blushed, and drooped her head. There was no question of approving or disapproving here. She answered his voice instantly, like a slave. There are many people who only see a thing in its best aspect when it becomes their own. For the moment Paul Markham became one of those. He had never thought her so handsome before; perhaps, indeed, in all her life she had never been so handsome as when she stopped, all blushing and glowing at his call, acknowledging in her every look the proprietorship which he liked to claim. "Where are you going so fast?" he said. "Oh, Mr. Markham, I am in a great hurry! I don't know what Miss Stitchel will say: I never was so late before in my life!" "What has kept you so late?" derness could have produced. Must he | ties with every one else; but with her no wring the girl's heart by making it all difficulties, no troubles. She acknowlplain to her, and humble her in her own edged his sway at once, stopped herself, eyes? or must he accept a position he had not sought, which he no more desired than they desired it, and of which he saw all the inappropriateness, all the disadvantages? As he went on with that cruel question in his mind, there rose out of the morning air, appearing not much less suddenly than his mother had done, running towards him, the figure_of_the girl of whom he was thinking. To Paul it was as if his thoughts had taken shape. She came towards him, not seeing him, with all the ease of motion which unconsciousness gives — tall and graceful in her plain black gown. The girl's head was full of a subdued triumph, but for the moment all she was consciously thinking of was how to get to her shop as quickly as possible. She ran like another Atalanta, skimming along the unlovely street, her feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground. This sudden apparition filled Paul with sudden excitement. She had changed to him altogether since yesterday, when she was nothing but Spears's daughter. Now she was suddenly identified, separated from all the world, and become herself. How could he help but be interested in her? She had owned to it. To what had she owned ? It seemed for the moment almost a relief, bitterly as he resented her introduction into his life, to turn to her - who knew none of the complications involved, who was unaware of his fury and indignation against everybody round him to turn to her, whose mind must be entirely single and simple, torn by no conflict. He did not know why he wanted to speak to her, what he wanted to say to her; but he stepped into her way with a certain imperiousness, making her stop short in her rapid career. Janet, thus arrested, gave a sudden cry. She stopped, the breath coming quick on her lips, and put her hand to her breast; her heart gave a sudden leap, the color flew over her face in a sudden wave of crimson. "Oh! Mr. Markham!" she said. "Where are you going so fast?" Somehow it seemed to him, with a halfconsolatory sense of proprietorship, that here was a creature who belonged to him, who would find no fault with him as the others did, who was his. He put himself in her way, stopping her- not as if by accident, but of set purpose-assuming the right which she for her part never resisted. There were troubles and difficul He was far more imperious in his tone than he had ever been when she was nothing to him. Then he had been courtly and polite, frightening the girl with a courtesy which she did not understand. She liked this roughness much better. It meant - it would be impossible to tell all it meant. "I was kept by-visitors. Oh, Mr. Markham! don't keep me any longer now. I don't know what Miss Stitchel will say to me. She will be so angry." "She must not be angry. How does she dare to show her anger to you? You had visitors. I know-my mother." "Oh, Mr. Markham!" Janet said faintly, drooping her head; and then there was a momentary pause. "I know," he said. He did not know, and could not tell afterwards by what impulse he did it. So infatuation took possession of him. He took her hand in the middle of the street, in sight of any one that might be looking. There was nobody looking, which vexed Janet, but he did it without thought of that. It would have made no difference if all the world had been there. "That is how it is, I suppose," he said, holding her hand. And then he added, somewhat drearily, "If there is anything wrong in it, it is their own doing, there is always that to be said." This somewhat chilled Janet, who expected a warmer address; but she reflected that the street was scarcely a place for love-making; and Miss Stitchel, though not so important as usual, had still to be considered. He dropped her hand as if it burnt him, and grew red with anger and uneasy shame. "Let me go, please, Mr. Markham," | liberated, cast more than one furtive she said; "I mustn't be late, for what- glance behind her at his departing figure. ever may happen afterwards, I am still But it did not seem to have occurred to their servant at the shop." Paul to look after her. He walked on stately and straight, turning neither to one side nor the other, towards Spears's shop. He had not meant to go, but neither had he intended any of the other things that had come to pass. Fate seemed to have got possession of him. He walked into the shop with the same straightforward, steady tread, not usual, that was impossible. Most likely there would have to be something said, but for that, too, he felt himself ready, if need was. "This must not be," he said. "I will go and speak to Spears." Though he was so firm in his democratic principles, the idea that any one connected with himself should be under the orders of a mistress galled him beyond bearing. It was a thing that could not be. "It will not be for long," Janet said, cheerfully. She, for her part, rather liked the shop. It was more cheerful than the other shop which was home. "I cannot suffer it," he said, "for another day. I will speak to Spears.” This was all he said, but he kept standing there, looking at her with eyes which were more investigating than admiring. If he had nothing more to say than this, why should he keep her standing there and expose her to Miss Stitchel's scolding? But she did not like to burst away as she would have done from a less stately wooer. She was much intimidated by a lover like Paul, though very proud of him. She stood with her eyes cast down, waiting till he would let her go free. The thing that would have made Janet most happy would have been that he should walk to the shop with her, showing that he was not ashamed of her, and give her the pride and glory of being seen by the other young ladies in company with the gentleman she was going to marry, the gentleman who had vowed that she could not remain there not another day. This would have been the natural thing to do, Janet thought. But it did not seem to occur to Paul in the same light. He looked at her, examining her appearance with anxious and critical, yet with very sober and calm inspection. They were neither of them so happily fluttered, so excited as they might have been. She was not exacting, did not ask too much; and he was critical with the discrimination of a superior, a judge whose powers of judgment were biassed by no glamor of partiality. "We shall see each other later, in the evening. I will not detain you longer," he said, in a tone of gentle politeness. He even gave a little sigh of relief as he turned away. Janet, not knowing whether she was more sorry or glad to be VOL. XXVIV, 1458 LIVING AGE. as Spears was no longer working at the simple work of his picture-frames. He had thrown them into a heap-all the little bits of carved work which he had been glueing and fitting into each otherand with a large sheet of paper on the table before him was drawing with much intentness and preoccupation. He had set the plume of the foxglove upright before him, and was bending his brows and contorting both limbs and features over his drawing as he had done over the lily he had designed for Alice. The handful of colored gladiolus which had been lying on the table he had pushed impatiently aside, and they lay at his feet, here and there, scattered under the table and about the floor like things rejected, while he drew in the foxglove boldly with a blue pencil. All his soul seemed to be in his drawing. He scarcely took any notice of Paul — a half glance up, a hurried nod, and that was all. Presently, however, he took up one of the gladiolus stalks and laid it tentatively across the foxglove; then, with a pshaw! of angry impatience, turned it again away. "That won't do," he said, half to himself, "none o' that. Nature will not stand it. The free-growing, wild thing is grand, but that poor, stiff, conventional rubbish, manufactured out of some gardener's brains, out of his bad dreams, is good for nothing; and it's everywhere the same, so far as I can see. Things must be wedded after their kind." "Do you mean that for me, Spears?" "Do I mean that for you? Which are you? the grand tower of the foxglove, that's good for everything - strength and continuance and beauty or that poor, spiky trash? I don't know. I mean nothing that I don't understand." Then there was silence once more. Paul took up some of the bits of uncompleted work and fixed them together. He would not open the subject, but he knew Spears well enough to know that it must have been some great agitation which had driven him away from his potboiling to the work of designing. This was not a work that would ever "pay." The frames answered the purpose of daily bread; but the drawings into which all the rude artist's soul was thrown were not profitable. A few of the young men who were his friends had got him purchasers for such work, but such purchasers were few and far between; and to spend a whole morning making a design for one of these unprofitable works showed that the workman had certainly for the moment lost command of himself. After a few minutes, during which he measured the little letters together and fitted them carelessly, Paul went quietly to the bench, and, taking an old coat which hung there, put it on and sat down to do the work which the other had left undone. This was not a kind of work he had ever attempted before. He had been a student of carving, not because of any natural impulse towards the art, but partly for Spears's company, partly in order to be able to aid in some small way the struggle for a living. This eventful morning brought him a new impulse. While his master labored impetuously at his drawing, Paul took the humbler work in hand. After all the distraction that had been in his mind, there was something in this homely effort that soothed him. Cast upon it on all hands, in all ways, it was a sort of relief to him to identify himself altogether with this other sphere, which he had chosen and sought out, yet into which he had never cast himself so completely, so fully, as his own family had cast him. He smiled at this within himself, as he began to work at Spears's everyday vulgar work. Well! if they would have it so, so be it! He had played with the notion of equality, of democratic simplicity, with the doctrine that it was every man's duty to earn his own living, and give up to humanity the full enjoyment of the land and accumulations of money, which no individual had a right to retain. All this he had held hotly in theory; but in the mean time had lived in his college rooms, and according to his natural position an anomaly which only now appeared to him in its full vividness. Yes, now he saw it. He smiled to himself, no longer with bitterness, with a lofty disdain of his own past, of all his traditions, of his family, which by way of opposition and resistance to his purpose and principles had pushed him over the verge on which he had been hesitating. Perhaps but for them he might still have hesitated before he took the final step. It was they who had decided it, who had given him the last impulse. He smiled with a sense of the weakness of efforts which thus naturally balked themselves, feeling superior in his calm certainty of decision to all these agitations. Yes, it was over; there was no longer any question of what might or might not be. His fate was settled; he was a member of Spears's family, not of Sir William Markham's. That sense of calm which follows a great decision, and at the same time of proud resignation which succeeds a sacrifice exerted, calmed his mind. Somehow, Paul could not have told how, he felt himself a sort of sacrificial offering to justice and nature, making the most eloquent of protests against wrong, tyranny, injustice, and everything that was evil in society. With the dignity of a noble victim, and with a sense of innate, inborn, but most illogical superiority to fate, he drew the glue-pot and the tools towards him, and began to do the workman's work. Nothing could have been more illogical; for the superiority of labor was one of the first principles of his creed, and to make picture-frames was a respectable occupation by which a man might live. Yet it was with a smile of superiority that he began his first day's work, enjoying the sensation of voluntary humility, of doing what it was beneath him to do.' Thus they went on in silence for some time. Paul working clumsily enough, with a sense of the humor implied in his adoption of the work which made it amusing in its novelty and inappropriateness, but which was most unlike the steady devotion of a man who felt this work to be his duty; while Spears pursued his with a fury of invention which denoted the perturbation of his mind. He flung the drooping bells of the foxglove upon his paper and erected its splendid stalk with an energy and force which was like a defiance, holding the somewhat coarse blue pencil in his hand like a sword, screwing his mouth and putting his limbs into every contortion possible, as he sat, with his stool pushed as far as might be from the table, and all the upper part of his person overhanging it. If it had been an eagle or a lion that he was drawing the force and expression of his whole figure would have been more appropriate. As it was, the foxglove bristled with a kind of scornful defiance, yet drooped with something of melancholy, as an eagle might have done in all its pride of strength, yet with the pathos of all speechless creatures in its eyes. In this particular, though he was an actor, he was speechless as the eagle or the wildly noble flower. He had seen a sight which had taken all speech out of him, as it might have done from Shakespeare. He had seen a something unknown, a small, vulgar, incomprehensible spirit, to him unrecognizable, a thing out of his cognizance, looking at him through the eyes of his child. What could he say to such a revelation? Nothing. It took his voice from him and almost his breath. He had not been able to endure the placid work which left him free for thought. Say that his designing did not reach a very ethereal point of art; but it was the highest exercise of skill to him. He flung himself upon the paper, thrusting away all the painful enlightenments and contradictions of his life as he thrust away the gay-colored spike of the gladiolus. He would have crushed them under foot if he had been able, but this he could not do. They would not disappear from his memory as the others did from his table. Thus he worked on, with a fervor which was almost savage, while Paul, with a proud smile on his face, handled the glue. After a while the mere sense of companionship mollified the elder man. He was wounded, and wanted just such soothing as the sight of his disciple sitting quietly by gave him. His work grew less firm, his hand less rigid; the great pencil ceased to dig into the paper with its violent lines. Insensibly the softening went on. First, he threw a hasty glance from beneath his bushy eyebrows at the young man tranquilly seated near him. Then his fiery inspirations slackened; he paused to look at his model, to devise the next line, and doing so let his eyes rest upon Paul with a growing softness. At last he got up, threw down his pencil, and coming up to his companion struck him on the shoulder. belongs to an accepted lover, as the man beside him, who had been a lover himself, was quick to see. I." "Who said that? Not I, Spears - not "Who said it? Well, I cannot tell you. The women among them; they have their own way of looking at things." And then the two men paused, looking at each other. This was the moment in which it was natural that Janet's lover should make his own explanation to the father of the girl whom he loved. The whole life of two people at least, and of many more in a secondary point of view, hung upon Paul's lip, to be decided by the next impulse that might move him, by the next fantastic words which, out of the mist of unreal fact in which he had got himself enveloped, he might be moved to say. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLOR SENSE. IT would be difficult to find another natural phenomenon which at the present time possesses so great a fascination for people of the most diverse tastes and occupations as color. And yet history shows that color has by no means always been held in such high esteem as now. The Greeks, for reasons which will be specified in the course of this article, regarded it with eyes of indifference, and have contributed little to our scientific knowledge of it. The Middle Ages present a still greater void; and only with the revival of letters, when the senses were released from the ascetic ban which had so long rested on them, did a hearty and healthy love of color begin to manifest itself in science, art, and literature. And the nearer we come to our own day, the more prominent color becomes as an object of speculation and experiment. The last fifteen or twenty years are so "Well!" he said. Boy, so that was remarkable in this respect that in a hishow it was! You listened to the father-tory of science they might not inaptly be old fool! but your thoughts were with the girl. That was how it was." This was not the thing that gnawed at Spears's heart, but he put it forward by way perhaps of persuading himself, as we all do sometimes, that it was the lesser matter that hurt him most. 66 Paul paused in his work, and looked up. His face was very serious, with none of that glow of happiness in it which alluded to as the Age of Color. The problem was found to be so complex and comprehensive that a division of labor had to be resorted to. Goethe, by writing no less than a thousand pages on the phenomena and history of color, had already endeavored to break up the monopoly held by the man of physical science. Helmholtz next appeared, in the name of physiology, to revive and improve the that first suggested the idea that the organ of color was but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age ("Homer and the Homeric Age," 1858, vol. iii. pp. 457-500). Two years ago he restated his views in a magazine article. and that none of the counter-arguments hitherto advanced have shaken his consummary in the "Primer of Homer," where he still insists (p. 150) that Homer "knew but little and vaguely of the differences of color, except as approximations to the opposite ideas of light and darkness, both of which he grasped firmly, and turned very largely to poetic use. He never gives an epithet of color to a flower; never calls the skies blue; and there is no word in the poems which would justify an assertion that he had any approach to a distinct perception either of green or blue." theory of Young, and by its aid to bring to light many new and important facts. More recently, the anatomist, F. Boll, discovered the retinal purple, which points to the conclusion that the act of vision is a photo-chemical process, and that we do not see external objects directly, but only their images in the eye. Max Schultze had already preceded him with the dis-viction is evinced by his more recent covery of the difference in functions between the rods and the cones in the retina, thereby, as we shall see, enabling us to ascertain the condition of the colorsense of prehistoric man with almost absolute certainty. Ever since the discovery was made that the examination through the spectroscope of the color of incandescent gases and metallic vapors is one of the most delicate methods of chemical analysis, the chemist and astronomer have also given much attention to color. Nor has the naturalist remained in the background. By their theories of sexual In a lecture delivered at Frankfort in selection, of protective, warning, and 1867, Dr. Lazarus Geiger adopts Mr. imitative colors, Mr. Darwin and Mr. Gladstone's theory, and extends it to Wallace have shown what a valuable aux- other ancient peoples besides the Greeks. iliary color is to the student of natural The same peculiarities that Mr. Gladhistory in his investigations. By a curi- stone had noticed in the Homeric poems, ous coincidence color-blindness next be- Dr. Geiger found again in the Vedas, the came a prominent subject of discussion, Zendavesta, the Bible, yea, even in the just a hundred years subsequent to the Koran and the songs of the Edda. Dr. time when the phenomenon was first re- Geiger is even convinced that within a corded. These discussions have brought period open to the investigations of the to light the curious fact that on an comparative philologist, there has been a average one male out of every twenty is progress in the development of the colorcolor-blind, i.e. unable to discriminate all sense of man exactly corresponding to the principal colors of the spectrum, and the scheme of the spectrum, from red therefore liable to confound the color of a through orange, yellow, green, blue, and ripe strawberry with that of its surround- indigo, to violet. The first period of ing leaves, or to make analogous mistakes. color-perception was the black-red age: The statistical proof that such a large then came the black-red-golden age, and proportion of us, without being aware of so on. For the sake of simplicity I shall it, have an imperfect color-sense, seems overlook these additions of Geiger, and curious enough to satisfy the most insa- consider the theory simply in relation to tiate lover of sensational science. But the Greeks, as put forward by Mr. Gladthe philologists, eager to make their con- stone. The nature of my argument is tribution to the many-sided color ques- such that what we find to be true of the tion, have now come forward with a theory Greeks must also hold in the case of which throws everything else in the shade. | other ancient peoples, mutatis mutandis. Basing their argument on the occurrence I wish to add a word or two, however, in in ancient literary records of certain pe- regard to the supposed analogy between culiarities in the use or absence of epi- the color-sense of Homer, and the phethets of color, these philologists would nomenon known as color-blindness. This have us believe that the color-sense of all analogy was timidly hinted at by Geiger, men was once in a rudimentary condition, and has been recently made the subject from which it has been gradually devel- of several communications to Nature by oped within a period accessible to philo- Dr. W. Pole. According to this view, logical research. Previous to this period modern color-blindness would be a form the world must then have presented to of reversion or atavism, recalling a time man the appearance of a photograph, or when all men were color-blind. Dr. Pole's rather a good stereoscopic view. It was arguments bear witness to an ingenuity the fertile imagination of Mr. Gladstone worthy of a metaphysician of the Hegelian |