deep. If I could stay"

"For me you will always be here," she softly interrupted. It was easy to interrupt him.

But he went on, after a moment:

"It passes, after all; it's passing now. But love remains. I don't know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out. There are many things in life; you are very young."

"I feel very old," said Isabel.

"You will grow young again. That's how I see you. I don't believeI don't believe" And he stopped again; his strength failed him. She begged him to be quiet now. "We needn't speak to understand each other," she said.

"I don't believe that such a generous mistake as yours-can hurt you for more than a little.'

"Oh, Ralph, I am very happy now," she cried, through her tears.

"And remember this," he continued, "that if you have been hated, you have also been loved."

"Ah, my brother!" she cried, with a movement of still deeper prostration.

He had told her, the first evening she ever spent at Gardencourt, that if she should live to suffer enough she might some day see the ghost with which the old house was duly provided. She apparently had fulfilled the necessary condition; for the next morning, in the cold, faint dawn, she knew that a spirit was standing by her bed. She had lain down without undressing, for it was her belief that Ralph would not outlast the night. She had no inclination to sleep; she was waiting, and such waiting was wakeful. But she closed her eyes; she believed that as the night wore on she should hear a knock at her door. She heard no knock, but at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow gray, she started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons. It seemed to her for an instant that Ralph was

She

standing there-a dim, hovering figure in the dimness of the room. stared a moment; she saw his white face-his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure. She went out of her room, and in her certainty passed through dark corridors and down a flight of oaken steps that shone in the vague light of a hall-window. Outside of Ralph's door she stopped a moment, listening; but she seemed to hear only the hush that filled it. She opened the door with a hand as gentle as if she were lifting a veil from the face of the dead, and saw Mrs. Touchett sitting motionless and upright beside the couch of her son, with one of his hands in her own. The doctor was on the other side, with poor Ralph's further wrist resting in his professional fingers. The nurse was at the foot, between them. Mrs. Touchett took no notice of Isabel, but the doctor looked at her very hard; then he gently placed Ralph's hand in a proper position, close beside him. The nurse looked at her very hard too, and no one said a word; but Isabel only looked at what she had come to see. It was fairer than Ralph had ever been in life, and there was a strange resemblance to the face of his father, which, six years before, she had seen lying on the same pillow.

THE GLORY OF NIAGARA.

[Portraits of Places. 1884.]

HOUGH hereabouts so much is great, distances are small, and a ramble

standpoints. The one you are likely to choose first is that on the Canada cliff, a little way above the suspension bridge. The great fall faces you, enshrined in its own surging incense. The common feeling just here, I believe, is one of disappointment at its want of height; the whole thing appears to many people somewhat smaller than its fame. My own sense, I confess, was absolutely gratified from the first; and, indeed, I was not struck with anything being tall or short, but with everything being perfect. You are, moreover, at some distance, and you feel that with the lessening interval you will not be cheated of your chance to be dizzied with mere dimensions. Already you see the world-famous green, baffling painters, baffling poets, shining on the lip of the precipice; the more so, of course, for the clouds of silver and snow into which it speedily resolves itself. The whole picture before you is admirably simple. The Horseshoe glares and boils and smokes from the centre to the right, drumming itself into powder and thunder; in the centre the dark pedestal of Goat Island divides the double flood; to the left booms in vaporous dimness the minor battery of the American Fall; while on a level with the eye, above the still crest of either cataract, appear the white faces of the hithermost rapids. The circle of weltering froth at the base of the Horseshoe, emerging from the dead-white vapors-absolute white, as moonless midnight is absolute black-which muffle impenetrably the crash of the river upon the lower bed, melts slowly into the darker shades of green. It

seems in itself a drama of thrilling interest, this blanched survival and recovery of the stream. It stretches away like a tired swimmer, struggling from the snowy scum and the silver drift, and passing slowly from an eddying foam-sheet, touched with green lights, to a cold, verd-antique, streaked and marbled with trails and wild arabesques of foam. This is the beginning of that air of recent distress which marks the river as you meet it at the lake. It shifts along, tremendously conscious, relieved, disengaged, knowing the worst is over, with its dignity injured but its volume undiminished, the most stately, the least turbid of torrents. Its movement, its sweep and stride, are as admirable as its color, but as little as its color to be made a matter of words. These things are but part of a spectacle in which nothing is imperfect. As you draw nearer and nearer, on the Canada cliff, to the right arm of the Horseshoe, the mass begins in all conscience to be large enough. You are able at last to stand on the very verge of the shelf from which the leap is taken, bathing your boot-toes, if you like, in the side-ooze of the glassy curve. I may say, in parenthesis, that the importunities one suffers here, amid the central din of the cataract, from hackmen and photographers and vendors of gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous. The road is lined with little drinking-shops and warehouses, and from these retreats their occupants dart forth upon the hapless traveller with their competitive attractions. You purchase release at last by the fury of your indifference, and stand there gazing your fill at the most beautiful object in the world.

The perfect taste of it is the great characteristic. It is not in the least monstrous; it is thoroughly artistic and, as the phrase is, thought out. In the matter of line it beats Michael Angelo. One may seem at first to say the least, but the careful observer will admit that one says the most, in saying that it pleases-pleases even a spectator who was not ashamed to write the other day that he didn't care for cataracts. There are, however, so many more things to say about it-its multitudinous features crowd so upon the vision as one looks-that it seems absurd to begin to analyze. The main feature, perhaps, is the incomparable loveliness of the immense line of the shelf and its lateral abutments. It neither falters, nor breaks, nor stiffens, but maintains from wing to wing the lightness of its semicircle. This perfect curve melts into the sheet that seems at once to drop from it and sustain it. The famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A green more vividly cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. It is to the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky is to artificial dyes, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as that. You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring of color to all the verdant water-caves and all the clear, sub-fluvial haunts and bowers of naiads and mermen in all the streams of the earth. The lower half of the watery wall is shrouded in the steam of the boiling gulf—a veil never rent nor lifted. At its heart this eternal cloud seems fixed and still with excess of motion-still and intensely white; but, as it rolls and climbs against its lucent cliff, it tosses little whiffs and fumes and pants of snowy smoke, which betray the convulsions we never behold. In the middle of the curve, the depth of the recess, the converging walls are ground into a dust of foam, which rises in a tall column, and fills

the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far overtops the crest of the cataract, and, as you look down along the rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted gulf like some far-flowing signal of danger. Of these things some vulgar verbal hint may be attempted; but what words can render the rarest charm of all-the clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and figure of the leap, the rounded passage of the horizontal to the perpendicular! To say it is simple is to make a phrase about it. Nothing was ever more successfully executed. It is carved as sharp as an emerald, as one must say and say again. It arrives, it pauses, it plunges; it comes and goes forever; it melts and shifts and changes, all with the sound as of millions of bass voices; and yet its outline never varies, never moves with a different pulse. It is as gentle as the pouring of wine from a flagon-of melody from the lip of a singer. From the little grove beside the American Fall you catch this extraordinary profile better than you are able to do at the Horseshoe. If the line of beauty had vanished from the earth elsewhere, it would survive on the brow of Niagara. It is impossible to insist too strongly on the grace of the thing, as seen from the Canada cliff. The genius who invented it was certainly the first author of the idea that order, proportion, and symmetry are the conditions of perfect beauty. He applied his faith among the watching and listening forests, long before the Greeks proclaimed theirs in the measurements of the Parthenon. Even the roll of the white batteries at the base seems fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle zone of difference between the flood as it falls and the mist as it rises you imagine a mystical meaning the passage of body to soul, of matter to spirit, of human to divine.

Clarence King.

BORN in Newport, R. I., 1843.

THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO.

[The Century Magazine. 1886.]

"How can I be mistaken, thou eternal misbeliever?" cried Don Quixote ; "dost thou not see that knight that comes riding up directly toward us upon a dapple-gray steed, with a helmet of gold on his head?"

"I see what I see," replied Sancho, "and the devil of anything can I spy but a fellow on such another gray ass as mine is, with something that glitters o'top of his head." "I tell thee that is Mambrino's helmet," replied Don Quixote.-Cervantes.

EAR DON HORACIO : You cannot have forgotten the morning we turned our backs upon San Francisco, and slowly rambled seaward through winding hollows of park, nor how the mist drooped low as if to hear the tones of fondness in our talk of Cervantes and the Don, nor how the approving sun seemed to send a benediction through the riven cloud-rack overhead.

It was after we had passed the westward edge of that thin veneer of polite

vegetation which a coquettish art has affixed to the great wind-made waves of sand, and entered the waste of naked drift beyond, that we heard afar a whispered sea-plaint, and beheld the great Pacific coming in under cover of a low-lying fog, and grinding its white teeth on the beach.

Still discoursing of La Mancha, we left behind us the last gateway of the hills, came to the walk's end and the world's end and the end of the Aryan migrations.

We were not disturbed by the restless Aryan who dashed past us at the rate of 2:20 with an insolent flinging of sand, a whirling cobweb of hickory wheel, and all the mad hurry of the nineteenth century at his heels.

For what (we asked one another as we paced the Cliff-House verandah) did this insatiable wanderer leave his comfortable land of Central Asia and urge ever westward through forty centuries of toilsome march? He started in the world's youth a simple, pastoral pilgrim, and we saw him pull up his breathless trotters at the very Ultima Thule, rush into the bar-room, and demand a cocktail.

Having quenched this ethnic thirst and apparently satisfied the yearning of ages, we watched him gather up his reins and start eastward again, as if for the sources of the sacred Ganges, and disappear in the cloud of his own swift-rushing dirt.

By the fire in our private breakfast-room we soon forgot him, and you led me again into the company of the good knight.

Even Alphonso must have felt the chivalric presence, for all unbidden he discreetly hispanized our omelet.

Years have gone since that Cervantean morning of ours, and to-day, my friend, I am come from our dear Spain.

As I journeyed in the consecrated realm of Don Quixote, it happened to me to pass a night "down in a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recollect."

Late in the evening, after a long day in the saddle, we had stopped at an humble posada on the outskirts of an old pueblo, too tired to press on in search of better accommodations, which we believed the town would probably afford. We were glad enough to tie our weary animals to their iron rings within the posada, and fling ourselves down to sleep in the doorway, lulled by the comfortable munching sound of the beasts, and fanned by a soft wind which came fitfully from the south.

The mild, dry night, wherein thin veils of cloud had tempered the moonlight and overspread the vacant plains with spectral shadows, was at length yielding to the more cheerful advance of dawn.

From an oaken bench on which I had slept, in the arched entrance of the posada, I could look back across those wan swells of plain over which my companion and I had plodded the day before, and watch the landscape brighten cheerfully as the sun rose.

Just in front, overhanging the edge of a dry, shallow ravine, stood the ruin of a lone wind-mill, a breach in its walls rendering visible the gnarled trunk of an old olive-tree, which hugged the shade of the ancient mill, as if safe under the protection of a veritable giant.