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THE IVORY TOWER on the spot might enjoin, this hero, Horton Vint, had alighted at one of those hours of brilliant bustle which could show him as all in his element if he chose to appear so, or could otherwise appeal at once to his perfect aptitude for the artful escape and the undetected counterplot. But the pitch had by that moment dropped and the company dispersed, so far as the quarter before him was concerned: the tennis-ground was a velvet void, the afternoon breeze conveyed soft nothings—all of which made his occasion more spacious for Horton. Cissy, from below, her charmingly cool cove, had watchfully signalled up, and they met afresh, on the firm clear sand where the drowsy waves scarce even lapsed, with forms of intimacy that the sequestered spot happily favoured. The sense of waiting understood and crowned gave grace to her opened arms when the young man, as he was still called, erect, slim, active, brightly refreshed and, like herself, given the temperature, inconsiderably attired, first showed himself against the sky; it had cost him but a few more strides and steps, an easy descent, to spring to her welcome with the strongest answering emphasis. They met as on ground already so prepared that not an uncertainty, on either side, could make reunion less brave or confidence less fine; they had to effect no clearance, to stand off from no risk; and, observing them thus in their freedom, you might well have asked yourself by what infallible 151


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THE IVORY TOWER tact they had mastered for intercourse such perfect reciprocities of address. You would certainly have concluded to their entire confidence in these. "With a dozen people in the house it is luck," Horton had at once appreciatively said; but when their fellow-visitors had been handled between them for a minute or so only to collapse again like aproned puppets on removal of pressure from the squeak, he had jumped to the question of Gray Fielder and to frank interest in Cissy's news of him. This news, the death of Mr. Betterman that morning, quite sufficiently explained her inability to produce the more direct impression; that worthy's nephew and heir, in close and more and more quickened attendance on him during the previous days, had been seen as yet, to the best of her belief, by no one at all but dear Davey—not counting of course Rosanna Gaw, of the fact of whose own bereavement as well Horton was naturally in possession, and who had made it possible, she understood, for their friend to call on Graham.

"Oh Davey has called on Graham?" Horton was concerned to ask while they sat together on a rude worn slab. "What then, if he has told you, was his particular idea?"

"Won't his particular idea," Cissy returned, "be exactly the one he won't have told me? What he did speak to me of yesterday morning, and what I told him I thought would be beautiful 152

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THE IVORY TOWER of him, was his learning by inquiry, in case your friend could see him, whether there was any sort of thing he could do for him in his possible want of a man to put a hand on. Because poor Rosanna, for all one thinks of her," said the girl, "isn't exactly a man."

Morton's attention was deeply engaged; his hands, a little behind him, rested, as props to his slight backward inclination, on the convenient stone; his legs, extended before him, enabled him to dig in his heels a little, while his eyes, attached to the stretch of sea commanded by their rocky retreat, betrayed a fixed and quickened vision. Rich in fine lines and proportions was his handsome face—with scarce less, moreover, to be said of his lean, light and long-drawn, though so much more pointed and rounded figure. His features, after a manner of their own, announced an energy and composed an array that his expression seemed to disavow, or at least to be indifferent to, and had the practical effect of toning down; as if he had been conscious that his nose, of the bravest, strongest curve and intrinsically a great success, was too bold and big for its social connections, that his mouth protested or at least asserted more than he cared to back it up to, that his chin and jaw were of too tactless an importance, and his fine eyes, above all, which suggested choice samples of the more or less precious stone called aquamarine, too disposed to darken with the 153


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34 We had other remittance-men on board, it was said. At least they said they were R. M.'s. There were two. But they did not resemble the Canadian; they lacked his tidiness, and his brains, and his gentlemanly ways, and his resolute spirit, and his humanities and generosities. One of them was a lad of nineteen or twenty, and he was a good deal of a ruin, as to clothes, and morals, and general aspect. He said he was a scion of a ducal house in England, and had been shipped to Canada for the house's relief, that he had fallen into trouble there, and was now being shipped to Australia. He said he had no title. Beyond this remark he was economical of the truth. The first thing he did in Australia was to get into the lockup, and the next thing he did was to proclaim himself an earl in the police court in the morning and fail to prove it.


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THE IVORY TOWER force of a straight look—so that the right way to treat such an excess of resource had become for him quite the incongruous way, the cultivation of every sign and gage that liberties might be taken with him. He seemed to keep saying that he was not, temperamentally and socially, in his own exaggerated style, and that a bony structure, for instance, as different as possible from the one he unfortunately had to flaunt, would have been no less in harmony with his real nature than he sought occasion to show it was in harmony with his conduct. His hard mouth sported, to its visible relief and the admiration of most beholders, a beautiful mitigating moustache; his eyes wandered and adventured as for fear of their very own stare; his smile and his laugh went all lengths, you would almost have guessed, in order that nothing less pleasant should occupy the ground; his chin advanced upon you with a grace fairly tantamount to the plea, absurd as that might have seemed, that it was in the act of receding. Thus you gained the impression—or could do so if your fancy quickened to him—that he would perhaps rather have been as unwrought and unfinished as so many monstrous men, on the general peopled scene of those climes, appeared more and more to show themselves, than appointed to bristle with a group of accents that, for want of a sense behind them, could attach themselves but to a group of blanks. The sense behind the 154


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 The Calcutta Review

Deshabandhu

By courtesy of “ The Ilustrated Sisir


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 The Calcutta Review

SIR RAMKRISHNA GOPAL BHANDARKAR

Born: 6th July, 1837. Died :_24th August, 1925


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 The Calcutta Review

Courtesy of the Artist Professor Abanindranath Tagore, C.I.E., D.Lit.]

DARSAN DARWAZA: THE DOOR OF AUSPICIOUS SIGHT


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THE IVORY TOWER outward man in Horton Vint bore no relation, it incessantly signified, to his being importantly goodlooking; it was in itself as easily and freely human a sense, making as much for personal reassurance, as the appeal of opportunity in an enjoying world could ever have drawn forth and with the happy appearance of it confirmed by the whimsical, the quite ironic, turn given by the society in which he moved to the use of his name. It could never have been so pronounced and written Haughty if in spite of superficial accidents his charming clever humility and sociability hadn't thoroughly established themselves. He lived in the air of jokes, and yet an air in which bad ones fell flat; and there couldn't have been a worse one than to treat his designation as true.

It might have been, at the same time, scarce in the least as a joke that he presently said, in return for the remark on Cissy's part last reported: "Rosanna is surely enough of a man to be much more of one than Davey. However," he went on, "we agree, don't we? about the million of men it would have taken to handle Gussy. A Davey the more or the less, or with a shade more or less of the different sufficiency, would have made no difference in that question"—which had indeed no interest for them anyhow, he conveyed, compared with the fun apparently proposed by this advent of old Gray. That, frankly, was to him, Horton, as amusing a thing as could have happened 155


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 AN AWKWARD PAUSE.


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 The Calcutta Review

MAHENDRANATH RAY

Born: October, 1862. Died: August, 1925

By courtesy of the Calcutta Law Journal]


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 The Calcutta Review

SIR SURENDRANATH BANERJEA

Born: roth November, 1848. Died: 6th August, 1925


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THE IVORY TOWER —at a time when if it hadn't been for Cissy's herself happening to be for him, by exception, a comfort to think of, there wasn't a blest thing in his life of the smallest interest. "It hadn't struck me as probable at all, this revulsion of the old man's," he mentioned, "and though Fielder must be now an awfully nice chap, whom you'll like and find charming, I own I didn't imagine he would come so tremendously forward. Over there, simply with his tastes, his 'artistic interests,' or literary ones, or whatever—I mean his array of intellectual resources and lack of any others—he was well enough, by my last impression, and I liked him both for his decent life and ways and for his liking me, if you can believe it, so extraordinarily much as he seemed to. What the situation appears most to mean, however, is that of a sudden he pops into a real light, a great blazing light visible from afar—which is quite a different affair. It can't not mean at least all sorts of odd things—or one has a right to wonder if it mayn't mean them." And Horton might have been taken up for a minute of silence with his consideration of some of these glimmering possibilities; a moment during which Cissy Foy maintained their association by fairly, by quite visibly breathing with him in unison—after a fashion that testified more to her interest than any "cutting in" could have done. It would have been clear that they were far beyond any stage of association at which 156


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 them, and just as they grow: The Pearls, are rich Pearls and round. The two pieces of Emmeraud-rock, the one scarce formed yet into perfect Emmeraud, but onely begun: the other quite finished and green. Then two close cupbords within the walls of this Room, in which I saw a world of curious Cups and Vases of Crystal, Agate, Lapis Lazuli, and other such curious, but brittle matter, yet of rare fabrick and shape: They value them at two hundred thousand Crowns. The Unicorns horne, and the Alabaster Pillar are not to be forgotten. The great Cabinet of Ebeny standing at the further end of this Tribuno, full of ancient Meddals of Gold Silver and Brass, of the ancient Consuls and Emperors, all digested into their several series; and yet this Cabinet is almost as rich without, as it contains riches within; being set without with precious stones of a vast bigness and value; to wit, a Saphir as broad as a twenty shillings piece, and half an inche thick; a Ruby full as great, but farr


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Rh of the Chhāndogya Upanishad, pp. 23-24), Professor Macdonell (History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 189, 202-203, 226) and others.

II. The second class comprises Brāhmaṇical works to which no definite date can be assigned, but large portions of which, in the opinion of competent crities, belong to the post-Bimbisārian period. To this class belong the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas. ‘The present Rāmāyaṇa not only mentions Buddha Tathāgata (II. 109. 34), but distinctly refers to the struggles of the Hindus with mixed hordes of Yavanas and Śakas, भकान् यवनमित्रितान् (I. 54. 21). In the Kishkindhyā Kāṇḍa (IV. 43. 11-12), Sugrîva places the country of the Yavanas and the cities of the Śakas between the country of the Kurus and the Madras, and the Himālayas. This shows that the Græco-Scythians at that time occupied parts of the Pañjāb.

As regards the present Mahābhārata, Hopkins says (Great Epic of India, pp. 391-393), “Buddhist supremacy already decadent is implied by passages which allude contemptuously to the eḍūkas or Buddhistic monuments as having ousted the temples of the gods. Thus in III. 190. 65 ‘They will revere eḍūkas, they will neglect the gods’ ; ib. 67 ‘the earth shall he piled with eḍūkas, not adorned with godhouses.’ With such expressions may he compared the thoroughly Buddhistie epithet, Cāturmahārājika in XII. 339. 40 and Buddhistic philosophy as expounded in the sane book.”

“The Greeks are described as a western people and their overthrow is alluded to ............ The Romans, Romakas, are mentioned but once, in a formal list of all possible peoples II. 51.17, and stand thus in marked contrast to the Greeks and Persians, Pahlavas, who are mentioned very often ............ The distinct prophecy that ‘Scythians, Greeks and Bactrians will rule unrighteously


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 richer; an emmeraud not inferiour to the rest; a pearl as big as an ordinary wallnut; a world of Diamonds and other lesser stones, but all of so great value, that this Cabinet, with that which is in it, is valued to be worth five hundred thousand Crowns. Lastly, I saw here the great round Table made of inlaid pretious stones polished neatly; a table able to make the most hungry stomack forget its grumbing, to feed its eyes upon the unroasted birds which together with curious flowers compose this admirable table; Pearles, Rubies, Saphirs, Cornelians, Emmerauds, Lapis Lazuli, &c are employed here artificially to the making of these birds & flowers. You'l conceive better of this Table when I shall tell you, that its worth a hundred thousand Crowns, and that it was fifteen years in making, and yet thirty men wrought at it dayly. In the midst of it is the great Ball of the Armes of the Duke of Florence in pretious stones.

The 5. Cabinet standing at the


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 FACSIMILE PAGE FROM THE AUTHOR'S NOTE BOOK. (49)


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THE IVORY TOWER their capacity for interest in the contribution of either to what was between them should depend upon verbal proof. It depended in fact as little on any other sort, such for instance as searching eyes might invoke; she hadn't to look at her friend to follow him further—she but looked off to those spaces where his own vision played, and it was by pressing him close there that she followed. Her companion's imagination, by the time he spoke again, might verily have travelled far.

"What comes to me is just the wonder of whether such a change of fortune may possibly not spoil him—he was so right and nice as he was. I remember he used really to exasperate me almost by seeming not to have wants, unless indeed it was by having only those that could be satisfied over there as a kind of matter of course and that were those I didn't myself have—in any degree at least that could make up for the non-satisfaction of my others. I suppose it amounted really," said Horton, "to the fact that, being each without anything to speak of in our pockets, or then any prospect of anything, he accepted that because he happened to like most the pleasures that were not expensive. I on my side raged at my inability to meet or to cultivate expense—which seemed to me good and happy, quite the thing most worth while, in itself: as for that matter it still seems. 'La lecture et la promenade', which old Roulet, our pasteur at Neuchâtel used so to enjoin on us 157


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THE IVORY TOWER as the highest joys, really appealed to Gray, to all appearance, in the sense in which Roulet regarded, or pretended to regard, them—once he could have pictures and music and talk, which meant of course pleasant people, thrown in. He could go in for such things on his means—ready as he was to do all his travelling on foot (I wanted as much then to do all mine on horseback,) and to go to the opera or the play in the shilling seats when he couldn't go in the stalls. I loathed so everything but the stalls—the stalls everywhere in life—that if I couldn't have it that way I didn't care to have it at all. So when I think it strikes me I must have liked him very much not to have wanted to slay him—for I don't remember having given way at any particular moment to threats or other aggressions. That may have been because I felt he rather extravagantly liked me—as I shouldn't at all wonder at his still doing. At the same time if I had found him beyond a certain point objectionable his showing he took me for anything wonderful would have been, I think," the young man reflected, "but an aggravation the more. However that may be, I'm bound to say, I shan't in the least resent his taking me for whatever he likes now—if he can at all go on with it himself I shall be able to hold up my end. The dream of my life, if you must know all, dear—the dream of my life has been to be admired, really admired, admired for all he's worth, by some 158


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Rh decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near. The struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in those days.

Thus advantageously was the new king situated. Will it be believed that the first thing he did was to destroy his Established Church, root and branch? He did indeed do that. To state the case figuratively, he was a prosperous sailor who burnt his ship and took toa raft. This Church was a horrid thing. It heavily oppressed the people; it kept them always trembling in the gloom of mysterious threatenings; it slaughtered them in sacrifice before its grotesque idols of wood and stone; it cowed them, it terrorized them, it made them slaves to its priests, and through the priests to the king. It was the best friend a king could have, and the most dependable. To a professional reformer who should annihilate so frightful and so devastating a power as this Church, reverence and praise would be due; but to a king who should do it, could properly be due nothing but reproach; reproach softened by sorrow; sorrow for his unfitness for his position.

He destroyed his Established Church, and his kingdom is a republic to-day, in consequence of that act.

When he destroyed the Church and burned the idols he did a mighty thing for civilization and for his people’s weal—but it was not "business." It was unkingly, it was inartistic. It made trouble for his line. The American missionaries arrived


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THE IVORY TOWER awfully rich man. Being admired by a rich woman even isn't so good—though I've tried for that too, as you know, and equally failed of it; I mean in the sense of their being ready to do it for all they are worth. I've only had it from the poor, haven't I?—and we've long since had to recognise, haven't we? how little that has done for either of us." So Horton continued—so, as if incited and agreeably, irresistibly inspired, he played, in the soft stillness and the protected nook, before the small salt tide that idled as if to listen, with old things and new, with actualities and possibilities, on top of the ancientries, that seemed to want but a bit of talking of in order to flush and multiply. "There's one thing at any rate I'll be hanged if I shall allow," he wound up; "I'll be hanged if what we may do for him shall—by any consent of mine at least—spoil him for the old relations without inspiring him for the new. He shan't become if I can help it as beastly vulgar as the rest of us."

The thing was said with a fine sincere ring, but it drew from Cissy a kind of quick wail of pain. "Oh, oh, oh—what a monstrous idea, Haughty, that he possibly could, ever!"

It had an immediate, even a remarkable effect; it made him turn at once to look at her, giving his lightest pleasantest laugh, than which no sound of that sort equally manful had less of mere male stridency. Then it made him, with a change of 159


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THE IVORY TOWER posture, shift his seat sufficiently nearer to her to put his arm round her altogether and hold her close, pressing his cheek a moment, with due precautions, against her hair. "That's awfully nice of you. We will pull something off. Is what you're thinking of what your friend out there dans le temps, the stepfather, Mr. Wendover, was it? told you about him in that grand manner?"

"Of course it is," said Cissy in lucid surrender and as if this truth were of a flatness almost to blush for. "Don't you know I fell so in love with Mr. Northover, whose name you mispronounce, that I've kept true to him forever, and haven't been really in love with you in the least, and shall never be with Gray himself, however much I may want to, or you perhaps may even try to make me?—any more than I shall ever be with anyone else. What's inconceivable," she explained, "is that anyone that dear delicious man thought good enough to talk of to me as he talked of his stepson should be capable of anything in the least disgusting in any way."

"I see, I see." It made Horton, for reasons, hold her but the closer—yet not withal as if prompted by her remarks to affectionate levity. It was a sign of the intercourse of this pair that, move each other though they might to further affection, and therewith on occasion to a congruous gaiety, they treated no cause and no effect of that sort as waste; they had somehow already so 160


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66 down-hill, we should fly. When she asked him the other day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard, the open area in the front end of the ship. That man has a good deal of learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all.

Afternoon. Crossed the equator. In the distance it looked like a blue ribbon stretched across the ocean. Several passengers kodak’d it. We had no fool ceremonies, no fantastics, no horseplay. All that sort of thing has gone out. In old times a

sailor, dressed as Neptune, used to come in over the bows, with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody who was crossing the equator for the first time, and then cleanse these unfortunates by swinging them from the yard-arm and ducking them three times in the sea. This was considered funny. Nobody knows why. No, that is not true. We do know why. Such a thing could never be funny on land; no part of the old-time grotesque performances gotten up on shipboard to celebrate the passage of the line could ever be funny on shore—they would seem dreary and witless to shore people. But the shore people would change their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage. On such a voyage, with its eternal monotonies, people’s intellects deteriorate; the owners of the intellects soon reach a point where they almost seem to prefer childish things to things of a maturer degree. One is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them. This is on long voyages only. The mind gradually becomes inert, dull, blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellec-


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 280 -. THE CALOUTTA REVIEW [ave.

THE DOOR OF AUSPICIOUS SIGHT!

Stone with blood mingled in its grain, stone with moon- light poured into it : of such stuff is made the Darsan Dar- waza, thé Door of Auspicious Sight in the Imperial Audience Hall. The pink flush of sunrise, with a digit of the moon caught up in its embrace; just a sportive mood of a moment which is of the morning twilight, made to take shape in the form of stone ; a mystery poem attuned to the two rhythms of the coloured and the colourless; a couplet, with its two verses written in letters of stone with the greatest care: only this much meets the eye, day after day, from morning until night.

This was the Door of Auspicious Sight. On the other side of it were the king’s own chambers, surrounded by lattice screens cut in marble delicate like the white petals of the jasmine: one could not see what happened there, and no message of it came to the people outside, and day to day they saw merely the Door of Auspicious Sight.

But no more was the space within the Door of Auspicious Sight filled up with the figure of Shah Jahan, dressed in his - kingly robe of Dacca muslin—woven in morning dew—and looking like a veritable image carved in marble. The mass of people gazed at this latticed and closed balcony, like birds silent with apprehension when at dawn the light of the day ‘does not show itself in the eastern sky; the artist stood expectant with his brush, waiting for Shah Jahan to show himself. .

At last the door opened, but if was not Emperor Shah Jahan who gave to his people the auspicious sight of himself. In his place came out and stood a figure, pale like hard stone tempered in blood. With one hand it seemed he was pressing

} Translated from Bengali by Professor Sunitikumar Chatterji, MLA, D.Lit,


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 THE BLUE RIBBON.


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THE IVORY TOWER worked off, in their common interest, all possible mistakes and vain imaginings, all false starts and false pursuits, all failures of unanimity. "Why then if he's really so decent, not to say so superior," Haughty went on, "won't it be the best thing in the world and a great simplification for you to fall—that is for you to be—in love with him? That will be better for me, you know, than if you're not; for it's the impression evidently made on you by the late Nort hover that keeps disturbing my peace of mind. I feel, though I can't quite tell you why," he explained, "that I'm never going to be in the least jealous of Gray, and probably not even so much as envious; so there's your chance—take advantage of it all the way. Like him at your ease, my dear, and God send he shall like you! Only be sure it's for himself you do it—and for your own self; as you make out your possibilities, de part et'd'autre, on your getting nearer to them."

"So as to be sure, you mean," Cissy inquired, "of not liking him for his money?"

 II

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 CONTENTS Oil

No. IV.-VoL. II. Art., 1.-THE STATE OF INDIGENOUS EDUCATION IN BENGAL AND BEHAR.

1. Second Report on the state of Education in Bengal.-District of Rajhsahi, 1836. Published by order of Government, 301 2. Third Report on the state of Education in Bengal and Behar, &c. 1838. By William Adam. Published by order of Government,

Art. II.-ROMANCE AND REALITY OF INDIAN LIFE.

1. Sale's Translation of the Koran-Bath, 1795, 877 2. Bernier's Travels. Translated by John Steuart, Calcutta, 1826, • • • . • • . ib. 3. Bernier's History of the late revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul-Englished out of French. London, J671. Calcutta, 1824, . ih. 4. History of Nadir Shah, by James Fraser. 2nd edition. London, 1742, • • • • • ib. 5. Life of Nadir Shah. Extracted from an Eastern · ltl.S~ tran~latedJnto French. By William Jones, . E~q. London, 1773, • • • . . ib. 6. Observations on the Mussulmans of India. By Mrs. Meer aassan Ali. London, 18:32, • . 'ib. 1. Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. . By E.W. Lane. London, 1836, • • . ib. 8. A Memoir of Central India, by lIajor General Malcolm. London, 1825, . . . . . ih. ~.Urquhart's Spirit of the East. Henry Colburn. . London., 1838, • . • • . • . ih. 10: Dow,s History of Hindostan. London, 1812, . ib. 11.. Account of the Kingdom of Caubul. By the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone. London, 1839, • ih. 12. The History of Persia by Sir John Malcolm. Murray. London, 1815, • • ib.


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 "HORSE BILLIARDS."

DIAGRAM.


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72 Mr. Thomas kept his luck, and won the game, and later the championship.

In a minor tournament I won the prize, which was a Waterbury watch. I put it in my trunk. In Pretoria, South Africa, nine months afterward, my proper watch broke down and I took the Waterbury out, wound it, set it by the great clock on the Parliament House (8.05), then went back to my room and went to bed, tired from a long railway journey. The parliamentary clock had a peculiarity which I was not aware of at the time—a peculiarity which exists in no other clock, and would not exist in that one if it had been made by a sane person; on the half-hour it strikes the succeeding hour, then strikes the hour again at the proper time. I lay reading and smoking awhile ; then, when I could hold my eyes open no longer and was about to put out the light, the great clock began to boom, and I counted—

I BEAT HER BRAINS OUT.

ten. I reached for the Waterbury: to see how it was getting along. It was marking 9.30. It seemed rather poor speed for a three-dollar watch, but I supposed that the climate was


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74 would be going into dock for a month in Sydney for repairs; but no matter, painting was going on all the time somewhere or other. The ladies’ dresses were constantly getting ruined, nevertheless protests and supplications went for nothing. Sometimes a lady, taking an afternoon nap on deck near a ventilator or some other thing that didn’t need painting, would wake up by and by and find that the humorous painter had been noiselessly daubing that thing and had splattered her white gown all over with little greasy yellow spots.

The blame for this untimely painting did not lie with the ship’s officers, but with custom. As far back as Noah’s time it became law that ships must be constantly painted and fussed at when at sea; custom grew out of the law, and at sea custom knows no death; this custom will continue until the sea goes dry.

A DAY OFF.

Sept. 8—Sunday. We are moving so nearly south that we cross only about two meridians of longitude a day. This morning we were in longitude 178 west from Greenwich, and 57 degrees west from San Francisco. To-morrow we shall be


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Rh things, I am tired of them, any way. I think they are well enough, but one doesn't want them always hanging around. My interest was all in the Southern Cross. I had never seen that. I had heard about it all my life, and it was but natural that I should be burning to see it. No other constellation makes so much talk. I had nothing against the Big Dipper—and naturally couldn't have anything against it, since it is a citizen of our own sky, and the property of the United States—but I did want it to move out of the way and give this foreigner a chance. Judging by the size of the talk which the Southern Cross had made, I supposed it would need a sky all to itself.

But that was a mistake. We saw the Cross to-night, and it is not large. Not large, and not strikingly bright. But it was low down toward the horizon, and it may improve when it gets up higher in the sky. It is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else. But that description does not describe; it is too vague, too general, too indefinite. It does after a fashion suggest a cross—a cross that is out of repair — or out of drawing; not correctly shaped. It is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted out of the straight line.

It consists of four large stars and one little one. The little one is out of line and further damages the shape. It should have been placed at the intersection of the stem and the cross-bar. If you do not draw an imaginary line from star to star it does not suggest a cross—nor anything in particular.

One must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination—it confuses everything. If you leave it out, then you can make out of the four stars a sort of cross—out of true; or a sort of kite—out of true; or a sort of coffin—out of true.


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 worshipers. Jim was sleeping, with a snore like the snarl of a leopard.

In his class in Public Speaking, a course designed to create congressmen, bishops, and sales-managers, Elmer had had to produce discourses on Taxation, the Purpose of God in History, Our Friend the Dog, and the Glory of the American Constitution. But his monthly orations had not been too arduous; no one had grieved if he stole all his ideas and most of his phrasing from the encyclopedia. The most important part of preparation had been the lubrication of his polished-mahogany voice with throat-lozenges after rather steady and totally forbidden smoking. He had learned nothing except the placing of his voice. It had never seemed momentous to impress the nineteen students of oratory and the instructor, an unordained licensed preacher who had formerly been a tax-assessor in Oklahoma. He had, in Public Speaking, never been a failure nor ever for one second interesting.

Now, sweating very much, he perceived that he was expected to think, to articulate the curious desires whereby Elmer Gantry was slightly different from any other human being, and to rivet together opinions which would not be floated on any tide of hallelujahs.

He tried to remember the sermons he had heard. But the preachers had been so easily convinced of their authority as prelates, so freighted with ponderous messages, while himself, he was not at the moment certain whether he was a missionary who had to pass his surprising new light on to the multitude, or just a sinner who—

Just a sinner! For keeps! Nothing else! Damned if he'd welsh on old Jim! No, sir! Or welsh on Juanita, who'd stood for him and merely kidded him, no matter how soused and rough and mouthy he might be Her hug. The way she'd get rid of that buttinsky aunt of Nell's; just wink at him and give Aunty some song and dance or other and send her out for chow—

God! If Juanita were only here! She'd give him the real dope. She'd advise him whether he ought to tell Prexy and the Y. M. to go to hell or grab this chance to show Eddie Fislinger and all those Y. M. highbrows that he wasn't such a bonehead—

No! Here Prexy had said he was the whole cheese; gotten

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80 Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. The Great Bear remained the Great Bear—and unrecognizable as such—for thousands of years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly; but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress changed it to the Big Dipper, and now everybody is satisfied, and there is no more talk about riots. I would not change the Southern Cross to the Southern Coffin, I would change it to the Southern Kite; for up there in the general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for coffins and crosses and dippers. In a little while, now—I cannot tell exactly how long it will be—the globe will belong to the English-speaking race; and of course the skies also. Then the constellations will be re-organized, and polished up, and re-named—the most of them "Victoria," I reckon, but this one will sail thereafter as the Southern Kite, or go out of business. Several towns and things, here and there, have been named for Her Majesty already.

In these past few days we are plowing through a mighty Milky Way of islands. They are so thick on the map that one would hardly expect to find room between them for a canoe;


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 them, and hear very different reports, especially of the last. Forget not your own, and reckon upon me as always most affectionately yours, 1em

Most Honoured Sir, I have received two letters you were pleased to write to me the 26th, and will take care of the punctual payment, according to your commands. I wish you could be pleased to have money paid here first; for it is your loss to take it there.

The business with my Lord Leycester is come to nothing as to the reference, for he would never be bound, and so has played fast and loose to try which he would bring us to; but he has gained no ground, though we have lost a little time. There was no avoiding your accepting the reference, for it would have been hard on you if you had refused it. Yesterday, being the day of our meeting, Mr. Baker declared from my Lord, that my Lord would not stand to any reference; but if Sir Wil- Rh


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334 plodding, monotonous mechanism, acting on head and heart with all the force of a congealing efficacy, the scheme of discipline may be truly characterized as throughout a reign of terror. Kindness, patience, generosity, love—all are alike unknown here. Fear is the first and last and only motive brought into play; punishment, the first and last and only stimulant. In varying the modes of this punitory discipline the utmost ingenuity is exercised. With the cane the master is always armed, as with an instrument as indispensable to his vocation as the eyes for seeing, or the ears for hearing; and it is in constant and faithful exercise. The open palm and clenched fist are also vigorously applied to the back, the cheek, and the head. These are but the common droppings that fall with the frequency and the fulness of tropical showers. Of the other varieties constantly exhibited, the following may be taken as those of most ordinary occurrence. A boy is made to bend forward with his face toward the ground; a heavy brick is then placed on his back and another on his neck; and should he let either of them fall, within the prescribed period of half an hour or so, he is punished with the cane. Or, a boy is condemned to stand, for half an hour or an hour, on one foot; and should he shake or quiver, or let down the uplifted leg before the time, he is severely punished. Again, a boy is made to sit on the floor in an exceedingly constrained position, with one leg turned up behind his neck. Or, still worse, he is made to sit with his feet resting on two bricks, and his head bent down between both legs, with his hands twisted round each leg so as painfully to catch the ears. Again, a boy is made to hang for a few minutes with his head downwards from the branch of a neighbouring tree. Or, his hands and feet are bound with cords; to these members so bound a rope is fastened; and the boy is then hoisted up by means of a pulley attached to the beams or rafters of the school. Again, nettles, dipped in water, are applied to the body, which becomes irritated and swollen; the pain is excruciating and often lasts a whole day; but, however great the itching and the pain, the sufferer is not allowed to rub or touch the skin for relief, under the dread of a flagellation in addition. Or, the boy is put up in a sack along with some nettles, or a cat, or some other noisesome creature, and then rolled along the ground. Again, the fingers of both hands are inserted across each other with a stick between, and two sticks without, drawn close together and tied. Or, a boy is made to measure so many cubits on the ground, by marking it along with the tip of his nose. Again, four boys are made to seize another, two holding the arms, and two the feet; they then alternately swing him, and


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 But the wolf answered: ‘At the end of a year we will pay a visit to your father and mother.’

And at these words the white furry skin slipped from his back, and the princess saw that he was not a wolf at all, but a beautiful youth, tall and stately; and he gave her his hand, and led her up the castle stairs.

One day, at the end of half a year, he came into her room and said: ‘My dear one, you must get ready for a wedding. Your eldest sister is going to be married, and I will take you to your father’s palace. When the wedding is over, I shall come and fetch you home. I will whistle outside the gate, and when you hear me, pay no heed to what your father or mother say, leave your dancing and feasting, and come to me at once; for if I have to leave without you, you will never find your way back alone through the forests.’

When the princess was ready to start, she found that he had put on his white fur skin, and was changed back into the wolf; and he swung her on to his back, and set out with her to her father’s palace, where he left her, while he himself returned home alone. But, in the evening, he went back to fetch her, and, standing outside the palace gate, he gave a long, loud whistle. In the midst of her dancing the princess heard the sound, and at once she went to him, and he swung her on his back and bore her away to his castle.

Again, at the end of half a year, the prince came into her room, as the white wolf, and said: ‘Dear heart, you must prepare for the wedding of your second sister. I will take you to your father’s palace to-day, and we will remain there together till to-morrow morning.’

So they went together to the wedding. In the evening, when the two were alone together, he dropped his fur skin, and, ceasing to be a wolf, became a prince again. Now they did not know that the princess’s mother was hidden in the room. When she saw the white skin lying on the floor, she crept out of the room, and sent a servant

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THE IVORY TOWER for once in a blue moon she had put into his mind a thought he couldn't have. He couldn't have the thought that it was of the least importance she should guard herself in the way she mentioned; and it was in the air, the very next thing, that she couldn't so idiotically have strayed as to mean to impute it. He quickly enough made the point that what he preferred was her not founding her interest in Gray so very abjectly on another man's authority—given the uncanny fact of the other man's having cast upon her a charm which time and even his death had done so little to abate. Yes, the late Northover had clearly had something about him that it worried a fellow to have her perpetually rake up. There she was in peril of jealousy—his jealousy of the queer Northover ghost; unless indeed it was she herself who was queerest, ridden as her spirit seemed by sexagenarian charms! He could look after her with Gray—they were at one about Gray; what would truly alienate them, should she persist, would be his own exposure to comparison with the memory of a rococo Briton he had no arms to combat. Which extravagance of fancy had of course after a minute sufficiently testified to the clearance of their common air that invariably sprang from their feeling themselves again together and finding once more what this came to—all under sublime palpability of proof. The renewed consciousness did perhaps nothing for their difficulties as such, 162


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THE IVORY TOWER but it did everything for the interest, the amusement, the immediate inspiration of their facing them: there was in that such an element of their facing each other and knowing, each time as if they had not known it before, that this had absolute beauty. It had unmistakably never had more than now, even when their freedom in it had rapidly led them, under Cissy's wonderment, to a consideration of whether a happy relation with their friend (he was already thus her friend too, without her ever having seen him!) mightn't have to count with some inevitable claim, some natural sentiment, asserted and enjoyed on Rosanna's part, not to speak of the effect on Graham himself of that young woman's at once taking such an interest in him and coming in for such a fortune.

"In addition to which who shall pretend to deny," the girl earnestly asked, "that Rosanna has in herself the most extraordinary charm?"

"Oh you think she has extraordinary charm?"

"Of course I do—and so do you: don't be absurd! She's simply superb," Cissy expounded, "in her own original way, which no other woman over here—except me a little perhaps!—has so much as a suspicion of anything to compare with; and which, for all we know, constitutes a luxury entirely at Graham's service." Cissy required but a single other look at it all to go on: "I shouldn't in the least wonder if they were already engaged." 163


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THE IVORY TOWER "I don't think there's a chance of it," Haughty said, "and I hold that if any such fear is your only difficulty you may be quite at your ease. Not only do I so see it," he went on, "but I know why I do."

Cissy just waited. "You consider that because she refused Horton Vint she'll decline marriage altogether?"

"I think that throws a light," this gentleman smiled—"though it isn't all my ground. She turned me down, two years ago, as utterly as I shall ever have been turned in my life—and if I chose so to look at it the experience would do for me beautifully as that of an humiliation served up to a man in as good form as he need desire. That it was, that it still is when I live it through again; that it will probably remain, for my comfort—in the sense that I'm likely never to have a worse. I've had my dose," he figured, "of that particular black draught, and I've got the bottle there empty on the shelf."

"And yet you signify that you're all the same glad?" Cissy didn't for the instant wholly follow.

"Well, it all came to me then; and that it did all come is what I have the advantage of now—I mean, you see, in being able to reassure you as I do. I had some wonderful minutes with her—it didn't take long," Haughty laughed. "We saw in those few minutes, being both so horribly 164


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THE IVORY TOWER intelligent; and what I recognised has remained with me. What she did is her own affair—and that she could so perfectly make it such, without leaving me a glimmer of doubt, is what I have, as I tell you, to blink at forever. I may ask myself if you like," he pursued, "why I should 'mind' so much if I saw even at the moment that she wasn't at any rate going to take someone else—and if you do I shall reply that I didn't need that to make it bad. It was bad enough just in itself. My point is, however," Horton concluded, "that I can give you at least the benefit of my feeling utterly sure that Gray will have no chance. She's in the dreadful position—and more than ever of course now—of not being able to believe she can be loved for herself."

"You mean because you couldn't make her believe it?" asked Cissy after taking this in.

"No—not that, for I didn't so much as try. I didn't—and it was awfully superior of me, you know—approach her at all on that basis. That," said Horton, "is where it cuts. The basis was that of my own capacity only—my capacity to serve her, in every particular, with every aptitude I possess in the world, and which I could see she saw I possess (it was given me somehow to send that home to her!) without a hair's breadth overlooked. I shouldn't have minded her taking me so for impossible, blackly impossible, if she had done it under an illusion; but she really believed 165


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THE IVORY TOWER in me as a general value, quite a first-rate value—that I stood there and didn't doubt. And yet she practically said 'You ass!'"

His encircling arm gained, for response to this, however, but the vibration of her headshake—without so much as any shudder at the pain he so vividly imaged. "She practically said that she was already then in love with Mr. Graham, and you wouldn't have had a better chance had a passion of your own stuck out of you. If I thought she didn't admire you," Cissy said, "I shouldn't be able to do with her at all—it would be too stupid of her; putting aside her not accepting you, I mean for a woman can't accept every man she admires. I suppose you don't at present object," she continued, "to her admiring Mr. Graham enough to account for anything; especially as it accounts so for her having just acted on his behalf with such extraordinary success. Doesn't that make it out for him," she asked, "that he's admired by twenty millions plus the amount that her reconciliation of him with his uncle just in time to save it, without an hour to spare, will represent for his pocket? We don't know what that lucky amount may be"

"No, but we more or less shall"—Horton took her straight up. "Of course, without exaggeration, that will be interesting—even though it will be but a question, I'm quite certain, of comparatively small things. Old Betterman—there are people 166


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THE IVORY TOWER who practically know, and I've talked with them—isn't going to foot up to any faint likeness of what Gaw does. That, however, has nothing to do with it: all that is relevant—since I quite allow that, speculation for speculation, our association in this sort represents finer fun than it has yet succeeded in doing in other sorts—all that's relevant is that when you've seen Gray you mayn't be in such a hurry to figure him as a provoker of insatiable passions. Your insidious Northover has, as you say, worked you up, but wait a little to see if the reality corresponds."

"He showed me a photograph, my insidious Northover," Cissy promptly recalled; "he was naïf enough, poor dear, for that. In fact he made me a present of several, including one of himself; I owe him as well two or three other mementos, all of which I've cherished."

"What was he up to anyway, the old corrupter of your youth?"—Horton seemed really to wonder. "Unless it was that you simply reduced him to infatuated babble."

"Well, there are the photographs and things to show," she answered unembarrassed—"though I haven't them with me here; they're put away in New York. His portrait's extremely good-looking."

"Do you mean Mr. Northover's own?"

"Oh his is of course quite beautiful. But I mean Mr. Fielder's—at his then lovely age. I remember it," said Cissy, "as a nice, nice face." 167


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Column 2, paragraph 4, line 5, the 's' in "wish" is printed very faintly. This seems to affect other copies of the magazine as well, e.g. the Bodleian Library copy on Google Books. -- Yodin T 09:39, 26 December 2023 (UTC)


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Rh brain, and the patient’s recovery, and prefers the operation for hernia by caustic to the knife or cautery, asserting that he had seen it performed thirty times with success.

, surgeon to St. Louis, instituted under royal authority the Faculty or Society of Surgeons at Paris in 1268, and thus laid the foundation of the artificial distinction between surgery and medicine which subsists, whether for better or worse, in the capital cities of Europe at the present day.

But long after the stirring spirit of the Crusades had roused Europe, and awakened the arts and sciences from their profound lethargy, surgery remained in a state of deplorable degradation. ‘The chivalrous spirit of the holy wars had confided the practice of it to women, and the faith and hopes of the wounded knight reposed exclusively on the skill of his mistress. I pass over as little worthy of narration, save as a picture of "the age and body of the time,” the squabbles for pre-eminence between the ecclesiastics and the lay professors; the prohibition laid upon the priests by the famous Council of Tours, and various Papal edicts, to shed blood, or to be present at the performance of any operation; of the lay surgeons to contract marriage, and to hold their meetings as hitherto in the churches; and the alternate vexations which passed for nearly two centuries

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12 between the physicians and the togati, or surgeons of the long robe of the new Society of St. Cosme and St. Damien, until at length the latter were permitted to join the University. But the introduction of the barbers, a source of constant and bitter feud between the high contending parties, is too curious an interlude to be altogether omitted. It would be an unpardonable oversight in the briefest chronicler of our art to suppress the mention, however unpalatable, of the long and intimate incorporation of our fraternities, and I cannot avail myself of the soft Dean’s example,

 * "Who never mentions hell to ears polite.”

The origin of the barber-craft is as follows: By a Bull of Alexander III. the neglected regulation of the tonsure was revived, and strictly enjoined; this obliged the priests to require the services of a barber, and thus their servants became barbers. By constantly attending upon the only informed men of that day, the barbers picked up some knowledge of physic; and the priests, being confined to their cloisters, employed them to visit their patients and perform the minor operations. Hence they learned to bleed, bandage, and dress wounds, and became regularly installed as subordinate medical attendants on families. The barbers, always a mercurial race, animated by

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THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 13 the patronage they received, became encroaching and presumptuous; and one, the famous Olivier le Dain, or "le Diable,” as he was more commonly called, was so distinguished as to share the Royal confidence. But they were in turn subject to annoyance from the surgeons, to whom they were offensive as rivals, and the physicians, who used them as artillery to harass the surgeons. Under a pretext of patronage, the physicians at length obtained permission to educate the barbers, and delivered lectures to them in Latin, a language of which they were ignorant. Ultimately, by an edict of Louis XIV. they were united by a regular contract with the surgeons, as subordinate or sub-assistant dressers. It was as late as the year 1745 that we dropped the honours of the connection. An Act was passed in the reign of George II. "for separating the surgeons and barbers into two distinct companies;" they had been united into one commonalty by Edward IV. Italy, the mother of the sciences, was exempt from these turmoils, the professors in all their celebrated schools employing alike their minds and hands in the cure of diseases.

We now turn toa brighter page. It was in the early part of the sixteenth century that, a native of Brussels and a pupil of Jacobus Sylvius, the discoverer of the valves of the veins, published

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14 at Paris his splendid work, illustrated by the pencil of a master, "De Corporis Humani Fabric,” the first systematic treatise of anatomy. Vesalius, then in his twenty-second year, questioned the authority and corrected many of the errors of Galen. He was physician to the Emperor Charles V., and for seven years held the anatomical chair of the University of Padua. The premature and melancholy termination of his career is well known. The celebrated anatomists Fallopius and Eustachius were contemporary with Vesalius; and Fabricius ab Acquapendente, eminent also as a surgeon, was his pupil and successor in the University.

At the same period flourished, the restorer of surgery, as Vesalius of anatomy. An uneducated man, of a bold and enterprising genius, he distinguished himself at an early age in the wars of France. His first feat, while young and unknown, at a skirmish near Boulogne, toward the close of the reign of Francis I., was characteristic. He extracted a lance-head from the forehead of the Count d’Aumale, son of that king, which was so deeply infixed and buried by the swollen integument that the surgeons had pronounced the wound mortal. Paré read Galen by aid of an interpreter. His anatomy was that of Vesalius; his instruments are copied from the Greeks, and much of his surgery was derived from the Italian

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THE IVORY TOWER Haughty on his side indulged in the act of memory, concluding after an instant to a headshake. "He isn't at all remarkable for looks; but putting his nice face at its best, granting that he has a high degree of that advantage, do you see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast everything to the winds for him?"

Cissy weighed the question. "We've seen surely what she has been carried away enough to do."

"She has had other reasons—independent of headlong passion. And remember," he further argued—"if you impute to her a high degree of that sort of sensibility—how perfectly proof she was to my physical attractions, which I declare to you without scruple leave the very brightest you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."

Again his companion considered. "Of course you're dazzlingly handsome; but are you, my dear, after all—I mean in appearance—so very interesting?"

The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met but in the same spirit. "Didn't you then find me so from the first minute you ever looked at me?"

"We're not talking of me," she returned, "but of people who happen to have been subjects less predestined and victims less abject. What," she then at once went on, "is Gray's appearance, 'anyway'? Is he black, to begin with, or white, 168


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THE IVORY TOWER or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or neither one thing or t'other? Is he fat or thin or of 'medium weight'? There are always such lots to be told about people, and never a creature in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover, when I come to think of it, never mentioned his size."

"Well, you wouldn't mention it," Horton amiably argued. The appeal, he showed withal, stirred him to certain recoveries. "And I should call him black—black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather distinctively 'slick' and soigné—the hair of a good little boy who never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's only very middling tall; in fact so very middling," Haughty made out, "that it probably comes to his being rather short. But he has neither a hump nor a limp, no marked physical deformity of any sort; has in fact a kind of futile fidgetty quickness which suggests the little man, and the nervous and the active and the ready; the ready, I mean, for anything in the way of interest and talk—given that the matter isn't too big for him. The 'active', I say, though at the same time," he noted, "I ask myself what the deuce the activity will have been about."

The girl took in these impressions to the effect of desiring still more of them. "Doesn't he happen then to have eyes and things?"

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Rh school. His first work was on midwifery: he performed the Caesarian operation with success.

He mentions cases of recovery from injuries of the head, with loss of substance of the brain; the fracture of the internal table of the cranium, the outer remaining sound, and his successful division of the dura mater for the removal of effused blood and pus. He recommends repeated bleedings in concussion of the brain, and relates a fortunate application of the trephine as late as the seventeenth day from the injury. He speaks of abscess of the brain and of the fungus cerebri, its amputation under a misconception of its nature, and the recovery of the patient. He cured a formidable wound of the Duc de Guise, the lance having entered below the eye and re-appeared under the ear of the opposite side. His treatment of a wounded nerve in venesection, probably phlebitis, in the person of Charles IX., led that king to preserve his life in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He gives cases of recovery from wounds transfixing the body, but rejects the operation for inguinal hernia, because, as he conceives, emasculation is unavoidable.

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THE IVORY TOWER and lots of eyes, though not perhaps so many of other things. Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think anything whatever you may require in the way of eyes."

"Then clearly they're not 'black': I never require black ones," she said, "in any conceivable connection: his eyes—blue-grey, or grey-blue, whichever you may call it, and far and away the most charming kind when one doesn't happen to be looking into your glorious green ones—his satisfactory eyes are what will more than anything else have done the business. They'll have done it so," she went on, "that if he isn't red in the face, which I defy him to be, his features don't particularly matter—though there's not the least reason either why he should have mean or common ones. In fact he hasn't them in the photograph, and what are photographs, the wretched things, but the very truth of life?"

"He's not red in the face," Haughty was able to state—"I think of him rather as of a pale, very pale, clean brown; and entirely unaddicted," he felt sure, "to flushing or blushing. What I do sort of remember in the feature way is that his teeth though good, fortunately, as they're shown a good deal, are rather too small and square; for a man's, that is, so that they make his smile a trifle"

"A trifle irresistible of course," Cissy broke in—"through their being, in their charming form, 170


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16 THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. a main step toward civilization, for which the profession is indebted to Ambrose Paré. But the ligature of the arteries after amputation, suggested by his aversion to the actual cautery—the greatest discovery ever made in practical surgery—forms the key-stone of his reputation, and would of itself immortalize his name.

He advocated the ligature on the ground of its greater security than the cautery of any description. The practice was stoutly assailed by his successors on account of its tediousness and difficulty, and the great effusion of blood during its performance: and if we call to mind the disadvantage attending the want of an efficient tourniquet, and the total ignorance of the circulation then prevailing, which would lead them to include the veins as well as arteries in their ligatures, we may conceive it open to these objections under the most skilful hands. The courage and firmness indeed then requisite, as qualifications for an operating surgeon, must have been of a higher quality than now, when the knowledge of anatomy, and its elucidation by that of physiology, has armed us against surprises from unforeseen sources, and, in this department especially, afforded the surgeon a calm vantage ground over the results of casualty and disease.

Paré, the surgeon of four successive reigns, the companion of princes and the friend of Sully, has

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THE IVORY TOWER of the happy Latin model; extremely like my own, be so good as to notice for once in your life, and not like the usual Anglo-Saxon fangs. You're simply describing, you know," she added, "about as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see."

"It's not I who am describing him—it's you, love; and ever so delightfully." With which, in consistency with that, he himself put a question. "What does it come to, by the way, in the sense of a moustache? Does he, or doesn't he after all, wear one? It's odd I shouldn't remember, but what does the photograph say?"

"It seems odd indeed I shouldn't—"Cissy had a moment's brooding. She gave herself out as ashamed. "Fancy my not remembering if the photograph is moustachue!"

"It can't be then very," Horton contributed—the point was really so interesting.

"No," Cissy tried to settle, "the photograph can't be so very moustachue."

"His moustaches, I mean, if he wears 'em, can't be so very prodigious; or one could scarcely have helped noticing, could one?"

"Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice yours—and therefore Gray's, if he has any, must indeed be very inferior. And yet he can't be shaved like a sneak-thief—or like all the world here," she developed; "for I won't have him with nothing at all any more than I'll have him with anything prodigious, as you say; which is 171


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THE IVORY TOWER worse than nothing. When I say I won't have him with nothing," she explained, "I mean I won't have him subject to the so universally and stupidly applied American law that every man's face without exception shall be scraped as clean, as glabre, as a fish's—which it makes so many of them so much resemble. I won't have him so," she said, "because I won't have him so idiotically gregarious and without that sense of differences in things, and of their relations and suitabilities, which such exhibitions make one so ache for. If he's gregarious to that sort of tune we must renounce our idea—that is you must drop yours—of my working myself up to snatch him from the arms of Rosanna. I must believe in him, for that, I must see him at least in my own way," she pursued; "believing in myself, or even believing in you, is a comparative detail. I won't have him bristle with horrid demagogic notes. I shouldn't be able to act a scrap on that basis."

It was as if what she said had for him the interest at once of the most intimate and the most enlarged application; it was in fact as if she alone in all the world could touch him in such fine ways—could amuse him, could verily instruct him, to anything like such a tune. "It seems peculiarly a question of bristles if it all depends on his moustache. Our suspense as to that, however, needn't so much ravage us," Haughty added, "when we remember that Davey, who, you tell me, will by 172


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Rh been designated the “Hippocrates of France.” Such was the confidence which the army reposed in him, that the besieged knew no fear if it chanced that Paré was within their walls.

He was undoubtedly one of those remarkable men, “homines centenarii” as they were called by Scaliger, who exist but once in a century, but who when they do exist, elevate the country in which they are born, and the age in which they live. The habit of observing, thinking, and acting for himself, the source of his reputation, drew upon him the rancorous hostility of his contemporaries,—so invariably the portion of genius in a dark age, that it only serves to confirm the favourable judgement of posterity.

Surgery languished after the death of Paré. , his pupil and editor, at Padua, and  at Naples, may be mentioned however as distinguished cultivators of the art, and with peculiar respect  of Berne.

The discovery of the circulation by our great countryman, whilst a student at Padua, had a more immediate and important influence on the progress of anatomy and physiology than on that of physic or surgery. But as it was the first emanation of British genius, so it was beyond all question the most splendid in its ultimate effects upon medicine and mankind. Well might the learned Gassendus, when

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THE IVORY TOWER this time have seen him, can settle the question for us as soon as we meet at dinner. It will by the same stroke then settle that of the witchcraft which has according to your theory so bedevilled poor dear Rosanna's sensibility—leading it such a dance, I mean, and giving such an empire to certain special items of our friend's 'personality', that the connection was practically immediate with his brilliant status."

 III

, looking at his watch, had got up as he spoke—which Cissy at once also did under this recall of the lapse of their precious minutes. There was a point, however, left for her to make; which she did with the remark that the item they had been discussing in particular couldn't have been by itself the force that had set their young woman originally in motion, inasmuch as Gray wouldn't have had a moustache when a small boy or whatever, and as since that young condition, she understood, Rosanna hadn't again seen him. A proposition to which Haughty's assent was to remain vague, merged as it suddenly became in the cry of "Hello, here he is!" and a prompt gay brandish of arms up at their host Bradham, arrayed for the evening, white-waistcoated and buttonholed, robustly erect on an overlooking ledge 173


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THE IVORY TOWER and explaining his presence, from the moment it was thus observed, by calling down that Gussy had sent him to see if she wasn't to expect them at dinner. It was practically a summons to Cissy, as the girl easily recognised, to leave herself at least ten minutes to dress decently—in spite of the importance of which she so challenged Davey on another score that, as a consequence, the good gorgeous man, who shone with every effect of the bath and every resource of the toilet, had within the pair of minutes picked out such easiest patent-leather steps as would enable him to convict the companions of a shameless dawdle. She had had time to articulate for Horton's benefit, with no more than due distinctness, that he must have seen them, and Horton had as quickly found the right note and the right wit for the simple reassurance "Oh Davey!" As occupants of a place of procrastination that they only were not such fools as to leave unhaunted they frankly received their visitor, any impulse in whom to sprinkle stale banter on their search for solitude would have been forestalled, even had it been supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by the instant action of his younger guest's strategic curiosity.

"Has he, please, just has he or no, got a moustache?—"she appealed as if the fate of empires depended on it.

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THE IVORY TOWER "whatever I can remember of Gray Fielder, but she won't listen to anything if I can't first be sure as to that. So as I want her enormously to like him, we both hang, you see, on your lips; unless you call it, more correctly, on his."

Davey's evening bloom opened to them a dense but perfectly pathless garden of possibilities; out of which, while he faced them, he left them to pluck by their own act any bright flower they sufficiently desired to reach. Wonderful during the few instants, between these flagrant worldlings, the exchange of fine recognitions. It would have been hard perhaps to say of them whether it was most discernible that Haughty and Cissy trusted most his intelligence or his indifference, and whether he most applauded or ignored the high perfection of their assurance. What was testified to all round, at all events—

"Ah then he is as 'odd' as I was sure—in spite of Haughty's perverse theory that we shall find him the flattest of the flat!" 175


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THE IVORY TOWER It might have been at Haughty's perverse theory that Davey was most moved to stare had he not quickly betrayed, instead of this, a marked attention to the girl herself. "Oh you little wonder and joy!"

"She is a little wonder and joy," Horton said—that at any rate came out clear.

"What you are, my boy, I'm not pretending to say," Davey returned in answer to this; "for I don't accept her account of your vision of Gray as throwing any light on it at all."

"On his judgment of Mr. Fielder, do you mean," Cissy earnestly asked, "or on your evidently awful opinion of his own dark nature?"

"Haughty knows that I lose myself in his dark nature, at my spare moments, and with wind enough on to whistle in that dark, very much as if I had the fine excitement of the Forêt de Bondy to deal with. He's well aware that I know no greater pleasure of the imagination than that sort of interest in him—when I happen also to have the time and the nerve. Let these things serve me now, however, only to hurry you up," Davey went on; "and to say that I of course had with our fortunate friend an impressive quarter of an hour—which everyone will want to know about, so that I must keep it till we sit down. But the great thing is after all for yourself, Haughty," he added—"and you had better know at once that he particularly wants to see you. He'll be glad of you at the very first moment" 176


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THE IVORY TOWER But Horton had already taken him easily up. "Of course I know, my dear man, that he particularly wants to see me. He has written me nothing else from the moment he arrived."

"He has written you, you wretch," Cissy at once extravagantly echoed—"he has written you all sorts of things and you haven't so much as told me?"

"He hasn't written me all sorts of things"—Horton directed this answer to Davey alone—"but has written me in such straight confidence and friendship that I've been wondering if I mayn't go round to him this evening."

"Gussy will no doubt excuse you for that purpose with the utmost joy," Davey rejoined—"though I don't think I advise you to ask her leave if you don't want her at once to insist on going with you. Go to him alone, very quietly—and with the happy confidence of doing him good."

It had been on Cissy that, for his part, Davey had, in speaking, rested his eyes; and it might by the same token have been for the benefit of universal nature, suspended to listen over the bosom of the deep, that Horton's lips phrased his frank reaction upon their entertainer's words. "Well then, ye powers, the amount of good that I shall undertake!"

Davey Bradham and Cissy Foy exchanged on the whole ground for a moment a considerable 177


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THE IVORY TOWER smile; his share in which, however, it might exactly have been that prompted the young woman's further expression of their intelligence. "It's too charming that he yearns so for Haughty—and too sweet that Haughty can now rush to him at once." To which she then appended in another tone: "One takes for granted of course that Rosanna was with him."

Davey at this but continued to bloom and beam; which gave Horton, even with a moment's delay, time to assist his better understanding. "She doesn't even yet embrace the fact, tremendously as I've driven it into her, that if Rosanna had been there he couldn't have breathed my name."

This made Davey, however, but throw up derisive hands; though as with an impatient turn now for their regaining the lawn. "My dear man, Rosanna breathes your name with all the force of her lungs!"

Horton, jerking back his head for the bright reassurance, laughed out with amusement. "What a jolly cue then for my breathing of hers! I'll roar it to all the echoes, and everything will be well. But what one's talking about," he said, "is the question of Gray's naming me." He looked from one of his friends to the other, and then, as gathering them into the interest of it: "I'll bet you a fiver that he doesn't at any rate speak to me of Miss Gaw."

"Well, what will that prove?" Davey asked, 178


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Rh “He that listens to these words (says the author of the legend), is free from malady, sorrow, and danger, and will ultimately go to heaven. But he that employs persons (says, a person believed by the Hindus to have been inspired by Brahma, their chief Deity) for the singing of these words, is to be blessed with sons and wealth.”

We shall not insult the understandings of our readers with any comments on this most loathsome legend; or with any reclamation or protest against its revolting barbarism, We shall only remind them that it is but a specimen of the atrocious and abominable stuff that constitutes so much of the scholastic provender of thousands of Bengali youth.

Having requested an intelligent and respectable native to furnish us with a set of the slokes, or metrical couplets, which he had learned memoriter when in the Patshala or vernacular school, he sent one as a specimen, accompanied with a literal translation in English, and enclosed in a note of which the following is a verbatim et literatim copy:—

"“Sir,—I beg to state that when I was translating this sloke, which I learned by heart when very young, from my GuraGuru [sic] mahashai, or teacher, without at the time understanding the meaning of it, whether it implied a dog or an ass, a kind of unpleasurable sensation arose in my mind, which made me indeed miserable. Afterwards, the whole mind rebelled, with frown and anguish, against the ideas which that sloke conveys, as if they were more than virulent venom, fit only to bring destruction on man. Therefore, I humbly beg that you will kindly excuse me for not translating the other slokes, which are more or less obscene than the one already translated; for I am afraid they will make me unhappy too; nay, they will make me worse. I wish that all the waters of forgetfulness would come to wash away from the tablet of my memory such slokes as these—they are most baneful.

I have, &c. &c. ____________________.”"

While the translated sloke is of so gross a nature that we dare not insert it here, we need scarcely add that we hastened to release our native friend from the odious task which we had unconsciously imposed upon him;—with feelings of deep and unfeigned regret at the discovery, that one portion of the vernacular scholastic instruction is, in some respects, even worse than our previous experience of its puerile and legendary absurdities, or its idolatrous and barbarous teachings, had led us to expect or conceive.

6. The System of Discipline—This is a subject which apparently did not attract Mr. Adam’s attention. But as it is one of vast importance in enabling us to arrive at a just and sober estimate of the genuine character and practical effects of the existing system of scholastic tuition, we must endeavour to supply a few brief notes, founded on our own inquiry and experience.

If the scheme of teaching be throughout one of dull, dry,


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THE IVORY TOWER quite easy about it and leading the way up the rocks.

"In the first place how much he thinks of her," said Cissy, who followed close behind. "And in the second that it's ten to one Haughty will find her there."

"I don't care if I do—not a scrap!" Horton also took his way. "I don't care for anything now but the jolly fun, the jolly fun!" He had committed it all again, by the time they reached the cliff's edge, to the bland participating elements.

"Oh the treat the poor boy is evidently going to stand us all!"—well, was something that Davey, rather out of breath as they reached the lawn again and came in sight of the villa, had just yet no more than those light words for. He was more definite in remarking immediately after to Cissy that Rosanna would be as little at the other house that evening as she had been at the moment of his own visit, and that, since the nurses and other outsiders appeared to have dispersed, there would be no one to interfere with Gray's free welcome of his friend. The girl was so attentive for this that it made them pause again while she brought out in surprise: "There's nobody else there, you mean then, to watch with the dead?"

It made Mr. Bradham for an instant wonder, Horton, a little apart from them now and with 179


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THE IVORY TOWER his back turned, seeming at the same moment, and whether or no her inquiry reached his ear, struck with something that had pulled him up as well and that made him stand and look down in thought. "Why, I suppose the nephew must be himself a sort of watcher," Davey found himself not other than decently vague to suggest.

But it scarce more contented Cissy than if the point had really concerned her. She appeared indeed to question the more, though her eyes were on Haughty's rather brooding back while she did so. "Then if he does stay in the room, when he comes out of it to see people?"

Her very drop seemed to present the state of things to which the poor deceased was in that case left; for which, however, her good host declined to be responsible. "I don't suppose he comes out for so many."

"He came out at any rate for you." The sense of it all rather remarkably held her, and it might have been some communication of this that, overtaking Horton at his slight distance, determined in him the impulse to leave them, without more words, and walk by himself to the house. "We don't surround such occasions with any form or state of imagination—scarcely with any decency, do we?" Cissy adventured while observing Haughty's retreat. "I should like to think for him of a catafalque and great draped hangings—I should like to think for him of tall flambeaux 180


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THE IVORY TOWER in the darkened room, and of relays of watchers, sisters of charity or suchlike, surrounding the grand affair and counting their beads."

Davey's rich patience had a shrug. "The grand affair, my dear child, is their affair, over there, and not mine; though when you indulge in such fancies 'for him', I can't but wonder who it is you mean."

"Who it is?" She mightn't have understood his difficulty.

"Why the dead man or the living!"

They had gone on again; Horton had, with a quickened pace, disappeared; and she had before answering cast about over the fair face of the great house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with dressing-time glimmers from upper windows flushing it here and there like touches of pink paint in an elegant evening complexion. "Oh I care for the dead man, I'm afraid, only because it's the living who appeals. I don't want him to like it."

"To like?" Davey was again at a loss. "What on earth?"

"Why all that ugliness and bareness, that poverty of form."

He had nothing but derision for her here. "It didn't occur to me at all to associate him with the idea of poverty."

"The place must all the same be hideous," she said, "and the conditions mean—for him to prowl 181


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THE IVORY TOWER about in alone. It comes to me," she further risked, "that if Rosanna isn't there, as you say, she quite ought to be—and that in her place I should feel it no more than decent to go over and sit with him."

This appeared to strike Davey in a splendid number of lights—which, however, though collectively dazzling, allowed discriminations. "It perhaps bears a little on the point that she has herself just sustained a grave bereavement—with her offices to her own dead to think of first. That was present to me in your talk a moment since of Haughty 's finding her."

"Very true"—it was Cissy's practice, once struck, ever amusedly to play with the missile: "it is of course extraordinary that those bloated old richards, at one time so associated, should have flickered out almost at the same hour. What it comes to then," she went on, "is that Mr. Gray might be, or perhaps even ought to be, condoling over at the other house with her. However, it's their own business, and all I really care for is that he should be so keen as you say about seeing Haughty. I just delight," she said, "in his being keen about Haughty."

"I'm glad it satisfies you then," Davey returned—"for I was on the point of suggesting that with the sense of his desolation you just expressed you might judge your own place to be at once at his side." 182


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THE IVORY TOWER "That would have been helpful of you—but I'm content, dear Davey," she smiled. "We're all devoted to Haughty—but," she added after an instant, "there's just this. Did Mr. Graham while you were there say by chance a word about the likes of me?"

"Well, really, no—our short talk didn't take your direction. That would have been for me, I confess," Davey frankly made bold to add, "a trifle unexpected."

"I see"—Cissy did him the justice. "But that's a little, I think, because you don't know!" It was more, however, than with her sigh she could tell him.

"Don't know by this time, my dear, and after all I've been through," he nevertheless supplied, "what the American girl always so sublimely takes for granted?"

She looked at him on this with intensity—but that of compassion rather than of the conscious wound. "Dear old Davey, il n'y a que vous for not knowing, by this time, as you say, that I've notoriously nothing in common with the creature you mention. I loathe," she said with her purest gentleness, "the American girl."

He faced her an instant more as for a view of the whole incongruity; then he fetched, on his side, a sigh which might have signified, at her choice, either that he was wrong or that he was finally bored. "Well, you do of course brilliantly 183


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THE IVORY TOWER misrepresent her. But we're all"—he hastened to patch it up—"unspeakably corrupt."

"That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder if it were true," she judiciously threw off.

"But as you're a judge you know it isn't?"

"It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim. I don't say we don't do our best," she added; "but we're still of an innocence, an innocence!"

"Then perhaps," Davey offered, "Mr. Fielder will help us; unless he proves, by your measure, worse than ourselves!"

"The worse he may be the better; for it's not possible, as I see him," she said, "that he doesn't know."

"Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered, "how wrong we are—to be so right?"

"Know more on every subject than all of us put together!" she called back at him as she now hurried off to dress.

 IV

, on being admitted that evening at the late Mr. Betterman's, walked about the room to which he had been directed and awaited there the friend of his younger time very much as we have seen that friend himself wait under stress of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of a crisis might have been almost equally sharp; 184


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