with a sudden gesture, and revealed Wan Lee, the Pagan, lying there dead!

Dead, my reverend friends, dead! Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace, eighteen hundred and sixty-nine, by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian school children!

As I put my hand reverently upon his breast, I felt something crumbling beneath

his blouse. I looked enquiringly at Hop Sing. He put his hand between the folds of silk and drew out something with the first bitter smile I had ever seen on the face of that pagan gentleman.

It was Wan Lee's porcelain god, crushed by a stone from the hands of those Christian iconoclasts!

No doubt many of our readers noticed a letter printed in the columns of a New York daily newspaper several weeks ago, in which the writer told the story of how he lost his umbrella. This letter was such a clever bit of writing as might have appeared in "The Spectator;" only, the English was that of our day, and not of Queen Anne's, and, if it were ever civil to go behind a writer's initials, we might have thought we recognized the signature of one of the real leaders in American journalism. Good as the letter was, however, it seems to us that the writer failed to see where the real difficulty lies in the great umbrella-question. And, as this is a question to which we have given a great deal of thought, and of which we are reasonably sure we have discovered the solution, we make no apology for asking the reader to hear what we have to say about it.

The umbrella is of so great antiquity that many archeologists suspect it to be as old as man himself. One scholar whose name would command universal respect for his opinion, if we only dared to give it, has declared in an unedited memoir his belief that the forbidden fruit was an umbrella. Be this as it may, there seems proof enough that umbrellas are very old. Beside the pictures on old Greek vases, and on the walls of Egyptian tombs, and on Chinese and Japanese porcelain, there is the remarkable fact that the Spanish for "man" is hombre, and that umbra, the root of our word "umbrella" is the Latin for a shade-facts which, if they prove anything, prove that man is a shadow, and that, originally, there could have been no difference between stealing an umbrella and

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stealing a man. We have not time to fight the etymologists on this question; we know that the prigs among them object to derivations such as we have just traced, and call those who offer them sciolists, tyros, and other snubbing names. trust our readers have a better opinion of us than to care much for what these gentlemen may say, and that when we stamp an etymology with our approval, they will accept it blindly.

Indeed, on this occasion, they must accept the derivation we propose if we are to be allowed to make our point. What we intend to prove is, that umbrellas have been for countless ages so identified with man, the fact that their name and his mean the same thing, proves it,—that they have become the universal touch-stone by which we test the true character of our fellow-creatures.

It is only of late, however, that a general agreement has been reached on this point. In the earlier ages other tests have been tried, and the success of some of them has led to too hasty generalizations. In the metallic ages, the gold and silver, the bronze and iron,-the ages when specie payments prevailed, small change was considered a very good touch-stone of honor. A man borrowed sixpences or shillings and forgot to pay them back :-that settled him, and he could be comfortably labelled and put away. But, of course, this could only serve as a test for rich and well-to-do people. Poor folk are chary in lending, though generous in giving, and would have ways enough of making a forgetful borrower uncomfortable.

Then, books were tried, but here the test was felt to be still more limited in its

field-book-owners and book-borrowers are, in reality, a small and unimportant class. It is true that every private library, especially if it be an old one and in a country-house, shows disastrous traces of the ravages of the book-borrower. The first volumes of nearly all the books are pretty sure to be gone. Whoever saw in such a library the first volumes of The Decline and Fall," or of Pamela," or of "Nouvelle Héloïse," or of any of the books that furnish good, solid reading? But this dishonesty only affects the character of the educated portion of the community. How are we to get at the character of the average villager?

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Postage-stamps have been proposed, and for a time there seemed a hope that the true test had been found in them. But then,the people who borrow postage-stamps and neither pay for them nor return them are all members of the letter-writing class, and however large that class may be, it falls short of including all humanity, so that postage-stamps have been given up in their

turn as a test.

As civilization becomes more and more refined, the hopes of those who seek after a sign by which a gentleman can be infallibly distinguished, settle with increasing unanimity about the umbrella. Really, if we look at it, there is no other movable article of what we may call man's vestatory furniture (we invent this word to cover finger-rings, eye-glasses, cane, sleeve-buttons, knives, pencils, etc., which, of course, are not clothing) that is so universal an adjunct to the modern human being as an

umbrella. Everybody must have one, be he, or she, rich or poor, high or low, learned or unlearned, lay or cleric, good or bad. Umbrellas are made of every style and shape, and of all degrees of costliness, to meet the craving of humanity at large. From Queen Victoria to the King of Ashantee, from Mr. Stewart to the apple-woman, from Gen. Washington to Ben. Butler or Bill Tweed, everybody feels the need of an umbrella. And the universality of the need makes the universality of the test. The temptation to appropriate, annex, convey, or, to put it bluntly, to steal, umbrellas is one from which no son of Adam is exempt. A man may be punctilious about returning pennies; he may walk five miles to return a borrowed book, or he may never be known to ask for a postage-stamp without paying for it on the spot-and yet he may not be able to resist taking a better umbrella than his own from the rack by mistake, and he may be always forgetting to return the very stylish one he borrowed from a confiding friend on a rainy evening. When phrenology, and physiognomy, and dress, and reputation fail, the umbrella is an unfailing sensitive-paper to detect the touch of a dishonest hand. If Diogenes had known all that we know in our day, he would not have wasted his time tramping about Athens with a lantern, to find an honest man. He would have rolled himself up comfortably in his big earthen wine-jar, with his head on one of his dogs, and gone to sleep, leaving his green cotton umbrella leaning up against the outside of his tub.

I WILL say at the outset, as I believe some one else has said on a like occasion, that in this narrative I shall probably describe myself more than the objects I look upon. The facts and particulars of the case have already been set down in the guide-books and in innumerable books of travel. I shall only attempt to give an account of the pleasure and satisfaction I had in coming face to face with things in the mother country, seeing them as I did with kindred and sympathizing eyes.

The ocean was a dread fascination to me a world whose dominion I had never entered, but I proved to be such a wretched sailor that I am obliged to confess, Hibernian-fashion, that the happiest moment I spent upon the sea was when I set my foot upon the land.

Almost the only thing about my first sea voyage that I remember with pleasure is the circumstance of the little birds that, during the first few days out, took refuge on the steamer. The first afternoon, just

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as we were losing sight of land, a delicate little wood-bird, the black and white creeping warbler,-having lost its reckoning, in making perhaps its first Southern voyage, came aboard. It was much fatigued and had a disheartened, demoralized look. After an hour or two it disappeared, having, I fear, a hard pull to reach the land in the face of the wind that was blowing, if indeed it reached it at all.

The next day, just at night I observed a small hawk sailing about conveniently near the vessel, but with a very lofty, independent mien, as if he had just happened that way on his travels, and was only lingering to take a good view of us. It was amusing to observe his coolness and haughty unconcern in that sad plight he was in; by nothing in his manner betraying that he was several hundred miles at sea, and did not know how he was going to get back to land. But presently I noticed he found it not inconsistent with his dignity to alight on the rigging under friendly cover of the tops'l, where I saw his feathers rudely ruffled by the wind, till darkness set in. If the sailors did not disturb him during the night, he certainly needed all his fortitude in the morning to put a cheerful face on his situation.

The third day, when we were perhaps off Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, the American pipit or tit-lark, from the far North, a brown bird about the size of a sparrow, dropped upon the deck of the ship, so nearly exhausted, that one of the sailors was on the point of covering it with his hat. It stayed about the vessel nearly all day, flitting from point to point, or hopping along a few feet in front of the promenaders, and prying into every crack and crevice for food. Time after time I saw it start off with a reassuring chirp, as if determined to seek the land, but before it had got many rods from the ship its head would seem to fail it, and after circling about for a few moments, back it would come, more discouraged than ever.

These little waifs from the shore! Igazed upon them with a strange, sad interest. They were friends in distress, but the seabirds, skimming along indifferent to us, or darting in and out among those watery hills, I seemed to look upon as my natural enemies. They were the nurslings and favorites of the sea, and I had no sympathy with them.

No doubt the number of our land birds that actually perish in the sea during their VOL. VIII.-36

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autumn migration, being carried far out of their course by the prevailing westerly winds of this season, is very great. casionally one makes the passage to Great Britain, by following the ships and finding them at convenient distances along the route, and I have been told that over fifty different species of our more common birds, such as robins, starlings, grosbeaks, thrushes, etc., have been found in Ireland, having, of course, crossed in this way. What numbers of these little navigators of the air are misled and wrecked during those dark and stormy nights, on the light-houses alone that line the Atlantic Coast? Is it Celia Thaxter who tells of having picked up her apron full of sparrows, warblers, flycatchers, etc., at the foot of the light-house, on the Isles of Shoals, one morning after a storm, the ground being still strewn with birds of all kinds that had dashed themselves against the beacon, bewildered and fascinated by its tremendous light?

If a land bird perishes at sea, a sea bird is equally cast away upon the land, and I have known the Sooty Turn, with its almost omnipotent wing, to fall down utterly famished and exhausted, two hundred miles from salt water.

But my interest in these things did not last beyond the third day. About this time we entered what the sailors call the "devil's hole," and a very respectably sized hole it is, extending from the Banks of Newfoundland to Ireland, and in all seasons and weathers it seems to be well stirred up.

Amidst the tossing and the rolling, the groaning of penitent travelers, and the laboring of the vessel as she climbed those dark unstable mountains, my mind reverted feebly to Huxley's statement, that the bottom of this sea, for over a thousand miles, presents to the eye of science a vast chalk plain, over which one might drive as over a floor, and I tried to solace myself by dwelling upon the spectacle of a solitary traveler whipping up his steed across it. The imaginary rattle of his wagon was like the sound of lutes and harps, and I would rather have clung to his axletree than been rocked in the best berth in the ship.

LAND.

On the tenth day, about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we sighted Ireland. The

ship came up from behind the horizon where for so many days she had been buffeting with the winds and the waves, but had never lost the clew, bearing straight as an arrow for the mark. I think if she had been aimed at a fair sized artillery target, she would have crossed the ocean and struck the bull's eye.

In Ireland, instead of an emerald isle rising out of the sea, I beheld a succession of cold, purplish mountains, stretching along the north-eastern horizon, but I am bound to say that no tints of bloom or verdure were ever half so welcome to me as were those dark, heather-clad ranges. It is a feeling which a man can have but once in his life, when he first sets eyes upon a foreign land, and in my case, to this feeling was added the delightful thought that the "devil's hole" would soon be cleared and my long fast over.

Presently, after the darkness had set in, signal rockets were let off from the stern of the vessel, writing their burning messages upon the night, and when answering rockets rose slowly up far ahead, I suppose we all felt that the voyage was essentially done, and no doubt a message flashed back under the ocean, that the "Scotia " had arrived.

The sight of the land had been such medicine to me that I could now hold up my head and walk about, and so went down for the first time and took a look at the engines-those twin monsters that had not stopped once, or apparently varied their stroke at all since leaving Sandy Hook; I felt like patting their enormous cranks and shafts with my hand; then at the coal bunks, vast cavernous recesses in the belly of the ship, like the chambers of the original mine in the mountains, and saw the men and firemen at work in a sort of purgatory of heat and dust. When it is remembered that one of these ocean steamers consumes about one hundred tons of coal per day, it is easy to imagine what a burden the coal for a voyage alone must be, and one is not at all disposed to laugh at Dr. Lardner, who proved so convincingly that no steamship could ever cross the ocean because it could not carry coal enough to enable it to make the passage.

On the morrow, a calm, lustrous day, we steamed at our leisure up the Channel and across the Irish Sea, the coast of Wales and her groups of lofty mountains in full view nearly all day. The mountains were in profile, like the Catskills viewed from the

Hudson below, only it was evident there were no trees or shrubbery upon them, and their summits, on this last day of September, were white with the snow.

ASHORE.

The first day or half day ashore is, of course, the most novel and exciting; but who, as Mr. Higginson says, can describe his sensations and emotions this first half day. It is a page of travel that has not yet been written. Paradoxical as it may seem, one generally comes out of pickle much fresher than he went in. The sea has given him an enormous appetite for the land. Every one of his senses is like a hungry wolf clamorous to be fed. For my part I had suddenly emerged from a condition bordering on that of the hibernating animals-a condition in which I had neither ate, nor slept, nor thought, nor moved, when I could help it, into not only a full, but a keen and joyous, possession of my health and faculties. It was almost a metamorphosis. I was no longer the clod I had been, but a bird exulting in the earth and air, and in the liberty of motion. Then to remember it was a new earth and a new sky that I was beholding, that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a fable, but an actual fact there before my eyes and under my feet-why should I not exult? Go to! I will be indulged. These trees, those fields, that bird darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys picking blackberries in October, those English flowers by the road-side, (stop the carriage while I leap out and pluck them ;) the homely, domestic look of things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those thick-coated horses, those big-footed, coarsely-clad,clear-skinned men and women, this massive, homely, compact architecture-let me have a good look, for this is my first hour in England, and I am drunk with the joy of seeing! This housefly even, let me inspect it, and that swallow skimming along so familiarly; is he the same I saw trying to cling to the sails of the vessel the third day out? or is the swallow the swallow the world over? This grass I certainly have seen before, and this red and white clover, but this daisy and dandelion are not the same, and I have come three thousand miles to see the mullen cultivated in a garden, and christened the velvet plant.

As we sped through the land, the heart

of England, toward London, I thought my eyes would never get their fill of the landscape, and that I would lose them out of my head by their eagerness to catch every object as we rushed along! How they reveled, how they followed the birds and the game, how they glanced ahead on the track-that marvelous track!—or shot off over the fields and downs finding their delight in the streams, the roads, the bridges, the splendid breeds of cattle and sheep in the fields, the superb husbandry, the rich mellow soil, the drainage, the hedges-in the inconspicuousness of any given feature and the mellow tone and homely sincerity of all; now dwelling fondly upon the groups of neatly modeled stacks, then upon the field occupations, the gathering of turnips and cabbages, or the digging of potatoes, -how I longed to turn up the historic soil into which had passed the sweat and virtue of so many generations, with my own spade, then upon the quaint, old thatched houses, or the cluster of tiled roofs, then catching at a church spire across a meadow (and it is all meadow) or at the remains of tower or wall overrun with ivy!

Here, something almost human looks out at you from the landscape nature; here has been so long under the dominion of man, has been taken up and lain down by him so many times, worked over and over with his hands, fed and fattened by his toil and industry, and on the whole, has proved herself so willing and tractable, that she has taken on something of his image, and seems to radiate his presence. She is completely domesticated, and no doubt loves the titivation of the harrow and plow. The fields look half conscious, and if ever the cattle have great and tranquil thoughts," as Emerson suggests they do, it must be when lying upon these lawns and meadows. I noticed that the trees, the oaks and elms, looked like fruit trees, or as if they had felt the humanizing influences of so many generations of men, and were betaking themselves from the woods to the orchard. The game is more than half tame, and one could easily understand that it had a keeper.

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But the look of those fields and parks went straight to my heart. It is not merely that they were so smooth and cultivated, but that they were so benign and maternal, so redolent of cattle and sheep and of patient, homely, farm labor. One gets only here and there a glimpse of such in

this country. I see occasionally about our farms a patch of an acre or half acre upon which has settled this atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry; a choice bit of meadow about the barn or orchard, or near the house, which has had some special fattening, perhaps been the site of some former garden or barn, or homestead, or which has had the wash of some building, where the feet of children have played for generations, and the flocks and herds been fed in winter, and where they love to lie and ruminate at night-a piece of sward thick and smooth, and full of warmth and nutriment, where the grass is greenest and freshest in spring, and the hay finest and thickest in summer.

This is the character of the whole of England that I saw. I had been told I should see a garden, but I did not know before to what extent the earth could become a living repository of the virtues of so many generations of gardeners. The tendency to run to weeds and wild growths seems to have been utterly eradicated from the soil, and if anything were to spring up spontaneously, I think it would be cabbage and turnips, or grass and grain.

And yet, to American eyes, the country seems quite uninhabited, there are so few dwellings, and so few people. Such a landscape at home would be dotted all over with thrifty farm-houses, each with its group of painted out-buildings, and along every road and highway would be seen the well-to-do turnouts of the independent free-holders. But in England the dwellings of the poor people, the farmers, are so humble and inconspicuous and are really so far apart, and the halls and the country-seats of the aristocracy are hidden in the midst of vast estates, that the landscape seems almost deserted, and it is not till you see the towns and great cities that you can understand where so vast a population keeps itself.

SO

Another thing that would be quite sure to strike my eye on this my first ride across British soil and on all subsequent rides, was the enormous number of birds and fowls of various kinds that swarmed in the air or covered the ground. It was truly amazing. It seemed as if the feathered life of a whole continent must have been concentrated upon this island. Indeed, I doubt if a sweeping together of all the birds of the United States into any two of the largest States, would people the earth and air more fully. There appeared