Gershom quailed. So did the girl for a mo- | less a fact, that as he stood looking from the ment. She walked weakly away from him, with wet darkness to Hitty, and from Hitty back to a little moan like a hurt child's, not considering the dark wetness, and from both into his future, whether it were dignified or not-acting herself he felt himself to be suddenly aggrieved, afflictout, as she always did. ed, irreparably injured. It is undeniable that at that moment he would rather have had Hitty for his wife than any other woman in the world. "Don't, Hitty!" he whispered, hoarsely; "don't! I never meant to leave you for any other woman on earth. We can be happy together yet. I know I am not worthy, but if you would come back to me-' "I can never come back to you." Hitty spoke distinctly. She stepped up to him, but with a certain shining in her eyes which warned him not to touch so much as the fold of her dress. "I can never come to you again. But, standing right here where I can see you, I should like to hear all about it, if I can." He told her then, I believe, as best he could, the story of his last three years, brokenly, in an agony of distress and self-abasement greater far than hers. When it was all finished, I have been told that she touched him very gently on the shoulder, and said: "My poor Gershom! My poor boy!" and cried a little-her first and only tears that night -for his sake. "It was all one of my blunders, Gershom. Don't fret about it. I should have known, I should have known! All these years you have been wearing and worrying on with me. All these years you have tried so hard, I see, to love me as you ought to love your wife. Come, see, now, how it is; you did not see; you did not understand. You meant to marry me for my sake all this long, long while. Gershom, if you had done that I should have hated you! You would have been wicked, wicked, wicked! It was for my sake you should have told me! It was for my sake you should not have let me think of you for one day, nor hour, unless I was the dearest thing in all the world to you. It is for my sake that I must never, never be your wife. It has all been a terrible mistake; but you did not know. Never mind! There! Say good-by now, and go, for I am tired." He obeyed her, bewildered and dumb. In were wet. "I believe there is something in the Bible," said Hitty, when he turned, in silence still, to go, "about the kiss of peace. You must never kiss me now; but that you may not think I mind it much, dear, or ever think I blame you, or ever wish you had not told me, I should like if you please-to kiss you good-by." She put both hands upon his shoulders and very gravely kissed him on the forehead. He received the touch mutely, and went down between the rows of wet flowers with uncovered head. Hitty stood to watch him till he had passed quite beyond the line of light and wet gravel, and listened a little to the dripping from the hemlock branches, and noticed the creeper staring from the porch. Then she went in and shut the door. WEBSTER, CLAY, CALHOUN, AND HOW THEY SAT FOR THEIR DAGUERREOTYPES. taking portraits by the aid of sunlight a staring scarlet blossom, had brushed in from and chemical combinations, Webster, Clay, Calthe porch when the door was opened, and peer-houn, and Jackson were past the prime of life. ed, nodding, about. Two of them had wasted much time in sitting to artists; and if they had been captious men they could have told of long, dreary hours they had dreamily, and often miserably, passed in the studios of painters and sculptors. In fact, Clay and Webster had been so much "persecuted" in this way that they were nervous at the very suggestion of the idea of entering an artist's studio. Calhoun was not a popular idol Hitty, standing quietly to close the door upon him, was a sight to which he could have kneeled in reverence. The girl's eyes were wide open; her lips closed and still; her hands folded into one another; all the woman in her had blossomed, opened, enriched itself in this crisis, to which God, or Cousin Phipps, had brought them. It may be a curious fact in the psychological with the masses, and his immediate constituhistory of young men in the abstract, or of this ents seemed never to have taxed his patience young man in the concrete, but it is neverthe-much in endeavors to obtain his "counterfeit presentment." Jackson lived so much on the corridors of the City Hall were lively with noise. "frontiers" before he was President that he At the very moment Mr. Clay was to sit "a comseemed to have had little experience with art-mittee" of some kind broke open the door into ists, if we may judge from the fact that he asked Mr. Powers, the sculptor, "how he was getting along with his portraits?" meaning busts. When these great men were in the very acme of their fame the daguerreotype came into vogue, and it was deemed a desirable thing to preserve their faces for posterity by the aid of the new process; and while they would probably have refused to sit long and weary hours and days to accomplish this desired object, they made no objection to giving a flitting moment of their valuable time for the purpose. Mr. Webster sat for his picture in the year 1849, in the art-gallery corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, opposite St. Paul's Church. He was the guest at the time of the Astor House, in which establishment he was by the proprietors treated with the most princely consideration. He received the request to sit for his picture, after being informed it would only occupy a few moments of his time, with a prompt assent, and made no other remarks than were necessary to fix the time and place. Punctually to the moment, and unattended, he was at the gallery. He was expected, and when he made his appearance his dignified presence, massive head, his large dark eye, and commanding political position almost paralyzed the then comparatively inexperienced workmen. His style of dress was also calculated to attract attention, the prominent object of which was a blue dress-coat ornamented with richly-gilt but tons. Under direction he quietly took his seat, and was as kindly disposed as a well-trained child. It was more difficult in those days than now to take a picture, but Mr. Webster submitted with the greatest good-nature to every request, and at the proper moment was as motionless as a statue. The picture, under such favorable circumstances, was soon obtained, and Mr. Webster, on being told that such was the case, his face brightened up with an expressive smile, and without other demonstration, except a formal bow, he left the gallery. Mr. Clay sat for his picture in New York in 1850, directly after he had announced himself in favor of the "Compromise Act" of that year. The attention he received from our citizens made it almost impossible to see him. Mr. Clay, whose health was then beginning to decline, declared that he was overwhelmed with demands on his time. His friends, however, were very urgent, and he finally decided that he would gratify their wishes, and appointed the morning of the day he was to have a public reception at the City Hall. Mr. Matsell was then Chief of Police, and by his assistance the camera was taken to the Governor's Room, curtains were tacked up, and every thing arranged, Mr. Clay being present, and expressing himself relieved by the quietness of the room. The crowd of people in the mean time outside of the building was becoming demonstrative, and the the refreshment-room, where a lunch was spread, and commenced helping themselves with the greatest freedom; from the lunch-room they came into the Governor's Room. Mr. Clay acted with great presence of mind, by seeming to not notice the intrusion. He was dressed with unusual care, for he had set apart some hour of the day for the especial reception of the ladies. The fashion of the day for the neck was a high satin stock, with standing collar to match, which gave a singular stiffness to the whole costume. When every thing was announced as in readiness Mr. Clay took his seat, surrounded by his host of admirers, who seemed wonderfully delighted with this "private view." For a moment it appeared as if the real object of the moment would be defeated. Mr. Clay, however, suddenly waved his hand, which had the effect to command the utmost silence; then dropped both before him, one grasped within the other. While the process of taking the picture continued, which was for some seconds, many of the spectators, unaccustomed to mental discipline, grew pale in their efforts to subdue their interest in what was going on, or from fear of being rude by some unfortunate interruption. Mr. Clay all the while seeming to be perfectly at his ease; the blood flowed calmly through his cheeks, his eyes beamed with peculiar intelligence, and his large, expressive mouth was firm but kindly disposed; he could not have been more self-possessed if alone in his study. When the click of the instrument announced that the affair was ended, an enthusiastic but subdued demonstration was made by the spectators. Mr. Clay took the hint, and gracefully rising, put every one at ease by commencing conversation with those persons nearest to him, and he did this as if he had not been interrupted. In a few moments the room was relieved of cameras and extra curtains, the doors were thrown open to the public, and then proceeded the last and probably the grandest reception Mr. Clay while living ever received in New York. Mr. Calhoun sat for his picture in Washington city in the year 1849-less than two years before he died. His hair, which in his younger days was dark, and stood so frowningly over his broad, square forehead, was now long, gray, and thin, and combed away from his face and fell behind his ears. Mr. Calhoun was dressed in a suit of black, over which he wore a long cloak. Nothing in human form could have exceeded his dignity of manner and impressive personal appearance that day. He came promptly in accordance with his appointment, accompanied by his daughter, Mrs. Klempson. The day was cloudy and unfavorable for the business proposed. Mr. Calhoun seemed to feel this, but was at the same time very obliging, and was constantly making some kind remark about any delay or accident that might occur. The first trial, owing to the floating clouds and Calhoun's eyes were cavernous, they seemed so deeply set in his head, but there was a deep blue in their depths that appeared trembling with a threatening storm; and yet there was, for all this, inconsistent as it may. seem, a wonderful sense of repose. Jackson's eye was of a bluish-gray, dashed with yellow and red, that in his youthful days made it look so hot, red, and terrible. It was ever trembling by the agitations it had been accustomed to, and was constantly changing, one moment stern and defiant, the next quiet and peaceful; the imperious was, however, always predominant. murky atmosphere, consumed some thirty sec-| gaze. General Jackson's picture was taken at the Hermitage in the spring of 1845. He was at the time a confirmed invalid, so much so that his death was a possible event at any moment. Against the wishes of his household, who were only solicitous for his comfort, he would know who called upon him, and against the positive advice of his attending physician he persisted in gratifying those who had "come so far" by having his picture taken. On the morning appointed he caused himself to be dressed with especial care, and bolstered up with pillows and cushions. He was very determined in his manner, and would not listen to any denial. At this time his hair, once such a remarkable steelgray, and which then stood like a mass of bayonets round his forehead, was now soft and creamy white, and combed quietly away from his temples, and fell upon his shoulders. When the moment came that he should sit still he nerved himself up with the same energy that characterized his whole life, and his eye was stern and fixed and full of fire. The task accomplished, he relapsed into his comparatively helpless condition. When relieved from pain he was pleasant and courtly, yet never seemed to be entirely satisfied with the restraints imposed upon him as an invalid. In looking through the camera glass into the eyes of these remarkable men, Webster's seemed to be dark and mysterious, where way down in profound depths were hidden strange mysteries. Clay's was a light bluish-gray, and was always restless, the pupil of which seemed to be constantly trembling from the electrical effects of the controlling mind; it was fascinating, and caused you to look away from its concentrated THE PLAINS, AS I CROSSED THEM TEN YEARS AGO. ["The Plains," as seen from the windows of a “Silver Palace" rail-car, well stocked with creature comforts, and traversing a region covered with houses and fences, will soon be familiar to traveling Americans: but the Plains as they were till the Iron Horse first careered over them-as they still are every where else than within sight of his track-have been seen by comparatively few: one of whom has made the following record of his impressions.-HORACE GREELEY.] THE Mississippi is the King of Rivers. Tak ing rise almost on the northern limit of the temperate zone, it pursues its majestic course nearly due south to the verge of the tropic, with its tributaries washing the Alleghanies on the one hand and the Rocky Mountains on the other, throughout the entire length of those great mountain chains. The Amazon, or La Plata, may possibly bear to the sea an equal volume of waters; the Nile flows through more uniformly genial climates, and ripples over grander and more ancient relics of the infancy of mankind; the Ganges, or the Hoang-ho, may be intimately blended with the joys and griefs, the fears and hopes, of more millions of human beings; while the Euphrates, the Danube, or the Rhine, is far richer in historic associations and bloody, yet glorious, memories: but the Mississippi still justifies its proud appellation of "The Father of Waters." Its valley includes more than one million square miles of the richest soil on earth, and is capable of sustaining in plenty half the population of the globe; its head-springs are frozen half, the year, while cane ripens and frost is rarely seen at its mouth; and a larger and richer area of its surface is well adapted at once to Indian corn, to wheat, and to grass-to the apple, the peach, and the grape-than of any other commensurate region of earth. Its immense prairies are gigantic natural gardens, which need but the plow to adapt them to the growth of the most exacting and exhausting plants. It is the congenial and loved home of the choicest animals: I judge that more game is now roving at will over its immeasurable wilds and pastures than is found on an equal area all the world besides. It is the geographic heart of North America, and probably contains fully half the arable land in the New World north of the Isthmus of Darien. Its recent progress in industry and civiliza tion has been rapid beyond parallel. birth of this century, its only city was a village; its total white population was less than one million. To-day, it has five cities, averaging two hundred thousand inhabitants each, and its civilized population exceeds fifteen millions. At the on the Missouri and its affluents; but human genius can never wholly overcome the obstacles to secure and speedy navigation presented by the nature of that resistless current, or rather of the country it traverses. The eager thousands pressing westward overland each summer to the shores of the Pacific find no relief from the length, the weariness, of their tedious journey in the shrill but welcome whistle of the firepropelled, floating caravanserai. For weeks, they stalk in dusty, sombre array, beside the broad, impetuous Platte: finding obstruction, not furtherance, in its rippling, treacherous current; this moment scarcely knee-deep, and the next far over head; only their thirst, with that of their fainting beasts, is assuaged thereby, For all other uses, its bed might as well-perhaps better-be a stretch of uniformly thirsty, torrid sand. And to its luxuriant and still unpeopled expanse all nations, all races, are yet eagerly flocking. The keen-eyed sons of cold and hard New England there meet the thrifty Dutchmen of Pennsylvania, the disinherited children of Scandinavia, of Northern Germany, and of the British Isles. From every quarter, every civilized land, the hungry, the portionless, the daring, hie to the Great Valley, there to forget the past buffets of niggard fortune and hew out for their offspring the homes of plenty and comfort denied to their own rugged youth. Each year, as it flits, sees the cultivated portion of the Great Valley expand; sees the dominion of the brute and the savage contracted and driven back; sees the aggregate product of its waying fields and fertile glades dilate and increase. Another century, if signalized by no unforeseen calamity, will witness the Great Valley the home of one hundred millions of energetic, efficient, intelligent farmers and artisans, and its chief marts the largest inland cities of the globe. The Mississippi and its eastern tributaries are among the most placid, facile, tractable of rivers. A single fall wholly arrests navigation on the former; the Ohio rolls its bright volume a thousand miles unbroken by one formidable cataract. If half the steam-vessels on earth are not found on these waters, the proportion is not much less than that. It may almost be said that steam navigation and the development of the Great Valley have hitherto gone hand in hand, and that the former is the vital impulse, the indispensable main-spring, of the latter. For the wide PLAINS, which slope imperceptibly, regularly upward from the bluffs of the Missouri to the bases of the Rocky Mountains, are unlike any other region of earth. They labor under what, with no reference to our current politics, may be fitly characterized as a chronic deficiency of back-bone. Rock, to be sure, is sometimes seen here in place; but very rarely, save in the buttes, or perpendicular faces of hills, which are mainly confined to the vicinity of mountains, and are obviously a sort of natural adobe-a modern product of sun and rain and wind, out of the mingled clay and sand which form the subsoil of all this region. Apart from this butte formation, the Plains have little or no rock, save at unfathomed depths; and their larger streams run through valleys and over beds washed and worn through countless centuries to a depth of hundreds of feet below the ordinary level of the country, yet exposing no rock in their beds—nothing still but clay and sand-sand in their channels, clay in their intervales and along their banks, save where some tributary--perhaps dry throughout most of each summer-has brought down additional miles of coarse, heavy, yielding, clogging sand, across which the teams of traders or immigrants plod slowly their weary way as they follow up the banks of the central stream. There is no eastern affluent of the Great River whose sands have not been plowed by adventurous keels almost to their sources; and the spectacle of a steamboat pilot backing his engine to let a yoke of oxen and cart ford unharmed ahead of his stern-wheeled, light-drawing craft, is probably peculiar to this region. The Ohio River captain who averred that his boat drew so little that she could get on by the help of a moist sur- Half a dozen ridges of stubborn Eastern face or a smart dew was less extravagant than granite, ribbing these Plains, would have comhe would have been in uttering the same hyper-pletely changed the character and destiny of bole any where else. But, the moment the Great River is crossed, all this is changed. The turbid, resistless Missouri waters a far larger area than the other "inland sea" of Mr. Calhoun, wherewith it blends at St. Louis; yet its tonnage is but a fraction when compared with that of the latter; and, while boats of liberal size are overshadowed by the Alleghanies at almost each day's journey along their western base, the rays of no setting şun were ever yet intercepted on their way to a steamboat deck by the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Time will doubtless multiply the keels plying the central Western world. Behind or above those ridges, lakes and marshes would have been formed, arresting the sweep of fires and insuring the growth of ample timber: water-power, building-stone, and other aids to industry, would have incited to settlement and civilized effort; in due time, arts would have flourished and cities risen where all is now, and seems to have ever been, savage solitude and bleak desolation. For in the absence of resisting ridges of rock, sometimes rising above or nearly to the surface, and of consequent lakes or swamps, annual fires, impelled by furious gales, sweep mercilessly over every foot of the country which has still virtue enough in its soil to evoke a tolerable growth of herbage; while the flooding rains of autumn and winter, the melting snows of spring, acting upon a clayey surface unprotected by rocks or matted roots, constantly wash and gully it away, carrying off millions of tons of it annually to render opaque and milky the waters of the Arkansas, Kansas, Platte, and Niobrarah, and render the Missouri and lower Mississippi gigantic rivers of pea-soup-the least pellucid and most fertilizing streams under the sun. deeper subsoil and depositing them, in the shape of ashes or of decaying stalks, on the surface; and that moisture would thus be retained and other plants ultimately encouraged to germinate and grow under the protection of this much dispraised annual, which, nevertheless, was not created in vain, nor yet to curse, but rather to bless mankind. Weeds and noxious plants are confessions of human ignorance. Were we but wise enough, every one would contribute to our sustenance and comfort, or to those of the animals who do. It is the mind, the human soul, that has run to weeds. Were but that put right, we should realize that nothing else is wrong. Each year sees them bear to and squander upon the ocean a wealth of fertility, a volume of plant-food, adequate to the production of ample bread and meat for all the beggars on earth; Drouth is, throughout each summer, the but each year, alas! sees the Plains still farther master scourge of the Plains. No rain-or denuded and impoverished by this same pro- next to none--falls on them from May till Occess, which threatens to continue till the crack tober. By day, hot suns bake them; by night, of doom. Nay: the process tends ever to self- fierce winds sweep them; parching the earth acceleration; for, as the streams and water-to cavernous depths; withering the scanty vegcourses are annually gullied still deeper and deeper, the exposure of the intervening hills and glades to abrasion and waste from falling and running water becomes greater; and the more the soil is washed away and impoverished the less capable it becomes of producing those plants and grasses which can alone, by the abundance and tenacity of their interlacing roots, present some barrier to this sweep of devastation. There is urgent need of some great genius, some creative Napoleon, some Liebig of the western wastes, to tell us by what means this desolation may be arrested and overcome. etation, and causing fires to run wherever a thin vesture of dead herbage may have escaped the ravages of the previous autumn. Of course, no young tree escapes destruction, unless it cowers behind the perpendicular, herbless bank of some gullying, washing stream, or stands in the low, wet, narrow bottom of some unfailing creek. Even here, the slender belt of scanty, indifferent timber-usually the elsewhere worthless cotton-wood-is often set upon by a fierce prairie-fire, driven through the dead grass to windward by some resistless gale, and is charred and blackened to lifelessness, save at the roots. Yet from those roots springs a new I ventured timidly to suggest the Canada growth of luxuriant shoots, and, if no fresh disthistle as, in the absence of a better, a plant ad-aster is encountered, these shoots develop rapmirably adapted to counteract this fatal tend- idly into trees, while their predecessors fall, ency-to bar the road to ruin-defying drouth decay, and are forgotten. But, let the fires by its facility of piercing the earth to any imag-ravage them for two or three seasons successiveinable depth and drawing thence sustenance ly, the vigor of the roots is exhausted, and the and solace under the most scorching suns-a trees disappear forever. plant which affords nourishment in later Spring and early Summer to nearly all ruminating animals, especially if it be cut and slightly salted a few hours before it is eaten; which sends its seeds to great distances on the wings of the wind, and which would laugh to scorn the rav-gether. ages of the fires of October and November. There may be plants better adapted to the end in view than this-I sincerely hope there are-possibly the Alfalfa (or Chilian clover) is one of them-and I trust the best may be chosen and propagated. My own suggestion was made to incite, not foreclose, inquiry and discussion; and I shall be most gratified to see it largely improved upon. But, even if there be no plant better adapted to the end in view than the Canada thistle, I insist that a very moderate outlay would insure the general diffusion of this one over the parched plains and naked, water-worn, clayey hill-sides of the Far West; that such diffusion would rapidly arrest the waste and loss of their soil, while gradually restoring their fertility by drawing up mineral elements from the Hence, as prairie-fires are kindled far more frequently and wantonly by white men than by Indians, timber on the Plains has visibly been diminishing throughout the last fifty years, and threatens at no remote day to disappear alto The bleached skeletons of dead cotton-woods, and, as you approach the Rocky Mountains, of pines also, still linger beside creek-beds where no living tree has been seen for an age; while the thin screens of timber along many streams have for miles been swept away by the relentless axe of camping teamster or emigrant. Rivers sink and are lost for miles in beds where water was formerly visible nearly through the summer; what were once perennial brooks are now for months but stretches of thirsty, scorching sand. Grass now springs but in patches, in hollows wherein the drifted snow lies deep far into spring, where it formerly overspread miles of hill and glade. And the predominant tendency, as wherever matters are left to the anarchical caprice and short-sighted greed of coarse, selfish men |