to similar lapses in this particular, are probably satisfied with the explanation. It would be difficult for a layman to understand how the testimony given by the witness on the stand can affect even remotely the question of the guilt or innocence of Mr. Beecher. But great are the mysteries of the law, and the evidence having been received, whether material or not, every method must be adopted to make it appear untrustworthy. The last and to ordinary minds most unjustifiable expedient to accomplish this end, is the dissection of the life of the witness and the disclosure of some of the moral weaknesses in his previous history. It had been stated in the testimony of the morning that the witness had once been a candidate for the office of attorney-general of Massachusetts, and had been defeated. This was a mine which might be worked with the hope of developing some of the precious metal. "I understand you to say that you were a candidate for the position of attorney-general in your State?" says Mr. Beach. "We don't elect the beaten ticket down there," says the witness, appreciating the blunder of the counsel. "I said I had the highest number on our ticket, not that I ran ahead of the general ticket." The joke, poor as it may seem, creates a general laugh, against which the judge protests with his gavel, but which is destined to go down to posterity, nevertheless. "Now," says the counsel, returning to the charge in good order, "were you ever convicted of forgery?" "I was so unfortunate," replied the examination closes. witness. The intellectual-looking physiognomy "Were you so much more unfortunate of Mr. Evarts rises above the sea of as to be elected ?" heads as he questions the witness, with a clear distinct enunciation, on the redirect examination. "No. I was candidate for a third party, and had no hope of election." "O! You led a forlorn hope?" "That is it precisely." "And did you get any votes?" says the sympathetic counsel. "I got fourteen thousand, the highest of any on the ticket." The counsel understanding him to say that he had a higher number than any other candidate, and knowing that he was not elected, places a trap for the witness into which he himself is destined to fall. "How do you elect in Massachusetts, if you had the highest number of votes and yet were defeated?" VOL. 15.-13. "Mr. Cowley, when were you indicted?" "Eighteen years ago, when I first commenced practice." "For what were you indicted?” "Upon the pretense that I demanded a fee for services not rendered." "By whom?" "At the instigation of the district-attorney, Morse, my rival and enemy.” "Was the case ever brought to trial?" "It was not; it was 'nolle-prossed.'" "What has become of Morse?" "He is under charges for malfeasance in office." "That will do for Morse," says Mr. per, file out and disappear, and then the Evarts. Mr. Beach finding the cloud which he had thrown about the reputation of the witness gradually lifting under the manipulations of Mr. Evarts, becomes suddenly concerned for the reputation of the district-attorney. impatient crowd is disgorged. Some remain, however, to watch to the end the movements of the prominent actors in the drama. It is easy to discover that the sympathies of these are with the defendant, Mr. Beecher. They crowd eagerly around him to grasp him by the "I object," says he to the judge, "to hand. Tilton turns to his counsel and any testimony against the character of engages them in a few moments' congentlemen who are not here to defend versation, when they gather up their themselves." papers and disappear, leaving him en"The objection is sustained," says tirely alone. He stands for a moment the judge. "But, your honor," says Mr. Evarts. "Go on, sir!" is the brusque rejoinder of the judge; and Mr. Evarts, with a reputation almost world-wide, without further protest bows to the majesty of law as it is, represented by the Judge of the City Court of Brooklyn. The clock on the wall announces that the hour of four has arrived. Precisely at that moment the judge requests the audience to retain their seats until the jury have retired. These gentlemen, who, as a penance for their temporary fame, are deprived of that modern essential to happiness, the daily newspa like a tiger at bay, glaring at Mr. Beecher and those surrounding him with their congratulations, then suddenly starts for the door. Those in his path make room for him to pass, one pointing him out to another with the remark, "There he goes," as he stalks past the different groups, without a word of recognition from any, and disappears through the open door-way. Mr. Beecher dons his broad-brimmed black felt hat, which gives him the appearance of a well-to-do farmer, takes his wife's arm under his own, and follows. And the curtain drops on the closing scene of a Tilton-versus-Beecher matinée. STX AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PHILOSOPHER. CHAPTER IX. IX weeks after that day I was in San Francisco, with a continent and an ocean between the landscapes and the faces so familiar and so hateful. My father was muddled the day I bade him good-by; my step-mother angry that he had given me the bulk of their savings, leaving little for her son Ady; Ady, under temporary sentence of exile by my father, was visiting his mother's family in England. It went hard with me to leave old Mr. Knox without a word, but a consultation with Gawn Bruce assured me that he was in no fit state of health to see anybody; and Mary Knox was nursing Mr. Knox and seeing to Paul Lagarre with that terrible cut in his head that my father had given him. Get away from them all! forget them all! were the only clear ideas I had. I was not, after all, so miserable as one might think. A good draughtsman, at least, I soon got work in a surveyor's office. In the evenings I read until my eyelids fell together. I left myself no time to think of the past, or of the future that had once been so brightly dreamed of. It was the past that was the dream now. It had been burned into my life as with an acid. The process had been painful, but it was over; the result still remained graven on steel, but the steel was dimmed and rusted with tears too bitter to shed. My ambition was wounded to death. I no longer even hated-what was I that I should hate? An ungainly, semi-educated pedant, graceless and giftless, insolent and laggard in love, impractical and whimsical in every-day life, I had imagined there was some mysterious force in me to crush the obstacles I scorned to avoid-and they had crushed me. Here, thought I, is the lesson of my life, if it have any-a lesson I have learned too late-that merely fair natural abilities, even by stubborn application to their cultivation and by stolid self-sufficient assurance, can not be made to supply the place of that great genius and masterhood which is only born with one or two men in a century. I had tried to make bricks without straw, to take more out of myself than God had put in me, to know no such word as fail, while the image and terror of it ever be fore me might have saved me from the reality. I worked and lived like a man in a trance. An old habit of sleep-walking overcame me again; neither my sleeping nor my waking was complete any longer. The spring left my step, the old searching expression faded out of my eyes, my voice was deserted of its firm ring; I was a broken, beaten man before I was yet of age. I began to be nicely particular about what I should eat and drink. With little pleasures and little pains a whole stagnant year slid somehow past. The peculiar waters of Californian life flowed past and over me, and mixed no more with my existence than oil does with water. My unsocial ways and habits called up a little insolence in some of those few whom I was forced to meet and talk to more or less, but my callous - nerved insensibility and clock-work accuracy in my round of mechanical work soon brought me through or carried me above such trifles. Once, indeed, I was really annoyed. Some one stole or hid the little dole of English mustard which I always used to flavor my luncheon of cold meat every day at noon. I looked round inquiringly; my fellow-draughtsmen were laughing quietly and preparing to go out to the fashionable restaurant they patronized. Something swelled up in my throat; then, as I tried to swallow the piece of dry beef I had lifted without remark, some petty aggravation of the insult was offered me, and a scene occurred, with the ultimate result of my being thereafter left alone. All this is only worth mentioning as examples of how a man with some great ideal and aim darkened and struck down some great spring of spinal energy broken-may suddenly contract himself like a hurt worm and crawl round in some little dusty track until the dust of it hides the whole earth and heaven, and the nadir, zenith, and horizon of his hopes and pleasures meet in some mean nutshell-mean because it is little. Once I wrote home to my father, but my step-mother answered the letter. He was unable to keep sober long enough, she said, to attend to that or anything else. All cares now fell on her. The Knoxes and Lagarres had six months before gone to London for the sake of medical advice for Mr. Knox. Ady, who followed them, had been banished his father's presence. There was no news from them. She hoped I was doing better in San Francisco than I had done at home, and that I attended church regularly. And so the letter ended. Then a blessing came to me which I could not return, but which brightened my existence. A little delicate lonely girl, without friend or family, did law yers' copying in the room next to our office. The more thoughtless clerks used to torment her on the stair, as she went to and from her work. I pitied the shy melancholy creature, and interfered at last for her right to earn a miserable living free from insult or temptation. All the strong and the good in me were appealed to when one night at last she took my arm as I left work and entered the street, and told me that her old enemies had only shifted their ground of attack-that two of them were still accustomed to waylay her near the door of her lodging-house. I was armed, for I had found that not otherwise could I take my long winter evening walks in all sorts of places with feelings of perfect safety. I told the little one to walk on and I would follow her. The result was as might have been predicted—the usual insulting greeting, my advance, hot bluster and threats on the part of the Don Juans; then I covered them before they could "draw," and warned them with passionate words that the third time we met in this role I would shoot them without notice or delay. The girl and I walked to the same restaurant together every evening after that, and then I guarded her to her lodginghouse door, and that was all we saw of each other. Her story came out bit by bit; how her mother had been deserted by her father; how the wife had died by degrees in want and sorrow; and how she the daughter had done copying, and had had no pleasures, ever since she could hold a pen. There were hundreds of just such cases, or worse, all round us, and I at least knew it, but I was strongly affected by this nearest sorrow, and sorely perplexed as I saw it growing into too strong a trust and friendship for me. I pitied the little copyist, I loved her like a sister, but I could find no other love to give her, reason with myself as I might. It seem ed to me there was something wanting in me ever since my fever, one broken chord in me that should never answer to the touch of the key again—that I was cursed now in not being able to love as I was cursed before in loving. All this I told the little one; because she was meek and patient she answered nothing, but only asked me not to leave her alone again, nor to be angry if she loved without hope—we had the same sorrow, and should comfort each other a little, she added. It was better this than nothing. So the months dropped one by one into the past, and grew to years, and little Sue and I walked together evening by evening, and she grew on me with her sweet trusting eyes and voice like a gentle tune, and I began to long for the evening and the warmth of her arm in mine. We were both so lonely, and she loved so much, and to know it filled me with gratefulness; and little seeds of true love came at last, and took root one by one in the desolated heart she pitied. Then we agreed that we two should join ourselves together for man and wife, each taking what love the other had to give and what legacies of regret or bitterness the past had left, and live each to make the other happy. Some day we should go home to Glendrum-and I wrote home my third letter in all the four years of my absence to learn how things went there. I had heard two years before that the Knoxes were still in London-the old man in a chronic semi-paralyzed state; that Miss Knox and Paul Lagarre were married; and that my brother, practising as a physician in the metropolis, was engaged to Miss Lagarre. After this news I had cared to have no more till now. But if the Lagarres and Knoxes were away, I thought I should like to return, when married, to the old place. I thought we could after all be happy there. But it was never to be so. Our trothplight was not a fortnight old, and it was on a Christmas night that we loitered slowly home from seeing the pantomime. It was a lonely street where my little woman lived, and before we reached it we had left all the belated revelers of the evening far behind, save one seemingly drunken man who kept up with us wonderfully well. We had reached the last corner, marked by a dim and solitary street-lamp, when the faltering steps behind us grew suddenly steady and swift, and were upon us before we knew. As I turned, there came the sudden flash of a pistol, and a pain burned along my ribs. I staggered, but drew and fired my own weapon almost with one motion. The assassin ran as he saw me armed; but his pistol blazed out again as he turned, and this time the hiss of the bullet passed me, and the girl at my side fell without a cry. I stooped over her. "Are you hurt?" But she never spoke again; the ball had pierced her throat. Nothing could stop the internal bleeding. While I tried to lift her away, her lips touched my face, and she kissed meor I fancied it. People came running from the nearest house. They chased the murderer without result. His pistol was found in the next street, but no one had seen which way he went; no one knew him—no one but me. A hundred years and a hundred suns could not have helped me to see that face more distinctly than the lightning-flash of the pistol had done. It was the face of Paul Lagarre. Riflemen, Form! ETC. It was a rifle that fired "the shot heard round the world." Not buncombe nor paper bullets, but the conical ball, has kept the Union whole. From enemy, foreign or domestic, it is useless to pray God to deliver us with damp powder. In the imminent deadly breech of the rifle must the freedom of the future find her cradle, and her swaddlingclothes in the cartridge-shell. The tug of war is in the trigger now, and the piping time of peace need never be weak if the organ at Springfield that Longfellow saw be the instrument piped upon. Next year a centenary of American repub. licanism will be completed. Volunteer riflemen made the republic possible-must keep it actual. To no standing army of mercenaries can such a task be safely or economically intrusted. Right is not on this earth worth a pin's fee without might. Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence, what were they to a John or a George, until materialized in the white swords of the barons and the black muzzles of the continentals? It is fatuous to affirm that things are essentially changed in these last days. It is true that arbitration has to some extent taken the place of war, but that means simply that a prudent judgment in estimating the chances and results of war has taken the place of the blind fury by which nations fell formerly upon and annihilated each other like the Kilkenny cats. If, in the much-vaunted case of the Alabama claims, it had not been a question between two powerful nations both bristling with weapons-if America had had Modocs to deal with, or England Caffres-who is silly enough to suppose that the discussion would have ended at Geneva? Two million volunteer riflemen (those of Canada included), every man of them trained to use his weapon effectively up to a distance of a thousand yards, a standing army, and an actual navy larger than that of the remaining combined world, saved the Downing - street dove of amity from the talons of the Washington eagle; and the olives of American peace tasted less sour to English throats than the gunpowder that had already blackened a continent from Maryland to Mexico. The manner of war is changing. Battal |