Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11 No. 27 June 1873 by Various

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A NEW ATLANTIS.

THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA. CONCLUDING PAPER.

A REMINISCENCE OF THE EXPOSITION OF 1867 by ITA ANIOL PROKOP.

SLAINS CASTLE by LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.

SAINT ROMUALDO by EMMA LAZARUS.

THE EMERALD by A.C. HAMLIN, M.D.

BOWERY ENGLAND by WIRT SIKES.

DAY-DREAM by KATE PUTNAM OSGOOD.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP. THE GLADSTONE FAMILY. WHITSUNTIDE AMONG THE MENNISTS. THE RAW AMERICAN by PRENTICE MULFORD.

FAREWELL by LUCY H. HOOPER.

NOTES.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

ATLANTIC CITY FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE. UP THE INLET. LANDING-PLACE ON THE INLET. CONGRESS HALL. MR. RICHARD WRIGHT'S COTTAGE. THE SENATE HOUSE. ON THE SHINING SANDS. MR. THOMAS C. HAND'S COTTAGE. THE THOROUGHFARE. THE EXCURSION HOUSE. A SCENE IN FRONT OF SCHAUFLER'S HOTEL. ABD-EL-KADER IN KABYLIA. AN AGHA OF KABYLIA HUNTING WITH THE FALCON. THE DISCIPLES OF TOFAIL. A KOUBBA, OR MARABOUT'S TOMB. KABYLE MEN. KABYLE WOMEN. DEFILE OF THIFILKOULT. AN ARAB MARKET. POVERTY AND JEWELS. GEORGE CHRISTY IN AFRICA.

A NEW ATLANTIS.

The New Year's debts are paid, the May-day moving is over and settled, and still a remnant of money is found sticking to the bottom of the old marmalade pot. Where shall we go?

There is nothing like the sea. Shall it be Newport?

Well, Nahant, then, or Long Branch?

Too slow and too fast. Besides, we have seen them.

Suppose we try the Isles of Shoals? Appledore and Duck Island and White Island, now? Or Nantucket, or Marblehead?

Too stony, and nothing in particular to eat. You ask for fish, and they give you a rock.

In truth, under that moral and physical dyspepsia to which we bring ourselves regularly every summer, the fine crags of the north become just the least bit of a bore. They necessitate an amount of heroic climbing under the command of a sort of romantic and do-nothing Girls of the Period, who sit about on soft shawls in the lee of the rocks, and gather their shells and anemones vicariously at the expense of your tendon achilles. We know it, for we have suffered. We calculate, and are prepared to prove, that the successful collection of a single ribbon of ruffled seaweed, procured in a slimy haystack of red dulse at the beck of one inconsiderate girl, who is keeping her brass heels dry on a safe and sunny ledge of the Purgatory at Newport, may require more mental calculation, involve more anguish of equilibrium, and encourage more heartfelt secret profanity than the making of a steam-engine or the writing of a proposal.

No, no, we would admire nothing, dare nothing, do nothing, but only suck in rosy health at every pore, pin our souls out on the holly hedge to sweeten, and forget what we had for breakfast. Uneasy daemons that we are all winter, toiling gnomes of the mine and the forge--"O spent ones of a workday age"--can we not for one brief month in our year be Turks?

Our doctors, slowly acquiring a little sense, are changing their remedies. Where the cry used to be "drugs," it now is "hygiene." But hygiene itself might be changed for the better. We can imagine a few improvements in the materia medica of the future. Where the physician used to order a tonic for a feeble pulse, he will simply hold his watch thoughtfully for sixty seconds and prescribe "Paris." Where he was wont to recommend a strong emetic, he will in future advise a week's study of the works of art at our National Capital. For lassitude, a donkey-ride up Vesuvius. For color-blindness, a course of sunrises from the Rigi. For deafness, Wachtel in his song of "Di quella Pira." For melancolia, Naples. For fever, driving an ice-cart. But when the doctor's most remunerative patient comes along, the pursy manufacturer able to afford the luxury of a bad liver, let him consult the knob of his cane a moment and order "Atlantic City."

--Because it is lazy, yet stimulating. Because it is unspoilt, yet luxurious. Because the air there is filled with iodine and the sea with chloride of sodium. Because, with a whole universe of water, Atlantic City is dry. Because of its perfect rest and its infinite horizons.

Two of our best marine painters in their works offer us a choice of coast-landscape. Kensett paints the bare stiff crags, whitened with salt, standing out of his foregrounds like the clean and hungry teeth of a wild animal, and looking hard enough to have worn out the painter's brush with their implacable enamel. From their treeless waste extends the sea, a bath of deep, pure color. All seems keen, fresh, beautiful and severe: it would take a pair of stout New England lungs to breathe enjoyably in such an air. That is the northern coast. Mr. William Richards gives us the southern--the landscape, in fact, of Atlantic City. In his scenes we have the infinitude of soft silver beach, the rolling tumultuousness of a boundless sea, and twisted cedars mounted like toiling ships on the crests of undulating sand-hills. It is the charm, the dream, the power and the peace of the Desert.

The shore melts into the sea by a network of creeks and inlets, edging the territory with an inimitable lacework of azure waters; the pattern is one of looping channels with oval interstices, and the dentellated border of the commonwealth resembles that sort of lace which was made by arranging on glass the food of a silk-spinning worm: the creature ate and wove, having voracity always before him and Fine Art behind him. Much of the solider part of the State is made of the materials which enter into glass-manufacture: a mighty enchanter might fuse the greater portion of it into one gigantic goblet. A slight approximation to this work of magic is already being carried on. The tourist who has crossed the lagoons of Venice to see the fitful lights flash up from the glass-furnaces of Murano, will find more than one locality here where leaping lights, crowning low banks of sand, are preparing the crystal for our infant industries in glass, and will remind him of his hours by the Adriatic. Every year bubbles of greater and greater beauty are being blown in these secluded places, and soon we hope to enrich commerce with all the elegances of latticinio and schmelze, the perfected glass of an American Venice.

But our business is not with the land, but the sea. Here it lies, basking at our feet, the warm amethystine sea of the South. It does not boom and thunder, as in the country of the "cold gray stones." On the contrary, saturating itself with sunny ease, thinning its bulk over the shoal flat beach with a succession of voluptuous curves, it spreads thence in distance with strands and belts of varied color, away and away, until blind with light it faints on a prodigiously far horizon. Its falling noises are as soft as the sighs of Christabel. Its colors are the pale and milky colors of the opal. But ah! what an impression of boundlessness! How the silver ribbon of beach unrolls for miles and miles! And landward, what a parallel sea of marshes, bottoms and dunes! The sense of having all the kingdoms of the world spread out beneath one, together with most of the kingdoms of the mermen, has never so come to one's consciousness before. And again, what an artist is Nature, with these faint washes and tenderest varied hues--varied and tender as the flames from burning gases--while her highest lights are still diaphanous and profound!

One goes to the seaside not for pomp and peacock's tails, but for saltness, Nature and a bite of fresh fish. To build a city there that shall not be an insult to the sentiment of the place is a matter of difficulty. One's ideal, after all, is a canvas encampment. A range of solid stone villas like those of Newport, so far as congruity with a watering-place goes, pains the taste like a false note in music. Atlantic City pauses halfway between the stone house and the tent, and erects herself in woodwork. A quantity of bright, rather giddy-looking structures, with much open-work and carved ruffling about the eaves and balconies, are poised lightly on the sand, following the course of the two main avenues which lead parallel with the shore, and the series of short, straight, direct streets which leap across them and run eagerly for the sea. They have a low, brooding look, and evidently belong to a class of sybarites who are not fond of staircases. Among them, the great rambling hotel, sprawling in its ungainly length here and there, looks like one of the ordinary tall New York houses that had concluded to lie over on its side and grow, rather than take the trouble of piling on its stories standing. In this encampment of wooden pavilions is lived the peculiar life of the place.

We are sure it is a sincere, natural, sensible kind of life, as compared with that of other bathing-shores. Although there are brass bands at the hotels, and hops in the evening, and an unequal struggle of macassar oil with salt and stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is kept at a minimum. People really do bathe, really do take walks on the beach for the love of the ocean, really do pick up shells and throw them away again, really do go yachting and crab-catching; and if they try city manners in the evening, they are so tired with their honest day's work that it is apt to end in misery. On the hotel piazzas you see beauties that surprise you with exquisite touches of the warm and languid South. That dark Baltimore girl, her hair a constellation of jessamines, is beating her lover's shoulders with her fan in a state of ferocity that you would give worlds to encounter. That pair of proud Philadelphia sisters, statues sculptured in peach-pulp and wrapped in gauze, look somehow like twin Muses at the gates of a temple. Whole rows of unmatched girls stare at the sea, desolate but implacable, waiting for partners equal to them in social position. In such a dearth a Philadelphia girl will turn to her old music-teacher and flirt solemnly with him for a whole evening, sooner than involve herself with well-looking young chits from Providence or New York, who may be jewelers' clerks when at home. Yet the unspoiled and fruity beauty of these Southern belles is very striking to one who comes fresh from Saratoga and the sort of upholstered goddesses who are served to him there.

There is another feature of the place. With its rarely fine atmosphere, so tonic and bracing, so free from the depressing fog of the North, it is a great sanitarium. There are seasons when the Pennsylvania University seems to have bred its wealth of doctors for the express purpose of marshaling a dying world to the curative shelter of Atlantic City. The trains are encumbered with the halt and the infirm, who are got out at the doors like unwieldy luggage in the arms of nurses and porters. Once arrived, however, they display considerable mobility in distributing themselves through the three or four hundred widely-separated cottages which await them for hire. As you wander through the lanes of these cunning little houses, you catch strange fragments of conversation. Gentlemen living vis-?-vis, and standing with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas, are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse of each other's doctor. There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians. The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms, set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with invalids describing their own complaints. Or the sufferers turn their batteries on each other. On the verandah of a select boarding-house we have seen a fat lady of forty lying on a bench like a dead harlequin, as she rolled herself in the triangles of a glittering afghan. On a neighboring seat a gouty subject, and a tropical sun pouring on both.

"Good-morning! You see I am trying my sun-bath. I am convinced it relieves my spine." The same remark has introduced seven morning conversations.

"And my gout has shot from the index toe to the ring toe. I feared my slipper was damp, and I am roasting it here. But, dear ma'am, I pity you so with your spine! Tried acupuncture?"

The patient probably hears the word as Acapulco. For she answers, "No, but I tried St. Augustine last winter. Not a morsel of good."

Among these you encounter sometimes lovely, frail, transparent girls, who come down with cheeks of wax, and go home in two months with cheeks of apple. Or stout gentlemen arriving yellow, and going back in due time purple.

Once a hardened siren of many watering-places, large and blooming, arrived at Atlantic City with her latest capture, a stooping invalid gentleman of good family in Rhode Island. They boated, they had croquet on the beach, they paced the shining sands. Both of them people of the world and past their first youth, they found an amusement in each other's knowing ways and conversation that kept them mutually faithful in a kind of mock-courtship. The gentleman, however, was evidently only amusing himself with this travesty of sentiment, though he was never led away by the charms of younger women. After a month of it he succeeded in persuading her for the first time to enter the water, and there he assisted her to take the billows in the gallant American fashion. Her intention of staying only in the very edge of the ocean he overruled by main force, playfully drawing her out where a breaker washed partially over her. As the water touched her face she screamed, and raised her arm to hide the cheek that had been wet. She then ran hastily to shore, and her friend, fearing some accident, made haste to rejoin her. His astonishment was great at finding one of her cheeks of a ghastly, unhealthy white. Her color had always been very high. That afternoon she sought him and explained. She was really an invalid, she said calmly, and had recently undergone a shocking operation for tumor. But she saw no reason for letting that interfere with her usual summer life, particularly as she felt youth and opportunity making away from her with terrible strides. Having a chance to enjoy his society which might never be repeated, fearing lest his rapid disease should carry him away from before her eyes, she had concluded to make the most of time, dissemble her suffering, and endeavor to conceal by art the cold bloodlessness of her face. This whimsical, worldly heroism happened to strike the gentleman strangely. He was affected to the point of proposing marriage. At the same time he perceived with some amazement that his disease had left him: the, curative spell of the region had wrought its enchantment upon his system. They were wedded, with roles reversed--he as the protector and she as the invalid--and were truly happy during the eighteen months that the lady lived as his wife.

There are prettier and more innocent stories. Every freckle-nosed girl from the Alleghany valleys who sweeps with her polka-muslin the floors of these generous hotels has an idyl of her own, which she is rehearsing with young Jefferson Jones or little Madison Addison. In the golden afternoons they ride together--not in the fine turn-outs supplied by the office-clerks, nor yet on horse-back, but in guiltless country wagons guided by Jersey Jehus, where close propinquity is a delightful necessity. Ten miles of uninterrupted beach spread before them, which the ocean, transformed for the purpose into a temporary Haussmann, is rolling into a marble boulevard for their use twice a day. On the hard level the wheels scarcely leave a trace. The ride seems like eternity, it lapses off so gentle and smooth, and the landscape is so impressively similar: everywhere the plunging surf, the gray sand-hills, the dark cedars with foliage sliced off sharp and flat by the keen east wind--their stems twisted like a dishclout or like the olives around Florence.

At the Inlet, which penetrates the beach alongside the lighthouse, is draught for light vessels, and the various kinds of society which focus at Atlantic City may be seen concentrated there on the wharf any of these bright warm days. A gay party of beauties and aristocrats, with a champagne-basket and hamper of lunch, are starting thence for a sail over to Brigantine Beach. Two gentlemen in flannel, with guns, are urging a little row-boat up toward the interior country. They will return at night laden with rail or reed-birds, with the additional burden perhaps of a great loon, shot as a curiosity. Others, provided with fishing-tackle, are going out for flounder. Laughing farewells, waving handkerchiefs and the other telegraphic signs of departure, are all very gay, but the tune may be changed when the great sailing-party comes back, wet and wretched, and with three of the principal beauties limp as bolsters on the gentlemen's hands with sea-sickness.

Another spirited scene takes place at five in the morning--an hour when the city beauties are abed with all that tenacity of somnolence which characterizes Kathleen Mavourneen in the song. The husbands and brothers, who are due in the city before business hours, are out for a good, royal, irresponsible tumble in the surf. There is the great yeasty bath-tub, full of merry dashing figures, dipping the sleek shoulder to the combing wave. On the shore, active humanities hastily undressing. Then the heavens are filled with a new glory, and the dazzling sun leaves his bath at the same time with all these merry roisterers who have shared it with him. He takes up his line of business for the day, and so do the good husbands and brothers, first going through a little ceremony of toilet from which he is exempt.

Thus does the New Atlantis provide for her republic, holding health to her children with one hand, and shaking from the other an infinity of toys and diversions; while for those of more thoughtful bent the sea turns without ceasing its ancient pages, written all over with inexhaustible romance.

The great architect of the city was the Power who graded those streets of immaculate sand, and who laid out that park of mellow, foam-flowered ocean. Its human founders have done what seemed suitable in providing shelter for a throng of fitful sojourners, not forgetting to put up six neat and modest churches, where suitable praise and adoration may be chanted against the chanting of the sea. In several respects the place grows somewhat curiously. For instance, a lawn of turf is made by the simple expedient of fencing off the cattle: the grass then grows, but if the cows get in they pull up the sod by the roots, and the wind in a single season excavates a mighty hollow where the grassy slope was before. So much for building our hopes on sand. An avenue of trees is prepared by the easy plan of thrusting willow-stems into the ground: they sprout directly, and alternate with the fine native cedars and hollies in clothing the streets with shadow. Several citizens, as Mr. Richard Wright and Mr. Thomas C. Hand, whose handsome cottages are tasteful specimens of our seaside architecture, have been tempted by this facility of vegetable life at Atlantic City to lay out elaborate gardens, which with suitable culture are successful. Fine avenues of the best construction lead off to Shell Beach or to the single hill boasted by the locality. Finally, remembering the claims of the great democracy to a wash-basin, the aediles invited Tom, Dick and Harry, and set up the Excursion or Sea-View House, with its broad piazzas, its numberless facilities for amusement, and its enormous dining-hall, which can be changed on occasion into a Jardin Mabille, with flowers and fountains.

To a great city all the renovating and exhilarating qualities of sea-breezes and sea-bathing are but as the waters of Tantalus, unless the place which offers these advantages be easy of access. In this respect Atlantic City has for Philadelphia a superiority over all its rivals. The Camden and Atlantic Railroad, to whose secretary and treasurer, Mr. D.M. Zimmermann, we are indebted for much information, has simply drawn a straight line to the coast, which may be reached in an hour and three-quarters from Vine street wharf. The villages on the route, like the seaside terminus, owe their existence to the road, which is now reaping the reward of a far-sighted enterprise.

THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

A noble life, whose course belongs to the subject of these pages, is, while they are preparing, apparently drawing to a close. The severe illness now reported of Abd-el-Kader, coming upon old age, disappointment, war and the lassitude of a great purpose foiled, can have but one result. Dimmed to-day, as our hurrying century so rapidly dims her brightest renowns, Abd-el-Kader's existence has only to cease and his memory will assume the sacred splendor of the tomb.

"God will send me others," said young Abd-el-Kader.

The tourist remembers the trinity-portrait of him, by Maxime David, in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris, where his face, framed in its white hood, is seen in full, in profile and in three-quarters view. The visage is aquiline, olive-tinted, refined; but we can describe it more authentically in the terms of one of his enemies, Lieutenant de France, who became his prisoner in 1836, and who followed his movements for five months, taking down his daily talk and habits like a Boswell, but leaving nothing in his narrative that is not to the sultan's credit. Of Abd-el-Kader at twenty-eight the lieutenant says: "His face is long and deadly pale, his large black eyes are soft and languishing, his mouth small and delicate, and his nose rather aquiline: his beard is thin, but jet-black, and he wears a small moustache, which gives a martial character to his soft, delicate face, and becomes him vastly. His hands are small and exquisitely formed, and his feet equally beautiful." Every interlocutor leaves a similar portrait, impressing upon the mind the image of some warrior-saint of the Middle Ages, born too late, and beating out his noble fanaticism against our century of machines and chicanery.

Himself, according to some accounts, a Berber, the young marabout early saw the importance of inducing the Kabyles to join with him and his Arabs in expelling the French. He affiliated himself with the religious order of Ben-abd-er-Rhaman, a saint whose tomb is one of the sacred places of Kabylia; and it is certain that the college of this order furnished him succor in men and money. He visited the Kabyles in their rock-built villages, casting aside his military pomp and coming among them as a simple pilgrim. If the Kabyles had received him better, he could have shown a stouter front to the enemy. But the mountain Berbers, utterly unused to co-operation and subordination, met him with surprise and distrust.

The chief appeared in 1836 at Bordj-Boghni and at Si-Ali-ou-Moussa among the mountains. The Kabyle tribes visited him in multitudes. He addressed them at the door of his tent, and these rude mountaineers found themselves face to face with that saintly sallow visage, those long gazelle eyes and the prophetic countenance framed in its apostolic beard. Raising his arms in the attitude of Raphael's Paul at Lystra, he said simply, "I am the thorn which Allah has placed in the eye of the Franks. And if you will help me I will send them weeping into the sea."

But when it came to a demand for supplies, the Kabyles, says Daumas, utterly refused.

"You have come as a pilgrim," said their amins, "and we have fed you with kouskoussu. If you were to come as a chief, wishing to lay his authority on us, instead of white kouskoussu we should treat you to black kouskoussu" .

Abd-el-Kader, without losing the serenity of the marabout, argued with the Kabyles, and succeeded in obtaining their reverence and adhesion; but when he mounted his horse to go the amins significantly told him to come among them always as a simple pilgrim, demanding hospitality and white kouskoussu.

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