tended for the pigs. He immediately fished them out, and when the housewife expressed her astonishment, he told her that it was an abuse of the gifts of a merciful God to allow the smallest quantity of any thing that was designed to supply the wants of mankind to be diverted from its purpose. instances, when the news of Hull's surrender the surface of a bucket of slops that was incame like a thunder-bolt upon the frontier. Large bands of Indians and British were destroying every thing before them and murdering defenseless women and children, and even the block-houses were not always a sufficient protection. At this time Johnny traveled day and night, warning the people of the approaching danger. He visited every cabin and delivered this message: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and he hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for, behold, the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them." The aged man who narrated this incident said that he could feel even now the thrill that was caused by this prophetic announcement of the wild-looking herald of danger, who aroused the family on a bright moonlight midnight with his piercing voice. Refusing all offers of food and denying himself a moment's rest, he traversed the border day and night until he had warned every settler of the approaching peril. His diet was as meagre as his clothing. He believed it to be a sin to kill any creature for food, and thought that all that was necessary for human sustenance was produced by the soil. He was also a strenuous opponent of the waste of food, and on one occasion, on approaching a log-cabin, he observed some fragments of bread floating upon In this instance, as in his whole life, the peculiar religious ideas of Johnny Appleseed were exemplified. He was a most earnest disciple of the faith taught by Emanuel Swedenborg, and himself claimed to have frequent conversations with angels and spirits; two of the latter, of the feminine gender, he asserted, had revealed to him that they were to be his wives in a future state if he abstained from a matrimonial alliance on earth. He entertained a profound reverence for the revelations of the Swedish seer, and always carried a few old volumes with him. These he was very anxious should be read by every one, and he was probably not only the first colporteur in the wilderness of Ohio, but as he had no tract society to furnish him supplies, he certainly devised an original method of multiplying one book into a number. He divided his books into several pieces, leaving a portion at a log-cabin, and on a subsequent visit furnishing another fragment, and continuing this process as diligently as though the work had been published in serial numbers. By this plan he was enabled to furnish reading for several people at the same time, and out of one book; but it must have been a difficult undertaking for some nearly illiterate backwoodsman to endeavor to comprehend Swedenborg by a backward course of reading, when his first installment happened to be the last fraction of the volume. Johnny's faith in Swedenborg's works was so reverential as almost to be superstitious. He was once asked if, in traveling barefooted through forests abounding with venomous reptiles, he was not afraid of being bitten. With his peculiar smile, he drew his book from his bosom, and said, "This book is an infallible protection against all danger here and hereafter." It was his custom, when he had been welcomed to some hospitable log-house after a weary day of journeying, to lie down on the puncheon floor, and, after inquiring if his auditors would hear some news right fresh from heaven," produce his few tattered books, among which would be a New Testament, and read and expound until his uncultivated hearers would catch the spirit and glow of his enthusiasm, while they scarcely comprehended his language. A lady who knew him in his later years writes in the following terms of one of these domiciliary readings of poor, self-sacrificing Johnny Appleseed: "We can hear him read now, just as he did that summer day, when we were busy quilting up stairs, and he lay near the door, his voice rising denunciatory and thrilling-strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morning-glory leaves about his gray beard. His was a strange eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius." What a scene is presented to our imagination! The interior of a primitive cabin, the wide, open fire-place, where a few sticks are burning beneath the iron pot in which the evening meal is cooking; around the fireplace the attentive group, composed of the sturdy pioneer and his wife and children, listening with a reverential awe to the news right fresh from heaven;" and reclining on the floor, clad in rags, but with his gray hairs glorified by the beams of the setting sun that flood through the open door and the unchinked logs of the humble building, this poor wanderer, with the gift of genius and eloquence, who believes with the faith of apostles and martyrs that God has appointed him a mission in the wilderness to preach the Gospel of love, and plant apple seeds that shall produce orchards for the benefit of men and women and little children whom he has never seen. If there is a sublimer faith or a more genuine eloquence in richly decorated cathedrals and under brocade vestments, it would be worth a long journey to find it. 66 Next to his advocacy of his peculiar religious ideas, his enthusiasm for the cultivation of apple-trees in what he termed "the only proper way”—that is, from the seed—was the absorbing object of his life. Upon this, as upon religion, he was eloquent in his appeals. He would describe the growing and ripening fruit as such a rare and beautiful gift of the Almighty with words that became pictures, until his hearers could almost see its manifold forms of beauty present before them. To his eloquence on this subject, as well as to his actual labors in planting nurseries, the country over which he traveled for so many years is largely indebted for its numerous orchards. But he denounced as absolute wickedness all devices of pruning and grafting, and would speak of the act of cutting a tree as if it were a cruelty inflicted upon a sentient being. Not only is he entitled to the fame of being the earliest colporteur on the frontiers, but in the work of protecting animals from abuse and suffering he preceded, while, in his smaller sphere, he equaled the zeal of the good Mr. Bergh. Whenever Johnny saw an animal abused, or heard of it, he would purchase it and give it to some more humane settler, on condition that it should be kindly treated and properly cared for. It frequently happened that the long journey into the wilderness would cause the new settlers to be encumbered with lame and broken-down horses, that were turned loose to die. In the autumn Johnny would make a diligent search for all such animals, and, gathering them up, he would bargain for their food and shelter until the next spring, when he would lead them away to some good pasture for the summer. If they recovered so as to be capable of working, he would never sell them, but would lend or give them away, stipulating for their good usage. His conception of the absolute sin of inflicting pain or death upon any creature was not limited to the higher forms of animal life, but every thing that had being was to him, in the fact of its life, endowed with so much of the Divine Essence that to wound or destroy it was to inflict an injury upon some atom of Divinity. No Brahmin could be more concerned for the preservation of insect life, and the only occasion on which he destroyed a venomous reptile was a source of long regret, to which he could never refer without manifesting sadness. He had selected a suitable place for planting apple seeds on a small prairie, and in order to prepare the ground he was mowing the long grass, when he was bitten by a rattlesnake. In describing the event he sighed heavily, and said, "Poor fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my ungodly passion, put the heel of my scythe in him, and went away. Some time afterward I went back, and there lay the poor fellow dead." Numerous anecdotes bearing upon his respect for every form of life are preserved, and form the staple of pioneer recollections. On one occasion, a cool autumnal night, when Johnny, who always | We must not leave the reader under the camped out in preference to sleeping in a impression that this man's life, so full of house, had built a fire near which he intend-hardship and perils, was a gloomy or uned to pass the night, he noticed that the happy one. There is an element of human blaze attracted large numbers of mosquitoes, pride in all martyrdom, which, if it does not many of whom flew too near to his fire and soften the pains, stimulates the power of enwere burned. He immediately brought wa-durance. Johnny's life was made serenely ter and quenched the fire, accounting for his happy by the conviction that he was living conduct afterward by saying, "God forbid like the primitive Christians. Nor was he that I should build a fire for my comfort devoid of a keen humor, to which he occawhich should be the means of destroying sionally gave vent, as the following will any of His creatures!" At another time he show. Toward the latter part of Johnny's removed the fire he had built near a hollow career in Ohio an itinerant missionary found log, and slept on the snow, because he found his way to the village of Mansfield, and that the log contained a bear and her cubs, preached to an open-air congregation. The whom, he said, he did not wish to disturb. discourse was tediously lengthy, and unnecAnd this unwillingness to inflict pain or essarily severe upon the sin of extravagance, death was equally strong when he was a suf- which was beginning to manifest itself ferer by it, as the following will show. among the pioneers by an occasional indulJohnny had been assisting some settlers to gence in the carnal vanities of calico and make a road through the woods, and in the "store tea." There was a good deal of the course of their work they accidentally de- Pharisaic leaven in the preacher, who very stroyed a hornets' nest. One of the angry frequently emphasized his discourse by the insects soon found a lodgment under John- inquiry, "Where now is there a man who, ny's coffee-sack cloak, but although it stung like the primitive Christians, is traveling to him repeatedly he removed it with the great-heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiest gentleness. The men who were present ment?" When this interrogation had been laughingly asked him why he did not kill it. repeated beyond all reasonable endurance, To which he gravely replied that "It would Johnny rose from the log on which he was not be right to kill the poor thing, for it did reclining, and advancing to the speaker, he not intend to hurt me." placed one of his bare feet upon the stump which served for a pulpit, and pointing to his coffee-sack garment, he quietly said, "Here's your primitive Christian!" The well-clothed missionary hesitated and stammered and dismissed the congregation. His pet antithesis was destroyed by Johnny's personal appearance, which was far more primitive than the preacher cared to copy. Theoretically he was as methodical in matters of business as any merchant. In addition to their picturesqueness, the locations of his nurseries were all fixed with a view to a probable demand for the trees by the time they had attained sufficient growth for transplanting. He would give them away to those who could not pay for them. Generally, however, he sold them for old clothing or a supply of corn meal; but he preferred to receive a note payable at some indefinite period. When this was accomplished he seemed to think that the transaction was completed in a business-like way; but if the giver of the note did not attend to its payment, the holder of it never troubled himself about its collection. His expenses for food and clothing were so very limited that, notwithstanding his freedom from the auri sacra fames, he was frequently in possession of more money than he cared to keep, and it was quickly disposed of for wintering infirm horses, or given to some poor family whom the ague had prostrated or the accidents of border life impoverished. In a single instance only he is known to have invested his surplus means in the purchase of land, having received a deed from Alexander Finley, of Mohican Township, Ashland County, Ohio, for a part of the southwest quarter of section twenty-six; but with his customary indifference to matters of value, Johnny failed to record the deed, and lost it. Only a few years ago the property was in litigation. Some of the pioneers were disposed to think that Johnny's humor was the cause of an extensive practical joke; but it is generally conceded now that a wide-spread annoyance was really the result of his belief that the offensively odored weed known in the West as the dog-fennel, but more generally styled the May-weed, possessed valuable antimalarial virtues. He procured some seeds of the plant in Pennsylvania, and sowed them in the vicinity of every house in the region of his travels. The consequence was that successive flourishing crops of the weed spread over the whole country, and caused almost as much trouble as the disease it was intended to ward off; and to this day the dog-fennel, introduced by Johnny Appleseed, is one of the worst grievances of the Ohio farmers. In 1838—thirty-seven years after his appearance on Licking Creek-Johnny noticed that civilization, wealth, and population were pressing into the wilderness of Ohio. Hitherto he had easily kept just in advance of the wave of settlement; but now towns and churches were making their appearance, and even, at long intervals, the stage-driver's he declined to eat with the family, but accepted some bread and milk, which he partook of sitting on the door - step and gazing on the setting sun. Later in the evening he delivered his "news right fresh from heaven" by reading the Beatitudes. Declining other accommodation, slept, as usual, on the floor, and in the early morning he was found with his features all aglow with a supernal light, and his body so near death that his tongue refused its office. The physician, who was hastily summoned, pronounced him dying, but added that he had never seen a man in so placid a state at the approach of death. At seventy-two years of age, forty-six of which had been devoted to his self-imposed mission, he ripened into death as naturally and beautifully as the seeds of his own planting had grown into fibre and bud and blossom and the matured fruit. "HERE'S YOUR PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN." horn broke the silence of the grand old for- | ests, and he felt that his work was done in the region in which he had labored so long. He visited every house, and took a solemn farewell of all the families. The little girls who had been delighted with his gifts of fragments of calico and ribbons had become sober matrons, and the boys who had wondered at his ability to bear the pain caused by running needles into his flesh were heads of families. With parting words of admonition he left them, and turned his steps steadily toward the setting sun. Thus died one of the memorable men of pioneer times, who never inflicted pain or knew an enemy-a man of strange habits, in whom there dwelt a comprehensive love that reached with one hand downward to the lowest forms of life, and with the other upward to the very throne of God. A laboring, self-denying benefactor of his race, homeless, solitary, and ragged, he trod the thorny earth with bare and bleeding feet, intent only upon making the wilderness fruitful. Now "no man knoweth of his sepulchre;" but his deeds will live in the fra During the succeeding nine years he pursued his eccentric avocation on the western border of Ohio and in Indiana. In the sum-grance of the apple blossoms he loved so mer of 1847, when his labors had literally borne fruit over a hundred thousand square miles of territory, at the close of a warm day, after traveling twenty miles, he entered the house of a settler in Allen County, Indiana, and was, as usual, warmly welcomed. well, and the story of his life, however crudely narrated, will be a perpetual proof that true heroism, pure benevolence, noble virtues, and deeds that deserve immortality may be found under meanest apparel, and He far from gilded halls and towering spires. [F the reader will open a map of the West | mance-Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples re I'Indies he will observe a group of small peated again and again with every possible islands sweeping southward in a graceful curve from Porto Rico, the most easterly of the great Antilles, till the southern extremity almost touches the delta of the Orinoco River. These are the Caribbee Islands, among the most beautiful and most delightful of the West Indies. But, although lying in such close proximity to the familiar islands of the great Antilles, being, as it were, smaller members of the same family, they are comparatively an unknown world, and, with the exception of St. Thomas, rarely visited by the tourist or scientific explorer. As viewed from the sea, each presents little but the appearance of a volcanic cone, whose subterranean fires are slumbering in suspicious repose. The character of the whole group is volcanic, and each little island appears to be but the jutting out above the surface of the water of a vast mountain, lown whose Titanic shoulders lava and ashes have slidden from age to age, changing under the magic influence of tropical air and sun into soils of exhaustless fertility. The scenery is full of wonderful beauty and ro *At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies. By CHARLES KINGSLEY. With illustrations. New York: Harper and Brothers. variation of the same type of beauty. No fairy-land of the poet's imagination could be more enchanting. With a climate such as Eden's must have been, a perfect garden of God, these islands appear to have been made for the favored dwelling-place of the human race. Responding to the wondrous creative influence of the tropics, the mountain slopes, the swamps and plains, even the waters of the surrounding seas, teem with all new and strange forms of animal and vegetable life, and the lover of natural investigation finds himself completely encircled by untold and unrevealed treasures. Attracted by this wealth of beauty and interest, a well-known English author, Mr. Charles Kingsley, has recently visited these delightful islands, and has written an account of his travels, setting forth the glories of the region through which he passed in such spirited and enthusiastic terms as must tempt many to follow his example. For lack of more substantial enjoyment we propose to do so in imagination, and shall find Mr. Kingsley the most charming of traveling companions. Though an Englishman, he never grumbles. His pages are unencum |