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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND are created to be lost and saved." It should be added that this terrible trend was not confined even to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be a permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton, without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, "How splendid! How glorious! … and oh what an escape!"

The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was in a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason, turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yet it was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be a small republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. In relation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but an aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and alone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican virtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues—publicity. One of the 168


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THE AGE OF THE PURITANS Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all the unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: "This thing was not done n a corner. But their most drastic idealism did nothing to recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people. They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which the Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they may have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular. England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when she was a republic.

The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history, arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance, between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism which affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashion of Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made that creed and perhaps that cultured world possible—the aristocratic revolt under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and a son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really from hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is at once the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal passion that passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion 169

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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND that remained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland; and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at Worcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist matter in both countries—a mere brigandage of barons; and even John Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did become popular in the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our own land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixed with Parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England Parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing, and was mixed with Puritanism. When the storm began to rise against Charles I., after the more or less transitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the instances commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny Geddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English legend is that of John Hampden, the great squre who raised a county against the King. The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed, almost wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies the merchants. They were squires who may well have regarded themselves as the real and natural leaders of the English; but they were leaders who allowed no mutiny among their followers. 170


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THE AGE OF THE PURITANS There was certainly no Village Hampden in Hampden Village.

The Stuarts, it may be suspected brought from Scotland a more mediæval and therefore more logical view of their own function; for the note of their nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I. was a Scot and a pedant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I. also was not a little of a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had also the virtues of a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for the things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un-English, and could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, and seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of the sort that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore remembered—especially the black. From the first he fenced with his Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman who wished to finish the chapter in order to find out what happened to Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt to make him strong in the fashion of a French king and perished on the scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first carried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the Parliamentary 171


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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience and genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the same death as his great servant.

Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, through ramifications generally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the great modern query of whether a King can raise taxes without the consent of his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the great Buckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax which Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires made a legend of the mediæval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths cover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very different certainty, and should be considered separately.

For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of the facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that the seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is not possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn of the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic and actively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I. to raise Ship Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II. to free the serfs. The 172


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THE AGE OF THE PURITANS group which claimed coal and minerals from Charles I. was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from the village communities. It was the same institution which only two generations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly had, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusively the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House of Commons has itself been a House of Lords.

But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign against the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are said against the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies is little realized; for it is connected with what our insular history most neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered that though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the spread of a conflagration. Charles II., for instance, was a man of strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was quite certainly and even reluctantly, convinced of 173


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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND Catholicism as a philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost awful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It was more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was lettre de cachet as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the law were better off than the French; a French satirist would probably have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse off than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was with the squire; but he was, if anything, more limited when he was the magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually weaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, in short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were in a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some remains of mediæval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements, which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such things might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes was a single monster and for France a single man.

As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism was pure, it was unfortunately 174


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THE AGE OF THE PURITANS passing. And the very type of the transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who is popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in history much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism. He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as he emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism of the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less of the Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy became at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity, toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his, and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the high inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had to 175


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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness regarded as beasts—or as the modern euphemism would put it, as aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a sort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not a representative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or vision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own God who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as overpowering as a nightmare—and as passing.

It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day; it was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even what followed Cromwell's death, the Restoration, was an aristocratic compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for a mediæval king; but the Protectorate and the 176


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 THE PROVENIENCE OF CERTAIN NEGRO FOLK-TALES.

BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS.

II.

The Pass-word.

In the Cape Verde Islands "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" is a true folk- tale—I have called it "The Seven Robbers." Whether the island tale came from Portugal as a folk-tale or as literature I do not know. The evidence as far as it goes is in favour of the second hypothesis. In the Portuguese collections accessible to me I have not found "The Seven Robbers." The literary version of the tale I found known to a Saõ Nicolau Islander in Newport, Rhode Island, and to a Boa Vista friend of his in New Bedford. But whether as a Portuguese or as a Cape Verde Islands folk-tale the following tale is of interest as representing probably the initial variant of a great number of variants of "Ali Baba" in negro folklore.


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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND becoming more new. In observing what is called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest Jew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning from an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than the nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work. They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another far away in the western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the whole story of Britain. 178


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 Rh The Seven Robbers.

Once there were two brothers; one was rich, the other was poor. The poor brother gave the rich one his three sons to christen. Every day the children went to their godfather to get bread. Then he said that giving them bread every day was very expensive. One day one of his god-children came to his house to get bread. He took the bread, he threw it in his face, he said, "Do not come to get bread any more." The poor brother got grass for a living. One day he went out early for grass. He was too early, he sat down to wait for daybreak. He saw seven robbers come out through the rocks. He heard them say where they were going to steal. One said, "I'm going to Providence"; another said, "I'm going to Newport"; another said, "I'm going to San Francisco." After they left he went to the rock, he said, "Rock, open." He entered, he found all kinds of money on the ground like grass. He had only one donkey, no sack. He took off his trousers, filled them with money, saddled them on his donkey, he went home. Next day he borrowed a donkey, making two, and he took with him a sack. When he came home with all this money he saw he had too much money not to measure it. He sent to borrow a quarta from his rich brother. He measured the money, he buried it under the bed. Next day he went again with four donkeys, he sent to borrow the quarta again. Before this he bought food by the litre. His brother thought he could buy only by the litre, not by the quarta. He put some tar on the quarta he lent. He measured, when he sent the quarta a pound of gold stuck to the bottom of the quarta. The rich brother found it. He went to ask his brother where he got it. The poor brother said that was a quarta of corn which he bought. The rich brother answered, "No, I found a pound sticking to the quarta. If you don't tell me, I'm going to denounce you in the


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 208 city." The poor brother told him how he saw the robbers come out of the rock as well as how he got the money. The rich brother said, "You must take me there to get some money." "Yes, I will take you. Yes, go and come at midnight, we will go." The man went home, but as he was in a hurry to get the money he came back at ten, he crowed like a rooster. His brother said, "Go home. You are not a rooster. When it is time, I will call you." He went, in half an hour he came back. His brother said, "It is still too early, but let us go." The rich brother took five donkeys, the other took two. They went to the same place, they sat down to wait. When it was time out came the seven robbers. The poor brother counted them. When all seven had gone and left, he said, "Rock, open." They went in, they collected the money together. There was a bar of gold. The rich brother said, "I will take it with me." The poor brother said, "No, don't take it. It's the only one here. They would discover it, they would miss it." The rich brother took it, however, he put it in his sack. Next day he did not wait for his brother, he went alone with twenty donkeys. The robbers had not missed the gold bar. He loaded his donkeys, he left. The next day he took forty donkeys. After he came there, six robbers came out, they left one there to catch the man who came there to steal. He counted "One, two, three, four, five, six, six, it can't be six, it's seven." He counted again. "That's six, but I'm going to make it seven. . . . Rock, open." He went in, he filled his sack. The robber who was inside caught him. He put irons on his hands and feet, he left him until the other robbers came. They took him, they skinned him, they cut him up joint by joint, they left him there. A day passed, he did not come home. His wife went to the house of her brother-in-law. She said to him, "If you don't go get your brother, I'll denounce you in the city." He answered, "I'll go for him, but I believe


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 Rh they've killed him." He went to the same place. Seven robbers come out as usual. He said, "Rock, open." The first thing he saw was his brother lying dismembered in the middle of the floor. He put him in the sack, took it on his back-and went home. He said to his sister-in-law, "I found my brother cut up piece by piece. I'm going to look for a shoemaker to sew him together. I'll put him in a bed, we will make out he died sudden." (The woman had three boys and one girl.) "If one of your boys wants to be a doctor or a priest we'll make him one. If the other wants to be a governor we'll educate him for it. The girl we'll teach what she wants to know. What money you want, when you need it I will give it to you to the end of your life." They put the dead man in bed, the shoemaker came and sewed him up, they gave him a lot of money for his work. When the seven robbers came they did not find the dismembered man, they said, "The robber has been again in our house." The next day they left one robber in the house again, but no one came. The captain of the robbers said that he was going into the city to see where they had buried him. The first house he came to was the house of the shoemaker. The shoemaker was at work. The captain said to him, "Can you sew well [enough] to make a pair of shoes?" The shoemaker answered, "That is nothing. Yesterday I sewed up a man's body that they cut up joint by joint." He had agreed with the poor brother not to tell. The captain knew that was the place. He said to the shoemaker, "Go with me. Show me the place. I'll pay you twice as much as they paid you." The shoemaker showed the place. The captain went home, he put the six robbers each in a barrel, he rolled the barrels on the road. He rolled them to the house of the widow. He asked her if she wanted to buy molasses. The woman said no. The boys went to the house of their uncle, they asked him to buy the molasses. They told the captain to put the


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saw an upheaval of sand, followed by a column of oil, heard a shout of victory from the men, and then Clover, who had been shivering with apprehension, snorted loudly, took the bit between her teeth and began to run. MacDuffy, resting securely in the assurance Betty had given that the horse would not be frightened, was occupied with the men, and horse and rider were rapidly disappearing from sight before he realized what had happened.

"Clover, Clover!" Betty put her arms around the maddened creature's neck and spoke to her softly. "It's all right, dear. Don't be afraid. I thought you had been brought up in an oil country, or I wouldn't have let you stand where you could see the well."

But Clover's nerves had been sadly shaken, and she was not yet in a state to listen to reason. Betty was now an excellent horsewoman, and had no difficulty in remaining in the saddle. She did not try to pull the horse in, rather suspecting that the animal had a hard mouth, but let Rh


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Rh the reins lie loosely on her neck, speaking reassuringly from time to time. Gradually Clover slackened her wild lope, dropped to a gentle gallop, and then into a canter and from that to a walk.

"Well, now, you silly horse, I hope you feel that you're far enough from danger," said Betty conversationally. "I'm sure I haven't the slightest idea where we are. Bob and I have never ridden this far, and from the looks of the country I don't think it is what the geographies call 'densely populated'. Mercy, what a lonesome place!"

Clover had gone contentedly to cropping grass, and that reminded Betty that she was hungry.

Far away she saw the outlines of oil derricks, but the horse seemed to have taken her out of the immediate vicinity of the oil fields. Not a house was in sight, not a moving person or animal. The stillness was unbroken save for the hoarse call of a single bird flying overhead.

Suddenly Betty's eyes widened in astonishment. She jerked up Clover's head so sharply that that pampered pet shook it angrily. Why should she be treated like that?

"The three hills!" gasped Betty. "Grandma Watterby's three hills! 'Joined together like hands' she always says, and right back of the


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102 Saunders' house. Clover! do you suppose we've found the three hills and Bob's aunts?"

Clover had no opinion to offer. She had been rudely torn from her enjoyment of the herbage, and she resented that plainly. Betty, however, was too excited to consider the subject of lunch, even though a moment before she had been very hungry.

She turned the horse's head toward the three hills, and with every step that brought her nearer the conviction grew that she had found the Saunders' place. To be sure, she had seen nothing of a house as yet, but, like the name of Saunders, three hills were not a common phenomenon in Oklahoma, at least not within riding distance of the oil fields.

"It's an awful long way," sighed Betty, when after half an hour's riding, the hills seemed as far away as before. "I suppose the air is so clear that they seemed nearer than they are. And I guess we came the long way around. There must be a road from the Watterby farm that cuts off some of the distance."

Betty did not worry about what Bob or the men at the wells might be thinking. They knew her for a good rider, and Clover for a comparatively easily managed horse. No one in the West considers a good gallop anything serious, even when it assumes the proportions of a runaway.


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Rh Betty was sure that they would expect her to ride back when Clover had had her run, and, barring a misstep, no harm would be likely to befall the rider.

After a full hour and a half of steady going, the three hills obligingly moved perceptibly nearer. Betty could see the ribbon of road that lay at their base, and the outline of a rambling farmhouse.

"Grandma Watterby said the hills were right back of the house!" repeated Betty ecstatically. "Oh, I'm sure this must be the place. If only Bob had come with me!"

She laughed a little at the notion of such an accommodating runaway, and then pulled Clover up short as they came to a rickety fence that apparently marked the boundary line of a field.

"We go straight across this field to the road, I think," said Betty aloud. "I don't believe there is anything planted. Clover, can you jump that fence?"

The fence was not very high, and at the word Clover gracefully cleared it. The field was a tangled mass of corn stubble and weeds, and a good farmer would have known that it had not been under cultivation that year. At the further side Betty found a pair of bars, and, taking these down, found herself in a narrow, deserted road, facing a lonely farmhouse.


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 210 barrels in the house of their uncle. While they were cooking for the captain, the children took the corkscrew to get out the molasses. They bored a hole in the barrel, the man inside the barrel asked, "Is this the time?" The little boy said, "No, wait a while." He told his mother that somebody was inside the barrel. The mother went and bored holes in all the barrels. "Is this the time?" they asked. "Wait a while," said the woman, "Wait a while." The woman took a club, she went behind the captain sitting at table. She gave him a blow on the head, she killed him. The woman put on the fire a big pot of water. She turned up all the barrels, in each she made a big hole. She poured boiling water into the barrels, she killed all the robbers. Then she sent to summon two kinsmen. They dug a big hole in the court, they buried the bodies. The poor brother went back to the rock, he took out the rest of the money, he brought it home, he divided it with the widow. The eldest son of the woman became a doctor, the second son a governor, the youngest a priest. The girl became a schoolmistress. The four children and the widow together built a fine house in their place. The road to their house was paved with gold. When the widow died she left all her wealth to my father. My father was so mean he drank up all the money and left me none.

Between this Cape Verde Islands variant and the following variant from Northern Nigeria occurs a gap which I have no doubt will be filled in when larger collections of African tales are available.

"Dodo [a mythical monster]. The Robber, and the Magic Door.— Soon the Women met a certain Robber who said that he was going to commit a theft in Dodo's house. So they said, 'When you go, say to the door "Zirka bude" [open], and when you have stolen what you want, and have gone out again, say "Zirka Gumgum" [shut].' So he went to Dodo's house and said, 'Zirka bude,' and the door


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Index talk:John Masefield.djvu

Date
Date is 1929 according to http://www.zvab.com/displayBookDetails.do?ts=john-masefield&itemId=128685646, as indicated in --Mpaa (talk) 08:35, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

title: Index talk:John Masefield.djvu


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104 The house was set back several yards from the road and even to the casual observer presented a melancholy picture. The paint was peeling from the clapboards, leaders were hanging in rusty shreds, and the fence post to which Betty tied her horse was rotten and worm-eaten.

"My goodness, I'm afraid the aunts are awfully poor," sighed Betty, who had cherished a dream that Bob might find his relatives rich and ready to help him toward the education he so ardently desired. "Even Bramble Farm didn't look as bad as this."

She went up the weedy path to the house, and then for the first time noticed that all the shades were drawn and the doors and windows closed. It was a warm day and there was every reason for having all the fresh air that could be obtained.

"They must be away from home!" thought Betty. "Or—doesn't anybody live here?"

A cackle from the hen yard answered her question and put her mind at ease. Where there were chickens, there would be people as a matter of course. They might have gone away to spend the day.

"I'll take Clover out to the barn and give her a drink of water," decided Betty. "No one would mind that. Grandma Watterby says a farmer's barn is always open to his neighbor's stock."


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Rh So, Clover's bridle over her arm, Betty proceeded out to the barnyard.

"Why—how funny!" she gasped.

The unearthly stillness which had reigned was broken at her approach by the neighing of a horse, and at the sound the chickens began to beat madly against the wire fencing of their yard, cows set up a bellowing, and a wild grunting came from the pig-pen.

Betty hurried to the barn. Three cows in their stanchions turned imploring eyes on her, and a couple of old horses neighed loudly. Something prompted Betty to look in the feed boxes. They were empty.

"I believe they're hungry!" she exclaimed. "Clover, I don't believe they've been fed or watered for several days! They wouldn't act like this if they had."

There wasn't a drop of water anywhere in or about the barn, and a hasty investigation of the pig troughs and the drinking vessels in the chicken yard showed the same state of affairs.

"I don't know how much to feed you," Betty told the suffering animals compassionately, "but at any rate I know what to feed you. And you shall have some water as fast as I can pump it."

She was thankful for the weeks spent at Bramble Farm as she set about her heavy tasks. She was tired from her long ride and the excitement


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106 of the morning, but it never entered her head to go away and leave the neglected farm stock. There was no other house within sight where she could go for help, and if the animals were fed and watered that day it was evidently up to her to do it.

She worked valiantly, heaping the horses' mangers with hay, carrying cornstalks to the cows and feeding the ravenous pigs and chickens corn on the cob, for there was no time to run the sheller. She had some difficulty in discovering the supplies, and then, when all were served, she discovered that not one of the animals had touched the food.

"Too thirsty," she commented wisely.

Watering them was hard, tiresome work, for one big tub in the center of the yard evidently served the whole barn. When she had pumped that full—and how her arms ached!—she led the horses out, and after them, the cows. She was afraid to let either horses or cows have all they wanted, and jerking them back to their stalls before they had finished was not easy. She carried pailful after pailful of water to the pigs and the chickens and it was late in the afternoon before she had the satisfaction of knowing that every animal, If not content, was much more comfortable than before her arrival.

"Now I think I've earned something to eat!"


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Rh she confided to Clover, when, hot and tired and flushed with the heat, she had filled the last chicken yard pan. "And I'm going up to the house and help myself from the pantry. I'm 'most sure the kitchen door is unlocked; no one around here ever locks the back door."

She was very hungry by this time, having had nothing since an early breakfast, and she had no scruples about helping herself to whatever edibles she might find.

"I begin to sympathize with all the hired men," she thought, making her way to the kitchen door. "I don't wonder they eat huge meals when they have to do such hard work."

The door, as she had expected, was not locked. A slight turn on the knob opened it easily, and Betty stepped cautiously into the kitchen. The drawn shades made it dark, but it was not the darkness that caused Betty to jump back a step.

She listened intently. Would she hear the noise again, or had it been only her nervous imagination?

No—there it was again, plain and unmistakable. Some one had groaned!


text: Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil/Chapter 13


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, for a single wild instant, had an impulse to slam the door shut and gallop off the place on Clover. She was all alone, and miles from help of any sort, no matter what happened. Then, as another groan sounded, she bravely made up her mind to investigate. Some one was evidently sick and in pain; that explained the state of affairs at the barns. Could she, Betty Gordon, run away and leave a sick person without attempting to find out what was needed?

It must be confessed that it took a great deal of courage to pull open the grained oak door that led from the kitchen and behind which the groans were sounding with monotonous regularity, but the girl set her teeth, and opened it softly. In the semi-darkness she was able to make out the dim outlines of a bed set between the two windows and a swirl of bedclothes, some of which were dragging on the floor.

"I'm just Betty," she quavered uncertainly, for though the groans had stopped no one spoke. "I Rh


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Rh heard you groaning. Are you sick, and is there anything I can do for you?"

"Sick," murmured a woman's voice. "So sick!"

At the sound of utter weariness and pain, Betty's fear left her and all the tenderness and passionate desire for service that had made her such a wonderful little "hand" with ill and fretful babies in her old home at Pineville came to take its place.

"I'll have to put the shades up," she explained, stepping lightly to the windows and pulling up the green shades. "Then I can see to make you more comfortable."

She spoke clearly and yet not loudly, knowing that a sick person hates whispering.

The afternoon sunlight streamed into the room, revealing a clean though most sparsely furnished bedroom. A rag rug on the floor, two chairs, a washstand and mirror and the bed were the only articles of furniture.

Betty, after one swift glance, turned toward the occupant of the bed. She saw a woman apparently about sixty years old, with mild blue eyes, now glazed by fever, and tangled gray hair. As Betty watched her a terrible fit of coughing shook her.

"You must have a doctor!" said Betty decidedly, wondering what there was about the woman that seemed familiar. "How long have you been


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110 like this? Have you been alone? How hard it must have been for you!"

She put out her hand to smooth the bedclothes, and the sick woman grasped it, her own hot with fever, till Betty almost cried out.

"The stock!" she gasped. "I took 'em water till I couldn't get out of bed. How long ago was that? They will die tied up!"

"I fed and watered them," Betty soothed her. "They're all right. Don't worry another minute, I'll make you tidy and get you something to eat and then I'm going for a doctor."

What was there about the woman—Betty stared at her, frowning in an effort to recollect where she had seen her before. If Bob were only here to help her—Bob! Why, the sick woman before her was the living image of Bob Henderson!

"The Saunders place!" Betty clapped her hand to her mouth, anxious not to excite her patient. "Why, of course, this is the farm. And she must be one of Bob's aunts!"

As if in answer to her question, the sick woman half rose in bed.

"Charity!" she stammered, her hands pressed to her aching head. "Charity! She was sick first."

She pointed to an adjoining room and Betty crossed the floor feeling that she was walking


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Rh in a dream and likely to wake up any minute.

The communicating room was shrouded in darkness like the other, and when Betty had raised the shades she found it furnished as another bedroom. Evidently the old sisters had chosen to live entirely on the first floor of the house.

The woman in the square iron bed looked startlingly like Bob, too, but, unlike her sister, her eyes were dark. She lay quietly, her cheeks scarlet and her hands nervously picking at the counterpane. When she saw Betty she struggled to a sitting posture and tried to talk. It was pitiable to watch her efforts for her voice was quite gone. Only when Betty put her ear close down to the trembling lips could she hear the words.

"Hope!" murmured the sick woman hoarsely. "Hope—have you seen her?"

"Yes, she asked for you, too." Betty tried to nod brightly. "I'm going to do a few things here first and get you both something to eat, and then I'm going for a doctor."

Miss Charity sank back, evidently satisfied, and Betty hurried out to the kitchen. The wood-box was well-filled and she had little difficulty in starting a fire in the stove. Like the rest of the farm homes, the only available water supply seemed to be the pump in the yard, and Betty


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112 pumped vigorously, letting a stream run out before she filled the teakettle. She thought it likely that no water had been pumped for several days.

There was plenty of food In the house, though not a great variety, and mostly canned goods at that. Betty, who by this time was really faint with hunger, made a hasty lunch from crackers and some cheese before she carried a basin of warm water in to the two patients and sponged their faces and hands. She wanted to put clean sheets on the beds, but wisely decided that was too much of an undertaking for an inexperienced nurse and contented herself with straightening the bedclothes and putting on a clean counterpane from the scanty little pile of linen in a bottom drawer of the washstand in Miss Hope's room. She was slightly delirious for brief intervals, but was able to tell Betty where many things were. Neither of the sisters seemed at all surprised to see the girl, and, if they were able to reason at all, probably thought she was a neighbor's daughter.

When Betty had the two rooms arranged a bit more tidily, and she was anxious to leave them looking presentable for she planned to send the doctor on ahead while she found Bob and brought him out with her, she brushed and braided her patients' hair smoothly, and then


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Rh fed them a very little warm milk. Neither seemed at all hungry, and Betty was thankful, for she did not know what food they should have, and she longed for a physician to take the responsibility. She had given each a drink of cool water before she did anything else, knowing that they must be terribly thirsty.

She stood in the doorway where she could be seen from both beds when she had done everything she could, and the two sisters, if not better, were much more comfortable than she had found them.

"Now," she said, "I'm going to get a doctor. No, I won't leave you all alone—not for long," she added hastily, for Miss Charity was gazing at her imploringly and Miss Hope's eyes were full of tears. "I'll come back and stay all night and as long as you need me. But I must get some things and I must tell the Watterbys where I am. I'll hurry as fast as I can."

She ran out and saddled Clover, for she had been turned out to grass to enjoy a good rest, and, having got the proper direction from Miss Hope, urged her up the road at a smart canter. She knew where the Flame City doctor lived; that is, the country doctor who had practised long before the town was the oil center it was now. There were good medical men at the oil fields, but Betty knew that they were liable to be in any


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114 section and difficult to find. She trusted that Doctor Morrison would be at home.

He lived about two miles out of the town and a mile from the Watterby farm, and, as good luck would have it, he had come in from a hard case at dinner time, taken a nap, and was comfortably reading a magazine on his side porch when Betty wheeled into the yard. She knew him, having met him one day at the oil wells, and when she explained the need for him, he said that he would snatch a bit of supper and go immediately in his car.

"I know these two Saunders sisters," he said briefly. "They've lived alone for years, and now they're getting queer. It's a mercy they ever got through last winter without a case of pneumonia. Both of 'em down, you say? And impossible to get a nurse or a housekeeper for love or money."

"Oh, I'm going back," explained Betty quickly. "They need some one to wait on them. Uncle Dick will let me, I know, and I really know quite a lot about taking care of sick people, Doctor Morrison."

"But you can't stay there alone," objected the doctor. "Why, child, I wouldn't think of it. Some one will come along and carry you off."

"Bob will come and stay, too," declared Betty confidently. "There are horses and cows to take


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Rh care of, you know. I found them nearly dead of thirst, and all tied in their stalls."

The doctor interrupted impatiently.

"Nice country we live in!" he muttered bitterly. "Every last man so bent on making money in oil he'd let his neighbor die under his very eyes. Here are two old women sick, and no one to lift a hand for 'em. I suppose they haven't been able to get a hired man to tend to the stock since the oil boom struck Flame City. Well, child, I don't see that I have much choice in the matter. I know as well as you do, that they must have some one to help out for a few days. That Henderson lad looks capable, and you'll be safe, as far as that goes, with him in the house. But you musn't try to do too much, and, above all, no lifting. I'll keep an eye on you."

The doctor offered to take Betty back with him in the car but she was anxious that he should not be delayed and asked him to go as soon as he could. She herself would ride on to the Watterby farm, see if Bob was there, get her supper, and pack a few necessary things in a small bag. Then she and Bob would ride back to the Saunders place. Clover was fresh enough now, after her respite, far fresher than Betty, who was more tired than she had ever been in her life, though nothing would have dragged that confession from her. Of course her uncle must be notified, if he


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116 were not at the farm. Betty knew that a message left with the Watterbys would reach him. He had been off for four days, and was expected home very soon.

Betty did not hurry Clover, for she wanted to save her for that evening's trip, and it was well on toward six o'clock before she came in sight of the farm. A black dot resolved itself into Bob and he came running to meet her.

"I was beginning to worry about you," he called. "I waited up at the fields till afternoon, because Thorne was sure you would come back there. When I got here and found you hadn't come in, I was half afraid the horse had thrown you. You look done up, Betty; are you hurt?"

"I'm all right," said Betty carelessly, dismounting. "Have you heard from Uncle Dick?"

Bob did not answer, and she turned in surprise to look at him. His face was rather white under the tan, and his hands, fumbling with the reins, were trembling.


text: Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil/Chapter 14


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"!" Betty's over-tired nerves seemed to jangle like tangled wires. "Bob, is anything the matter?"

"Well, of course, nothing is really the matter," replied Bob, his assumed calmness belied by his excited face. "Nothing that need worry you, Betty. But—there's another oil fire!"

"Another well on fire?" repeated Betty. "Oh, Bob, is it anywhere near Uncle Dick?"

"You come in and sit down. Ki will look after Clover," said Bob authoritatively. "Supper is almost ready, and I'll tell you all I know. Mrs. Watterby has gone to bed with a sick headache, but Grandma is taking her place."

"Is it a very bad fire?" urged Betty. "Where is it? When did it start? Have you seen it?"

"I guess it is pretty bad," said Bob soberly. "It's the north section, Betty. Just what Thorne has been afraid of."

"The north section!" Betty looked startled. "But, Bob, we were there this morning. Everything was all right." Rh


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118 "Well, when I came back with the record book Thorne sent me with and found you and Clover had dashed off, everything was all right, too. I hung round for an hour or so, hoping you'd ride back, and then MacDuffy asked me to take a message to Thorne. They were having dinner at the mess house, and Uncle Dick came in before we had finished. He was feeling great over some leases they'd signed that morning, and he thought he'd get home to-night. He didn't seem to worry about you—said he knew Clover was a sensible and well-broken horse and that he guessed you'd come out none the worse for wear. Somebody called Thorne outside just as the Chink brought in the pie, and he was back in a few minutes, looking as if the bottom had dropped out of the world.

"'Two wells afire in the north section, Mr. Gordon,' he said, and at that every man shot from the table out into the air. We could just see the two thin spirals of smoke—that section must be four miles from the bunk house.

"Everybody ran for their horses, and Uncle Dick for his car. He cranked it and then saw me getting in with him.

"'You go back and stay with Betty,' he cried to me. 'Stay with her every minute till I come back. If I'm gone three hours or three days or three years, don't leave her. And keep her away


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Rh from the oil fields. We'll be overrun as soon as news of this gets out, and the kind of crowd that will be here is no place for a girl. Promise me, Bob.'

"So of course I promised," concluded the lad earnestly. "He got into the car, and maybe he didn't make that tin trap speed. All I saw was a cloud of dust. This afternoon all of Flame City has gone past here on foot. In cars, and on horseback. They say more wells have caught."

"Do you think Uncle Dick is in danger?" faltered Betty. "Aren't the fire fighters surrounded sometimes and suffocated with smoke?"

"What have you been reading?" demanded Bob with a stoutness he was far from feeling. "Uncle Dick knows too much to be caught like that. No, he may not get home for a couple of days more, but there is no need for you to lie awake and worry. Take my advice and go to bed the minute you've had supper; you look tired to death, Betty."

"Oh, Bob!" For the moment Betty had actually forgotten her great news, but now it came rushing back to her. "Oh, Bob, I've something wonderful to tell you!"

"Won't listen till you've had your supper," said Bob firmly, marching her out to the dining-room table, as Grandma Watterby rang the bell. "You eat first, then you can talk."


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120 Betty could hardly touch her food for excitement, but she did not want the Prices to hear what she had to tell Bob, so she made a pretense of eating. The Watterby household was eager to hear what had happened to her on her unplanned-for ride, and she told them that Clover had taken her some miles before she could be halted. She did not go into details.

"Now, Bob!" She fairly dragged him from the supper table, ignoring his suggestion that they help Grandma Watterby wash the dishes. "I can't wait another minute, not even to help Grandma. I have something to tell you, and you simply must listen. I've found your aunts!"

Bob stared at her stupidly.

"I found the three hills!" Betty hurried on excitedly. "Clover carried me ever so far, and I saw the three hills in the distance. I had to ride miles before I reached them, but it isn't more than seven or eight by the road. And, Bob, both your aunts are very sick, and they have no one to take care of them or get them anything to eat. There aren't any neighbors around here, you know; all the women are too old or too busy like Mrs. Watterby, and the men are crazy about oil. You and I have to go there to-night."

"Betty, are you sure you are not crazy?" demanded Bob uneasily. "How do you know they


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Rh are my aunts? How can we go there and stay? They must need a doctor."

Betty was impatient of explanations, but she saw that Bob was genuinely bewildered, so she hastily sketched the proceedings of the afternoon for him.

"And Doctor Morrison must be there now," she wound up triumphantly. "They look so much like you, Bob. He'll see it, too."

"I never saw any one like you, Betty!" Bob gazed at her in undisguised admiration. "No wonder you look tired. Why, I should think you'd be ready to drop. Hadn't you better go to bed and get a good night's sleep and let me go out to the farm? You can come to-morrow morning."

"I'm rested now," insisted Betty. "That hot supper made me feel all right again. Doctor Morrison will probably have some directions for me, and I promised the old ladies I'd be back and you promised Uncle Dick not to leave me. Let's go and tell Grandma and leave word with her for Uncle Dick. Then you saddle up, and I'll get my bag."

Bob forbore to argue further, more because he thought that it was best to get Betty away from the Watterby place on the main road to Flame City than because he approved of her taking another long ride after an exhausting day.


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122 The most disquieting rumors had come down from the fields that afternoon, and Bob knew that every kind of story, authentic and unfounded, would be promptly retailed over the Watterby gate. If Mr. Gordon's life were in danger, and Bob feared it was, it would be agony for Betty to be unable to go to him and be forced to listen to hectic accounts of the fire.

"Well, well," said Grandma Watterby, when Betty told her that she had found the Saunders place. "So you rode to the three hills, did you? Ain't they pretty? Many and many's the time I've seen 'em. And Bob's aunties—Hope and Charity—they living there?"

Betty explained briefly that they were ill and that she and Bob were going to look after things.

"We may be gone two or three days or a week," she said. "You tell Uncle Dick where we are if he comes, won't you? Doctor Morrison will bring messages if you ask him. He's going to see them, too."

Grandma Watterby hurried to the pantry and came back with a glass jar in her hands.

"This is some o' my home-made beef extract," she told them. "You take it with you, Betty. There ain't nothing better for building up a sick person. Dear, dear, to think of you finding Hope and Charity Saunders. Do they know 'bout Bob?"


text:
Translation:Ben Ish Chai

=Preface by the Author ztzuk"l=

Praised be the Creator and Glorified be the Designer, Who has caused us to inherit a hidden and precious thing of desire, wonderful wisdom, "For the Jews there was Light;" light is Torah, to labor in it and to heed to it. Rabbi Shim`on gave this introduction, saying (Zohar Vol. 3, daf 166b): "Ayelet ahavim ve'ya`alat chen, dadeiha yeravukha bekhol `et; be'ahavatah tishgeh tamid/A lovely ewe and a graceful she-ibex, let her teats satisfy you at all times; with her love be involved (to the [partial] neglect of other matters) always. (Prov. 5:19)" Oraita! Oraita! (Torah! Torah!) the light of all the worlds! How many seas and rivers and wells and springs spread out from you to in all directions! From you is everything, by you the upper and lower [worlds] are sustained. His upper light goes out from you. Oraita! Oraita! what shall I say of you, ayelet ahavim ve'ya`alat chen, above and below are your mercies, whoever merits to acquire from you in the proper fashion. Oraita! Oraita! The delights of those who master you! Who can reveal and tell your secret and hidden things!

פתח רבי שמעון ואמר (זוהר ח"ג קס"ו ע"ב), אילת אהבים ויעלת חן, דדיה ירווך בכל עת, באהבתה תשגה תמיד. אורייתא אורייתא,  נהירו דכל עלמין,  כמה ימין ונחלין ומקורין ומבועין מתפשטין מינך לכל סטרא. מינך כלא, עלך קיימי עלאין ותתאין. נהירו עלאה מינך נפקא. אורייתא אורייתא, מה אימא לגבך,  אילת אהבים ויעלת חן,  עילא ותתא רחימין דילך,  מאן יזכי לינקא מינך כדקא יאות.  אורייתא אורייתא, שעשועים דמארך, מאן יכיל לגלאה ולמימר סתרין וגניזין דילך:

Master of Universe, let it be Your will to give strength and power to me and to all Yisrael, and let us enter in without shame before you and before the Matronita `Ila'ah (Higher Divine Presence), of which it is said, "em-habanim smechah/as joyful as a mother of children". And let us not be in shame before the Barta DiMalka (Lower Divine Presence), of which it is said, "kol kevudah bat melekh penimah/all honor [shall be] for the King's daughter (His entourage) who is within (i.e. humble)," and of which it is said, "Rabot banot `asu chayil, ve'at `alit `al kulanah/Many women have acquired riches, but you surpass them all" (Prov. 31).

רבון עלמא, יהא רעוא קמך למיהב חילא ותוקפא לי ולכל ישראל,  וניעול בלא כיסופא קמך וקמי מטרוניתא עלאה, דאתמר בה אם הבנים שמחה. ולא ניהוי בכיסופא קמי ברתא דמלכא, דאתמר בה כל כבודה בת מלך פנימה, ועלה אתמר רבות בנות עשו חיל, ואת עלית על כולנה:

And being that the holy way of the genius who wrote Halakhot Gedolot is very pleasant to me, who opened the preface with Birkot Hatorah/Blessings recited before learning Torah, I too, the humble one, shall also proceed in this straight way, and give thanks first in reciting the Birkot Hatorah:

ולהיות כי ערב לי מאד דרך הקודש של הגאון בעל הלכות גדולות, שפתח בברכות התורה בראשית ספרו הנורא, גם אנכי הצעיר אעברה בדרך זו הישרה. ואברך תחלה בברכות התורה:

Oraita Oraita! how beloved are your words, what a tree having roots, and having bark, and having brains, and having branches, and having foliage, and having flowers, and having buds; and also your words have simple meanings of the scripture, comparative meanings, clues, which hint wisdom, gematrias, hidden hints. Concealed hints, one on another, kasher (valid) and pasul (invalid), tameh (impure) and tahor (pure), assur (forbidden) and mutar (permitted), chayav (obligated) and zakai (entitled), and from thenceforth spread out branches to all sides, wide as the sea; you have no end or finish.

אורייתא אורייתא, כמה חביבין אינון מלין דילך,  מה אילנא אית ביה שרשין,  ואית ביה קליפין,  ואית ביה מוחא, ואית ביה ענפין,  ואית ביה טרפין,  ואית ביה פרחין,  ואית ביה איבא,  אוף הכי אינון מילין דילך, אית בהו פשטי דקראי,  דרשה,  רמז,  דקא רמיז חכמתא,  גמטריאות,  רזין טמירין. רזין סתימין, אלין על אלין, כשר ופסול,  טמא וטהור,  אסור ומותר,  חייב וזכאי,  ומכאן ולהלאה מתפשטין ענפין לכל סטר, רחבה את מני ים, לית בך קץ ותכלית:

Oraita Oraita! This love and glow of flame of the heart for you! May it be the [Divine] will that you be engraved in on our hearts returning to you holy Torah. And your glory upon us holy Torah, your knowledge on us holy Torah, and our minds on you holy Torah, be not lifted from you, and do not part from us, not in this world and not in the coming world.

אורייתא אורייתא. הא אהבה ורשפין דשלהובא דליבא אבתרך, יהא רעווא דתהוי אנת חקוקה בליבן, הדרן עלך אורייתא קדישתא. והדרך עלן אורייתא קדישתא. דעתך עלן אורייתא קדישתא, ודעתן עלך אורייתא קדישתא, לא נתנשי מינך ולא תתנשי מינן, לא בעלמא דין ולא בעלמא דאתי:

Blessed is our God who has created us for His glory, and separated us from those who err, and given us the Torah of truth, and planted eternal life among us, "Mah ashiv laShem kol tagmuluhi `alai/How can I return to Hashem all his benevolences toward me?" , Who has permitted me in His great mercies and great compassions, to serve in the "courtyards of the Temple of Hashem," in the place that our holy forefathers served, nishmatam eden/their souls in Paradise, in the permanent dwelling each and every Shabbat, when the children of Yisrael assemble there, to expound to them holy scriptures, which they read on their Shabbatot each parashah in its time, as its arrangement and order is given; zot chuqat hatorah/This is the statute of the Torah. Also including drashahs of the Haftarah readings, though my original [work] was review of the Torah, and as Hashem Yitbarakh graced me in His great compassion, to some produce chidushim/novel words by the way of peshat [basic explanation of the scripture] or derash [mystical explanation] or the crown of remez, I recorded the chidushim for reminder. And already in the year 5624 I printed from my chidushim with the help of Heaven a book small in quantity, on the Pentateuch, and I named it Aderet Eliyahu (the cape of Eliyahu ), and behold, from that time until now, praise to El Yitbarakh, the chidushei Torah increased from what Hashem bestowed to me, and because we have heard an admonition from the mouth of scribes and from the mouth of sefarim/holy books that a man is obligated to print his sefarim in his lifetime, I awakened myself to bring to the printhouse chidushei Torah in the way of drash and remez on the Pentateuch, because I reasoned that it is proper to advance this before other chidushei Torah, because it is food for every man, and it is a staple for every soul, and benefits the masses a bit more, but because the printing expenses were great, and I have not the financial means, I was forced to bring to print at this time only a little of my produce, one quarter of what I have by the grace of `El Eylon, and if Hashem Yitbarakh desires He will help me bring what remains with me in a separate book, because that which remains has a great quantity, and furthermore has also the chidushei Torah that I darshened on the verses of the Haftarot of the whole year; I have not brought one of the here, because due to their great quantity they are fit to be a large sefer by themselves, if Hashem helps.

ברוך אלקינו שבראנו לכבודו, והבדילנו מן התועים, ונתן לנו תורת אמת, וחיי עולם נטע בתוכינו, מה אשיב לה' כל תגמולוהי עלי,  אשר זיכני ברוב רחמיו וברוב חסדיו,  לשמש בחצרות בית ה', במקום ששמשו בו אבותי הקדושים, נשמתם עדן, בישיבה של קבע מדי שבת בשבת, כי יתאספו שם עם בני ישראל, לדרוש להם מקראי קודש,  אשר יקראו אותם בשבתם פרשה ופרשה בזמנה,  כאשר ניתנה ערוכה וסדורה, זאת חוקת התורה. גם לרבות מדרשות מקראות הפטרה, והתחלתי היתה משנת כת"ר תורה, ואשר חנני ה'  יתברך בחסדו הגדול,  לחדש איזה דבר על דרך הפשט או הדרש או הרמז, הייתי רושם את החידושים למזכרת.  וכבר בשנת תרכ"ד הדפסתי מחדושי בסייעתא דשמיא ספר אחד קטן הכמות, על חמשה חומשי תורה,  וקראתיו בשם אדרת אליהו,  והנה מאותו זמן ועד עתה תהילות לאל יתברך נתרבו אתי חדושי תורה ממה שחנני ה', ולהיות כי אזהרה שמענו מפי סופרים ומפי ספרים דחייב אדם להדפיס ספריו בחייו, נתעוררתי להביא לבית הדפוס חדושי תורה בדרך דרש ורמז על חמשה חומשי תורה, כי חשבתי ראוי להקדים זה לשאר חדושי תורה, יען כי הוא מאכל כל אדם, והוא דבר השוה לכל נפש,  ויש בו זכות הרבים טפי,  ברם להיות כי הוצאת הדפוס מרובה, ואין לי יכולת בדבר הכסף,  הוכרחתי להביא בעת הזאת לבית הדפוס מקצת פרי תבואתי שיעור רביעית מן הנמצא אתי בחסד אל עליון, ואם ירצה השם יתברך יעזרני להביא הנשאר אתי בספר בפני עצמו, כי הנשאר תהילות לאל יש בו שיעור גדול,  ולא עוד אלא גם את חדושי תורה שדרשתי על פסוקי הפטרות של כל השנה כולה, לא הבאתי פה את אחד מהם,  כי אלו לרוב כמותם ראויים להיות ספר גדול בפני עצמו, אם יעזור ה':

Nonetheless I interlaced settled halakhot/laws of conduct throughout this collection, from all kinds of halakhot that are brought in the Shulchan Arukh "Orach Chayim" and "Yoreh De`ah," because I was already accustomed to publicly lecture also one these each and every Shabbat, because I immersed myself in the sefarim and enlightened my eyes with the words of our Sages of blessed memory, and I knew that the ancient way of our Rabbis the Rishonim [or "our early Rabbis"] z"l who would lecture to the people every Shabbat, that they would not make a constant [study] only on aggada/homily in the Midrashim and peshatim, but rather they also lectured them halakhot to let them know the statutes of God and His Torahs/instructions, to know the way they should go, and the things they should do, because likewise we find in the Gemara in Sanhedrin (daf 38), "Said Rabbi Yochanan, 'When Rabbi Meir would lecture on his piece, he would say one-third legal decisions, one-third aggada, one-third parables,'" see there. And likewise we find in our Rabbis z"l in Mekhilta, they bring the words of Rabbeinu Maharam Alshich z"l, at the beginning of parashat/the Torah portion Vayakhel, that Moshe Rabbeinu the servant of Hashem taught the children of Yisrael that they should gather on Shabbatot, to lecture to them the laws of Shabbat and His Torahs, see there. And likewise they said the same in the Gemara, "Moshe ordained for Yisrael, to teach the laws of Pesach at Pesach [time], laws of Atzeret at Atzeret [time], laws of the [Sukkot] Festival at Sukkot [time], and such is the report from several devotees in the Gemara, that their custom was to teach halakhot each and every Shabbat, and truthfully logical reasoning also requires this, to teach halakhot to the people, to know what Yisrael should do in the mitzvot of Hashem, and see Pri Chadash in Yoreh De`ah hilkhot Tol`ayim [laws regarding prohibition of eating worms], siman 84, that he wrote, verbatim, "And it is necessary to inspire and teach these matters to the people more that teaching them peshatim," end of quote.

ברם צירפתי עם החיבור הזה הלכות פסוקות, מכל מיני הלכות אשר הובאו בשלחן ערוך אורח חיים ויורה דעה, כי אנכי כבר נהגתי לדרוש בציבור גם באלה בכל שבת ושבת,  יען כי בינותי בספרים ופקחתי עיני בדברי חכמינו זכרונם לברכה, וידעתי כי מנהג הקדמון של רבותינו הראשונים ז"ל, אשר ידרשון לעם ה' בכל שבת,  שאין עושין קבע באגדה במדרשים ופשטים בלבד,  אלא גם ידרשון להם הלכות להודיעם חקי אלהים ותורותיו, לדעת את הדרך אשר ילכו בה, ואת המעשה אשר יעשון, כי כן מצינו בגמרא דסנהדרין (דף ל"ח),  אמר רבי יוחנן כי הוה דריש רבי מאיר בפרקיה,  הוה דרש תלתא שמעתתא, תלתא אגדתא,  תלתא מתלי,  עיין שם. וכן מצינו לרבותינו ז"ל במכילתא, הביא דבריהם רבינו מהר"ם אלשיך ז"ל,  בריש פרשת ויקהל,  שלימד משה רבינו ע"ה את בני ישראל שיקהלו בשבתות לדרוש להם משפטי השבת ותורותיו, עיין שם. וכן אמרו גם כן בגמרא משה תיקן להם לישראל, לדרוש הלכות פסח בפסח, הלכות עצרת בעצרת, הלכות חג בחג, והכי משמע מכמה עובדי בגמרא, דהיה מנהגם לדרוש בהלכות בכל שבת ושבת,  וכאמת גם הסברא מחייבת בכך,  לדרוש הלכות לעם לדעת מה יעשה ישראל במצות ה', ועיין פרי חדש ביורה דעה הלכות תולעים סימן פ"ד, שכתב וזה לשונו, וצריך להזהיר ולדרוש עניינים אלו לעם יותר מלדרוש להם פשטים, עד כאן לשונו:

Actually it is a known thing that to lecture on halakhot alone, the heart of the masses is not drawn after this, rather it is necessary to make the derash the root and most of it words of agadda and mussar/ethical teaching, and the lecturer should also mention in the middle the decided halakhot, through the tie that that he ties in the lecture that he says on the text, in order to draw the hearts of the people to these things in chokhmah/wisdom and da`at/knowledge, and this was the intention of our master the Tanna Rabbi Meir a"h, who wuold lecture a third in halakhot, a third in aggadot and a third in mashalim/allegories in order to draw the heart of the masses to hear the halakhot via two thirds of aggada and mashalim, and it seems to me the mashalim were in the manner of mussar, and so will you find in Shabbat daf 30: The question was asked of Rabbi Tanchum, "What does it mean to extinguish a lamp for a sick person on Shabbat?" And he opened with this introduction and said first some long words of aggada, and afterwards at the end of his words he gave them a short answer on the legal question mentioned, and Rashi z"l explains there, so were they accustomed to give an introduction with aggada first, in order to draw the hearts of the audience to hear the halakhah.

אמנם הדבר ידוע כי לדרוש בהלכות בלבד אין לב המון העם נמשך אחריהם, אלא צריך שיהיה עיקר הדרש ורובו בדברי אגדה ומוסר, ויזכור גם כן הדרשן באמצע פסקי הלכות,  על ידי הקשר שיקשרם בדרשה שדורש על המקרא, כדי למשוך לב העם אל הדברים האלה בחכמה ודעת,  ובעבור זאת היתה כונתו של אדונינו התנא רבי מאיר ע"ה, שהיה דורש שליש הלכות שליש אגדות שליש משלים, כדי למשוך לב ההמון העם לשמוע ההלכות על ידי שני שלישים של אגדות ומשלים, ונראה לי כי המשלים היו על דרך המוסר,  וכן תמצא בשבת דף ל', שאול שאלתא מרבי תנחום,  מהו לכבות הנר מפני החולה בשבת,  והוא פתח ואמר תחלה דברי אגדה ארוכה,  ואחר כך בסוף דבריו השיב להם תשובה בקצרה על שאלת הדין הנזכר, ופירש רש"י ז"ל שם, כך היו רגילין לפתוח באגדה תחלה, כדי למשוך לבבות השומעין לשמוע את ההלכה:

And likewise we find in the Gemara of Sotah daf 40: Rabbi Abbahu and Rabbi Chiya bar Abba happened uppon that place. Rabbi Chiya bar Abba spoke about halakhic decisions, and Rabbi Abbahu told aggada. Everybody abandoned Rabbi Chiya bar Abba, and came before Rabbi Abbahu. Rabbi Chiya was downcast. Rabbi Abahu said to him, "I will tell you a parable what this is like. To two men who come to a city, one selling gems and jewels, and one selling tinsel.  Who do they jump to?  Not to the one who sells tinsel!" See there. Hence the world chases after homiletics and peshatim, therefore you must proceed wisely according to the minds of people, namely to make most of the lecture in aggada and explanation of the scripture, and the lesser part words of halakhah absorbed into it in the middle or in the end, and this is the proper way.

וכן מצינו בגמרא דסוטה דף מ', רבי אבהו ורבי חייא בר אבא אקלעו לההיא אתרא, רבי חייא בר אבא דריש שמעתתא, ורבי אבהו דריש אגדתא,  שבקו כולי עלמא לרבי חייא בר אבא,  ואתו לקמיה דרבי אבהו, חלש דעתיה דרבי חייא,  אמר ליה רבי אבהו,  אמשול לכם משל למה הדבר דומה,  לשני בני אדם שנכנסו לעיר אחת, אחד מוכר מיני אבנים טובות ומרגליות,  ואחד מוכר מיני סדקית,  על מי קופצים לא על מי שמוכר מיני סדקית, עיין שם. נמצא העולם רודפים אחר דרשות ופשטים, לכן צריך להתנהג בחכמה כפי דעתן של בני אדם, והיינו שיעשה רוב הדרשה באגדה וביאורי המקרא,  והמעט דברי הלכה בהבלעה באמצע או בסוף, וזו דרך הנכונה:

Therefore I, the young one, after the year 5630, it came to my heart to mention in the lecture on the parashah that I am publicly speaking each Shabbat, some halakhot from matters mentioned in the Orach Chayim and Yoreh De`ah, and I would tie the beginnings of the halakhot with the lecture on the Torah, and after the halakhot I would end the lecture with verses of the Haftarah. However it was not possible to finish all the halakhot that I decided to teach on every Shabbat in one year, rather they needed a length of two years, as they are organized in the eyes of the reader in the second part of this book, and every two years they are to be repeated, and therefore I made the halakhot with their ties in separate parts, Part One and Part Two, and brought them to the printhouse to join them with the lectures that are in this book, so that the eyes of the Tzadikim should see straight [ways], and also in the halakhot I mentioned I omitted for now several halakhot from the first part and the second part, due to the expense of printing, and if Hashem helps, in the halakhot part too there will be a later edition, and they will come in a separate book.

על כן אנכי הצעיר, אחר שנת תר"ל,  עלה בלבי להזכיר בתוך הדרשה שעל הפרשה שאנכי דורש בציבור בכל שבת,  איזה הלכות מעניינים הנזכרים באורח חיים ויורה דעה,  והייתי מקשר תחלת ההלכות עם הדרשה שעל התורה,  ואחר ההלכות אסיים הדרשה בפסוקי ההפטרה,  אך לא אפשר לסיים כל ההלכות אשר קבעתי לדרשם בכל שבת בשנה אחת, כי צריך להם משך שתי שנים, וכאשר הם מסודרים לעיני הרואה בחלק השני של הספר הזה,  וכל שתי שנים חוזרים חלילה,  ולכך עשיתי ההלכות עם הקשרים שלהם חלק בפני עצמו לראשונה,  ולשניה,  ואביאם לבית הדפוס לחברם עם חלק הדרשות שבספר הזה,  כאשר עיני צדיקים תחזינה מישרים,  וגם בחלק ההלכות הנזכר, השמטתי לעת עתה כמה הלכות מן הראשונה ומן השניה,  מפני הוצאות הדפוס,  ואם יעזור ה'  גם בחלק ההלכות נעשה מהדורא בתרא, ויבואו בספר אחד בפני עצמו:

And behold since I named my book on Talmud discourses " Ben Yehoyada" -- which I have not yet printed but only on two tractates -- and Hashem Yitbarakh allow me to print all of it for good life and peace -- I chose to call this book "Ben Ish Chai". And Hashem Yitbarakh help me to print the rest of the books which He has graced me in His great compassion and great kindness. And the name of the man who donated money for printed expenses shall be displayed at the end of this introduction in a certain form on his good name. Hashem Yitbarakh make his days and life long, long good and sweet life, Amen so let it be [His] will.

והנה אחר אשר קראתי לספרי אשר על מאמרי התלמוד בשם בן יהוידע, אשר כעת לא הדפסתי ממנו אלא רק על שתי מסכתות, וה'  יתברך יזכני להדפיסו כולו לחיים טובים ולשלום,  בחרתי לקרוא שם לספר הזה בשם "בן איש חי", הן יתברך יעזרני להדפיס שאר ספרים אשר חנני ברוב רחמיו וברוב חסדיו, ושם האיש המתנדב כסף הוצאות הדפוס יהיה מפורש בסוף הקדמה הזאת בציור מסויים על שמו הטוב, ה' יתברך יאריך ימיו וחייו חיים ארוכים טובים ומתוקנים, אמן כן יהי רצון:

And from now on, behold I reveal my mind and will with all my heart and soul, that my whole intention in this collection, and also in all the collections that Hashem Yitbarakh allowed me to assemble in the Written Torah and in Oral Torah, it is all for the unification of Kudsha Brikh Hu and his Shekhinah, and in awe and love and in fear and love, to unify the name of Hashem, Y"H with W"H, in complete unity, in the name of all Yisrael, and all my reasoning and thought and speech that is not according to the His will Yitbarakh, let them be null and anulled, so that all my desire in this collection, and the other collections that I do in chidushei Torah wit the help of heaven, and also any mitzvah that I do, it be in order to unify Kudsha Brikh Hu and his Shekhinah, and to rest of spirit before Him Yitbarakh specifically, without any outward turning, and Hashem Yitbarakh in His compasion help me to learn and teach Torah for its own sake, Amen so may it be [His] will.

ומעתה הנני מגלה דעתי ורצוני בכל לבי ובכל נפשי, שכל כונתי בחיבור הזה, וגם בכל חיבורים אשר יזכני ה' יתברך לחבר,  בתורה שבכתב ותורה שבעל פה,  הכל הוא לשם יחוד קודשא בריך הוא ושכינתיה, בדחילו ורחימו ורחימו ודחילו,  ליחדא שם הוי"ה ברוך הוא י"ה בו"ה,  ביחודא שלים,  בשם כל ישראל,  וכל מחשבה והרהור ודבור שהם אינם כרצונו יתברך,  הנה הם בטלים ומבוטלים,  באופן שכל רצוני בחיבור זה,  ושאר חבורים שאעשה בחדושי תורה בסייעתא דשמיא,  וגם בכל מצוה שאעשה,  הוא כדי ליחד קודשא בריך הוא ושכינתיה,  ולעשות נחת רוח לפניו יתברך דוקא,  בלי שום פניה זרה, והשם יתברך ברחמיו יעזרני ללמוד וללמד תורה לשמה, אמן כן יהי רצון:

And since my proclamation is steadfast, in truth and in faith, before Hashem Yitbarakh, and in the eyes of all Yisrael a declaration great and strong, valid and lasting, I will prolong my prayer before Hashem, Please Hashem save us [from affliction], Please Hashem make us successful [in our deeds], and establish the fallen Sukkah of David, and let the Redeemer come to Tziyon, righteous [in deeds] and victorious is he , and let our eyes see the coming of our Righteous Mashiach, and the rebuilding of our Holy Temple, soon in our days, and let the pleasantness of Hashem our God be on us, and the work of our hands, establish for us (w/o mishap to us), and the work of our hands, establish it , and let the great name of Y-H be magnified and sanctified speedily and soon, Amen so let it be [His] will.

These are the words of the youth who awaits the salvation of Hashem, and who trusts in His great compassions and His great mercies; may he illuminate my eyes with His Torah, the Torah of Chaim/Life:

The junior, ', son of His Honor Our Great Teacher Rabbi ',

son of His Honor Our Great Teacher Rabbi Moshe Chaim, Sefardi Tahor.

ואחרי אשר הודעתי נאמנה, באמת ובאמונה,  לפני השם יתברך,  ולעיני כל ישראל,  מודעה רבה וחזקה שרירה וקיימת, אערוך תפלה לפני ה', אנא ה'  הושיעה נא,  אנא ה'  הצליחה נא,  והקם סוכת דוד, ובא לציון גואל,  צדיק ונושע הוא,  ויראו עינינו בביאת משיח צדקנו,  ובבנין בית מקדשנו,  במהרה בימינו, ויהי נועם ה' אלקינו עלינו, ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו,  ומעשה ידינו כוננהו,  ויתגדל ויתקדש שם י"ה רבא בעגלא ובזמן קריב, אמן כן יהי רצון:

כה דברי הצעיר המצפה לתשועת ה', והבוטח ברוב רחמיו וברוב חסדיו, יאיר עיני בתורתו תורת חיים:

הצעיר ' בכמהר"ר '

בכמהר"ר  ס"ט:

=Year One=

Lekh Lekha -- Hilkhot Tzitzit continued
...

Ki Tetze -- Hilkhot Mishkolot
...

=Year Two= ...

=References=

בן איש חי

title: Translation:Ben Ish Chai


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Rh Betty said no, and the horses being brought round by Ki, who had insisted on saddling them, she and Bob rode off. It was faintly dusk, and a new moon hung low in the sky.

"Isn't it lovely?" sighed Betty. "In spite of sickness and danger and selfish people, I love this country on an evening like this. What do you think we ought to do about telling your aunts. Bob? I knew Grandma would ask that question."

"Why, if they're sick, I think it would be utterly foolish to mention a nephew to 'em," said Bob cheerfully. "They probably are blissfully unaware that I'm alive, and trying to explain to them would likely bring on an attack of brain fever. I'm just a neighbor dropped in to help while they're laid up."

Betty could not bring herself to speak of the evident poverty of the lonely Saunders home. She had built so many bright castles for Bob, and the dilapidated house and buildings she had left that afternoon quite failed to fit into any of the pictures. However, she remembered happily, there was always the prospect of oil.

"It can't be out of the fields," she argued to herself. "Just suppose oil should be discovered in that section! Bob might easily be a millionaire!"

Bob was silent, too, but his thoughts were not


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124 on a problematical fortune. He was wondering, with a quickened beating of his heart, how his mother's sisters would look and whether he should be able to see in them anything of the girlish face in the long-treasured little picture that was one of the few valuables in the black tin box.

"There's a team ahead," said Betty suddenly.

Her quick ears had caught the sound of wheels, and though it was almost dark now, no lantern was lit on the rattling buggy to which they presently caught up. The rig made such a noise, added to the breathing of the bony horse that was suffering from a bad case of that malady popularly known among farmers as "the heaves," that the occupants were forced to raise their voices to make themselves heard. The top was up and it was impossible to see who was inside.

"I tell you, let me handle it, and I'll make you thousands," some one was saying as they passed the buggy single file. "I can manage women and their money, and I don't believe the idea of oil has as much as entered their heads."

"Always oil," thought Bob, hurrying his horse to catch up with Betty. "In Oklahoma the stuff that dreams are made of comes up through an iron derrick, that's sure."

At the Saunders place, bathed in faint moonlight, they found Doctor Morrison's car, and a


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Rh light in the window told that he was waiting for them.

"Didn't know whether you would make it to-night or not," was his greeting, as they went around to the kitchen door and he opened it to show the room brightly lighted by two lamps. "Both patients are asleep. Miss Charity has laryngitis and Miss Hope a very heavy cold. But I think the worst is over."

He stopped, and shot a keen glance at Bob.

"Funny," he said abruptly. "For the moment I would have said you looked enough like Miss Hope to have been her younger brother."

Bob merely smiled at the doctor's remark, for he did not want the relationship to be guessed before his aunts had recognized him.


text: Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil/Chapter 15


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Rh opened. And he went in and stole Dodo's riches, but when he was ready to go away again he forgot the words, he could then remember only Zirka Gumgum, and immediately he had said this the door jambed more tightly than ever into the wall. Then he tried and tried to get out, but he could not do so.

"Now the Women from where they were standing began singing, 'O Mad Robber, we gave you the chance to steal, but we did not give you forgetfulness,' and they went off home. So Dodo when he returned caught the Robber in his house, and he killed him, and stuck his body on a spit. Soon the flesh was cooked, and then Dodo ate it."

Since the Hausa are Mahometans, likewise great travellers and traders, this tale may well have been learned more or less directly from Arabic sources. The following variant from the Cape Verde Islands is probably more indirect.

Picking Teeth; The Password; In the Ashes.

There was a wolf with Tubinh. One day they separated, Lob going to Ferrero and Tubinh to Sparadinha to meet again at Figondago. When they meet Lob asks Tubinh, "Xubinh, how is it you are so fat and I am so thin? Where is it you eat?" "I've been going about getting rats and lizards under the stones, Ti' [uncle] Lob. That's what makes me fat." "This is the seventh day I've been eating lizards," Lob says. "I've a little tail in my teeth. Come take it out." Tubinh took a needle to get it out. "No, Xubinh," objects Lob, "don't you remember it was a needle which sewed for the mortelha [mourning] of


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 and is preserved in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal Academy. In this incomparable work St Anne, pointing upward with her left hand, smiles with an intense look of wondering, questioning, inward sweetness into the face of the Virgin, who in her turn smiles down upon her child as He leans from her lap to give the blessing to the little St John standing beside her. Evidently two different though nearly related designs had been maturing in Leonardo’s mind. A rough first sketch for the motive of the Academy cartoon is in the British Museum; one for the motive of the lost cartoon and of the Louvre picture is at Venice. No painting by Leonardo from the Academy cartoon exists, but in the Ambrosiana at Milan there is one by Luini, with the figure of St Joseph added. It remains a matter of debate whether the Academy cartoon or that shown by Leonardo at the Annunziata in 1501 was the earlier. The probabilities seem in favour of the Academy cartoon. This, whether done at Milan or at Florence, is in any case a typically perfect and harmonious example of the master’s Milanese manner; while in the other composition with the lamb the action and attitude of the Virgin are somewhat strained, and the original relation between her head and her mother’s, lovely both in design and expression, is lost.

In spite of the universal praise of his cartoon, Leonardo did not persevere with the picture, and the monks of the Annunziata had to give back the commission to Filippino Lippi, at whose death the task was completed by Perugino. It remains uncertain whether a small Madonna with distaff and spindle, which the correspondent of Isabella Gonzaga reports Leonardo as having begun for one Robertet, a favourite of the king of France, was ever finished. He painted one portrait, it is said, at this time, that of Ginevra Benci, a kinswoman, perhaps sister, of a youth Giovanni di Amerigo Benci, who shared his passion for cosmographical studies; and probably began another, the famous “La Gioconda,” which was only finished four years afterwards. The gonfalionere Soderini offered him in vain, to do with it what he would, the huge half-spoiled block of marble out of which Michelangelo three years later wrought his “David.” Isabella Gonzaga again begged, in an autograph letter, that she might have a painting by his hand, but her request was put off; he did her, however, one small service by examining and reporting on some jewelled vases, formerly the property of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which had been offered her. The importunate expectations of a masterpiece or masterpieces in painting or sculpture, which beset him on all hands in Florence, inclined him to take service again with some princely patron, if possible of a genius commensurate with his own, who would give him scope to carry out engineering schemes on a vast scale. Accordingly he suddenly took service, in the spring of 1502, with Cesare Borgia, duke of Valentinois, then almost within sight of the realization of his huge ambitions, and meanwhile occupied in consolidating his recent conquests in the Romagna. Between May 1502 and March 1503 Leonardo travelled as chief engineer to Duke Caesar over a great part of central Italy. Starting with a visit to Piombino, on the coast opposite Elba, he went by way of Siena to Urbino, where he made drawings and began works; was thence hastily summoned by way of Pesaro and Rimini to Cesena; spent two months between there and Cesenatico, projecting and directing canal and harbour works, and planning the restoration of the palace of Frederic II.; thence hurriedly joined his master, momentarily besieged by enemies at Imola; followed him probably to Sinigaglia and Perugia, through the whirl of storms and surprises, vengeances and treasons, which marked his course that winter, and finally, by way of Chiusi and Acquapendente, as far as Orvieto and probably to Rome, where Caesar arrived on the 14th of February 1503. The pope’s death and Caesar’s own downfall were not destined to be long delayed. But Leonardo apparently had already had enough of that service, and was back at Florence in March. He has left dated notes and drawings made at most of the stations we have named, besides a set of six large-scale maps drawn minutely with his own hand, and including nearly the whole territory of the Maremma, Tuscany and Umbria between the Apennines and the Tyrrhene Sea.

At Florence he was at last persuaded, on the initiative of Piero Soderini, to undertake for his native city a work of painting as great as that with which he had adorned Milan. This was a battle-piece to decorate one of the walls of the new council-hall in the palace of the signory. He chose an episode in the victory won by the generals of the republic in 1440 over Niccolo Piccinino near a bridge at Anghiari, in the upper valley of the Tiber. To the young Michelangelo was presently entrusted a rival battle-piece to be painted on another wall of the same apartment; he chose, as is well known, a surprise of the Florentine forces in the act of bathing near Pisa. About the same time Leonardo took part in the debate on the proper site for Michelangelo’s newly finished colossal “David,” and voted in favour of the Loggia dei Lanzi, against a majority which included Michelangelo himself. Neither Leonardo’s genius nor his noble manners could soften the rude and taunting temper of the younger man, whose style as an artist, nevertheless, in subjects both of tenderness and terror, underwent at this time a profound modification from Leonardo’s example.

In one of the sections of his projected Treatise on Painting, Leonardo has detailed at length, and obviously from his own observation, the pictorial aspects of a battle. His choice of subject in this instance was certainly not made from any love of warfare or indifference to its horrors. In his MSS. there occur almost as many trenchant sayings on life and human affairs as on art and natural law; and of war he has disposed in two words as a “bestial frenzy” (pazzia bestialissima). In his design for the Hall of Council he set himself to depict this frenzy at its fiercest. He chose the moment of a terrific struggle for the colours between the opposing sides; hence the work became commonly known as the “Battle of the Standard.” Judging by the accounts of those who saw it, and the fragmentary evidences which remain, the tumultuous medley of men and horses, and the expressions of martial fury and despair, must have been conceived and rendered with a mastery not less commanding than had been the looks and gestures of bodeful sorrow and soul’s perplexity among the quiet company on the convent wall at Milan. The place assigned to Leonardo for the preparation of his cartoon was the Sala del Papa at Santa Maria Novella. He for once worked steadily and unremittingly at his task. His accounts with the signory enable us to follow its progress step by step. He had finished the cartoon in less than two years (1504–1505), and when it was exhibited along with that of Michelangelo, the two rival works seemed to all men a new revelation of the powers of art, and served as a model and example of the students of that generation, as the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine had served to those of two generations earlier. The young Raphael, whose incomparable instinct for rhythmical design had been trained hitherto on subjects of holy quietude and rapt contemplation according to the traditions of Umbrian art, learnt from Leonardo’s example to apply the same instinct to themes of violent action and strife. From the same example Fra Bartolommeo and a crowd of other Florentine painters of the rising or risen generation took in like manner a new impulse. The master lost no time in proceeding to the execution of his design upon the mural surface; this time he had devised a technical method of which, after a preliminary trial in the Sala del Papa, he regarded the success as certain; the colours, whether tempera or other remains in doubt, were to be laid on a specially prepared ground, and then both colours and ground made secure upon the wall by the application of heat. When the central group was done the heat was applied, but it was found to take effect unequally; the colours in the upper part ran or scaled from the wall, and the result was a failure more or less complete. The unfinished and decayed painting remained for some fifty years on the wall, but after 1560 was covered over with new frescoes by Vasari. The cartoon did not last so long. After doing its work as the most inspiring of all examples for students it seems to have been cut up. When Leonardo left Italy for good in 1516 he is recorded to have left “the greater part of it” in deposit at the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, where he was accustomed also to deposit his

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 moneys, and whence it seems before long to have disappeared. Our only existing memorials of the great work are a number of small pen-studies of fighting men and horses, three splendid studies in red chalk at Budapest for heads in the principal group, one head at Oxford copied by a contemporary of the size of the original cartoon (above life); a tiny sketch, also at Oxford, by Raphael after the principal group; an engraving done by Zacchia of Lucca in 1558 not after the original but after a copy; a 16th-century Flemish drawing of the principal group, and another, splendidly spirited, by Rubens, both copies of copies; with Edelinck’s fine engraving after the Rubens drawing.

During these years, 1503–1506, Leonardo also resumed (if it is true that he had already begun it before his travels with Cesare Borgia) the portrait of Madonna Lisa, the Neapolitan wife of Zanobi del Giocondo, and finished it to the last pitch of his powers. In this lady he had found a sitter whose face and smile possessed in a singular degree the haunting, enigmatic charm in which he delighted. He worked, it is said, at her portrait during some portion of four successive years, causing music to be played during the sittings that the rapt expression might not fade from off her countenance. The picture was bought afterwards by Francis I. for four thousand gold florins, and is now one of the glories of the Louvre. The richness of colouring on which Vasari expatiates has indeed flown, partly from injury, partly because in striving for effects of light and shade the painter was accustomed to model his figures on a dark ground, and in this as in his other oil-pictures the ground has to a large extent come through. Nevertheless, in its dimmed and blackened state, the portrait casts an irresistible spell alike by subtlety of expression, by refinement and precision of drawing, and by the romantic invention of its background. It has been the theme of endless critical rhapsodies, among which that of Pater is perhaps the most imaginative as it is the best known.

In the spring of 1506 Leonardo, moved perhaps by chagrin at the failure of his work in the Hall of Council, accepted a pressing invitation to Milan, from Charles d’Amboise, Maréchal de Chaumont, the lieutenant of the French king in Lombardy. The leave of absence granted to him by the signory on the request of the French viceroy was for three months only. The period was several times extended, at first grudgingly, Soderini complaining that Leonardo had treated the republic ill in the matter of the battle picture; whereupon the painter honourably offered to refund the money paid, an offer which the signory as honourably refused. Louis XII. sent messages urgently desiring that Leonardo should await his own arrival in Milan, having seen a small Madonna by him in France (probably that painted for Robertet) and hoping to obtain from him works of the same class and perhaps a portrait. The king arrived in May 1507, and soon afterwards Leonardo’s services were formally and amicably transferred from the signory of Florence to Louis, who gave him the title of painter and engineer in ordinary. In September of the same year troublesome private affairs called him to Florence. His father had died in 1504, apparently intestate. After his death Leonardo experienced unkindness from his seven half-brothers, Ser Piero’s legitimate sons. They were all much younger than himself. One of them, who followed his father’s profession, made himself the champion of the others in disputing Leonardo’s claim to his share, first in the paternal inheritance, and then in that which had been left to be divided between the brothers and sisters by an uncle. The litigation that ensued dragged on for several years, and forced upon Leonardo frequent visits to Florence and interruptions of his work at Milan, in spite of pressing letters to the authorities of the republic from Charles d’Amboise, from the French king himself, and from others of his powerful friends and patrons, begging that the proceedings might be accelerated. There are traces of work done during these intervals of compulsory residence at Florence. A sheet of sketches drawn there in 1508 shows the beginning of a Madonna now lost except in the form of copies, one of which (known as the “Madonna Litta”) is at St Petersburg, another in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum

at Milan. A letter from Leonardo to Charles d’Amboise in 1511, announcing the end of his law troubles, speaks of two Madonnas of different sizes that he means to bring with him to Milan. One was no doubt that just mentioned; can the other have been the Louvre “Virgin with St Anne and St John,” now at last completed from the cartoon exhibited in 1501? Meantime the master’s main home and business were at Milan. Few works of painting and none of sculpture (unless the unfulfilled commission for the Trivulzio monument belongs to this time) are recorded as occupying him during the seven years of his second residence in that city (1506–1513). He had attached to himself a new and devoted young friend and pupil of noble birth, Francesco Melzi. At the villa of the Melzi family at Vaprio, where Leonardo was a frequent visitor, a colossal Madonna on one of the walls is traditionally ascribed to him, but is rather the work of Sodoma or of Melzi himself working under the master’s eye. Another painter in the service of the French king, Jehan Perréal or Jehan de Paris, visited Milan, and consultations on technical points were held between him and Leonardo. But Leonardo’s chief practical employments were evidently on the continuation of his great hydraulic and irrigation works in Lombardy. His old trivial office of pageant-master and inventor of scientific toys was revived on the occasion of Louis XII.’s triumphal entry after the victory of Agnadello in 1509, and gave intense delight to the French retinue of the king. He was consulted on the construction of new choir-stalls for the cathedral. He laboured in the natural sciences as ardently as ever, especially at anatomy in company with the famous professor of Pavia, Marcantonio della Torre. To about this time, when he was approaching his sixtieth year, may belong the noble portrait-drawing of himself in red chalk at Turin. He looks too old for his years, but quite unbroken; the character of a veteran sage has fully imprinted itself on his countenance; the features are grand, clear and deeply lined, the mouth firmly set and almost stern, the eyes strong and intent beneath their bushy eyebrows, the hair flows untrimmed over his shoulders and commingles with a majestic beard.

Returning to Milan with his law-suits ended in 1511, Leonardo might have looked forward to an old age of contented labour, the chief task of which, had he had his will, would undoubtedly have been to put in order the vast mass of observations and speculations accumulated in his note-books, and to prepare some of them for publication. But as his star seemed rising that of his royal protector declined. The hold of the French on Lombardy was rudely shaken by hostile political powers, then confirmed again for a while by the victories of Gaston de Foix, and finally destroyed by the battle in which that hero fell under the walls of Ravenna. In June 1512 a coalition between Spain, Venice and the pope re-established the Sforza dynasty in power at Milan in the person of Ludovico’s son Massimiliano. This prince must have been familiar with Leonardo as a child, but perhaps resented the ready transfer of his allegiance to the French, and at any rate gave him no employment. Within a few months the ageing master uprooted himself from Milan, and moved with his chattels and retinue of pupils to Rome, into the service of the house that first befriended him, the Medici. The vast enterprises of Pope Julius II. had already made Rome the chief seat and centre of Italian art. The accession of Giulio de’ Medici in 1513 under the title of Leo X. raised on all hands hopes of still ampler and more sympathetic patronage. Leonardo’s special friend at the papal court was the pope’s youngest brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, a youth who combined dissipated habits with thoughtful culture and a genuine interest in arts and sciences. By his influence Leonardo and his train were accommodated with apartments in the Belvedere of the Vatican. But the conditions of the time and place proved adverse. The young generation held the field. Michelangelo and Raphael, who had both, as we have seen, risen to greatness partly on Leonardo’s shoulders, were fresh from the glory of their great achievements in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. Their rival factions hated each other, but both, especially the faction of Michelangelo, turned bitterly against the veteran

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