ing-glass.* The artist who arranged that play, it must be feared, knew his countrywomen but too well. This little Eve of the kitchen, in Frère's picture, has evidently yielded to her temptation so soon as she is left alone, and she is evidently well pleased with the results. Her dumpy shoes and substantial stockings and warm dress require no fairy's wand to make them satisfactory, and her chubby little face makes us glad that we have also in art a mirror to reflect it. Her mouth is slightly open, as if she were conversing with the image of herself, and one can almost overhear the vain and pretty prattle. Another picture represents a group more in the style of Chardin, and is probably an earlier work. The subject is a mother cutting bread from an ample roll for her three children. That she is a poor widow we know by her black dress and humble widow's cap; but the shining tea-pot on the table, and large pot on the fire-above all, the watch hung over the mantel-attest that she has enough for happiness. No other artist would have been so careful to place just four saucers on the table-the number of persons in the house, and none but a French housekeeper would have had these saucers so tidily arranged one in the other. A little boy stands patiently awaiting his turn, the larger of two little sisters has both hands up for her slice, and the smallest tugs at her mother's apron to make sure that she shall not be forgotten. Every attitude betokens pleasure. The grace of the lowly mother as she bends downward toward the little ones, and the smile on her face, are such as they who dwell in palaces might envy. The floor is of stone, but the little shoes are wooden, so there is no need for fear. One side of the room is bare, except for the cage with its bird, which would no doubt burst into mirth at the very idea of there being any poverty in the young widow's home. No fictitious plot could be added to such pictures as these without marring their simplicity, and consequently their picturesque beauty. No doubt some novel might be written with which the widow among her children might be associated, or the after-life of the little coquette might be imagined; but how poor would be such fancies compared with the great mysterious lights and shadows of human life which environ these human beings! Simple and commonplace are sorrow, toil, fate, joy, death; like the sunshine and the air and love, they are the companions of all; but who has yet penetrated their immeasurable significance or * The Parisian notion is not so new as it may seem. On an Etruscan vase in the Hamilton collection there is a picture of the Pandora of Hesiod opening her box, the ills coming from which correspond with those ascribed to Eve. Among the articles which Pandora has let slip from the open box is a small mirror. PASSING INTO SHADE."-BY G. II. BOUGHTON, their sublimity and how little is any anecdote or romance compared with their silent presence? Alas! as I write it is only the shadows that are falling upon and into those poor homes where Frère has found such harvests of truth and beauty. (How can I write of France at such an hour, and say no word concerning her anguish and her desolation?) For some years before these recent months of terror it had been an annual joy to the writer of these notes to rove through some part of France; and among other things learned thereby was the fidelity of the artists named above in their delineations of French landscapes and villages. But it was when traveling with the victorious Germans into the heart of that dear land that I realized the greatness of the artist who had more than any portrayed the in-door life of the French peasant. Here, indeed, was the furniture, here the walls and the tidy utensils, and here the women and the children; but no colorist could picture them now unless he could catch his rays from some orb of blackness. Yet no agonies could crush out all the tints of beauty in the way-side cottages it was so often my fate to enter. In one I saw a poor woman cooking some eggs for a wounded Prussian, who had tried to make his way to some shelter, and sank exhausted at her door; and in several others there were women and children nursing wounded enemies with tender care, pausing only to brush away tears shed for some absent dear one whose fate they could not know. At the mention of these humanities to an enemy one said, "Amidst such miseries as we all have it is a mercy to have some- Burned upon my memory-as if for a time a portion of the fair earth were given over to Hell to make into its own image and likeness-is that day of Gravelotte. Not hours but ages seemed to rise and lapse as I gazed on those long snaky fingers of the mighty hand of Germany, reaching from every hill or valley or wood to clutch Metz with a grasp never to be relaxed. At last the evening came, the soft summer evening, with its offering of balm and repose to the earth that had shut away such heavenly gifts by a lurid cloud, a nether firmament whose stars were bombs, and whose dews were iron and death. I stood on the brow of a hill, with hundreds of the unburied dead around me, until the last shell had exploded, and the last brutal snarl of the mitrailleuse hydra had been heard, then bethought me whither I should go. The small company of gazers who had been on the spot had gone their several ways. The villages around were many of them on fire. I made up my mind to lie down among the dead and remain until the morning. Just then against the ground a figure moved: was it some poor fellow not yet dead? Not so; it was a German artist, who through the long hours of that day had sat at his task, motionless as a stone, and now had his work in his hand. This artist invited me to return with him to a house where he lodged, and where the feverish night was passed. I induced him to sit up all night and produce for me a duplicate of his sketch of the battle of Gravelotte. Next morning, as I sat with the picture in my hand, the Frenchwoman at whose house I had lodged asked to see it. But she could not see it for her tears, and, returning the picture, said, "Ah, Sir, France will long be all a picture of war." Then she hastened to her place beside the groaning Germans. I went to roam through the desolated villages, and amidst the soldiers burying their dead; paused to watch German soldiers as they gave their rations to forlorn French girls suddenly made houseless. This was the picture War had made, with its bayonet-pencil, of the most beautiful land peopled with the most affectionate hearts! fy the walls of Venice report the life and spirit of the country and age which produced them, what shall be gathered from the loving homes and scenes of peaceful industry which have inspired the only original art of our time-the sympathetic art of France? Do you remember, my reader, the stories of lonely princesses transformed by wicked enchantment into hags, and of noble youths so deformed into serpents? Behold them all fulfilled in the France of the second empire! From being the most generous, friendly, affectionate nation in the world, they became a nation grasping at Savoy, sneaking with double tongue into Mexico, and at last aiming an assassin's blow at the heart of a neighboring nation, which, whatever its faults toward others, had never wronged France. From being lovers they became haters; from being contented they became harriers of the world. Such was the power of the evil genius who was able to conjure the good heart out of France by the spell of a name. In the legends it is sometimes a kiss that liberates the spell-bound, and changes again the hag to a beautiful maiden; but sometimes it is the deadly stroke of a sword-as when the blade of Sir Gawain, laying low poor Carl, the dwarf, revealed in his place the long-lost knight, Sir Carleton. And so I, for one, will sit down before these sweet memorials of the France that has vanished-the France of Frère (the brother!)— and trust that the unsparing sword of the Northman will prove kindly in the end, and restore to us, in place of the "greatest military power," the peaceful people who shall teach mankind that art of fraternity which can make the beautiful world, of which the best pictures are but a study. I know not whether the story connected with the permission given him by the King of Prussia to return to his home from Paris be mythical or not; it is equally significant in either case. It is said that when the Germans entered his studio their rude hands were held and their eyes softened, and, it may be, moistened, by the pictures on the walls. After all, the interiors of German and of French cottages are not so dissimilar! The aged mother, the little ones, the fireside prayer, these are memories of the FatherI thought of the strange destiny which had land too, and they weave chains around the brought the German military artist to those rough soldiers which are too gentle to be fields and villages so long haunted by Edou- broken easily as a line of Chassepôts. ard Frère and such as he, and felt burdened so with the king and Bismarck; they have by the terrible mystery that, of all nations, it not come to wage war against the painter should have been just France, with her ten- of peaceful homes. "By all means let Meinder-hearted peasantry and her fraternal so- herr Frère pass where he will." It is, at cieties, who should have sent this horrid red least, one gleam of light upon the thick deluge over her neighbors' and her own darkness--a light reminding us of the deep homes. The world has long heard of France unity of men underlying their discords, and being the great military nation of Europe. But one that shall wax to the perfect day, while there must have been a France which pro- ambitious dynasties recede into a darkness duced the pictures of Chardin, Fortin, Breton, befitting the agony and ruin they have Millet, and Frère. If the pictures that glori- | caused. And A NEW ENGLAND VILLAGE. A NEW ENGLAND VILLAGE. THE A 64 STOCKBRIDGE BOWL," OR MOUNTAIN MIRROR.-COTTAGE IN WHICH HAWTHORNE WROTE THE "HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES." PROPER New England village is a thing unique, the product of a new and peculiar type of civilization. As such, the history of hardly any one can be sketched without unfolding much that is of general interest. Some of these villages, however, stand out by themselves, and eminent above the rest, on account of certain marked peculiarities which have characterized their origin or their subsequent development. Among such, and yielding to none in features calculated to interest, general readers, is one near the centre of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. The tide of summer tourists sets strongly every year through this westernmost portion of the State, and many a denizen of the crowded and sultry city has learned that there is new life to be found in an abode of even a few weeks among its picturesque and valleys. But as the traveler, hills threading his way among them, comes upon the wide plain which had been made by and in every field and door-yard, and even of the present county of Berkshire, with the in the nicely graveled foot-paths by the road-reservation of a small portion on the southside, he sees the marks of care and culture- ern border, and another larger portion (inhe seems to have found the most admirable cluding nearly all of the present town of blending of nature with art and taste, and Stockbridge), which were then occupied by altering only a little the verse of Goldsmith, Indians. These Indians, the sole inhabitis disposed to exclaim, ants of this whole region, were a small band of the Mu-he-ka-ne-ok, or River Indians, as they were called, from their residence being on and near the Hudson River. Their name signifies "the people of the continually flowing water." That portion of the tribe who resided in Berkshire came to be known as the Housatonic Indians, from the name they gave to the river on whose borders they lived. They had a tradition that their tribe came originally from a country northwest of their present home, having, as they said, "crossed the great water at a place where this and the other country are nearly connected." They said, also, that in coming from the west "they found many great waters, but none of them flowing and ebbing like Muhekaneok until they came to Hudson River." Then they said, one to another, Here, then, we have a tradition which, if to be relied upon, indicates that one tribe of Indians at least found its way hither from Eastern Asia by way of Behring Strait-an origin which agrees, it is well known, with the theory of some of the best ethnologists. “Sweet Stockbridge! loveliest village of the plain!" But how few of those who from year to year are surprised by this scene of loveliness are aware that this most beautifully set jewel of Berkshire was only a little while ago the wild hunting-ground of the Indian, kept as such long after the surrounding region had come under the ownership of the whites! It is but a step from this bright scene of civilization back to the midst of heathen barbarism. There are those alive to-day in Stockbridge who were living there when the Indian tribe who owned its whole territory had not yet parted with it nor removed to their new home nearer the setting sun. Such is the change wrought within a human lifetime. The later settlements of the West, aided by our modern appliances" This is like Muhekaneok, our nativity." of railroads and telegraphs, may show greater changes in a briefer period of time, but for New England the change here wrought is little less than a marvel. The growth of our country during the first century and a half, if we may not say two centuries, was comparatively slow. The day of railroads and steamships had not come. It was a hundred years after the settlement at Plymouth before Massachusetts had any white inhabitants west of the Connecticut River valley, or the region properly included in it. Westfield, as its name tells us, was then the westernmost settlement, the very outpost of civilization. All beyond to the Mississippi, and to the Canadian line on the north, was a wilderness. But in the year 1722 the wave of migration, which had rested for sixty years in the fertile meadows of the Connecticut, rolled forward to the valley of the Housatonic. Upon the petition of Joseph Parsons and nearly two hundred other inhabitants of Hampshire County-which then embraced almost all the western half of Massachusetts -for the grant of two townships of land upon the Housatonic River, a committee was appointed for the purpose of purchasing the Indian title to the designated tract, and dividing the same properly among the settlers. The committee was instructed also to reserve a suitable portion of the lands for the first minister, for the subsequent maintenance of the ordinance of the Gospel, and for the support of schools. Thus the new settlements were begun in the true Puritan style, with scrupulous regard to the rights of the aborigines, and with a zealous interest in behalf of education and religion. The townships thus granted and opened to settlement embraced all the lower part The committee charged with the duty of laying out the new townships set about their work at once. In a few months they had received the names of fifty-five proposed settlers; and in April, 1724, the Indians gave a deed of the land, signed by Koukapot, their king, or chief, and twenty others. The consideration in the case is somewhat peculiar, but indicates strongly the change, in some respects, which has taken place in the usages of society. The land was given, as the deed says, "in consideration of £450, three barrels of cider, and thirty quarts of rum." As the settlers occupied their newly granted lands, and thus came into contact with the Indians, they were surprised to find them well disposed and of good moral character, and that Koukapot, their chief, was even favorably inclined toward the Christian relig ion. This coming to the knowledge of Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Springfield, he became very desirous that the Indians should have the Gospel preached to them. After conferring with some others, he made his wishes known to the Commissioners of Indian Affairs at Boston. This board, embracing among others the Governor of the colony, was an agency of the London Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The Commissioners approved the plan of Hopkins, and requested him, in conjunction with Rev. Stephen Williams, who in his youth had been carried away as a captive from Deerfield by the Indians in their fa SOLDIERS' MONUMENT AT STOCKBRIDGE. faith openly, and, after a proper examination, was publicly baptized, assuming the English name Ebenezer. With this Indian convert began the church in Stockbridge as it exists to-day. It is surprising and interesting as one looks into the catalogue of that church, as it is printed most recently, to find standing second on the list of its officers the name of Peter Pau-qua-nau-peet; while Ebenezer Poohpoonuc heads the roll of members, followed by such a succession as this: Captain John Koukapot, Mary Koukapot (wife), Catharine Koukapot (daughter), Lieutenant Aaron Umpachenee,* Hannah Umpachenee (wife), Isaac Wuaumpee. And so the roll goes on for more than fifty years, the names of whites and Indians mingled; the latter, however, gradually losing their predominance as the white population becomes relatively more numerous, and finally, with the removal of the Indians to their new home in New York, their names disappear; the church ceases to be a mission church, and takes its place with the other churches of the commonwealth. The peculiar growth of this New England village is shown also in the fact that for many years the town offices, as well as those of the church, were shared by the Indians. Thus in 1761 we find Johannes Mthoksin and Captain Jacob Cheek-sou-kun were selectmen, Frederick Poh- pou-seet constable, Peter Nau-nee-wau-nau-koot tithingman, and King Benjamin Kau-ke-we-naunaunt and Captain Cheek-sou-kun on the committee for seating the church. In the mous attack upon that place, and who, by residence among them, knew their character and habits, to procure a suitable person to act as missionary to the Housatonic tribe, or, as they were afterward called, the Stock-year 1765 a constable's return reads thus: bridge Indians, and authorized the pledge of £100 a year for his support. They were fortunate in finding very soon a man eminently fitted for the proposed work. This was John Sergeant, a native of New Jersey, and at that time a tutor in Yale College. He had been heard to say that he would prefer the life of a missionary to the Indians rather than any other. Accordingly, when applied to on behalf of the Commissioners, he engaged at once, if the college authorities would consent, to spend half the year with the Indians and half the year at the college, until he should have carried the class he was instructing through their course, which he was anxious to do, and then, if his missionary efforts gave promise of success, to devote his life to the Indians. He was soon on his way to his new field of labor. A company of twenty adults was gathered to meet him almost as soon as he reached the Housatonic, and he began at once to preach the Gospel to them by means of an interpreter. The name of this interpreter was Poohpoonuc. He had lived among the whites, and those of the better character, and had gained from them a knowledge of the Christian religion. Under the preaching of Sergeant he was disposed to avow his VOL. XLIII.-No. 258.-52 "By virtue of the foregoing order I have warned all the Indian inhabitants within said town, as within described, to meet at time and place within mentioned. Per me, Joseph Quinsquaunt, Constable." This When Sergeant came to Stockbridge he found the Indians living in two villages several miles apart. Divided thus into two bands, and of roving habits at the best, it was felt that it would be difficult to reach them in the most effective manner. difficulty was in part removed by the agreement of the Indians to take up their residence in the winter at a point midway between their two villages, building there a school - house, and pitching their huts or lodges around it. Here the missionary taught a school during the week-days, and on the Sabbath preached to his dusky auditors. But no sooner had the spring begun to return than he found his parishioners forsaking him and going into the woods for the purpose of making maple sugar. It seems we are indebted to these Housatonic Indians for the discovery of that delightful sweet, so universally relished; for in the history of the. Governor Belcher had conferred the commission of captain and lieutenant upon Koukapot and Umpachenee. |