On the whole, I thought I would leave Jan. He had cleared the snow to the ground. And I covered him with a heavy bear-skin he had upon the sled. My march was now less than an hour. I knew he would sleep till I came back again. North for the last tramp of all! I took the sled with me. As I pulled up a long slope there is, just before you come to the pole itself, it seemed to me that I should die with sleep. Still, of mere will power, I pressed on until I turned the summit, and looked still north. A wide flat plain a hundred feet below me stretched I can not tell how far away. Perhaps a mile and a half from me a black spot. Was it a man? The binocular settled that. It was a man, and he was lying on a sled, asleep. But for me, had it been the angel Uriel, I could not have gone to him. I was dead with sleep. I just remember having sense to unroll my bag, which I carried as a knapsack, and crawling into it, and then I was at once unconscious. How long I slept I do not know, but it must have been hours: that I knew afterward. When I awoke I did not know where I was. But I heard snoring. The bag was not buttoned. I had been too sleepy. I pushed my head out, and at the moment a man fell heavily to the ground at my side. He had fallen asleep as he sat watching me. He was in the winter costume of Northern China-a fur cap, a fur pea-jacket, trousers of deer-skin. I had seen hundreds of such traders on the Baikal. It was Myself-my Other Self! He had come to meet me! I was wholly prepared to speak to him. I cried to him in these words: must sleep while I waked; I must sleep while he waked. This was the basis of the whole journey. No one had ever thought that one soul could carry on two bodies at the same time. Of course, then, we could not talk to each other. All we could do was to write, and await an answer. I wrote in my best handwriting, in Chinese, this note: "My brother-nay, myself: I see you are well. My name is Frederic Ingham. What is yours? What grief that we can not hear each other's voices, or see each other's eyes!" Then I crept into my bag, and forced myself to go to sleep. I did not sleep long. When I woke there was a note in my hand, which said: "I am called Kan-schau. My rank is of the blue button of the province of Fi. I am the government inspector of furs. May your waking be joyful!" I think he saw the situation, and poked me hard as his last conscious act. But this made no difference. I should have waked, of course, as soon as he slept. I had with me Wells's Smaller Dictionary, and I made out most of what he wrote. Then I bethought me what I should say. What did I want to say? What do you ever want to say in a letter? Of course he knew what I was, and I knew what he was, for I was he, and he was I. So far there was no need to write. As for the inspection of furs, I cared nothing for that. Nor did he care, I think, much about my home-mission work in District K. It seemed a pity to talk politics. As to fine art, I did not know the Chinese words for "realistic," or "preraphaelite.” It is not the first time that, having an opportunity to address a friend, I found But he heard nothing; he lay that I had very little to say to him. like a log. I shook him. I rolled him over. He only groaned in his sleep. But it was as if he were dead-only he breathed. Then I remembered how I had been sleeping! I remembered how stupidly Jan was sleeping! Could it be?-it was-that Jan's other self was three miles south of us, on the opposite me ridian! And I and Kaolin? Of course he What I did was this-always a good thing to do: I opened my can of beef, which I had taken from Jan, and placed under it a bit of hard-tack. I wrote: "Feed yourself from my stores. Eat of my bread and meat. If only you might sit with my family at my table! But, alas! our destiny forbids." Then I crept back into my bag, counted ten thousand, and imagined a flock of sheep jumping over a wall, until I lost my self in slumber. I woke to find this note: By-by." "I am made new by your bounty. Eat men behind this Kan - schau. Mucheeof my last bird's nest. It is indeed life muchee, him go and help them. to death, and strength to faintness. We must now turn our backs on each other. But I leave a guide for your instruction." Dead asleep I found him, but this message, and a Chinese envelope with his Chinese address, were in his hand. I fastened in a parcel a volume of my essays, a small flask of cordial, and a picture alphabet for his children. I wrote my address on an envelope, and on the parcel I placed a card with this: "FAREWELL. "We shall not soon meet again. I shall rejoice in your joy, I shall sorrow in your sorrow. Polly, my wife, will gladly hear of the welfare of yours. Farewell." I left it in his hands, but as I did so that horrid drowsiness came over me. I fell; but waked to find, in a sort of pigeon English, this billet by my side. I was alone. "By-by. Top-notch muchee good for him all the ways. By-by. Two Lapland TH Could my gold-chop Chinese be as bad as his English? The prints of his feet in the snow were clear enough. But he had gone. I looked at the sun, which was near noon when I left Jan, and it was now quite on the other side of the sky. I looked at my watch, which Bond had made for me, for safety's sake at this point, and had arranged for it a dial of twentyfour hours. It was half past twenty-three o'clock. Poor Jan had been asleep twelve hours, or had waked to find me gone. I retraced my own steps, and found him just rousing. I knew one of Kanschau's Laplanders was going to sleep at the same moment. Jan never knew how long he slept. In three hours more we had joined Hans, and with two snow-rabbits which he had knocked over, and a few specimens of Grassus inequalis which he had killed for the dogs, we all feasted. We all slept twelve hours. I suppose Kan-schau was making a long pull home. I have never seen him again. Editor's Easy Chair. HERE is rumor of a suspicion in Boston that its intellectual ascendency is passing away, and that it must presently become, like Edinburgh, famous for a former glory. For more than a generation its supremacy has been unquestioned. There has been no literary cirele in the country like the Boston circle, for that of New York fifty and sixty years ago could not rival the undoubted superior genius and rich variety of the Boston group. The three New York names were Irving, Cooper, and Bryant, and each of these was indeed a master. Irving was our first humorist, Cooper the first distinctive American novelist, and Bryant the poet of the first American verse that has become part of general literature. They were surrounded by a cultivated and variously accomplished company-Paulding, and Halleck, and Hosack, and Mitchill, and Sands, and Verplanck, and Sedgwick, and Inman, and Harvey, and Anderson, and other delightful gentlemen and companions. But many of these names flicker, and some have already gone out. However brilliant a society it may have been, it was not a creative and moulding influence, like the Boston circle. The Knickerbocker group has hardly affected even literary expression. But the New England men have directed American | thought, and colored the whole stream of the national life. New England, indeed, has been the formative influence, not only in literature, but in politics and morals. This is the result of the virile and aggressive Puritan genius which has moulded modern England also, but which had its freest and fullest development in the newer England on this side of the sea. During the prime of the Knickerbocker group the Boston circle had not appeared. The sombre tone of a literature produced by provincial Puritan divines was still unrelieved. Channing and Buckminster were already astir, but they were solitary stars heralding the dawn. The Knickerbockers had a certain Cavalier gayety of spirit which contrasts strongly with the prevailing Roundhead sobriety of their Eastern neighbors. The Knickerbocker feeling toward the Boston or New England school was that of the court to the province, of the city mouse to the country mouse, of Waller toward Milton. It is easy now, also, to see the reflected or imitative strain in the Knickerbocker work, not exclusively, of course, nor without signs of the freshness and originality of a new country. But although very little of its literature now survives, except the work of its three chiefs, it is easy to imagine the good-natured banter with which at Dr. Hosack's Saturday evenings the provincial earnestness of the Yankee genius was treated by a company which held that New York was the metropolis of America, and, of course, the seat of the literary as of the social and commercial eminence of the country. As time passed, and the Knickerbocker group was slowly dispersed, and the splendor in the East deepened, this feeling of gay raillery changed to something more bitter, of which the most striking expression is found in the amiable Mr. Brodhead's History of New York. The pertinacious vigor with which he depreciates Puritanism and New England is very droll. As the Vicar of Holland he resents what he supposes to be the determination of "the losel Yankee" to appropriate for himself every good thing in this country, and to assume the credit of civil and religious liberty, of common schools, and of popular government. Whoever knew the good-natured historian, whose work, so far as it goes, is admirable and most serviceable, must smile as he sees the fidelity with which he discharges the duty of warning all Yankee trespassers off the grounds which he has consecrated to Dutch initiative and influence. This feeling sometimes re-appears. But the fondest New York Cavalier would hardly compare the Knickerbocker group, charming as it was, to the Boston Round Table: Channing, Norton, and the elder Dana and the Everetts and Ticknor and Choate; Prescott and Bancroft and Sparks, Motley and Palfrey and Parkman; | Emerson and Hawthorne and Mrs. Stowe and Margaret Fuller; Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes and Whittier and Howells and Aldrich; Agassiz and Peirce and Dr. Howe and Mrs. Howe, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips and Garrison and the Quincys, the Adamses, the younger Dana and younger Norton, and Hoar, Whipple and Fields and Higginson and Edward Hale and John Dwight, and, as the despairing footman exclaimed, as the guests poured up the staircase, "more of the same." These are all contemporaries, although of various ages. They constantly met, and still meet, some of them habitually. A more brilliant, vigorous, and effective intellectual group has been | seldom seen. With the exception of some of the older men, Everett, Ticknor, Webster, and Choate, it was moved by the same conviction and purpose; and the later circle, of which the four gentlemen named were not part, is the distinctive group which gave Boston the su- | premacy in literature, as in politics and morals, which is now said to be passing away. It is undoubtedly true, because so many of the group are gone, and no such company of men and women is immediately succeeded by another. The age of Pericles did not pass into another age of Pericles. The Elizabethan era did not renew itself. The "Anne's men" had no such successors. Dr. Johnson's club was not recruited. The Edinburgh of the beginning of the century does not re-appear at its end. The Knickerbocker set that preceded the Column, the Sketch Club, and the Century in New York, has left no heir, and the Boston circle, once broken, is not completed elsewhere. The London Times thinks that the Boston intellectual decrees have always been tinged with Boston, and that intellectual autocracy in New York will be free from any local stamp. There is no particular meaning in such a remark, for Hawthorne is no more Yankee than Scott is Scotch, and Longfellow no more local than Tennyson, nor Emerson than Carlyle. Doubtless in all of them the Puritan bent is discernible, like the Cavalier sympathy in Scott. Like Milton, they are blossoms of the old Lutheran stock; but that stock clings to no single garden, and strikes its roots in every soil. With the vast increase of a heterogeneous population, and the extending area of the country, it may well be that no city or local group of men and women will ever again exert so mighty a dominance as that of New England and its capital. If the sceptre is falling from the old grasp, it is not "wrenched by an unlineal hand." It is seized by none, and although it be never lifted again, it will always recall a glorious and beneficent reign, a great power greatly used, a circle of men and women eminent not only for variety and charm of genius, but for well-ordered lives and for noble citizenship. To find a satisfactory definition of gentleman is as difficult as to discover the philosopher's stone, and yet if we may not say just what a gentleman is, we can certainly say what he is not. We may affirm indisputably that a man, however rich, and of however fine a title in countries where rank is acknowledged, if he behave selfishly, coarsely, and indecently, is not a gentleman. "From which, young gentlemen, it follows," as the good professor used to say at college, as he emerged from a hopeless labyrinth of postulates and preliminaries an hour long, that the guests who abused the courtesy of their hosts, upon the late transcontinental trip to drive the golden spike, may have been persons of social eminence, but were in no honorable sense gentlemen. It is undoubtedly a difficult word to manage. But gentlemanly conduct and ungentlemanly conduct are expressions which are perfectly intelligible, and that fact shows that there is a distinct standard in every intelligent mind by which behavior is measured. To say that a man was born a gentleman means not at all that he is courteous, refined, and intelligent, but only that he was born of a family whose circumstances at some time had been easy and agreeable, and which belonged to a traditionally "good society." But such a man may be false and mean, and ignorant and coarse. he a gentleman because he was born such? On the other hand, the child of long generations of ignorant and laborious boors may be humane, honorable, and modest, but with total Is ignorance of the usages of good society. He | member, as the Easy Chair has sought more may be as upright as Washington, as unselfish than once to point out, that organized charity as Sidney, as brave as Bayard, as modest as is none the less Christian charity. Give to him Falkland. But he may also outrage all the that asketh is one of the oldest written injunclittle social proprieties. Is he a gentleman tions, as it is the surest instinct of a righteous because he is honest and modest and humane? heart, and it is truly to obey that injunction In describing Lovelace, should we not say that that organized charity aims. he was a gentleman? Should we naturally say so of Burns? But, again, is it not a joke to describe George the Fourth as a gentleman, while it would be impossible to deny the name to Major Dobbin? The catch, however, is simple. Using the same word, we interchange its different meanings. To say that a man is born a gentleman is to say that he was born under certain social conditions. To say in commendation or description of a man that he is a gentleman, or gentlemanly, is to say that he has certain qualities of character or manner which are wholly independent of the circumstances of his family or training. In the latter case, we speak of individual and personal qualities; in the former, we speak of external conditions. In the one case we refer to the man himself; in the other, to certain circumstances around him. The quality which is called gentlemanly is that which, theoretically, and often actually, distinguishes the person who is born in a certain social position. It describes the manuer in which such a person ought to behave. ner. The most persistently head-shaking of skeptics, who looks askance at the organized system and holds strictly to the duty of personal interest and relief, can not insist that everybody who asks is to be relieved without inquiry, or in the precise way that he may indicate. This would not be Christian charity, nor even charitable knight-errantry. It would be mere dangerous tomfoolery. But when the skeptic has | granted this-which he can not deny-he has agreed that the question is one of expediency simply. It is a question of method. How can the aid be best given to him that asketh? This will certainly not be done by leaving the aid to chance, or to individual charitable impulse. The result of this would be overwhelming demoralization and immeasurable suffering. There must be association, organization, and reflection. This is the basis of the modern system of organized charity which dates from the observation both of the increasing demoralization and suffering. It is not the work of indifferent, cold, and mechanical persons, but of the most sympathetic, generous, and humane. It is the task of the most practical Christians of the time, whose purpose is to do effectively under the conditions of to It is not machine charity, unless sympathy and intelligence and wise beneficence are mechanical. It is not perfunctory, unless careful inquiry and special relief when needed, and the baffling of imposture and exposure of fraud, are ceremonial. Behavior, however, can be imitated. Therefore, neither the fact of birth under certain conditions, nor a certain ease and grace and charm of manner, certify the essential charac-day the work of Christ among his fellow-men. ter of gentleman. Lovelace had the air and breeding of a gentleman, like Don Giovanni; he was familiar with polite society; he was refined and pleasing and fascinating in manEven the severe Astarte could not call him a boor. She does not know a gentleman, probably, more gentlemanly than Lovelace. She must then admit that she can not arbitrarily deny Lovelace to be a gentleman because he is a libertine, or because he is false, or mean, or of a coarse mind. She may, indeed, insist that only upright and honorable men of refined mind and manner are gentlemen, and she may also maintain that only men of truly lofty and royal souls are princes, but there will still remain crowds of immoral gentlemen and unworthy kings. The persons who abused the generous courtesy of the Northern Pacific trip were gentlemen in one sense, and not in the other. They were gentlemen so far as they could not help themselves, but they were not gentlemen in what depended upon their own will. According to the story, they did not even imitate the conduct of gentlemen, and Astarte must admit that they belonged to the large class of ungentlemanly gentlemen. As the winds begin to whistle sharply and the snow to fall, and the appeal of the beggar has a more pathetic emphasis, it is well to re This is all shown in a brief little manual by Mrs. James T. Fields, which is just published, and which, with much valuable suggestion and information, describes a method of organization which has been found very effective in Boston. She also relates her own experience in charitable work, and adds to it the wisdom of many of the most observant and thoughtful modern writers upon the subject. There is no more excellent little manual for those either in town or country who wish to make charity truly beneficent by uniting and organizing the labor of the charitable. The fact never to be forgotten is that spasmodic and eccentric individual giving in the street and at the door increases poverty and fosters crime, establishes hereditary pauperism, and wastes enormous sums of money. If any housekeeper or other person is moved by the sense of Christian duty to relieve suffering and to console poverty, he must not deceive himself with the fancy that unintelligent giving is anything but a form of selfish indulgence. If he would do the work of his Master in his own person, let him visit the poor and search out the suffering, but take strict care that he is not promoting crime or drunkenness or fraud. To multiply paupers, to furnish drams to drunkards, to support idle rogues with the hard-won wages of honest men, is not to do the work of Christ. But to take all possible care that almsgiving produces real relief, and that by personal visitation and inquiry the actual need of the suffering is known, that is to do the work of Christ. It is the devoted men and women who have given time and thought and labor and money to the wise organization of charitable relief, | and not those who stand by idly and complacently sneer at it as mechanical charity, whose names are worthy to be written with AbouBen-Adhem's. It is the charm of Mrs. Fields's little book that it emphasizes especially the value of "friendly communication with the poor and unfortunate," and shows that intelligent system in almsgiving makes personal sympathy most effective. It is because alms have been so constantly given to get rid of the poor, to silence an importunate conscience, or to satisfy a sense of duty, that they have been such squandered treasures. This is the true creaking mechanism of charity, which organization proposes to smooth and silence with personal inquiry and individual sympathy. his own. It would be, doubtless, a surprise to ascertain precisely how much of the doctrine of his constitutional speeches Webster derived from Story, and how much of his financial wisdom came from friends in Wall Street and State Street; nor would the knowledge detract from the greatness of the exposition and the argument. Laurence will remember also how much of the story of his plays Shakespeare drew from other sources than his own invention. Indeed, White says of the Merry Wives of Windsor, "This amusing comedy seems to be the only one of Shakespeare's plays which is wholly original." Of the Tempest he says: "Gonzalo's description of his ideal commonwealth is taken almost word for word from Floris's Translation of Montaigne's Essays, which was published in 1603. It was Shakespeare's habit thus to appropriate to himself any thought or any personage that he found in his reading, and which secured to him good stuff to work into his plays." Again, White says of Measure for Measure: "The plot and the principal personages are taken from George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, a drama published in 1578, but not acted. The story is also told in the same writer's Heptameron, a collection of tales published in 1582. Whetstone himself found the story in Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi, but he amplified it and improved it much; and LAURENCE was recently reading a novel of then came Shakespeare to tonch it with imthe day, when the story seemed suddenly mortality." As You Like It is "a mere dramastrangely familiar to him, and after much puz-tization" of a tale by Thomas Lodge. zling and wondering he turned to an old collection of tales, and there found it. It was not a pleasant discovery, he says. There seemed to be something a little questionable, if not dishonest, in the proceeding. Was the story original with both authors, he asks, or was it a common property of literary and artistic genius, like the legend of Fanst or of Rip Van Winkle? Or was it deliberately appropriated by the later author? and if so, was it not a theft as dishonest as any other theft, throwing all the stories of the same author under suspicion, and making them, in a literary sense, forgeries? What is the moral difference between the offense of Chatterton, who published as the works of an old poet inventions of his own, and that of a novelist who publishes as his own the inventions of another? But would Master Lodge have recognized his modest fowl beneath those heaven-soaring pinions? Here is the answer to Laurence's question: "Then came Shakespeare to touch it with immortality." If Irving did not invent the legend of Rip Van Winkle, what then? Is he a plagiarist? Is he dishonest? He first saw its significance and beauty. He first interpreted it so that it charms the world. By his touch alone the legend lives. Such stories grow slowly. They are gradually moulded by tradition, passing from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, like old melodies which vary and expand from one singer to another. No person is the inventor. They are for him whose happy genius gives them a form which fixes them forever. Evidently Laurence would not deny this. Laurence demurs to Emerson's remark that He admits that there are certain legends which a man having once shown himself capable of are common property, amid which creative genoriginal writing is entitled thenceforth to ap-ins is a chartered libertine. His point is more propriate the writings of others at discretion. But Emerson does not say that he approves the practice; he says only that this has come to be understood in literature. This, indeed, Laurence can not deny. The overlapping of literature in this way is familiar. The appropriation by genins is not less so. Dumont tells us how Mirabeau heard a Deputy state his views privately, and then, ascending the tribune, the great orator poured them forth, fused in his impassioned rhetoric, having made them forever precise and prosaic. If, for instance, he should find in a novel by Anthony Trollope a scene which is the counterpart or reproduction of a scene in one of Miss Ferrier's novels, or if in a tale of Mrs. Oliphant's he should discover the same situation and characters and conversation that he recalls in one of Miss Austen's, or if in any such coincidence the original was a story little known, what would Laurence be obliged to conclude in regard to Mr. Trollope or Mrs. Oliphant? He could not plead that it |