The women stood on either hand crying. They had clothed the dead in white and crossed her hands upon her breast. A linen covering had been passed, nun-like, round the head and chin. The wound was hidden, and the face lay framed in an oval of pure white, which gave it a strange severity.

Isaac bent over her. Was this Bessie -Bessie, the human, faulty, chattering creature-whom he, her natural master, had been free to scold or caress at will? At bottom he had always been conscious in regard to her of a silent but immeasurable superiority, whether as mere man to mere woman, or as the Christian to the sinner.

Now he dared scarcely touch her. As she lay in this new-found dignity, the proud peace of her look intimidated, accused him-would always accuse him till he too rested as she rested now, clad for the end. Yet she had bade him kiss her-and he obeyed her -groaning within himself, incapable altogether, out of sheer abasement, of saying those words she had asked of him.

Then he sat down beside her, motionless. John tried once or twice to speak to him, but Isaac shook his head impatiently. At last the mere presence of Bolderfield in the room seemed to anger him. He threw the old man such dark and restless looks that Mary Anne perceived them, and, with instinctive understanding, persuaded John to go.

She, however, must needs go with him, and she went. The other woman stayed. Every now and then she looked furtively at Isaac.

"If some one don't look arter 'im,' she said to herself, "'ee'll go as his father and his brothers went afore him. 'Ee's got the look on it awready. Wheniver it's light I'll go fetch Muster Drew."

With the first rays of the morning Bolderfield got up from the bed in Mary Anne's cottage, where she had placed him a couple of hours before, imploring him to lie still and rest himself. He slipped on his coat, the only garment he had taken off, and taking his stick he crept down to the cottage door. Mary Anne, who had gone out to fetch some bread, had left it ajar. He

opened it and stood on the threshold looking out.

The

The storm of the night was over, and already a milder breeze was beginning to melt the newly fallen snow. sun was striking cheerfully from the hill behind him upon the glistening surfaces of the distant fields; the old laborer felt a hint of spring in the air. It brought with it a hundred vague associations, and filled him with a boundless despair. What would become of him now-penniless and old and feeble? The horror of Bessie's death no longer stood between him and his own pain, and would soon even cease to protect her from his hatred.

Mary Anne came back along the lane, carrying a jug and a loaf. Her little face was all blanched and drawn with weariness; yet when she saw him her look kindled. She ran up to him.

"What did yer come down for, John? I'd ha' taken yer yer breakfast in yer bed."

He looked at her, then at the food. His eyes filled with tears.

"I can't pay yer for it," he said, pointing with his stick; "I can't pay yer for it."

Mary Anne led him in, scolding and coaxing him with her gentle, trembling voice. She made him sit down while she blew up the fire; she fed and tended him. When she had forced him to eat something, she came behind him. and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"John," she said, clearing her throat, "John, yer sha'n't want while I'm livin'. I promised Eliza I wouldn't forget yer, and I won't. I can work yet— there's plenty o' people want me to work for 'em-an' maybe, when yer get over this, you'll work a bit, too, now and again. We'll hold together, John -anyways. While I live and keep my 'elth yer sha'n't want. An' yer'll forgive Bessie "-she broke into sudden sobbing. "Oh! I'll never 'ear a crule word about Bessie in my 'ouse, never!”

John put his arms on the table and hid his face upon them. He could not speak of forgiveness, nor could he thank her for her promise. His chief feeling was an intense wish to sleep; but as Mary Anne dried her tears and began to go about her household work, the

sound of her step, the sense of her loving presence near him, began for the first time to relax the aching grip upon his heart. He had always been weak and dependent, in spite of his thrift and his money. He would be far more weak and dependent now and henceforward. But again, he had found a woman's tenderness to lean upon, and as she ministered to him-this humble, shrinking creature he had once so cordially despised-the first drop of balm fell upon his sore.

Meanwhile, in another cottage a few yards away, Mr. Drew was wrestling with Isaac. In his own opinion he met with small success. The man who had refused his wife mercy, shrank with a kind of horror from talking of the Divine mercy. Isaac Costrell's was a strange and groping soul. But those misjudged him who called him a hypocrite.

Yet, in truth, during the years that followed, whenever he was not under

the influence of recurrent attacks of melancholia, Isaac did again derive much comfort from the aspirations and self-abasements of religion. No human life would be possible if there were not forces in and round man perpetually tending to repair the wounds and breaches that he himself makes. Misery provokes pity; despair throws itself on a Divine tenderness. And for those who have the " grace" of faith, in the broken and imperfect action of these healing powers upon this various world-in the love of the merciful for the unhappy, in the tremulous yet undying hope that pierces even sin and remorse with the vision of some ultimate salvation from the self that breeds them in these powers there speaks the only voice which can make us patient under the tragedies of human fate, whether these tragedies be "the falls of princes," or such meaner, narrower pains as brought poor Bessie Costrell to her end.

I

T is as an interpreter of Nature that Elbridge Kingsley is best known. His reproductions of paintings by famous landscape artists-Corot, Diaz, Daubigny, Inness, and Tryon-and his original blocks, either from his own studies or directly in the wood, are permeated through and through with a sympathy and poetry only possible to one who knows and loves Nature.

His boyhood was passed upon a farm near Hadley, Mass., in the heart of a beautiful and varied country, and his early acquired fondness for the freedom of the woods and fields has led him back in his maturity to make his home amid the scenes that gave him his first artistic inspiration. From the age of sixteen until manhood, when he came to New York with the ambition to study art, he worked in the office

With a portrait and two original wood-engravings.

Ar

of a small country newspaper. rived in the city, his first object was to enter the evening classes of the Cooper Union Art Schools, after which he found a practical means of defraying expenses as a compositor on The Tribune. An opportunity presenting to take up the more congenial study of wood-engraving, he began it with the enthusiasm that has characterized all of his work. After a few years of city life he returned to the freedom of his loved country, where his spare time was spent in wandering through the woods, sketch-book in hand, ready to make note of any scene that might appeal to his passing mood. A reading of Mr. Hamerton's " Painter's Camp,' and a long-cherished wish to live and be in touch with Nature, to work within her charmed circle, to be at hand in all her changing moods from dawn to night, and in sun and storm, suggested

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the building of a wheeled car that might be used both as a studio and dwelling.

Elbridge Kingsley.

While working in this gypsy - like home in the fall of 1882 he engraved a scene directly in the wood which at the time attracted attention, both as a beautiful example of his art and a remarkable achievement. It went far to prove his claim for the wood-engraver's art as one that, in the hands of a master, may assume the value and dignity of a place for itself apart from its merely reproductive value. With Kingsley the successful engraving of a landscape depends upon his going into the woods himself; he must, as far as possible, be in full accord with the environment that contributed to the original conception and inspiration. He cannot work from suggestions by the artist he is to copy. "If I do not go to the same source of inspiration myself and earn my position, he would tire of me in half an hour." There is no use in talking technique, "if I can in my own way find the black and white translation of his color scheme, sacrificing the smaller to the greater masses. I am a creative artist myself." In other words, the responsibility of producing a harmony in black and white rests

VOL. XVIII.-5

with the engraver. His work is a creation in precisely the same way as the painter-etcher's, and should receive the same consideration.

66

This note of individuality, the expression of a strong nature striving toward an ideal, is the key to Kingsley's work. He believes the artist should be a law unto himself, untrammelled by aught beyond the necessity of being true to his own impulses and convictions born of an intense earnestness, and an elevating enthusiasm for the best that is in him. "His art is his personality identified with his every expression." Kingsley says we do not stop to analyze every detail of a picture that touches and moves us, its faults of technique, often its defiance. of recognized conventional canons, but we are carried away by its spirit-the thought that gives the impression of truth, and speaks to us of deeper things than mere dexterity of handling. "Whatever reaches down and lifts up that which is sweetest and best within us, whether it comes from the running brooks in the meadows, the whispering of the pines in the forest, the music of cow-bells on the mountain-side, or from simple wood-engraving, that to you is

the highest art." Kingsley's especial distinction in the use of the graver lies in his beautifully delicate tones and in the treatment of masses. He is willing to sacrifice perfection of form, strict accuracy in textures, and a precision of line for the sake of attaining a thoroughly sympathetic translation of the picture as a whole, its meaning and poetry; and few will find fault with the result who will study the essential life that vibrates in such a fine example of the engraver's art as the frontispiece of this number.

It is rich in the tender and delicate feeling of the scene, and conveys with a fine truth the artist's motives and mood. Modern process methods of illustrating have encroached upon the domain of the wood engraver, but while this development has narrowed the field it has also stimulated the wood-engravers, and called upon them for a quality of training and execution that must more and more put their work on a truly creative basis. Kingsley has always been one of the leaders in this new and broader direction, and has done much both by his original and reproductive work to raise the position of his art.

For a number of years he has given

F

IFTY years ago Art and Commerce made little pretence of grasping hands. There was no reference to the "dignity" or "degradation" of which now we hear so much. Wall - announcements and advertising-vans-the latter a nuisance long since legislated off London's face -were already a grievance fast growing into a scandal; and when in a spirit of banter Punch suggested that advertisers had better take whole houses while they were about it and plaster their entire frontages with posters right up to the eaves, the hint was taken with appalling promptness and hideous effect. But Art was as yet unsmirched save by

Rowland's "incomparable" Macassar Oil, beloved of Byron, and Warren's Nubian Blacking. The former showed us the interesting but unconvincing spectacle of a lady covered from head to foot with a luxuriant growth of hair obtained through a course of judicious loyalty to Mrs. Rowland; and the latter, the delight of a negro grinning at the reflection of his face in a Wellington boot to which he has applied the splendor that lay hid in the blacking-bottle. And that was practically the sum of English poster art. It was admittedly not "high;" but it was large, and made to cover vast acreage of space.

Matters went from bad to worse. Im

itators of the Catnach order, one would say-sprang up in plenty, and illustration accompanied printed announcement of a sort that did not require familiarity to breed contempt. It was a

discrediting "displayed advertisement,' made a walk in London streets past London hoardings a matter of tribulation. Practically, up to 1870 no pictorial effort appeared upon the walls that did not make the artistic angels weep. To that utter debasement, to the deliberate if not intentional ugliness-for sometimes there was obviously a vague idea of beauty in the designer's mindand to the splendid vulgarity that nearly always accompanied it, we owe much of the prejudice that exists to this day in the minds of many artists and art writers against the union of art and advertisement; and it is as much in spite of them as of the advertisers themselves that Art has gradually forced her way into her rightful place, and promises henceforth to attend as fairy-godmother at the birth of many a commercial enterprise.

One of the first serious and worthy attempts to free "the poor man's picture-gallery" of its bad taste and barbaric coarseness was made in 1869 and 1870 by the Graphic when it heralded its appearance with posters by M. Godfroy Durand, still a member of the staff The first was a preliminary design familiarly called "The Tombstone" by reason of its shape and attendant winged amorini; and others represented a dignified female figure, and, during the Franco-Prussian war, a French and German soldier. These posters helped to show the way-but none followed in it, until in 1871 Fred Walker, A.R. A., drew his famous poster of "The Woman in White." This, a magnificent design of a woman, with her finger to her lips, stepping out into the starlight night, announced Wilkie Collins's new story. People complained that it illustrated no scene in the story, ignorant of the fact that that was precisely Walker's intention, and was, in truth, at the very root of his and of the modern principle of poster-designing. This, he proclaimed, should not be a pictorial illustration of the object or

R. Anning Bell, del.