quoise. Often while the sun was still bright on Antigua, I would see a storm moving about the horizon. It would circle from northeast to southeast, then come down across the valley, a black wall of water, bringing with it the fearful lightning. There would be no warning, no large, solitary rain-drops, no slanting shower. The compact, straightfalling water would come swiftly, beating the earth like horses' hoofs. I would hear it loud upon the bricks of Innocente's patio before the sun had quite left my own. A moment more, and both patios would be lakes, each with a whirlpool in the centre, where the water would be rushing away through holes that had been cut for it, centuries ago, in the centre stones.

The sky would be black and thunderous for perhaps an hour, then the storm would go over to the cemetery hills, and I would go down and walk along the streaming streets. The air would be sweet and the hills bright again; the roofs, newly washed, would show rich and dark against the cleared sky; doves would alight upon them and eat of the grass blades that grew in the hollows of the tilings. Buzzards, also, would descend to the housetops, and stand in rows with wings outstretched, drying in the sun.

Of mornings I would arise at the madrugada- break of day - and watch the sun come up from the Valley of the Hermitage, come up so quickly that the light would flow like milk down the opposite volcano; and, after the coffee, I would walk out the tree-darkened Alameda of Calvario to meet the Indian women on their way into Antigua with its day's food.

They were from little ranchos and pueblos, sometimes four leagues away. They would come trotting in groups, with jars and baskets on their heads, the dull blues and reds of their embroidered trappings showing richly against

the bright colors about. They seemed to me almost majestic, so strong, straight, silent, calm they were, with steady eyes that told nothing. Inscrutable women. I often wondered what they saw when they lifted their eyes to the trees, the sky, the mighty cordillera. They would enter and cross the city to the plaza,—the big square in front of the church of La Merced, and I would follow along with them and sit on the church steps, and watch them arrange their fruits, vegetables, eggs, chickens, flowers, milk, and honey, under the big seybo-trees of the plaza ; and all the morning I would sit there watching the peculiar life of the Plaza of La Merced.

Blessed morning sun on the steps of La Merced! I would feel ready for anything: for a swift walk out the aqueduct, for a run up and down the volcanoes; but in reality, I would sit, very quiet, on the church steps.

Until June these strolls were all I had been equal to, and I always returned from them slowly; but by June I wished to go away out on the Camino Real, and to follow the alluring lanes that I could see from my housetop, shaded lanes that led over hills to the pueblos.

I wrote for permission. I had, of course, to wait six weeks for an answer; but six weeks in Antigua are but as a watch in the night.

Yes; I might walk out the old road; but I might walk only half an hour out, then rest an hour before returning.

The restrictions were hard, I felt equal to great things; but on the first morning, when my half-hour was up, I found myself hardly beyond the Gate of the Arch of Saint Catherine, and was glad to sit down under a mango tree for the hour's rest.

Not until October got into the air could I do better.

By November I got as far as the

house of Juan Capistrano Robledo, a weaver of fire-fans.

Juan Capistrano was an old friend of mine; I had often bought his wares at the monastery gate; so, that first day, as his wide front door stood open and he himself sat busy within, I entered and asked him to make a fan for me; and I spent my hour watching him plait the iris reeds.

There were no flowers in Juan Capistrano's patio, and the old man was well set off by the severe walls and the stretch of brick pavement that so often struck his own color-tone. Then too, with no trees against it, the square of sky above the warm tilings seemed wondrous delicate and heavenly.

Juan Capistrano, a serious man, thought his work important. He would stretch and bend each reed; the less than perfect he would throw aside; and as he worked, his face was grave, not a thought wandered.

And I watched him as seriously, for I too would become a weaver of fire-fans.

So until gentle December I sat out my hour, morning after morning, weaving iris reeds in the patio of Juan Capistrano Robledo.

The air of the beneficent valley! With the desire for work came the desire for companionship, another impulse that had long been side-tracked; and I began to return the visits of the Doñas Quevedo.

Their house had great charm for me; not the tomb-like parlors, but the patio with its noble corridors, its long run of heavily-barred windows, its long run of vine-covered columns, and its twelve apostles standing, life-sized, each over his own deep doorway.

Out in the centre, amongst the flowers, gabbled parrots and paroquets; and, near the gargoyled pila, upturned water-jars were always drying in the sun. I would sit on one of the worn stone seats under the pointed auricaria tree,

drink tiste from a black calabash, and listen to traditions and vividly-told tales of happenings that were, to me, strange enough.

These sincere women showed me many a quaint kindness. On the feast of Santa Marta, anniversary of the great destruction, they importuned me to stay the night with them, it seemed that on this date one 'Stanislau the Watchful' is wont to arise from his tomb under the place of the high altar, and prowl the 'Recoleccion'; and when I would not, a Central American bedroom is so much more dangerous than a ghost, they, much distressed, followed me home and wound about my wrist a rosary, blessed by Pius IX, that would prevent all sorts of things.

At Christmas, when I came down with nostalgia, they brought me to the house of their old friends to see the miniature Bethlehems that are always arranged in rooms set aside for that purpose.

And again, when I began to thirst for music 'as the hart panteth after the water brooks,' they brought to my sunset roof a wonderful young man who had been touched by the gods and Munich, and who, until far into the perfect January night, played for us with rapture on the violin.

By February I could walk to the nearest pueblo, which was a great point for me. I had long wished to see the Indian women at their weaving; and I had long wished to learn the secret of the calmness and silence, whether it were from almost superhuman intelligence, or from stupidity.

So from February until May I sat weaving with the women of San Pedro.

Innocente came walking down the lanes and over the hills with me the first morning, carrying the primitive loom, but unwillingly, she disapproved, — and she bargained in

'Quiche Spanish,' that, for moneys, I be allowed to sit in the midst of them, and that they teach me to set the threads and charge the shuttle.

They looked at her as she explained energetically; but if they understood they gave no sign, and they made no offer to help me.

I took my loom over beside a woman who was about to set her threads, and I sat upon the ground beside her and did as she did, turn for turn.

We all sat in the sun,--the shade gives fever, and not a word would be spoken. Hour after hour of silence, day after day. What a time for thinking, for imaginings! But the forest women sat dull-eyed; they seemed not even to think of the patterns they wove. For generations had their mothers been weaving these same men and birds and trees, and now the long brown fingers seemed to need no guidance.

By May, I too knew the weave and the patterns; knew them as though for generations my mothers had sat in the sun at San Pedro; and by May I knew that the majestic silence of the Indian women was not from intelligence, and that when they lifted their eyes to the sky, the forest, the cordillera, they saw nothing at all.

One morning in May I walked clear across the valley and halfway up the high hill Tigre, to a coffee plantation, whose owner, the widowed Doña Solidad, friend to the Quevedos, I knew very well.

This finca is one of the few that retain the old spirit and customs. Houses of Indian laborers are just inside the gates; rows of thatched bamboo huts along clean lanes, each hut with its vegetable patch and its plantain bushes, its pig, hens, dogs, parrots, and naked babies; and its leathery old woman grinding something upon a stone.

There is a school in the pueblo, and a church, the unshaven padre of which

lives at the house of Doña Solidad, along with generations of her poor relations.

The coffee was in bloom that May morning, and Doña Solidad took me to the west veranda to see the glory of it; hundreds of thousands of fine little trees with dark polished leaves, their stiff branches dragged down by weight of white blossoms.

We had breakfast there on the western veranda, the coarse finca breakfast, black beans, tortillas, tamales, roasted plantains.

When I was leaving, Doña Solidad insisted that I let a servant accompany me, and it pleased me, when we reached home, to hear this strong Indian woman complain to Innocente that she was fagged out; that the 'Americana' walked so strong, so swift, like a man.

In May my year was rounded, and from that year are left me many a fine recollection, illusive but dominating: the gradual changing of the valley colors, the pageants and music of Holy Week, the gathering of the coffee; memories of Indian women in scarlet, washing clothes by the brooks, of charcoalcarriers in the sun, of beggars sitting by stone crosses; memories of lonely evening streets, and of dark young men in black cloaks standing beneath grated windows; memories of slow-walking women, saying the rosary on the way from vespers; memories of long rows of cocoanut palms, their slim gray bodies and green plumes delicate against the sky, their splendid shadows black on field, or road, or white adobe wall; memories of the nights: of the momentary waking in the depth of a January night to feel on cheek and forehead the tempered north wind; the momentary waking in a July tempest to the pounding of rain out in the blackness, that could not enter, could not be seen, but that flung in under the dome its blessed gifts, ozone, electricity, love of life.

rain

those events thin

j.

THE witty remark of Dumas, that Lamartine had raised history to the dignity of romance, would have appealed to Thomas Buckle, who was much occupied with reducing it to the level of a science. Critics have told us that the attempt of the latter was a flat failure. But the attitude of the critics toward Buckle is less reassuring than the attitude of the scientists toward history; for while the former maintain that Buckle pursued a good end by a false method, the latter to this day reproach history with being entertaining and useless.

The remarks of Herbert Spencer in this connection are well known to every one. But perhaps there are some who have not heard the complaint of Professor Minot, who recently took occasion, in some public addresses, to lament the quite obvious futility of present historical methods. Whereas, in all other departments of knowledge great and useful advances were being made, historians alone were industriously engaged in aimless endeavor. In this opinion he had been confirmed only the summer before, when he had carried with him to the mountains, or wherever it was that he spent his vacation, a work which he supposed represented the best that modern historical scholarship could offer the first volume of the Cambridge Modern History! A part of his summer had been pleasantly spent in perusing this work. In it he found much of interest: events related in great detail; facts, curious and suggestive, presented, the truth of

his

I do not suppose there are many torians who carry the Cambridge Modern History with them to the mountains. It is not a book to be read in the greenwood. Certainly, the vision of the eminent professor dropping the ponderous tome into a vacation trunk, and pressing the lid deliberately down without a qualm, is pathetic enough. And yet the Cambridge Modern History is a serious work. If it is not the best that modern historical scholarship can do, it should be. Until Professor Minot found it interesting, no one, I imagine, ever thought it in danger of being classed as literature. If it is not science, it is nothing.

Professor Minot, who is perfectly clear about its not being science, in spite of its being entertaining, would doubtless find the lively remarks of Bagehot, in his essay on Gibbon, even more entertaining. 'Whatever may be the uses of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly, it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider the position of a man of that species. He sits beside a library fire, with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style, every means of saying everything, but nothing to say; of course he is an able man, but still one cannot always have original ideas. Every day cannot be an era, and how dull it is

to make it your business to write, to stay by yourself in a room to write, and then to have nothing to say! What a gain if something would happen! Then one could describe it. Something has happened, and that something is history. Perhaps when a Visigoth broke a head, he thought that that was all. Not so: he was making history; Gibbon has written it down.'

Humorous sallies like this are to be enjoyed, but happily need not be answered. At least it is so in this case, for most historians will readily agree with Professor Minot that the Cambridge Modern History contains a great mass of facts the truth of which cannot be questioned. But they will think that in saying so he has given the book a very good character indeed. You cannot disconcert the orthodox historian of our day by saying that he has got a mass of facts together without knowing what to do with them: if the truth of them cannot indeed be questioned, he will know very well what to do with them: he will put them in a book. But imagine the sentiments of the authors if Professor Minot had said that 'the beautifully coördinated generalizations, with which the Cambridge Modern History is packed, are most stimulating and suggestive.' Their chagrin would have been immense! No, the modern historian is not given to generalization. It is not his business to generalize, — so, at least, he thinks; it is his business to find out and to record 'exactly what happened.' So far, Bagehot is quite right after all. History is what happened; the historian must write it down, if not like Gibbon, at least wie es ist eigentlich gewesen.

If historians take this attitude somewhat uncompromisingly, it is not because they do not care for scientific history. Quite the contrary! They care for nothing so much; and to contribute a little to such history to make ‘a

permanent contribution to knowledge'

- is their chiefest ambition. Yet the thoughtful man knows well, in spite of what the reviewers say every month, that it is not easy to make a permanent contribution to knowledge. In nearly every age, able men have written histories; of them all, a few have proved permanent contributions to literature; as history, not one but must be edited. Even the great masters, whom we loyally advised every one to read without reading them ourselves, do not escape. Of course Tacitus was a great writer, but he was not at all scientific: he had ideas, and they were, unfortunately, the ideas of a Roman republican. Even Gibbon, with all his fine lack of enthusiasm, gave expression to the eighteenth-century dream of a golden age. Finding nothing in the Middle Ages but the 'triumph of barbarism and Christianity,' he too, in his ponderous fashion, voiced the demand écraser l'infâme !

As for the favorite historians of the nineteenth century, a decade or a generation has sufficed in most cases to shelve their works behind glass doors now rarely opened. Ceasing to be read, they are advertised as standard by publishers, and fall at last to be objects of glib criticism by the young professor who has himself written a monograph and three book-reviews. Not a life of drudgery, or genius itself, shall avoid disaster. Faith in democracy discredits a history of Greece; lack of it inspires the apotheosis of Cæsar. Hatred of tractarianism guides a facile pen through twelve volumes. The Reform Bill is read back into the Revolution of 1688. The memory of Sedan becomes a misleading gloss in all Merovingian manuscripts. Little wonder if the modern historian, stumbling over the wreckage that strews his path, has no desire to add anything of his own to the débris. Much better, he thinks, to be employed quarrying out of the bed