any dark distractions, doubts, or fears. And as we have compared him for his personal popularity to Sir Walter Scott, so in another way did he resemble him: he resembled him in his utter freedom from all the little jealousies and meannesses, the ignoble cares and humours which are so sadly apt to taint and hinder the literary life. He envied no man; he disparaged no man; if others spoke ill of him he never answered them. If he was destined to no great mastery in his art, at least none who ever practised it loved it with a more sincere, simple, disinterested love. Once more we may go back to his own verse to find a fit tribute to this fine side of his character. We may go back, as we have gone before, to his Tales of a Wayside Inn,' where the Poet is thus praised "A Poet, too, was there, whose verse The gleam, the glory, the swift flight All these were his; but with them came He did not find his sleep less sweet Honour and blessings on his head If all the gifts of song this Poet owned were not Longfellow's, the moral gifts were pre-eminently his among all Poets. And as they brought him honour and blessings while he lived, so shall they bring him good report now that he is dead. A FIRE AT SEA.1 IN the month of May of the year eighteen hundred and thirty-eight I happened to be crossing from St. Petersburg to Lubeck on the steamship'Nicholas the First.' As at that time there was very little railway communication, every tourist took the sea-route, and for the same reason many people brought their travelling carriages with them, so as to be able to continue their tour through Germany, France, and other countries. We had with us, I remember, twentyeight private conveyances, and were in all two hundred and eighty passengers, including twenty children. I was very young at the time, and as I did not suffer at all from seasickness I enjoyed my new experiences immensely. Some of the ladies on board were extremely pretty, and a few quite beautiful; most of them, alas! are long since dead. It was the first time that my mother had ever allowed me to go away by myself, and before I left she made me promise to be on my best behaviour, and, above all things, never to touch a card. As it happened, it was this last promise that was the first to be broken. One particular evening there was a great gathering of the passengers in the saloon, where some well-known Russian bankers were gambling. They used to play a kind of lansquenet, and the jingle of the gold pieces, which were much more common then than they are now, was quite deafening. Suddenly one of the players, seeing that I did not join in, and not understanding why, asked me to 1 In a posthumous volume, ('Euvres Dernières de I. Tourgueneff,' Hetzel et Cie, Paris) this is said to have been a real incident in the novelist's life, dictated by him in French three months before he died. take a hand, and when in my boyish simplicity I told him my reason, he went into a fit of laughter, and called out to his friends that he had made a real find, a young man who had never played cards in his life, and who consequently was quite certain to have the most extraordinary luck, fool's luck in fact ! . . . I don't know how it came about, but ten minutes later I was sitting at the gambling-table with a lot of cards in my hand, as bold as brass, and playing, playing like a madman ! I must acknowledge that in my case the old proverb turned out true; money kept coming to me in waves; and beneath my trembling perspiring hands the gold piled itself up in heaps. The banker who had induced me to play never stopped for a moment urging me on, and exciting me to bet. I actually thought I had made my fortune! Suddenly the saloon door is flung wide open, a lady rushes in, cries out in a faint agonised voice, "The ship is on fire!" and falls on a sofa in a dead faint. The effect was like that of an earthquake. Everybody started from his seat; the gold and the silver and the banknotes were strewn all over the cabin, and we rushed out. I cannot understand how it was that we had not noticed the smoke before. It had already reached us. In fact the staircase was full of it, and the whole place was lit with a dull red glare, the glare of burning coal. In the twinkling of an eye every one was on deck. Two huge pillars of smoke were slowly rising up on each side of the funnel, and sweeping along the masts, and the uproar and tumult which began at that moment never ceased. The scene of disorder was indescribable. I felt that all the human beings on board were sud A Fire at Sea. denly seized with a frantic desire for self-preservation, I myself most of all. I remember catching hold of a sailor by the arm and pledging him my word that my mother would give him ten thousand roubles if he saved my life. The sailor naturally looked on my offer as a joke, and shook me off, and I did not suggest it again. I felt that what I had been saying to him was perfect nonsense. However I must add that everything I saw around me it is that nothing comes up to the After he had been doing this some time it so happened that the fury of the flames abated for a moment, in consequence of the great masses of water which were being pumped into the coal-bunks. He leapt to his feet at once, drew himself to his full height, and cried out in a stentorian voice, 66 of little faith, think ye that our God, the God of the Russian ye people, will suffer us to perish?" Just then, however, the flames broke out worse than before, and the poor man, with all his faith in the God of the Russian people, flung himself down again on his hands and knees and returned to his deck-kissing. A gauntlooking general kept bawling out, "A special messenger must be despatched immediately to the Emperor. We despatched a special messenger to him when the military colonies revolted, and the lives of several important people were saved in consequence. I myself was there in person!" A gentleman with an umbrella in his hand suddenly, in a mad fit of passion, rushed at a very ugly little oilpainting that happened to be among the luggage, fastened to an easel, and began to stave it in. It was a portrait; and with the ferule of his umbrella he made five holes in it, where the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the ears were, exclaiming from time to time, as he accomplished this act of vandalism, "What is the use of this picture now?" The picture did not belong to him at all! A huge fat man, looking like a German brewer, wept floods of tears, and kept calling out "Captain! Captain! Captain!" in most heartrending accents. Finally the captain, losing all patience, caught him by the collar of his coat, and shouted at him, "Well! I'm the captain. What do you want with me?" The fat brewer gazed at him blankly, and with in- However, it was the captain who gale, and the violence of the wind was It was now blowing a pretty strong a good deal intensified by the fire roaring over more than a third of the which by this time was raging and vanity of my own sex I feel bound to vessel. At the risk of wounding the acknowledge that during this crisis the women showed more presence of mind than most of the men did. With their pale faces and the white drapery of the bed-clothes which they had hurriedly caught up when summoned from their berths, they seemed to me, sceptic though I was even at that early age, like angels come down from heaven to shame us and to give us courage. However, there were a few men who showed some pluck. I remember one particularly, M. D . . . ff, our exambassador at Copenhagen. He had taken off his shoes and necktie, tied his coat round him with the sleeves across his chest, and was seated on a thick taut rope with his feet dangling in the air, quietly smoking a cigar and examining us all with a look of amused pity. As for myself, I had taken refuge on the lower rungs of one of the futtock shrouds, and sat there watching with a sort of dull wonder the red foam as it boiled and churned beneath me, wetting my face now and then with a flying flake of froth ; and, as I looked down into it, I kept saying to myself, "So there is where I must die, at eighteen years of age!" for I had quite made up my mind that it was better to be drowned than to be roasted. The flames were now shooting over my head in a great arch, and I could clearly distinguish the roar of the fire from the roar of the waves. Not far from me was sitting a little old woman, a cook, I should think, belonging to one of the families which were on their way to Europe. Her head was buried in her hands, and she seemed to be murmuring a prayer. Suddenly she looked up at me, and whether or not she thought she could see in my face the expression of some sinister resolve I cannot say, but, whatever her reason was, she clutched me by the arm, and in a voice in which entreaty and sternness were strangely blended, said to me, "No, sir, no one has absolute right over his own life, you no more than any one else. Whatever form of death God sends to you, you must submit to it. It is your duty. Else you will be committing suicide, and will be punished for it in the next world." I had really no desire at all to commit suicide; but from a sort of spirit of bravado, for which, considering the awful position I was in, I cannot at all account, I made two or three feigned attempts to carry out the purpose with which she credited me; and every time that I did so the poor old creature rushed at me to try and prevent my accomplishing, as she thought, a great crime. At last I felt ashamed, and stopped. And indeed with death before me, imminent and inevitable-why act? Why spend my last moments playing a comedy? However I had no time either to analyse my own fantastic feelings, or to admire the poor old woman's want of egotism (her altruism, as we should say nowadays) for the roar of the flames over our heads became suddenly more terrible, and simultaneously there rang out a voice like a trumpet, the voice of our guardian angel, "You fool, what are you doing there? You will be killed, follow me!" Immediately, though we did not know who was calling to us or where we had to go, up jumped this dear old woman and myself, as if we had been shot from a gun, and off we rushed through the smoke after a sailor in a blue jersey, whom we saw climbing a rope-ladder in front of us. Without in the slightest degree understanding why, I climbed up the ladder after him, and I verily believe that at that moment if he had thrown himself into the water or done anything extraordinary, no matter what, I should have blindly followed his example. After he had clambered up two or three rounds of the ladder, the sailor jumped heavily on to the top of a travelling carriage, whose wheels, by the way, were already on fire; I jumped after him; I heard the old woman jump after me; then from the top of the first carriage the sailor jumped on to the top of a second, then on to the top of a third, I keeping always behind him-and finally in this way we reached the bow of the ship. Nearly all the passengers were assem A Fire at Sea. bled there. The sailors, under the directions of the captain, were launching one of the life-boats, fortunately the largest we had. Across the other side of the vessel I could see the long line of the Lubeck cliffs lit up by the glare of our fire. They were a good deal more than a mile off. know how to swim, and though it was I did not probably not very deep where we had gone aground (for we had struck without any of us noticing it) still the waves were terribly high. However, the moment I caught sight of dry land I felt quite sure I was safe, and to the amazement of every one who was standing near me I began to dance and to cry "Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" I did not care to join the crowd which was hustling around the steps that led up to the big life-boat; there were too many women, old men, and children in it. Besides ever since I had caught sight of land, I did not care to hurry myself, I felt so certain I was saved. I remember noticing with surprise that the children showed any signs of very few of terror, and that many of them were actually asleep in their mother's arms. None of them were lost. I remarked in the middle of the crowd of passengers a tall military looking man leaning against a bench, which he had just wrenched out of the deck and set athwart ships. He stood there quite motionless, his clothes all dripping with sea-water. I was told that in an involuntary fit of terror he had brutally elbowed out of his way a woman who had tried to get in front of him, so as to jump into one of the first life-boats that had foundered; and that, on being collared by one of the stewards and thrown roughly down upon the deck, the old soldier, who, by the way, was a general, had felt so ashamed of his momentary act of cowardice that he had sworn an oath that he would not leave the steamer till after every one else, including the captain. He was a magnificently built man, with a curiously pale face. His forehead was still bleeding from the blow he had received; and as he stood there he looked about him with an air of deep humility, as if he were asking people to forgive him. In the meanwhile I had made my way over to the larboard side, where I saw the smaller of our two life-boats pirouetting on the waves like a toyboat. There were two sailors in it gers to try and jump. This, however, who were making signs to the passenthe Nicholas the First' stood very was not such an easy thing to do, as high out of the water, and it required a good deal of skill to jump into the boat without sinking it. At last, however, I made up my mind to have a try, and began by standing on one of the anchor-chains which were hung about letting myself go, something over the ship's side. But just as I was of me. very heavy and very soft fell on top It was a woman, who had hung there like a log. I must acknowthrown her arms round my neck, and ledge that my first impulse was to throw her right over my head; but catch her by her two hands and to fortunately I resisted the temptation. The shock, however, very nearly sent us both into the sea; and in we piece of extraordinary good luck there must assuredly have gone, if by a had not been dangling right in front. of my nose a rope belonging to some part of the rigging. I made a frantic clutch at this with one hand, and with this heavy lady still clinging to me, hung there for a moment, cutting my fingers to the bone. . . . I life-boat was right under us, and then looked down and saw that the putting my trust in Providence let myself go . . . Every timber in the life-boat creaked. cried the sailors. "Hurrah!" at the bottom of the boat, and turned I left my companion in a dead faint round to look at the steamer. A great mass of faces, women's faces chiefly, were anxiously peering at us over the side. "Jump!" I cried, holding out my arms, "Jump!" At this particular moment the splendid success of my |