high as the room, altogether a high-toned institution, from clerk to closet.

H

THE OLD LANDLORD AND THE NEW.

ONEST and thoroughly English words are “landlord" and "landlady," and used to fit what they were meant for, like Alexandre's gloves. They name a pair of bread-keepers and loaf-givers who feed travelers. In fact, in a nice, white, wheaten sense, they are a brace of loafers. But in pretentious hotels the landlady is about as nearly extinct as the mastodon. She has been succeeded by the housekeeper. The landlord is not utterly abolished, but he is often gilt-edged, bound in Turkey, and profusely illustrated. No longer does he carve the succulent pig and the noble roast. No longer do the fowls, breasted like dead knights in armor on a monument, fall to pieces beneath the dexterous hints of the carving-knife. No longer, when the guests are served, does he wash his hospitable hands in invisible water before their eyes, and wish that "good digestion may wait on appetite, and health on both." He is succeeded by a clerk and a steward.

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In the dining-room swarm a head-waiter and his underlings in black and white, to wit, faces and aprons, — who stand behind your chair and regard your organ of selfesteem, and look down the back of your neck, and watch your fork and your spoon and your plate and yourself, and never wink once. When you have done, they have done. They know you as an omnivorous animal ab ovo usque ad mala, from the egg to the apples. No need to say or sing, "Get thee behind me, Satan;" for that is the mischief of it: he is there already and all the time.

The first landlord I ever saw is but just dead, and he was an old man in the beginning, my beginning. He kept a stage house on the old State Road, as far north as the Black

River Country. It was an old-time inn, with a long, low, hospitable stoop, pulled down over the lower row of front windows like a broad-brimmed hat, a world too big, fallen over an urchin's eyebrows. Along the wall beneath this stoop was a hospitable bench. Within the wide door was the bar-room, with a great hospitable Franklin, and chuckleheaded andirons with slender, crooked necks, craning away from the maple logs as if they were afraid of burning their brains out. Across the room from the fiery cavern was "the bunk," a seat by day and a bed by night. Above it hung a stage-driver's whip, with an open-mouthed tin horn in the act of swallowing the handle, and the stock coiled about like the hapless Laocoön by a long and snaky lash with a pink-silk tail. Beside the whip a shaggy overcoat, a long red muffler, a buffalo robe, and a tin lantern tattooed like a Polynesian. Upon the wall the tatter of an old menagerie show-bill, where a spotted leopard, partly loosened from the plaster, wagged his tail in a strangely familiar way in the little breaths of air from the ever-opening door.

In the dining-room there were no sable waiters, and no bills of fare with impossible combinations of letters naming improbable things, but good and abundant food, — sugar that looked as if it had been quarried, and white as Parian marble; pure coffee fit for Turks, and tea for mandarins, — and withal a hearty welcome. When bedward bound, a pair of sheepskin slippers were produced from a closet in the bar, and "Brief candle" that Shakespeare mentions, and you were shown to a bed fat as Falstaff, to which whole flocks of geese paid feathery tribute. Mattresses were not yet.

That first landlord was a hero to me. He linked the small village to the big world. He was to strangers what the mayor He extended them the freedom of the city for two shillings a meal. There were shillings as well as "giants in those days." By the way, when an Ameri

is now.

can tradesman tells you an article is a shilling, knowing that a single shilling is a fiction and a delusion, he is joking at your expense, and lacks but very little of being an honest for he comes within half a cent of it!

man,

A

LX. IF I LIVE TILL SUNDOWN.

BY HENRY WOODFIN GRADY.

(1850-1889.)

SOLDIER lay wounded on a hard-fought field; the

roar of the battle had died away, and he rested in the deadly stillness of its aftermath. Not a sound was heard as he lay there, sorely smitten and speechless, but the shriek of wounded and the sigh of the dying soul, as it escaped from the tumult of earth into the unspeakable peace of the stars. Off over the field flickered the lanterns of the surgeons with the litter bearers, searching that they might take away those whose lives could be saved and leave in sorrow those who were doomed to die with pleading eyes through the darkness. This poor soldier watched, unable to turn or speak as the lanterns grew near. At last the light flashed in his face, and the surgeon, with kindly face, bent over him, hesitated a moment, shook his head, and was gone, leaving the poor fellow alone with death. He watched in patient agony as they went on from one part of the field to another. As they came back the surgeon bent over him again. "I believe if this poor fellow lives to sundown to-morrow he will get well." And again leaving him, not to death but with hope, all night long these words fell into his heart as the dews fell from the stars upon his lips, "If he but lives till sundown, he will get well." He

turned his weary head to the east and watched for the coming sun. At last the stars went out, the east trembled with radiance, and the sun, slowly lifting above the horizon, tinged his pallid face with flame. He watched it inch by inch as it climbed slowly up the heavens. He thought of life, its hopes and ambitions, its sweetness and its raptures, and he fortified his soul against despair until the sun had reached high noon. It sloped down its slow descent, and his life was ebbing away and his heart was faltering, and he needed stronger stimulants to make him stand the struggle until the end of the day had come. He thought of his far-off home, the blessed house resting in tranquil peace with the roses climbing to its door, and the trees whispering to its windows, and dozing in the sunshine, the orchard and the little brook running like a silver thread through the forest.

"If I live till sundown I will see it again. I will walk down the shady lane: I will open the battered gate, and the mocking-bird shall call to me from the orchard, and I will drink again at the old mossy spring.'

And he thought of the wife who had come from the neighboring farmhouse and put her hand shyly in his, and brought sweetness to his life and light to his home.

"If I live till sundown I shall look once more into her deep and loving eyes, and press her brown head once more to my aching breast."

And he thought of the old father, patient in prayer, bending lower and lower every day under his load of sorrow and old age.

"If I but live till sundown I shall see him again and wind my strong arm about his feeble body, and his hands shall rest upon my head, while the unspeakable healing of his blessing falls into my heart."

And he thought of the little children that clambered on

his knees and tangled their little hands into his heart strings, making to him such music as the world shall not equal or heaven surpass.

"If I live till sundown they shall again find my parched lips with their warm mouths, and their little fingers shall run once more over my face.'

And he then thought of his old mother, who gathered these children about her and breathed her old heart afresh in their brightness and attuned her old lips anew to their prattle, that she might live till her big boy came home.

"If I live till sundown I will see her again, and I will rest my head at my old place on her knees, and weep away all memory of this desolate night." And the Son of God, who had died for men, bending from the stars, put the hand that had been nailed to the cross on ebbing life and held on the staunch until the sun went down and the stars came out, and shone down in the brave man's heart and blurred in his glistening eyes, and the lanterns of the surgeons came and he was taken from death to life.

Extract from a Speech at Dallas, Tex., 1887.

LXI. BRUSA AND THE SEA OF MARMORA.

BY BAYARD TAYLOR.

(1825-1878.)

BAYARD TAYLOR was a most versatile American writer. He entered nearly every field of literary labor and always with distinction. As a poet he ranks not far below the highest; as a novelist, he presented charming pictures of pastoral life; he was a fine translator; while his books of travel give vivid and forceful descriptions of scenes all over the globe. His journeyings on foot, “upwards of three thousand miles in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France," were recorded in "Views