site answers letters and works at the subscription list. She is constantly with him, and their mutual devotion is good to see. He asked us of our work, and I gave him a brief outline as did Mrs. Barnes of her own beautiful mission for boys "up town." Then we told him we wanted to know his views as much as could be told in a few minutes. At this he began, and such a cylopean talk as he gave us I never heard. It was Carlyle and Mazzini in one. Words were fairly dynamited from his lips. They roared and rang, they scorched and hissed. Something of

the primal energy of nature was in the man. He brushed aside our favorite plans as if they had been butterfly wings in the lurid flame of Chicago's conflagration. He rolled from that deep bass chest his anathema maranatha against our trifling expedients, our straws to stay Niagara! He volleyed statistics of the increase of pauperism and crime in New York, "a city that gives ten millions a year in charity"; he tore down our scaffolds for building and uprooted our levers for lifting, until-as a face may be so ugly as to seem positively handsome by the positiveness of its quality-his pessimism approached the sublime. History was ransacked from Constantine onward to show that the year '89 in any century is the year of fate.

The fifth of Nehemiah was quoted as appropriate reading for the epoch. It had been lately read at a workingmen's union and they had no idea what book it came out of! He told us to go, as he had done last Sunday, to a district in New York, which he described, where seven hundred thousand people are flung into the chaos of poverty and crime; to watch the women and little children at work for a crust, as desperately as a drowning man works for a breath, and he said, "Anybody who can look at them, knowing the horror of their slime and sin, and not cut his own throat, is a scoundrel." I forebore to remind him that he had thus looked, and still lived on! He summarized the horrors of our present situation thus: Aggregation of the masses into great cities; aggregation of the money into monopolies; working of women and children like beasts of burden; "and last of all, nearest the devil of all, is this danger (his voice was full of sulphurous portent here), this workingman, this Titan, this monster of the mud-sills, who in other crises has been but the bond-slave of wealth and power, this giant with the basal brain

Nelson Sizer the Phrenologist.

529

and hairy hands, this Caliban has found his Cadmus; he begins to think; he has learned how to read--and he is reading the Police Gazette !"

66

When he was a New York boy, he said, but fifteen thousand papers were issued daily to one million five hundred thousand now. Then, the shipping news was the staple article, arousing such questions as "Where is Hong-Kong?" 'Where is Rio de Janeiro?" Now the news was of bursting bombs and monster strikes, and the question, "How can I get my hands upon the throat of the man who is richer than I and choke him to death?" He shook his great head and paused a moment in the tornado of his speech. I lifted a copy of John Swinton's Paper from his desk and said, "But here, my friend, is something better than the Police Gazette. You at least would help these men to a better road, and, little as you think of me, I would cool their brains from the alcohol delirium." He dropped the splendid jeremiad, smiled a radiant glance upon our quiet trio, said, "I was tired; I did not sleep last night. Am charmed to meet you ladies; delighted by much that you have told me," and we shook hands with him and his gentle monitor, and went on our way believing that all of us, after our fashion, are trying to help solve the problem of poor old Humanity's bewilderment and heartache.

NELSON SIZER.

A most antithetical character to burly John Swinton is Nelson Sizer, for thirty years the head examiner of Fowler & Wells. Anna Gordon had a fancy that I should let him know who I was when we dropped in one day to look at the collection of casts, whereupon he proceeded to give me the benefit of his life-long studies of the "bumps." I told him that mother always had a kind side for phrenology, one of her earliest and most oft-repeated remarks to me having been this: "You have combativeness largely developed, my child." After a fashion as cheery as John Swinton seemed sad, Nelson Sizer is the talker among ten thousand. He seems to be endowed with the balanced, or "tempered temperament," as Henry Tuckerman, the essayist, used to call it. His vocabulary is boundless, its pictorial quality exhaustless, and his anecdotes many and apt. A skilled stenographer with a little stenographic type-writing machine sat near him; and as he walked

530

Total Abstinence in the White House.

back and forth, between making his cranial observations, Mr. Sizer had only to speak his mind and the swift click of the machine did all the rest. When I told him of the tens of thousands of letters received and written at Rest Cottage, he said, "And do you people waste yourselves on that eternal scratching? It is the poorest of economy. You could quadruple your efficiency by dictation." I asked him if he thought I could after a life-time of thinking along a pen-holder learn to work in this easier harness, and he said, "My own experience is that twenty days of this new liberty will make you quit the other method forever and a day."

FRANCES FOLSOM CLEVELAND.

During the Cleveland administration I attended a reception given at the White House to the Woman's International Council, and thought the President seemed somewhat taken back by the invasion of such an army of representative women, although he was all that one could wish in the way of cordiality, and Mrs. Cleveland wore her usual charming smile. I had seen her when she was a school-girl at Wells College, where I went to speak by invitation of the lady principal, Miss Smith, a life-long friend of my sister-in-law, Mary B. Willard. My niece, Katharine Willard, who was a student there, was one of Mrs. Cleveland's special friends, and has received from her at the White House many tokens of her loyal remembrance and affection. I spoke to the young ladies at Wells College on the duty that girls owe to their country as well as themselves and the homes of the future, urging upon them the motto, "Noblesse oblige," and I remember that my niece and Miss Folsom accompanied me in the omnibus to the railway train, and seemed entirely sympathetic with what I had said. Mrs. Cleveland has written me letters showing her devotion as a Christian woman to what she believes to be right, and assuring me of her steadfast total abstinence principles. I hold her in the highest honor and regard, and believe that no woman of her age has ever had it in her power and in her heart to do more for the sacred cause of temperance. The position of a total abstainer in the White House is, of necessity, a difficult one, because of the inevitable contact with the representatives of other nations whose temperance ideas are even less advanced than those of our own high officials.

A Valhalla of Its Own.

THE BEECHER FAMILY.

531

When but a school-girl, the sense of the worshipful in me bowed down before the first member of this magnificent family that my eyes had yet beheld; the woman who had built her whole life into the rising temple of woman's work and worth. I looked for "somebody wonderful to behold."

Catherine Beecher was really the first distinguished woman that I met. On one of her trips to visit and inspect her favorite college at Milwaukee, she came to Evanston and was the guest of my friend and benefactress, Mrs. Dr. Kidder. I entered the room where I was told she was, with a feeling of appropriate awe, which was, however, soon dispelled by the wholly unconventional manner of the sturdy little woman who was putting on her rubbers preparatory to a walk. She seemed to me essentially Beecherish, like a lump of ore out of the mine, not smelted in the mill of custom nor hammered into shape on the anvil of prejudice. To me the Beecher family has always lived in a Valhalla of its own, and been an original force, strong and refreshing as Nature herself. My parents were never done talking about them and holding them up as examples. I have improved every unforced opportunity to meet the different members, and have had personal acquaintance with eight out of the twelve.

At Elmira, where I had the pleasure of being a guest in the well-known water-cure conducted by the Gleason family, I met Thomas K. and Mrs. Beecher in their own home, and in their church at an evening sociable. Brother Thomas was so genial that I said to his wife, "He is one of the most affable men I ever saw, and yet I had been told he was a man of moods." "Ah, well," she answered in her cheery tones, "you have seen my bear when his coat was stroked the right way, and I'm glad of it.”

Henry Ward Beecher was always my mother's hero beyond all other men. His sermons were her Sunday reading in the Independent and the Christian Union for many a year. She never saw him until in one of his last trips West he came to Evanston to speak, and it grieved me that in my absence she failed to meet him personally, for he never had a warmer friend or one more true and steadfast in the night of his great calamity. She would not hear a word against him, and her sturdy strength, when

almost every one around her wavered, gave me a new sense of her native force of character.

Mr. Beecher was more than any other man, a grown-up boy. It was seen in his whole manner. The very way in which he would take off that broad felt hat and tuck it under the chair or pulpit as he sat down; the way in which he would push back his hair and drum with his fingers on the chair arm; the curious forgetfulness that frequently led him to wear his rubbers into the pulpit and stand up in them to preach, showed the unpremeditated character of his words and thoughts. His "Lectures to Young Men" was one of the first books read by my brother and me. His papers on Pomology were special pets with my father, who was as fond of horticulture as Beecher himself.

In 1876, by invitation of Mary A. Livermore, I was her guest for a day at the Twin Mountain House, New Hampshire. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were there as usual. I sat at the same table, but not near enough to speak beyond the mere acknowledgment of the introductions with which I was then for the first time honored.

Next morning, the guests of the hotel all gathered in the parlors, as the custom was, and Mr. Beecher conducted family prayers. In my pocket testament I find these notes, penciled at the time:

TWIN MOUNTAIN HOUSE, August 18, 1876. As usual Mr. Beecher conducted morning prayers. Hon. William Wheeler, a worthy candidate for vice-president, was present, also Mrs. Beecher and Mrs. Livermore. The exposition of Romans xiv. and the prayer of Mr. Beecher were memorable and beautiful and helpful to my soul. There was in them so much of breadth, of strength and gentleness. In a word, they had the Christ-like spirit. He desired us to ask questions, and mine was on the twenty-first verse, "It is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine."

Mr. Beecher was very earnest in his reply. "It is just like this," he said: "Suppose there is a precipice out by a school-house where many children are assembled. Suppose that half way down that precipice there is a spring I specially enjoy, and, strong man that I am, I can go down there safely, by a narrow path, dangerous to many, but not to me. Suppose that the children are determined to go down there after me and won't believe the path is dangerous since they see that I tread it with impunity. Some of them that try it fall and break their necks and others are lamed for life. Now what sort of a man, much more, what sort of a Christian should I be, if, under these circumstances, I persisted in going down that