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small an obstacle as a fallen tree.

All auxiliary forces and camp followers were sent on in front of the caravan, and if overtaken had to withdraw from the road, since they were not allowed to mingle with or interfere in any way with the main caravan. With the rearguard the available extra porters and prisoners marched, whose duty it was to collect and bring in any loads or sick that had fallen out of the ranks.

The caravan road itself merits some description. It is seldom more than ten inches wide, and wherever it goes its width never varies; whether crossing rocky uplands or traversing forests, descending mountains or the steep sides of ravines, it is always the same monotonous track. It is wearying enough to follow for a few hours, but when the hours grow into days, and the days into weeks, one comes to regard it almost in the light of a personal enemy. After crossing a scorching sandy plain, with its ary blades of grass a foot or two apart so drear and lonely that the insects do not even hum-one perhaps emerges on a rising rocky ground (for hours before seen as a grey streak in the distance), from whence the unending path stretches away in a yellow line towards the horizon. It may be that away to the northward, though the course has been a north-easterly one, a blue line of mountains is visible, and you know that, however hard they may be to climb, the path will turn aside and scale them at their steepest point. If it has led you into a fertile country, it winds about like a snake, forming itself into letter S's, and succeeds in doubling the distance to the village, apparently quite close an hour or two before. The hostile native looks upon this path as his friend. He digs holes in it a foot in diameter, and places sharp spikes or poisoned arrow-heads in them, laying dust-covered leaves over the opening, into which the unwary among the barefooted porters puts his foot, and becomes useless or dies on the road. A fallen tree across the way also serves the enemy; he places a spear in the grass or brushwood overhanging the VOL. XV. 776

LIVING AGE.

track on the other side, in such a position that the first man who steps over or jumps across the tree is impaled. When a man dies on the caravan road he is not buried, and the path takes a little turn aside two or three yards from the body, and returns to its course at the same distance on the other side of it. The loop thus formed remains forever-once having left the straight course, the path never returns to it again. A small thorny bush, a fallen tree, or a stone may be sufficient to turn it, and if a precipice or a ford forces it into a detour of yards or miles, it invariably returns to the point opposite to, and never very far from, the obstruction. Rivers and ravines the path usually ignores; whatever the difficulty of crossing them may be, it winds its way up the bank on the opposite side, neitner larger nor smaller for the fact that, though the river is perhaps fordable in the dry season, a bridge or canoe is often the only means of crossing during the wet.

From "The Fall of the Congo Arabs." By Sidney Langford Hinde, Late Captain Congo Free State Forces. Thomas Whittaker, Publisher.

"THE SCENTED GARDEN."

If we were to search the wide world over, ransack history, dive deep into the annals of the past, I doubt if there would be found any more perfect example of unselfish love than that which is exemplified in the wedded life of Lady Burton. With her it was always "Richard only." It is with this thought in our minds that we approach her crowning act of self-sacrifice, her last supreme offering on the altar of her love. I refer to the act whereby she deliberately sacrificed the provision her husband had made for her and faced poverty, and the contumely of her enemies, for the sake of his fair memory.

Lady Burton's first act after her husband's death was to lock up his manuscripts and papers to secure them against all curious and prying eyes-a wise and necessary act under the circumstances, and one which was suffi

cient to show that, great though her grief was, it did not rob her for one moment of her faculties. As soon as her husband's funeral was over, she went back to his rooms, locked the door securely and examined carefully all his books and papers, burning those which he had desired to be burned, and sorting and classifying the others. Among the manuscripts was Sir Richard's translation of the notorious "Scented Garden, Men's Hearts to Gladden, of the Shaykh el Nafzawih," which he had been working at the day before his death, completed all but one page, and the proceeds of which he had told his wife were to form her jointure. As his original edition of "The Arabian Nights" had brought in £10,000 profit, the "Scented Garden," beside which the "Arabian Nights" was a "baby tale," might reasonably have been expected to have produced as much if not more. Indeed, a few days after Sir Richard's death a man offered Lady Burton six thousand guineas down for the manuscript as it stood, and told her that he would relieve her of all risk and responsibility in the matter. She might, therefore, easily have closed with this offer without any one being the wiser, and if she had been inclined to drive a bargain she would doubtless have had no difficulty in securing double the price. As her husband's death had reduced her to comparative poverty, the temptation to an ordinary woman, even a good and conscientious woman, would have been irresistible; she could have taken the money, and have quieted her conscience with some of those sophistries which we can all call to our aid on occasion. But Lady Burton was not an ordinary woman, and the money side of the question never weighed with her for one moment.

called "The Scented Garden,' a transiation from the Arabic. It treated of a certain passion. Do not let any one suppose for a moment that Richard Burton ever wrote a thing from the impure point of view. He dissected a passion from every point of view, as a doctor may dissect a body, showing its source, its origin, its evil, and its good, and its proper uses, as designed by Providence and Nature, as the great Academician Watts paints them. In private life he was the most pure, the most refined and modest man that ever lived, and he was so guileless himself that he could never be brought to believe that other men said or used these things from any other standpoint. I, as a woman, think differently. The day before he died he called me into his room and showed me half a page of Arabic manuscript upon which he was working, and he said, "Tomorrow I shall have finished this, and I promise you after this I will never write another book upon this subject. I will take to our biography.'

"I told him it would be a happy day when he left off that subject, and that the only thing that reconciled me to it was that the doctors had said that it was so fortunate, with his partial loss of health, that he could find something to interest and occupy his days. He said, 'This is to be your jointure, and the proceeds are to be set apart for an annuity for you;' and I said, 'I hope not; I hope you will live to spend it like the other.' He said, 'I am afraid it will make a great row in England, because "The Arabian Nights" was a baby tale in comparison to this, and I am in communication with several men in England about it.' The next morning at 7 A.M. he had ceased to exist. Some days later, when I locked myself up in his rooms, and sorted and examined the

How she acted at this crisis in her life manuscripts, I read this one. No promis best told by herself.

"My husband had been collecting for fourteen years information and materials on a certain subject. His last volume of "The Supplemental Night" had been finished and out on November 13, 1888. He then gave himself up entirely to the writing of this book, which was

ise had been exacted from me, because the end had been so unforeseen, and I remained for three days in a state of perfect torture as to what I ought to do about it. During that time I received an offer from a man whose name shall be always kept private, for six thousand guineas for it. He said, 'I know from

fifteen hundred to two thousand men who will buy it at four guineas, i.e., at two guineas the volume; and as I shall not restrict myself to numbers, but supply all applicants on payment, I shall probably make £20,000 out of it.' I said to myself, 'Out of fifteen hundred men, fifteen will probably read it in the spirit of science in which it was written, the other fourteen hundred and eighty-five will read it for filth's sake, and pass it to their friends, and the harm done may be incalculable.' 'Bury it,' said one adviser; 'don't decide.' 'That means digging it up again, and reproducing at will.' 'Get a man to do it for you,' said No. 2, 'don't appear in it.' 'I have got that,' I said, 'I can take in the world, but I cannot deceive God Almighty, who holds my husband's soul in His hands.' I tested one man who was very earnest about it: 'Let us go and consult So-andso;' but he, with a little shriek of horror, said, 'Oh, pray don't let me have anything to do with it; don't let my name get mixed up in it, but it is a beautiful book, I know.'

"I sat down on the floor before the fire at dark, to consult my own heart, my own head. How I wanted a brother! My head told me that sin is the only rolling stone that gathers moss; that what a gentleman, a scholar, a man of the world may write when living, he would see very differently to what the poor soul would see standing naked before its God, with its good or evil deeds alone to answer for, and their consequences visible to it for the first moment, rolling on to the end of time. Oh for a friend on earth to stop and check them! What would he care for the applause of fifteen hundred men nowfor the whole world's praise, and God offended? My heart said, 'You can have six thousand guineas; your husband worked for you, kept you in a happy home, with honor and respect for thirty years. How are you going to reward him? That your wretched body may be fed and clothed and warmed for a few miserable months and years, will you let that soul, which is part of your soul, be left out in cold and darkness till the end of time, till all those sins which may

of

I

have been committed on account reading those writings have been expiated, or passed away perhaps forever? Why, it would be just parallel with the original thirty pieces of silver! fetched the manuscript and laid it on the ground before me, two large volumes' worth. Still my thoughts were, was it a sacrilege? It was his magnum opus, his last work that he was so proud of, that was to have been finished on the awful to-morrow-that never came. Will he rise up in his grave and curse me or bless me? The thought will haunt me to death, but Sadi and El Shaykh el Nafzawih, who were pagans, begged pardon of God and prayed not to be cast into hell-fire for having written them, and implored their friends to pray for them to the Lord, that he would have mercy on them. And then I said, 'Not only not for six thousand guineas, but not for six million guineas will I risk it.' Sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling, I burnt sheet after sheet, until the whole of the volumes were consumed."1

As to the act itself I am not called upon to express any opinion. But there can be no two opinions among fairminded people as to the heroism, the purity, and the sublime self-sacrifice of the motives which prompted Lady Bur-. ton to this deed. Absolutely devoted to her husband and his interests as she had been in his lifetime, she was equally jealous of his honor now that he was: dead. Nothing must tarnish the brightness of his good name. It was this: thought, above all others, which led her to burn "The Scented Garden." For this act the vials of misrepresentation and abuse were poured on Lady Burton's head. She was accused of the "bigotry of a Tarquemeda, the vandalism of a John Knox." She has been called hysterical and illiterate. It has been asserted that she did it from selfish motives, "for the sake of her own salvation, through the promptings of a benighted religion," for fear of the legal consequences which might fall upon her if she sold the book, for love of gain,

1 Lady Burton's letter to The Morning Post, June 19, 1891.

for love of notoriety, for love of "posing as a martyr," and so on. She was publicly vilified and privately abused, pursued with obscene, anonymous and insulting letters until the day of her death. In fact, every imputation was hurled at her, and she who might have answered all her persecutors with a word, held her peace, or broke it only to put them on another track. It was not merely the act itself which caused her suffering; it was the long persecution which followed her from the day her letter appeared in the Morning Post almost to the day she died. How keenly she felt it none but those who knew her best will ever know. A proud, high-spirited woman she had never schooled herself to stay her hand, but generally gave her adversaries back blow for blow; but these cowardly attacks she bore in silence, nay, more, she counted all the suffering as gain, for she was bearing it for the sake of the man she loved.

From "The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton. The story of her life. Told in part by herself' and in part by W. H. Wilkins. Dodd, Mead & Co., Publishers. 2 vols. Price $7.50.

MANGAN AND HIS POETRY.

Apollo has a class of might-havebeens whom he loves; poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, with thwarted growth and thinned voices; poets compounded of everything magical and fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of knowledge and patience, and which wants in the end, even as common water would, the essence of immortality. The making of a name is too often like the making of a fortune; the more scrupulous contestants are

Delicate spirits, pushed away In the hot press of the noonday. Mangan's is such a memory, captive and overborne. It may be unjust to lend him the epitaph of defeat, for he never strove at all. One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals

of English literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness and stagnant grief. He had no public; he was poor, infirm, homeless, loveless; travel and adventure were cut off from him, and he had no minor risks to run; the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams from a boy; morbid fancies mastered him as the rider masters his horse; the demon of opium, then the demon of alcohol, pulled him under, body and soul, despite a persistent and heart-breaking struggle, and he perished ignobly in his prime.

Worldly wisdom is not a gift left in Irish cradles. It was Mangan's instinct, as it was Goldsmith's, to "hitch his wagon to a star;" and presently to discover, without any change of countenance, that his star had no legs, and so to stand, a spectacle for the laughter of men and gods. He was unfair to himself, we know. And the world was unfair to him, and to his industry.

Mangan, as may be surmised, made no sustained flights; but there survive from his pen rather more than two thousand short compositions, about half of which are translations, or in some measure too generously acknowledged, inspired by poems in another language. We may roughly rate his purely original work (the finer half of which, again, he chose to call translation) as numbering fully a thousand pieces. To reprint Mangan in the bulk would be (and one may count that his first stroke of luck!) difficult. It would amount, moreover, to the sin of detraction. The thinnest duodecimo, contain ing at the most thirty-five poems, would adequately show the quintessence of his gift, to the few whose senses are quick at literary divination.

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with Emily Brontë, Hartley Coleridge, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, in 1849; three spirits of lavish promise, defrauded and unfulfilled like his own, yet happier than he, inasmuch as they have had since many liegemen and rememberers. Let him come forward at last in a quieter hour, with his own whimsical, misgiving manner, or with questions pathetically irrelevant, as one whom the fairies had led astray:

O sayest thou the soul shall climb
The magic mount she trod of old,
Ere childhood's time?

He has been, for a half-century, wandering on the dark marge of Lethe. It will not do, as yet, to startle him with gross applause. Otherwise, his gratified editor would like to repeat, introducing Clarence Mangan, the gallant words with which Schumann once began a review of the young Chopin: "Hats off, gentlemen; a genius!"

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