Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne bayou far down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party that Claude was not with him.

"He did n't leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he had n't decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them to know just how to move.”

The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated, empearled free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to find out. So he added, "I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose you stay with me until then." And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox quickly jumped at the proposition. No letter came. But when the twenty-four hours had passed, the surveyor had taken that same generous-not to say credulous-liking for Mr. Tarbox that we have seen him show for St. Pierre and for Claude. He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward through a series of short canals that span the shaking prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across prairie and at length, leaving Lake Cataouaché on the left, through cypress swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans. He would have pressed Mr. Tarbox to bear him company; but before he could ask twice Mr. Tarbox had consented. They went in a cat-rigged skiff, with a stalwart negro rowing or towing whenever the sail was not the best.

"It's all of sixty miles," said the engineer; "but if the wind does n't change or drop we can sleep to-night in Achille's hut, send this man and skiff back, and make Achille, with his skiff, put us on board the Louisiana avenue ferry-launch to-morrow afternoon."

"Achille ? Oh! he's merely 'Cajun pothunter living on a shell bank at the edge of Lake Cataouaché- with an Indian wife. Used to live somewhere on Bayou des Allemands, but last year something or other scared him away from there. He's odd-seems to be a sort of self-made outcast. I don't suppose he's ever done anybody any harm; but he just seems to be one of that kind that can't bear to even try to keep up with the rest of humanity; the sort of man swamps and shaking prairies were specially made for, you know. He's living on a bank of fossil shells now,thousands of barrels of them,- that he knows would bring him a little fortune if only he

could command the intelligence and the courage to market them in New Orleans. There's a chance for some bright man who is n't already too busy. Why did n't I think to mention it to Claude? But then neither he nor his father have got the commercial knowledge they would need. Now-" The speaker suddenly paused and, as the two men sat close beside each other under an umbrella in the stern of the skiff, looked into Mr. Tarbox's pale blue eyes, and smiled, and smiled. "I'm here," said Mr. Tarbox.

"Yes," responded the other, "and I 've just made out why! And you 're right, Tarbox; you and Claude, with or without his. father, will make a strong team. You've got no business to be canvassing books, you—”

"It's my line," said the canvasser, smiling fondly and pushing his hat back,- it was wonderful how he kept that hat smooth,-"and I'm the head of the line

"A voice replied far up the height,
Excelsior!"

"I was acquainted with Mr. Longfellow." "Tarbox," persisted the engineer, driving away his own smile, "you know what you are; you are a born contractor! You 've found it out, and "- smiling again—" that 's why you 're looking for Claude."

"Where is he?" asked Mr. Tarbox.

"Well, I told you the truth when I said I did n't know; but I have n't a doubt he 's in Vermillionville."

"Neither have I," said the book-agent; "and if I had, I would n't give it room. If I knew he was in New Jersey, still I 'd think he was in Vermillionville, and go there looking for him. And wherefore? For occult reasons."

The two men looked at each other smilingly in the eye, and the boat glided on.

The wind favored them. With only now and then the cordelle, and still more rarely the oars, they moved all day across the lands and waters that were once the fastnesses of the Baratarian pirates. The engineer made his desired observations without appreciable delays, and at night they slept under Achille's thatch of rushes.

As the two travelers stood alone for a moment next morning, the engineer said:

"You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter."

"It's my natural instinct," replied Mr. Tarbox. "The study of human nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural- and easier. The pothunter is a study; you 're right."

"But he reciprocates," said the engineer; "he studies you."

The student of man held his smiling companion's gaze with his own, thrust one hand into his bosom, and lifted the digit of the other: "The eyes are called the windows of the soul.

66

"And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes-'

Have you tried to look into his eyes? You can't do it. He won't let you. He's got something in there that he does n't want you to see."

In the middle of the afternoon, when Achille's skiff was already reëntering the shades of the swamp on his way homeward, and his two landed passengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey's Canal with the Mississippi rolling by their feet and on its far

ther side the masts and spires of the city, lighted by the western sun, swinging round the long bend of her yellow harbor, Mr. Tarbox offered his hand to say good-bye. The surveyor playfully held it.

"I mean no disparagement to your present calling," he said, "but the next time we meet I hope you'll be a contractor."

"Ah!" responded Tarbox, "it's not my nature. I cannot contract; I must always expand. And yet - I thank you.

"Pure thoughts are angel visitors. Be such The frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.' "Good luck! Good-bye!"

One took the ferry; the other, the westbound train at Gretna.

George W. Cable.

SEAL OF THE SEE OF DURHAM.

turn now to the north-east of England. Here again we find a great Norman church, but one which differs widely from the three Norman sister-churches at Ely, Peterborough, and Norwich.

Among all the cathedrals of England, Durham is perhaps the most imposing, and its situation is magnificent past rivalry. We have seen that Ely stands well; but Durham stands well in an opposite sense. At Ely nature seems to have suppressed herself that there might be no scale by which the immeasurable dignity of man's work could be computed. At Durham she seems to have built a great work of her own just that man's work might complete and crown it; not a pinnacled hill, but a broad promontory with a level summit-a lordly pedestal where sits the lordly group of structures as kings sit upon thrones the single end of whose splendor is to enhance and show their own. Lincoln's site is as grand as Durham's, but Lincoln's only; and at Lincoln beauty does not aid and soften grandeur as it does at Durham.

I.

THE history of the choosing of this site takes us very far back in time.

I have spoken of that early church which had christianized a great part of the British Islands under Roman rule. I have said that with the gradual progress of the English conquest in the fifth and sixth centuries it was swept out of sight and almost out of memory in the south and center of England; but that in the far west it lingered on, and that when the good seed from Rome had begun to bear fruit among the heathen English, it too awoke to missionary effort and played its part in the re-christianizing of the realm. Ireland was the chief nurse of this ancient faith during its long languor. But Irish monks were constantly at work in Scotland, and no early monastery was more famous than that which St. Columba established in the sixth century upon the island of Iona off the western Scottish coast.

The Northumbrian land seems not to have been christianized in British-Roman days. So far as we know, the gospel won its first conspicuous body of adherents when it was preached by Paulinus, one of the missionaries of Rome who came from Kent early in the seventh century with the daughter of Ethelbert when she married King Edwin of Northumbria. Nor was this evangelization final. In 633 Edwin was slain by Penda and Cadwalla, heathens of vigorous arm; Paulinus was obliged to flee, and the district was left again

to paganism. But when Oswald conquered it in his turn he brought back the Christian faith, which he had imbibed in Scotland, and sent to Iona for priests to help him teach his people. Among those who answered his call was Aidan, whom he made the first bishop of the new diocese he established - the diocese which is now of Durham, but was then called of Bernicia and had its first seat at Lindisfarne. From Scotland too a little later came the great patron saint of Durham-Cuthbert. An evangelist who preached far and wide in a savage and desolate country, a hermit who lived for nine years in a rude cell on the island of Farne, and then in his turn became bishop of Bernicia, Cuthbert shares with Oswald and Aidan the honor of the final christianizing of the great north-eastern land. Thus we see it owes its faith of to-day not to St. Augustine's mission, but to the old pre-English establishment.

Cuthbert, Oswald, and Aidan were all canonized by Rome; and in their case at least the halo was worthily given, for Oswald was a kingly and a truly Christian king, and Aidan and Cuthbert were saints of the true saintly pattern. Aidan's name is less well remembered

now; but St. Oswald the king and St. Cuthbert the monk are still alive in men's minds, not only at Durham, which is their monument, but wherever the outlines of Christian history are read. Oswald was slain by Penda, and his head and arms were exposed on stakes on the battle-field. But they afterwards came into ecclesiastical keeping, and the head was buried in Cuthbert's coffin.*

To Northumbria, as well as to the fen-lands, the Danes in the ninth century brought their swords and torches. The monks of Lindisfarne fled before them carrying the holy coffin. For eight years they wandered until, in 883, they settled at an old Roman station Chester-leStreet - which was given them by a christianized Danish king. Thence they removed again, and again for fear of the rovers, about a century later. First they sat at Ripon for a few months, and then they turned back northward, doubtless encouraged to think once more of Chester-le-Street. But when they reached a spot a little to the eastward of Durham, St. Cuthbert caused his coffin to remain immovable for three days and then made known his

*One of the "incorruptible arms" we have already heard of at Peterborough.

wish to be sepultured where the cathedral now stands. The first church constructed here was of wood. But at the end of four years it had already been replaced by one of stone, which stood until after the Conquest and the stones of which, perhaps, now form a part of the Normans' reconstruction.

II.

THERE were times and places when the first thought of a monastic colony was for comfort and retirement, for fertile surroundings and facilities of access. But in the north of England in Danish days inaccessibility, impregnability, was the thing to be desired; and St. Cuthbert showed wonderful posthumous sagacity in selecting the final home of his perplexed, itinerant "congregation.”

There is a large town now where there was then a wilderness; a wide-spreading, busy town overhung, though faintly, by that gray smokecloud which is the invariable sign in England of commercial life; a town so modern in mood that it is hard to think of it as but an alien growth from an old monastic root. It lies chiefly to the eastward of the church, stretching out far to north and south, and divided again and again by the quick S-like curves of the River Wear a stream which is not a sluggish canal like the Ouse at Ely, but even to American eyes a fine little river bordered by woods that have a true forest look. All along the western bank these woods extend, and up the face of that great steep rock on the eastern bank which supports the church, jutting out like a bold promontory and clasped on three sides by a horse-shoe curve of the stream. Where the cliff is steepest towards the west rises the front of the cathedral, close above the thick clambering trees. To the south its long side overlooks the monastic buildings and the shady gardens which touch the Wear. To the northward, at some distance but still on the same plateau, springs sheer with the face of the rock a great castle founded by the Conqueror.

Castle and church together form a group and hold a station which we sometimes find paralleled on the Continent but nowhere in England. And I think there can be nothing else in England, or in all the world, quite like the walk which we may take along the river's opposite bank, following its many bends, passing its high-arched bridges, having the forest on the one hand and on the other the matchless panorama man has worked from nature's bold and fine suggestions.

The usual approach to the promontory is, of course, from the town behind it. Through a steep, narrow street we come up near the castle, and thence, beyond the broad flat Cas

tle Green, we see the north side of the church filling the whole view from left to right—from the crowding houses about its eastern to the crowding trees about its western end.

III.

THE old monastic "congregation of St. Cuthbert had lapsed into "secular" ways

before the Normans came. But the second Norman bishop, William of Carilef, made radical changes, bringing in monks from Wearmouth and Jarrow, and establishing a great Benedictine house at Durham. On his return from a three-years exile the price he paid for his share in the rebellion against William Rufus - he set about building himself a new cathedral too. Its foundation stones were laid beneath the eastern end of the choir in 1093, and in the four short years which remained to him Carilef seems to have completed the choir, the eastward wall of the transepts, the crossing with its tower, the adjacent first bay of the nave-arcade, and the two long outer (aisle) walls of the nave.

Three years after his death Ralph Flambard, William Rufus's famous chancellor, was appointed bishop. During these years the monks had nearly completed the transepts, and Flambard completed the whole of the nave and its aisles (excepting the roofs) and the western towers up to the same height as the walls. During another interregnum, which followed his death in 1128, the monks roofed-in his nave and aisles; and the western towers were finished in the Transitional period.

The windows throughout the church have been enlarged from time to time. The east end of the choir was conspicuously changed in the thirteenth century, and the vaulting of its central alley was renewed. In the fifteenth century the central tower was injured by lightning, and its upper portions had to be rebuilt. But with these exceptions the whole vast Norman body remains as first constructed. The Puritans dealt gently with it too - almost all the damage wrought by the passage of eight centuries stands accredited to the "restorations" of the last hundred years.

IV.

APPROACHING the church across the Castle Green, we enter by what has been the chief doorway since the thirteenth century-a doorway towards the western end of the north aisle. Thence we see at once how greatly the interior design of Durham differs from that of the typical Norman church.

The vertical proportioning is quite unlike what we have seen in the eastern districts — the main arcade is much higher and the triforium arcade relatively lower. Instead of a