remove mountains if they stood in the way of my success. Being a woman I can only rant —and I have a right to rant. Since the world insists on caging me it must be content to let me roar!" As a very humble and insufficient representative of the world, I kept silence. "Why, a man can accomplish anything," she went on, energetically. "After a woman has once been poor and alone, and been thrust aside to make way for men, she loses all respect for a man who yields to circumstances. He has the world at his beck and call!" "That is very true," I answered, slowly; "think of Mr. Ogilvie." Hypatia resumed her walk. "I don't see why I should think of Mr. Ogilvie," she said, quietly, "he is a good, honest fellow-nothing more." "John Ogilvie is a magnificent, noble-hearted gentleman!" I replied, with unnecessary heat; "you speak of him as if he were a hod-carrier." "I might speak of him in that way, and yet think very highly of him," she answered, indifferently. "I trust I have not fallen so low as to estimate any one by his calling." I had never seen Hypatia in her present mood. She puzzled me sorely. "You used to know Mr. Jerningham," I said, after a pause, "what was he then?" "What was he? Oh, a young man-young men are much the same. It was a long time ago." She stood quite still, gazing intently at the fire. "Malise has lost a shoe," she said presently, "do not let me forget to tell Esculapius." The next day I received a long letter from Johr. Ogilvie. He wrote: "The specimen I sent you per steamer Ancon struck me as uncommonly interesting. I came upon him in the Mercantile Library, one day, where he quoted the 'Hymn to a Water-fowl' with such effect that I insisted upon a dinner of roast duck in return. To my amazement, I found him prosaically hungry. Afterward, I learned his history from an Eastern acquaintance. It seems that he was sent adrift from the church for some mild theological originality, and has since failed to find rest for the sole of his ecclesiastical foot. Later, his wife died and left him with three little girls, one of whom has been for years a helpless cripple. Heaven knows how the man has struggled along, mothering his little brood and refusing to be separated from them; breaking down under the load, as any one but a woman must, and being obliged to leave them at last. The children are in some charitable institution in the East, where I fear they are likely to remain. If your world-renowned sunlight can do anything for the poor fellow, it will be the first good luck that has befallen him for many a day. He has taken an unaccountable hold on me in spite of his tendency to drop into poetry, and if Esculapius can patch him up in any fashion, I will add my blessing to that of the three mitherless bairns." I carried this letter to Hypatia at once. "Now, my dear," I said, triumphantly, "see how unjust you have been to Mr. Jerningham." Before I had finished reading, my listener got up and walked to the window. "How very unwise!" she exclaimed, impatiently, when I stopped; "and one of them is a cripple; poor child, no doubt she has been neglected-it was very unwise!" "Of course it was unwise," I replied, with a touch of bitterness, "all picturesque tenderness is unwise; but it is none the less lovely." My companion did not reply. "If I were a young woman,” I announced, after a long silence, "and in love with no one else, and John Ogilvie should ask me to marry him, I would say 'yes.'" Hypatia laughed. "There might not be a great deal of 'picturesque tenderness' in that," she said, "but it would be none the less wise." I asked Esculapius about our guest that evening. "It is a case of broken china," he replied; "can possibly be mended, but will always require care. The man can't live through a New England winter, and he will die here away from his babies." We could hear him singing on the piazza. The song was nothing-one of those oldfashioned lullabys that women sing at twilight. Hypatia moved her chair into the shadow. "You think he could live here, then?" she asked. "I mean if they were all comfortable." "Certainly. If he were a rich man he might get well. But then if he were a rich man he wouldn't be sick." Mr. Jerningham came in, and Esculapius made room for him by the grate. "I promised my little girl some ferns," he said, “are there many hereabout?" "Yes," Hypatia answered, quickly, "there are some exquisite varieties. I will show you where they grow, to-morrow." "Thank you," he said, with a glance of gentle surprise toward her. At breakfast the next morning, Hypatia trifled with her muffin, as if annoyed by its excellence. Esculapius was thoroughly appreciative. "Now, this is what I call practical piety," he said. "I begin to realize that cookery has an æsthetic side. Isn't the dining-room the thermometer of civilization, after all?” Mr. Jerningham smiled upon the speaker radiantly. "What heights the bee has reached!" he said, gently. "It dines always in the heart of a flower." It was delightful to see Esculapius impaled in that way. Neither Hypatia nor I went to his | since then. I have seen a little pain-worn face rescue. "My dear," he said, pathetically, "may I trouble you for another muffin?” The winter went lazily on. Beds of wildflowers bloomed and died in the valley, streaking it like a painter's palette. Spanish bayonets shot up among the chaparral, like phantom sentinels, and blood-red larkspur stained the walls of gloomy mountain caverns. Malise stood knee-deep in purple clover, while his rider looked away to the south, where the Pacific glittered like a silver bar. Mr. Jerningham recited whole volumes of verse to us, sitting in the stillness of mossy cañons, or lounging on scented hill-tops. He was growing stronger, Esculapius said; but at night-fall there always came the same anxious, yearning gaze eastward. "I must go home," he said, suddenly, one night, with a quick, appealing glance toward my husband; "I have stayed away too long. Surely I may go now with safety." Esculapius hesitated. "My dear fellow," he said, at last, "it is better to tell you the truth. You may go home for a "Do you mean that you are not amazed? that it is not the most unaccountable, unreasonable. "Pardon me, my love, but when you came in, I thought, from your manner, you might have something startling to tell, and, naturally, I was expectant. Of course Hypatia will marry Mr. Jerningham. I supposed every one knew that. And I must say it strikes me as an uncommonly sensible match. Any other woman would have let her heart run away with her. Hypatia never does that. She is thoroughly, almost inhumanly, practical." There are times when Esculapius has to be ignored. "My dear," he said, humbly, after an eloquent silence, "does my memory fail me, or did I little while, but it will only be for a very lit-hear you remark at one time that Hypatia tle while; if you stay here, it may be many years." "There is no hope?" "Absolutely none." The next day Mr. Jerningham and Hypatia went to San Gabriel for oranges. When they returned, Hypatia called me to her room. "Margaret," she said, quietly, "I am going to marry Mr. Jerningham." My surprise must have made itself manifest in my face; but she went on as calmly as she had commenced. lacked poetry?” "Possibly. Why?" "Oh, nothing. I was only wondering"-he went on poking the fire thoughtfully-"I was only wondering, you know, whether your suggestion had anything to do with her promptness in supplying the lack." "Ogilvie is a queer fellow," said Esculapius, the day after we returned to San Francisco. "I met him in the bank to-day, and told him about those books of Jerningham's. He looked at me a minute, and then walked away without answering. If he has mislaid them, why didn't he say so? A man needn't turn white over embezzling two or three volumes of Emerson." "What else did you tell him?" "We were engaged years ago, and I broke the engagement. I think now that I acted wisely. I was younger then, and had a great many theories, and Mr. Jerningham opposed me a good deal. He has changed very much; I think he has improved in many respects. "I don't remember exactly-nothing alarmI have tried most of my theories since then; ing-that Jerningham was going to housekeepsome of them have succeeded and others failed;ing and wanted the books, and something about but they can never be a source of discord between us again. If I had married him then, we might have been very unhappy, and there is not a possibility of that now. I have sent for the little girls, and we will live here." I have seen Hypatia among her children Hypatia and the children." "My dear," I said crushingly, "I thought every one knew that John Ogilvie was in love with Hypatia." MARGARET COLLIER GRAHAM. I. "ON WITH THE DANCE!" THE PRUDE IN LETTERS AND LIFE. tendencies are but the matchings of thought with action. Hence, we may reasonably expect to find-and indubitably shall find—certain well-marked correspondences between the literary faults which it pleases our writers to comIt is deserving of remark and censure that mit and the social crimes which it pleases the American literature is become shockingly moral. There is not a doubt of it; our writers, if acAdversary to see their readers commit. Within the current lustrum the prudery which had alcused, would make explicit confession that morality is their only fault-morality in the strict ready, for some seasons, been achieving a vineand specific sense. Far be it from me to dis- gar-visaged and corkscrew-curled certain age in parage and belittle this decent tendency to ig- letters, has invaded the ball-room, and is infestnore the largest side of human nature, and live-ing it in quantity. Supportable, because evadliest element of literary interest. It has an eminence of its own; if it is not great art, it is at least great folly-a superior sort of folly to which none of the masters of letters have attained. Not Shakspeare, nor Cervantes, nor Goethe, nor Molière, nor—no, not even Rabelais-ever achieved that shining pinnacle of propriety to which the latter-day American has aspired, by turning his back upon nature's broad and fruitful levels, and his eyes upon the passionless altitudes where, throned upon congenial ice, Miss Nancy sits to censure letters, putting the Muses into petticoats and affixing a fig-leaf upon Truth. Ours are an age and country of expurgated editions, emasculated art, and social customs that look over the top of a fan. Lo! prude-eyed Primdimity, mother of Gush, Now, prudery in letters, if it would but have the goodness not to coëxist with prudery in life, might be suffered with easy fortitude, inasmuch as one needs not read what one does not like, and between the license of the dear old bucks above mentioned, and the severities of Miss Nancy Howells, and Miss Nancy James, Jr., of t'other school, there is latitude for gratification of individual taste. But it occurs that a literature rather accurately reflects all the virtues and other vices of its period and country, and its able, in letters, it is here, for the opposite reason, insufferable; for one must dance and enjoy one's self whether one likes it or not. Pleasure, I take it, is a duty not to be shirked at the command of disinclination. Youth, following the bent of inherited instinct, and loyally con forming himself to the centuries, must shake a leg in the dance, and Age, from emulation and habit, and for the denial of rheumatic incapacity, must occasionally come twist his heel around though he twist it off in the performance. settled; the question of magnitude is, Shall we Dance we must, and dance we shall; that is caper jocund with the good grace of an easy conscience, or submit to shuffle half-heartedly with a sense of shame, wincing under the slow stroke of our own rebuking eye? To this momentous conundrum let us now intelligently address our minds, sacredly pledged, as becomes lovers of truth, to its determination in the manner most agreeable to our desires; and if, in pursuance of this laudable design, we have the unhappiness to bother the bunions decorating the all-pervading feet of the good people whose deprecations are voiced in The Dance of Death and the clamatory literature of which that blessed volume was the honored parent, upon their own corns be it; they should not have obtruded these eminences "when youth and pleasure meet To chase the glowing hours with flying feet." What, therefore, whence, and likewise why, is dancing? From what flower of our nature, fertilized by what pollen of circumstance or necessity, is it the fruit? Let us go to the root of the matter. 155 II. THE BEATING OF THE BLOOD. Nature takes a childish delight in tireless repetition. The days repeat themselves, the tides ebb and flow, the tree sways back and forth. This world is intent upon recurrences. Not the pendulum of a clock is more persistent of iteration than are all existing things; periodicity is the ultimate law and largest explanation of the universe-to do it over again the one insatiable ambition of all that is. Everything vibrates; through vibration alone do the senses discern it. We are not provided with means of cognizance of what is absolutely at rest; impressions come in waves. Recurrence, recurrence, and again recurrence-that is the sole phenomenon. With what fealty we submit us to the law which compels the rhythm and regularity to our movement-that makes us divide up passing time into brief equal intervals, marking them off by some method of physical notation, so that our senses may apprehend them. In all we do we unconsciously mark time like a clock, the leader of an orchestra with his bâton only more perfectly than the smith with his hammer, or the woman with her needle, because his hand is better assisted by his ear, less embarrassed with impedimenta. The pedestrian impelling his legs and the idler twiddling his thumbs are endeavoring, each in his unconscious way, to beat time to some inaudible music; and the graceless lout, sitting cross-legged in a horse-car, manages the affair with his toe. The more intently we labor the more intensely do we become absorbed in labor's dumb song, until with body and mind engaged in the ecstacy of repetition, we resent an interruption of our work as we do a false note in music, and are mightily enamored of ourselves after for the power of application which was simply inability to desist. In this rhythm of toil is to be found the charm of industry. Toil has in itself no spell to conjure with, but its recurrences of molecular action, cerebral and muscular, are as delightful as rhyme. Such of our pleasures as require movements equally rhythmic with those entailed by labor are almost equally agreeable, with the added advantage of being useless. Dancing, which is not only rhythmic movement, pure and simple, undebased with any element of utility, but is capable of performance under conditions positively baneful, is, for these reasons, the most engaging of them all; and if it were but one-half as wicked as the prudes have endeavored by method of naughty suggestion to make it, would lack of absolute bliss nothing but the other half. This ever active and unabatable something within us which compels us to be always marking time we may call, for want of a better name, the instinct of rhythm. It is the æsthetic principle of our nature; translated into words it has given us poetry; into sound, music; into motion, dancing. Perhaps even painting may be referred to it, space being the correlative of time, and color the correlative of tone. We are fond of arranging our minute intervals of time into groups. We find certain of these groups highly agreeable, while others are no end unpleasant. In the former there is a singular regularity to be observed, which led hard-headed old Leibnitz to the theory that our delight in music arises from an inherent affection for mathematics. Yet musicians have hitherto obtained but indifferent recognition for feats of calculation, nor have the singing and playing of renowned mathematicians been unanimously commended by good judges. Music so intensifies and excites the instinct of rhythm that a strong volition is required to repress its physical expression. The universality of this is well illustrated by the legend, found in some shape in most countries and languages, of the boy with the fiddle who compels king, cook, peasant, clown, and all that kind of people, to follow him through the land; and in the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin we discern abundant reason to think the instinct of rhythm an attribute of rats. Soldiers march so much livelier with music than without that it has been found a tolerably good substitute for the hope of plunder. When the foot-falls are audible, as on the deck of a steamer, walking has an added pleasure, and even the pirate, with gentle consideration for the universal instinct, suffers his vanquished foeman to walk the plank. Dancing is simply marking time with the body, as an accompaniment to music, though the same-without the music-is done with only the head and forefinger in a New England meeting-house at psalm time. (The peculiar dance named in honor of St. Vitus is executed with or without music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the thought, the briefest relaxing of the mind, is fatal to the performance. 'Tis as easy to fix attention on a sonnet of Shakspeare while working at whist as gloat upon your partner while waltzing. It can not be intelligently, appreciatively, and adequately accomplished—crede experto. On the subject of poetry, Emerson says: "Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by | the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs," and this really goes near to the root of the matter; albeit we might derive therefrom the unsupported inference that a poet "fat and scant of breath" would write in lines of a foot each, while the more able-bodied bard, with the capacious lungs of a pearl-diver, would deliver himself all across his page, with "the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon." While the heart, working with alternate contraction and dilatation, sends the blood intermittently through the brain, and the outer world apprises us of its existence only by successive impulses, it must result that our sense of things will be rhythmic. The brain being alternately stimulated and relaxed we must think-as we feel-in waves, apprehending nothing continuously, and incapable of a consciousness that is not divisible into units of perception of which we make mental record and physical sign. That is why we dance. That is why we can, may, must, will, and shall dance, and the gates of Philistia shall not prevail against us. La valse légère, la valse légère, The free, the bright, the debonair, III. THERE ARE CORNS IN EGYPT. Our civilization-wise child!-knows its father in the superior civilization whose colossal vestiges are found along the Nile. To those, then, who see in the dance a civilizing art, it can not be wholly unprofitable to glance at this polite accomplishment as it existed among the ancient Egyptians, and was by them transmitted-with various modifications, but preserving its essentials of identity-to other nations and other times. And here we have first to note that, as in all the nations of antiquity, the dance in Egypt was principally a religious ceremony; the pious old boys that builded the pyramids executed their jigs as an act of worship. Diodorus Siculus informs us that Osiris, in his proselyting travels among the peoples surrounding Egypt for Osiris was what we would call a circuit preacher-was accompanied by dancers male and dancers female. From the sculptures on some of the oldest tombs of Thebes it is seen that the dances there de picted did not greatly differ from those in present favor in the same region; although it seems a fair inference from the higher culture and refinement of the elder period that they were distinguished by graces correspondingly superior. That dances having the character of religious rites were not always free from an element that we would term indelicacy, but which their performers and witnesses probably considered the commendable exuberance of zeal and devotion, is manifest from the following passage of Herodotus, in which reference is made to the festival of Bubastis: "Men and women come sailing all together, vast numbers in each boat, many of the women with castanets, which they strike, while some of the men pipe during the whole period of the voyage; the remainder of the voyagers, male and female, sing the while, and make a clapping with their hands. When they arrive opposite to any town on the banks of the stream they approach the shore, and while some of the women continue to play and sing, others call aloud to the females of the place and load them with abuse, a certain number dancing and others standing up, uncovering themselves. Proceeding in this way all along the river course they reach Bubastis, where they celebrate the feast with abundant sacrifice." Of the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, in which dancing played an important part, the character of the ceremonies is matter of dim conjecture; but from the hints that have come down to us like significant shrugs and whispers from a discreet past, which could say a good deal more if it had a mind to, I hasten to infer that they were no better than they should have been. In Naturally the dances for amusement of others were regulated in movement and gesture to suit the taste of patrons: for the refined, decency and moderation; for the wicked, a soupçon of the other kind of excellence. the latter case the buffoon, an invariable adjunct, committed a thousand extravagances, and was a dear, delightful, naughty ancient Egyptian. These dances were performed by both men and women; sometimes together, more frequently in separate parties. The men seem to have confined themselves mostly to exercises requiring strength of leg and arm. The figures on the tombs represent men in lively and vigorous postures, some in attitude preliminary to leaping, others in the air. This feature of agility would be a novelty in the oriental dances of to-day; the indolence of the spectator being satisfied with a slow, voluptuous movement congenial to his disposition. When, on the contrary, the performance of our prehistoric friends was governed and determined by ideas of grace, there were not infrequently |