departments of the special relief service. In this paper, it is impossible to describe the feeding stations, the special relief at convalescent camps, the relief of men returning from Rebel prisons, that wonderful hospital directory, the pension bureau and war-claim agency of the Commission, and indeed many other of the services which were included under its Special Relief administration. They all showed ingenuity and the readiness of spirited men, governed by that strict system that the regular army itself did not surpass, which always regulated the work of the Commission.

Mr. Stille's book is, properly speaking, a history of the Commission itself, of the work, namely, directed by the eight or ten men who were the Sanitary Commission. He does not attempt to give the history of the work done by the thousands of branches, of every name and order. With one or two exceptions, he does not go into the history of the methods of raising funds for the service of the Commission. He is limited, of course, in the details which he can give of the service rendered. The book is the history of the work of the Commission in its chief departments. It is a complete answer, therefore, to the question of all the incredulous people, either of the type of Thomas or of the type of Judas, who used to ask, almost from hour to hour, "Where does all the money go to?" People of this type exist everywhere. "My husband is an excellent person," said one of the saints of this world; "but he never could tell what a woman wanted with a five-dollar bill." There were people, with such a passion for "husbanding," that they could never tell what the Sanitary wanted to do with five million dollars. In Mr. Stille's book is the complete answer, treasurer's returns and all, for any who choose to get an answer to their question. In one chapter the most picturesque and vivid, perhaps, in the book Dr. Bellows gives a narrative of the grand California contributions, which, with such exquisite poetical fitness,

came in with their solid weight of gold just when they were most needed. This is the chief exception, where in this book we get a bit of the romance, for it is nothing less, which, in this greatest of charities, attended the usually prosaic business of collecting the funds. Dr. Bellows is popularly and justly held to be the author of the Sanitary Commission. He may do what he pleases in other fields, but this is the title by which he will always be known, the country through. The work of a lifetime in the ministry of a large city, with special study of the prevention as well as the cure of social evil, was enough, apparently, to determine him from the beginning, that the army should never be left to the costly processes of cure, where an ounce of prevention could be served out so readily. His unflinching enthusiasm overwhelmed sticklers and doubters at Washington; or, as Olney says so well, "his tremendous emotional force carries him through brains and hearts alike." He has the reputation for a skill at organization, which is probably so far true, that he knows that it is best to get the best men you can, and then to trust them to carry out their own plans in the way in which they can best work in them. As working 'men of ability infallibly work on system, he is willing to trust the system or plan of the men with whom he works. But from all the elasticity of the "Sanitary's" work and processes, it is very evident that its president was never bigoted in clinging to his own particular methods, if only the thing itself were done. Like most men placed in responsible posts in a world which must be got forward somehow, he probably believes that, where no moral question is involved in the decision, it is generally better to do a thing than to refuse to do it. To this faith, which in practice is called energy, the activity and the triumph of the "Sanitary" are largely due.

California had won eternal blessings by sending to the "Sanitary," in the hour of its greatest need, first, one hundred thousand dollars, and in rapid

succession, three hundred and twentynine thousand nine hundred and ninetyfive dollars more in the short space of thirteen months. There was a charming poem published at the time, in which the writer, with great feeling, said, what we believe California felt heartily, — that because they might not give their iron, they would give their gold. A contribution so magnificent, of near half a million, would have been California's fair share, perhaps. But when the "Sanitary" for its largest work needed most money, it appealed to California again, and California pledged two hundred thousand more in monthly instalments. Our dear friend, Starr King, had proposed himself to canvass the State, county by county, to secure this result. He died. It was then that Dr. Bellows himself visited California, and by his own presence and influence assisted largely in the magnificent movement which he describes so well. Some of the funniest things that ever were done relieved with humor the uprising of the people of the Pacific coast, and some sacrifices of the most tender pathos gave solemnity to its history. The result of the

effort and enthusiasm was the contribution of one million four hundred and seventy-three thousand four hundred and seven dollars from the Americans of the Pacific coast and islands to the treasury of the Commission. Dr. Bellows's narrative, including the San Francisco report, furnishes one of the most suggestive, as it is one of the most entertaining, chapters of American history.

I have not said a word of the terrible details of battle-fields; nothing of the wonderful statistical work of the Commission; nothing of the ingenious, steady work of the local branches; nothing of the fairs, which, with all their flutter and filigree, netted two million seven hundred and thirty-six thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight dollars to the great cause. The history of each of these details will be a part of the history of the country, which no careful student of democratic government may neglect to study. Mr. Stille's volume, which has been my chief authority, will make us all long to see more of the official history of what we already begin to call "THE DEAR OLD SANITARY."

Severance got his precise combination of qualities. His father was simply what is called a handsome man, with stately figure and curly black hair, not without a certain dignity of manner, but with a face so shallow that it did not even seem to ripple, and with a voice so prosy that, when he spoke of the sky, you wished there were no such thing. His mother was a fair, little, pallid creature, wash-blond, as they say of lace, patient, meek, and always fatigued and fatiguing. But Severance, as I first knew him, was the soul of activity. He had dark eyes, that

out corresponding depth; his hair was dark, straight, and very soft; his mouth expressed sweetness, without much strength; he talked well; and though he was apt to have a wandering look, as if his thoughts were laying a submarine cable to another continent, yet the young girls were always glad to have the semblance of conversation with him in this. To me he was in the last degree lovable. He had just enough of that subtile quality called genius, perhaps, to spoil first his companions, and then himself. His words had weight with you, though you might

know yourself wiser; and if you went to give him the most reasonable advice, you were suddenly seized with a slight paralysis of the tongue. Thus it was, at any rate, with me. We were cemented therefore by the firmest ties, a nominal seniority on my part, and a substantial supremacy on his.

We lodged one summer at an old house in that odd suburb of Oldport called "The Point." It is well known that Oldport needs nothing to complete its attractions, except that it should be taken up and removed to the seaside; as "The Point" is the only part of that watering-place where it does not require a handsome income to keep within sight of the water. It is naturally, therefore, a sort of Artists' Quarter of the town, frequented by a class of summer visitors more addicted to sailing and sketching than to driving and bowing, persons who do not object to simple fare, and can live, as one of them said, on potatoes and Point. Here Severance and I made our summer home, basking in the delicious sunshine of the lovely bay. The bare outlines around Oldport sometimes dismay the stranger, but soon fascinate. Nowhere does one feel bareness so little, because there is no sharpness of perspective; everything shimmers in the moist atmosphere; the islands are all glamour and mirage; and the undulating hills of the horizon seem each like the soft arched back of some pet animal, and you long to caress them with your hand. At last your thoughts begin to swim also, and pass into vague fancies, which you also love to caress. Severance and I were constantly afloat, body and mind. He was a perfect sailor, and had that dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing but the ripple of the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself that he was a changed man since that voyage in search of health from which he had just returned. His mother talked in her humdrum way about heart disease; and his father, taking up the strain, bored us about organic lesions, till we almost wished he had a lesion himself.

Severance ridiculed all this; but he grew more and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be laying more submarine cables than ever.

When we were not on the water, we both liked to mouse about the queer streets and quaint old houses of that region, and to chat with the fishermen and their grandmothers. There was one house, however, which was very attractive to me,-perhaps because nobody lived in it, and which, for that or some other reason, he never would approach. It was a great square building of rough gray stone, looking like those sombre houses which every one remembers in Montreal, but which are rare in "the States." It had been built many years before by some millionnaire from New Orleans, and was left unfinished, nobody knew why, till the garden was a wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is the only place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow; there were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could hear of, for the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and retrospective by reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion where nobody had ever lived; but the ivy clustered round the projecting windows as densely as if it had the sins of a dozen generations to hide.

The house stood just above what were commonly called (from their slaty color) the Blue Rocks; it seemed the topmost pebble left by some tide that had receded, - which perhaps it was. Nurses and children thronged daily to these rocks, during the visitors' season, and the fishermen found there a favorite lounging-place; but nobody scaled the wall of the house save myself, and I went there very often. The gate was sometimes opened by Paul, the silent Bavarian gardener, who was master of the keys; and there were also certain great cats that were always sunning themselves on the steps, and seemed to have grown old and gray in waiting for mice that had never come. They looked as if they knew the past and the future. If the owl is the bird of Mi

nerva, the cat should be her beast: they have the same sleepy air of unfathomable wisdom. There was such a quiet and potent spell about the place, that one could almost fancy these constant animals to be the transformed bodies of human visitors who had stayed too long. Who knew what tales might be told by these tall, slender birches, clustering so closely by the sombre walls? - birches which were but whispering shrubs when the first gray stones were laid, and which now reared above the eaves their white stems and dark boughs, still whispering and waiting till a few more years should show them, across the roof, the topmost blossoms of other birches on the other side.

Before the great western doorway spread the outer harbor, whither the coasting vessels came to drop anchor at any approach of storm. These silent visitors, which arrived at dusk and went at dawn, and from which no boat landed, seemed fitting guests before the portals of the silent house. I was never tired of watching them from the piazza; but Severance always stayed outside the wall. It was a whim of his, he said; and once only I got out of him something about the resemblance of the house to some Portuguese mansion, at Madeira, perhaps, or at Rio Janeiro, but he did not say, - with which he had no pleasant associations. Yet he afterwards seemed to wish to deny this remark, or to confuse my impressions of it, which naturally fixed it the better in my mind.

I remember well the morning when he was at last coaxed into approaching the house. It was late in September, and a day of perfect calm.

As we looked from the broad piazza, there was a glassy smoothness over all the bay, and the hills were coated with a film, or rather a mere varnish, inconceivably thin, of haze more delicate than any other climate in America can show. Over the water there were white gulls flying, lazy and low; schools of young mackerel displayed their white sides above the surface; and it seemed as if even a butterfly might be seen for

miles over that calm expanse. The bay was covered with mackerel boats, and one man sculled indolently across the foreground a scarlet skiff. It was so still that every white sail-boat rested where its sail was first spread; and though the tide was at half-ebb, the anchored boats swung idly different ways from their moorings. Yet there was a continuous ripple in the broad sail (raised for the purpose of drying it) on some motionless schooner, and there was a constant melodious plash along the shore. From the mouth of the bay came up slowly the premonitory line of bluer water, and we knew that a breeze

was near.

Severance seemed to rise in spirits as we approached the house, and I noticed no sign of shrinking, except an occasional lowering of the voice. Seeing this, I ventured to joke him a little on his previous reluctance, and he replied in the same strain. I seated myself at the corner, and began sketching old Fort Louis, while he strolled along the piazza, looking in at the large, vacant windows. As he approached the farther end, I suddenly heard him give a little cry of amazement or dismay, and, looking up, saw him leaning against the wall, with pale face and hands clenched.

A minute sometimes appears a long while; and though I sprang to him instantly, yet I remember that it seemed as if, during that instant, the whole face of things had changed. The breeze had come, the bay was rippled, the sail-boats careened to the wind, fishes and birds were gone, and a dark gray cloud had come between us and the

sun.

Such sudden changes are not, however, uncommon after an interval of calm; and my only conscious thought at the time was of wonder at the strange aspect of my companion.

"What was that?" asked Severance in a bewildered tone.

I looked about me, equally puzzled. "Not there," he said. "In the window."

I looked in at the window, saw nothing, and said so. There was the great

empty drawing-room, across which one could see the opposite window, and through this the eastern piazza and the garden beyond. Nothing more was there. With some persuasion, Severance was induced to look in. He admitted that he saw nothing peculiar; but he refused all explanation, and we went home.

"Never let me go to that house again," he said abruptly, as we entered our own door.

I pointed out to him the absurdity of thus yielding to some nervous delusion, which was already in part conquered, and he finally promised to revisit the scene with me the next day. To clear all possible misgivings from my own mind, I got the key of the house from Paul, explored it thoroughly, and was satisfied that no improper visitor had recently entered the drawing-room at least, as the windows were strongly bolted on the inside, and a large cobweb, heavy with dust, hung across the doorway. This did no great credit to Paul's stewardship, but was, perhaps, a slight relief to me. Nor could I see a trace of anything uncanny outside the house. When Severance went with me, next day, the coast was equally clear, and I was glad to have cured him so easily.

Unfortunately, it did not last. A few days after, there was a brilliant sunset, after a storm, with gorgeous yellow light slanting everywhere, and the sun looking at us between bars of dark purple cloud, edged with gold where they touched the pale-blue sky; all this fading at last into a great whirl of gray to the northward, with a cold purple ground. At the height of the show, I climbed the wall to my favorite piazza, and was surprised to find Severance already there.

He sat facing the sunset, but with his head sunk between his hands. At my approach, he looked up, and rose to his feet. "Do not deceive me any more," he said, almost savagely, and pointed to the window.

I looked in, and must confess that, for a moment, I too was startled. There

was a perceptible moment of time during which it seemed as if no possible philosophy could explain what appeared in sight. Not that any object showed itself within the great drawing-room, but I distinctly saw across the apartment, and through the opposite window the dark figure of a man about my own size, who leaned against the long window, and gazed intently on me. Above him spread the yellow sunset light, around him the birch-boughs hung and the ivy-tendrils swayed, while behind him there appeared a glimmering water-surface, across which slowly drifted the tall masts of a schooner. It looked strangely like a view I had seen of some foreign harbor, Sorrento, perhaps, with a vine-clad balcony and a single human figure in the foreground. So real and startling was the sight, that at first it was not easy to resolve the whole scene into its component parts. Yet it was simply such a confused mixture of real and reflected images as one often sees from the window of a railway carriage, where the mirrored interior seems to glide beside the train, with the natural landscape for a background. In this case, also, the frame and foliage of the picture were real, and all else was reflected; the sunlit bay behind us was reproduced as in a camera, and the dark figure was but the full-length image of myself.

It was easy to explain all this to Severance, but he shook his head. "So cool a philosopher as yourself," he said, "should remember that this image is not always visible. At our last visit, we looked for it in vain. When we first saw it, it appeared and disappeared within ten minutes. On your mechanical theory it should be otherwise."

This staggered me for a moment. Then the ready solution occurred, that the reflection depended on the strength and direction of the light; and I proved to him that, in our case, it had appeared and disappeared with the sunshine. He was silenced, but evidently not convinced; yet time and common-sense, it seemed, would take care of that.