only one he read at that moment; not counting, of course, several notes that Mrs. Dallow addressed to him from Griffin. There were letters piled up, as he knew, in Calcutta Gardens, which his servant had strict orders not to bring to the studio. Nick slept now in the bedroom attached to this retreat; got things, as he wanted them, from Calcutta Gardens; and dined at his club, where a stray surviving friend or two, seeing him prowl about the library in the evening, was free to suppose that such eccentricity had a subtly political basis. When he thought of his neglected letters he remembered Mr. Carteret's convictions on the subject of not "getting behind;" they made him laugh, in the slightly sonorous painting-room, as he bent over one of the old canvases that he had ventured to turn to the light. He was fully determined, however, to master his correspondence before going down, the last thing before Parliament should reassemble, to spend another day at Beauclere. Mastering his correspondence meant, in Nick's mind, breaking open envelopes; writing answers scarcely involved in the idea. But Mr. Carteret would never guess that. Nick was not moved even to write to him that the affair with Mrs. Dallow was on the point of taking the form he had been so good as to desire: he reserved the pleasure of this announcement for a personal interview. was The day before Good Friday, in the morning, his stillness was broken by a rat-tat-tat on the outer door of his studio, administered apparently by the knob of a walking-stick. His servant was out, and he went to the door, wondering who his visitor could be, at such a time, especially of the familiar class. The class was indicated by the visitor's failure to look for the bell; for there was a bell, though it required a little research. In a moment the mystery was solved the gentleman who stood smiling at him from the threshold could only be Gabriel Nash. Dormer had not seen this whimsical personage for several months, and had had no news of him beyond the general intimation that he was abroad. His old friend had sufficiently prepared him, at the time of their reunion in Paris, for the idea of the fitful in intercourse ; and he had not been ignorant, on his return from Paris, that he would have had an opportunity to miss him if he had not been too busy to take advantage of it. In London, after the episode at Harsh, Gabriel had not reappeared: he had redeemed none of the pledges given the night they walked together to Notre Dame and conversed on important matters. He was to have interposed in Nick's destiny, but he had not interposed; he was to have dragged him in the opposite sense from Mrs. Dallow, but there had been no dragging; he was to have saved him, as he called it, and yet Nick was lost. This circumstance, indeed, constituted his excuse : the member for Harsh had rushed so to perdition. Nick had, for the hour, seriously wished to keep hold of him; he valued him as a salutary influence. Yet when he came to his senses, after his election, our young man had recognized that Nash might very well have reflected on the thanklessness of such a slippery subject might have considered that he was released from his vows. Of course it had been particularly in the event of a Liberal triumph that he had threatened to make himself felt; the effect of a brand plucked from the burning would be so much greater if the flames were already high. Yet Nick had not held him to the letter of this pledge, and had so fully admitted the right of a properly constituted æsthete to lose patience with him that he was now far from greeting his visitor with a reproach. He felt much more thrown upon his defense. Gabriel did not attack him, however. He brought in only blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the mystic voice- it was really he replied, "Oh, living, you know;" and a remarkable case of second sightwhich had whispered to him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town. He had just come back from Sicily, after a southern winter, according to a custom frequent with him, and had been moved by a miraculous prescience, unfavorable as the moment might seem, to go and ask for Nick in Calcutta Gardens, where he had extracted from his friend's servant an address not known to all the world. He showed Nick what a mistake it had been to fear a reproach from Gabriel Nash, and how he habitually ignored all lapses and kept up the standard only by taking a hundred fine things for granted. He also abounded more than ever in his own sense, reminding his friend how no recollection of him, no evocation of him in absence, could do him justice: you could n't recall him without seeming to exaggerate him, and then recognized, when you saw him, that your exaggeration had fallen short. He emerged out of vagueness (his Sicily might have been the Sicily of A Winter's Tale), and would evidently be reabsorbed in it; but his presence was positive and pervasive enough. He was very lively while he lasted. His connections were with beauty, urbanity, and conversation, as usual, but it was a circle you could n't find in the Court Guide. Nick had a sense that he knew "a lot of æsthetic people," but he dealt in ideas much more than in names and addresses. He was genial and jocose, sunburnt and romantically illusive. Nick gathered that he had been living for many days in a Saracenic tower, where his principal occupation was to watch for the flushing of the west. He had retained all the serenity of his opinions, and made light, with a candor of which the only defect was apparently that it was not quite enough a conscious virtue, of many of the objects of common esteem. When Nick asked him what he had been doing the tone of the words seemed to offer ness, Nick glanced round, with a heightened color. "They are pretty bad, eh?" Oh, you're a deep one," Nash went on. 66 "What's the matter?" "Do you call your conduct that of a man of honor?" "Scarcely, perhaps. But when no one has seen them!" "That's your villainy. C'est de l'exquis, du pur exquis. Come, my dear fellow, this is very serious it's a bad business," said Gabriel Nash. Then he added, almost with austerity, "You'll be so good as to place before me every patch of paint, every sketch and scrap, that this room contains." Nick complied in great good-humor. He turned out his boxes and drawers, shoveled forth the contents of bulging portfolios, mounted on chairs to unhook old canvases that had been severely "skied." He was modest and docile and patient and amused, and above all quite thrilled thrilled with the idea of eliciting a note of appreciation so late in the day. It was the oddest thing how, at present, in fact, he found himself attributing value to Gabriel Nash -attributing to him, among attributions more confused, the dignity of judgment, the authority of intelligence. Nash was "Nicholas Dormer," this personage remarked at last, "for grossness of immorality I think I have never seen your equal." "That sounds so well that I hesitate to risk spoiling it by wishing it explained." "Don't you recognize in any degree the fine idea of duty?" "If I don't grasp it with a certain firmness I am a great failure, for I was quite brought up in it," Nick said. "Then you are the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after all." "But what do you call right? What's your canon of certainty there?" "The conscience that's in us that charming, conversible, infinite thing which alone would make me think well of the world. But you must treat the oracle civilly if you wish to make it speak. You must n't stride into the temple in muddy jack-boots, with your hat on your head, as the Puritan troopers tramped into the dear old abbeys. One must do one's best to find out the right, and your criminality appears to be that you have not taken common trouble." "I had n't you to ask," smiled Nick. "But duty strikes me as doing something. If you are too afraid it may be the wrong thing, you may let everything go." "Being is doing, and if doing is duty, being is duty. Do you follow?” "At a great distance." "To be what one may be, really and efficaciously," Nash went on, "to feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it - that's conduct, that's life." "And suppose one's a brute or an ass, where's the efficacy?" "In one's very want of intelligence. In such cases one is out of it-the question does n't exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others. The brute, the ass, neither feels, nor understands, nor accepts, nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that, to profit by them, we must be as intelligent as we can. We must rec "Do I gather that you yourself recognize our particular form, the instru ognize obligations of the order you allude to?" asked Nick. ment that each of us — each of us who carries anything-carries in his being. "Every one,' my dear fellow, is too much to say, for the world is full of the crudest remplissage. The book of life is padded, ah but padded — a deplorable want of editing. I speak of every one that is any one. Of course there are pipes and pipes - little quavering flutes for the concerted movements and big cornets-à-piston for the great solos." "I see, I see. And what might your instrument be?" Nash hesitated not a moment; his answer was radiantly ready. "To speak to people just as I am speaking to you. To prevent, for instance, a great wrong being done." "A great wrong?" "Yes-to the human race. I talk I talk; I say the things that other people don't, that they can't, that they won't," Gabriel continued, with his inimitable candor. "If it's a question of mastery and perfection, you certainly have them," his companion replied. "And you have n't, alas; that's the pity of it, that's the scandal. That's - a the wrong I want to set right, before it becomes too public a shame. I called you just now grossly immoral, on account of the spectacle you present spectacle to be hidden from the eye of ingenuous youth: that of a man neglecting his own fiddle to blunder away on that of one of his fellows. We can't afford such mistakes, we can't tolerate such license." "You think, then, I have a fiddle?" asked Nick. 66 66 A regular Stradivarius! All these things you have shown me are singularly interesting. You have a talent of a wonderfully pure strain." I say I say -I say!" Nick exclaimed, standing in front of his visitor with his hands in his pockets and a blush on his smiling face, and repeating, with a change of accent, Nash's exclamation of half an hour before. "I like it, your talent; I measure it, I appreciate it, I insist upon it," Nash went on, between the whiffs of his cigarette. "I have to be intelligent to do so, but fortunately I am. In such a case that's my duty. I shall make you my business for a while. Therefore," Nash added, blandly, "don't say I'm unconscious of the moral law." "A Stradivarius?" said Nick, interrogatively, with his eyes wide open, and the thought in his mind of how different this was from having gone to Griffin. Henry James. THE "BLACK-CAPPED" BALTIMORE. To have his own way was the object in life of a certain small personage in black and gold who lived in my birdroom last winter. Of course he secured it. Dogged persistence in the degree he possessed that quality could not fail. Without once descending to the vulgarity of a fight, he reduced a roomful of birds, one after the other, to submission to his imperious will, and established upon firm foundation his right to the first and the best of anything he desired. He would have been autocrat in that small colony, but fortunately he was not the only one of his self-willed family in the room. He had a mate. At first, after I had introduced them the rather summary process of thrusting both into one cage, I feared the stranger would but add one to the list of his subjects. She had not been well treated, and her plumage was in a terribly draggled state; and clothes have as much to do with self-respect in the feathered world as in our own. Her condition of general wreck was so complete as to leave her without a tail, in the last stage of respectability. She was depressed in spirits, and at first did not gainsay the dictation of the small tyrant of the household. He drove her away from the food-dishes, denied her a place on his perch, and in fact set up for lord and master, and she submitted for a time. It was amusing to see these birds trying, on the first evening, to settle the question of sleeping-quarters. As usual, the mind of the male was made up, and he planted himself in the darkest corner of the upper perch away from the window, shook himself out, and considered the matter decided. The meek little dame did not aspire to his corner, but she ardently desired a place on that farther perch, and after he became quiet she resolved to try for it. Too modest to approach it in the natural way, from the lower perches, she scrambled up the wires of the cage, and shyly came on from the back. The autocrat was not asleep, and the instant her foot touched it he bounced across the cage to the other upper perch. He evidently expected that she would be put to shame in her surreptitious attempt to share his perch, and would at once retire to her proper sphere; but he was mistaken. So far from being embarrassed by his displeasure, she calmly accepted the relinquished position, and prepared for sleep. This was far from satisfactory to his majesty, and he jumped back as suddenly as he had gone; whereupon madam dropped to the floor. But, with true oriole persistence, in a moment she tried it again, going as before up the wires. Again the annoyed oriole deserted his post, and, disappointed in the effect, returned; once more, also, rather disconcerted, she descended to the floor. Not to stay, however. She was as set in her way as he was, and to sleep in that corner was her determination. This curious see-saw performance was reënacted far into the twilight with amusing regularity, but how they finally settled. it I could not stay to see. The unfortunate condition of the female kept her in subjection a few days, and then she rose superior to clothes, and quietly rebelled. The possession of the bath was the first disputed point. There she took her stand, bowed and postured on the edge, while he splashed unconcernedly in the tub; and the next time she went so far as to remain in the water and keep on bathing, while he assumed the offensive on the edge, After trying in vain to awe or terrify her, he actually plumped in beside her, and they spattered and fluttered side by side, as if they were inseparable friends. The oriole, however, had learned a lesHe recognized a kindred spirit, and henceforth they lived peaceably together, in a sort of armed neutrality. No quarreling disgraced their house; each went on in his own way, and the other did not interfere. son. With outsiders the case was different. The first to come into collision with the "black-cap" was a Brazilian cardinal, a loud-voiced, self-assertive bird, who also fully expected to have his own way, but, unfortunately for himself, had not the "staying qualities" of the native bird. Hostilities began with a bit of impertinence on the part of the oriole, who, as I said, seldom quarreled, but coolly went wherever he wished, and helped himself to anything he desired. In his travels around the room, one morning, he was attracted to the empty cage of the cardinal, went in, and fell to eating. From afar the owner saw |