ing. Then we shut the door, stretched ourselves on the great heap of hay, our wood fire snapping in explosions of liberated zeal, while upward through the slight rafters, to the god of comfort, curled the incense of a pipe. Our neighbor's lamplight sent slender rays of yellow through the bluish twilight of our room; laughter, swearing, and the clatter of dishes came in as freely. Another world lay there: a world of coarseness and swift emotions; a world where life and life's experience, stated in the English of Shakespeare's clowns, were canvassed with no reserves. But was it another world? The jests seemed half familiar. We rested, listening; our dark little room the one quiet division of that swarming shell, where life seemed a battle even at twilight. Along the road outside clattered carts of butcher, milkman, grocer; each by his coming throwing the colony into renewed excitement of chaffering, laughter, and dispute.

66

Say!" called out the young woIman in the next room. "Less have a dance to-night. Those fellers got most of the platform done for to-morrow night. Come on, old man; get your fiddle. I'll friz my hair."

Talk of the dance flew through the settlement and out among the tenters. Two pairs of curling-irons went hot from hand to hand, curling dozens of heads.

"Goin' to the dance?" called a girl to me, as she returned a comb she had borrowed from my next neighbor.

After the younger people had gone the place grew much quieter: the voice of a fretful child being put to bed, an old picker yawning wearily, or some one counting in lowered tones the day's gains, - these were the only sounds.

When we opened the door to go out, we found the night dark and cool, with clear starlight overhead; but as we turned the angle of the long shanty, we came into the glare of scores of camp fires among the tents. Men and women

sat together about their outdoor hearths, making gorgeous effects of color with their sun-browned faces in the orange light. The dramatic pose and gesture of figures brilliantly lit and darkly shadowed were painted boldly against the canvas of the night. An old man, with lifted haranguing hand, was cut in black profile against the fire: all in his group, with faces in the full light and heat, leaned forward, listening. By a knot of seated men a girl in red stood laughing, poised with an action of flight about her garments, her teeth shining as no man would dare paint them. Her dress, toward the fire, was brilliant, throwing a glow upward over her throat and face e; while out of the direct light the color lost itself completely in the night. Lamps burned in many of the tents, turning them palely luminous, and transmitted exaggerated outlines of face and form that flitted and hovered unsteadily. As we stood silent, there came to us the distant tramp of feet, and then the squeal of a fiddle, and we remembered the dan

cers.

On a platform of unplaned boards, raised a foot or two from the ground, they were dancing, a tangle of figures, seen indistinctly by the glimmer of a few lanterns that stood near the rough benches running around the four sides of the floor. These seats were given over to the women; and the men stood on the ground, pressing, four or five rows deep, about the platform. As we worked our way in among the spectators, a man in shirt sleeves was calling the figures of the square dance with

great energy. He seemed to be master of ceremonies, and took the most unselfish delight in finding partners for the unmated. Now and then, when the banjo and fiddle rose into a particularly irresistible tune, a man would break through the crowd, leap upon the platform, and search out a partner from among the women. It mattered little, in the dini light, whether she had simply added a

white apron to her working dress, or if she were one of the young girls in cashmere and cotton lace finery.

In the fiddler I recognized the father of the baby hop picker. I had divined that there was something of the artist in the young fellow; and now, as he sat with his hat pushed back, legs crossed, and cheek laid on the fiddle, playing for himself and to the others, he made a delightful figure of happy abandon. Close at his knee sat the baby, perfectly erect, a thin black shawl drawn tightly over its head and wrapped around the body, bambino-wise, holding the arms down. The tiny pale face and large eyes turned always toward the mother, who danced unceasingly. At my elbow, an elderly woman, in a broad brown sunshade hat and calico dress, watched the dance with shining eyes; her comfortable, well-cushioned shoulders moved with short breaths in time to the music.

"Do you want to dance?" asked the man in shirt sleeves, as he threw the light of his lantern on her.

"Well," she said, in smiling embarrassment, "I don't care if I do."

"What's your name?" "Mrs. Smith." (It may have been an alias, but she said Mrs. Smith.) "All right. You stay here, and I'll find some feller that 'll dance with you;" and he dived among the dancers and across the platform. In a few minutes he returned with a man whom he halted in front of Mrs. Smith.

"What's your name?" he asked

The music changed, and the master of ceremonies called aloud, "Take your partners for a quad-rille!”

The square dance was really a dance as the hop pickers conceived it. The men, their broad soft hats tipped over one ear, took the hands of their partners, and went through a series of bewildering side steps and flourishes that varied in the different dancers from grace to clownish grotesquerie.

The terpsichorean director had called. the figures alone,.in a powerful voice; but suddenly all the dancers took up the refrain in a chanting measure:

"Lady 'round the gent, and the gent so-lo;

Lady 'round the lady, and the gent don't

go."

This figure continued long enough to fasten the sing-song in the memory for a lifetime.

Dance followed dance; the women lifted their aprons and wiped their faces, to the wonder of chill bystanders, and danced again. The boards of the floor creaked, the fiddle and banjo thrilled and screamed, a few fell away from the press about the platform; but the tramp of feet beat with a ceaseless pulse. The little black figure at the fiddler's knee sat silent, with wide eyes. A young fellow, who had not missed a dance since our coming, threw up his head and cried, "What's the matter with the roof?" Then, as all eyes turned up to the solemn dark of the star-pierced sky, "Why, the roof's all right!"

It was pleasant, in the quiet of our little room in the shanty, to drowse upon the hay, and let the aroma of the day float back to us; the bouquet of a coarse draught, perhaps, and yet from nature's

source.

Louise Herrick Wall.

WHOEVER has had the curiosity to turn over a pile of sallow Latin books in a second-hand English bookshop, on a Parisian quay, or beside an Italian barrow has probably said, in his haste, that the learned writers of the sixteenth century produced nothing which has a permanent interest for any but the religious historian. So summary a judgment is of course quite wrong: great names presently arise in the memory to refute it, Erasmus first of all, whose writings have an intense and undying human significance over and above their connection with the controversies of their day. Meanwhile, even among the supposed literary refuse of that memorable time one sometimes discovers a treasure. What can be more piquant, for example, than to open at haphazard a very small and black-looking octavo, modestly entitled Nic. Clenardi, Epistolarum Libri Duo, and to light upon a sentence like the following at the close of a long letter: "My desire is if your Majesty will but deign to consider it favorably – that the books which are being burned up by wholesale all over Spain may henceforth be allowed to further my studies. For although this scheme of mine for helping on the cause of religion may appear novel to some, there should be nothing in it repugnant to an Emperor who is perpetually at war with Mahomet. This, then, is what I have felt bound to write your Majesty, partly because, when I was in the palace of the king of Fez, I stoutly declared that I would complain to you of the ill treatment I had received, and partly because the Emperor is one who can assist a pious cause without any inconvenience to himself. Farewell, most fortunate Cæsar, and consider whether there be anything unreasonable in the request of a man who has been drawn by the love of learning from Louvain

to Mauritania. Granada, January 17, 1542."

The Cæsar was of course the Emperor Charles V., but who was Nicolaus Clenardus? Well, it seems impossible to find out much more about him than may be gathered from this same small volume of his letters. His name was properly Cleynaerts. He was born at the high noon of the revival of humanistic learning, in the small town of Diest, in South Brabant, December 5, 1495: three and a half years, therefore, after the April day when Lorenzo the Magnificent died at Careggi, in the arms of Pico and Poliziano, one year after the untimely death of these two, three years before Marsilio Ficino followed his friends into the unknown; when Erasmus and Colet were in the prime of middle life, and Thomas More in the flower of his brilliant youth. Nicolas Cleynaerts was sent, when very young, to the excellent University of Louvain, less than twenty miles from his birthplace, and he soon became a proficient in the classic languages. He possessed himself of a Latin style which was quite his own, useful, flowing, and even picturesque, though by no means Ciceronian, and he did his best, in after life, to make his pupils use the stiffened speech of the Romans freely and colloquially; but his main strength was spent upon Greek and Hebrew. In 1529 he published a treatise on the Hebrew language, and in the following year a Greek grammar. Both these books found a ready sale at Paris, " insomuch," he observes gayly to his friend Hoverius, "that I shall not starve this winter," and the Greek grammar remained in favor for two centuries.

He had at this time already taken orders, and while waiting for preferment was studying theology at Louvain,

grandis theologus;" and he was also giving lessons in Greek and Hebrew. Louvain lives in the memory of the nineteenth-century tourist for two things: its Hôtel de Ville, a perfect gem of civic architecture, in ornate yet exquisite Gothic, and its very flat and unpalatable beer. Cleynaerts, or Clenardus, as he preferred to call himself, remembered the beer with fond regret, during the long years of his exile; but of the building, though he must have seen it in the freshness of its beauty, he speaks not at all. His mind was upon other, and in his own estimation more important things.

The letter to Charles V. from which we have already quoted begins with a short sketch of his own life, in the course of which he says:

"Ten years ago, when I was studying theology at Louvain, and, having plenty of leisure, had also acquired enough Greek and Hebrew to lecture on them in public, I began to have a great desire to learn the Arabic tongue; having noticed in the Jewish commentaries how like it was to Hebrew, and feeling sure that either language would help in the acquisition of the other. But there was not a soul in all Flanders who knew a word of Arabic, or could satisfy in the least my Arabic cravings" (me Arabicaturientem).

He plodded on by himself, however, with great perseverance and some profit, and was even beginning to compile a rude sort of Arabic lexicon, when there appeared on the scene one Ferdinand Colon, or Columbus, the son of the great Christopher, in search of a man to assist him in setting in order the collection of books he was forming, and which he proposed to present to the city of Seville. "At that time," says Clenardus, "I was publicly expounding Chrysostom on the Dignity of the Priesthood, for the benefit of the Greek students, and I had a very big attendance; of which when Colon heard, and when he had presently learned something more

about me and my ambitions from the Spaniards, he proposed that I should go to Spain. I acceded readily enough: first because the casuists were already beginning to make so much trouble for me that I longed to get away where I might pass my days in peace, and be rid of those makers of controversy and masters of strife; and then because I thought I should have special advantages there for learning Arabic."

So in 1532, at the age of thirty-seven, Clenardus departed for Spain, stopping for a night or two in Paris on the way. We hear little, after his arrival, about the Columbian library, though much for a time concerning his relations with Don Fernando, who finally granted him permission to stay awhile at Salamanca and deliver a course of lectures there. His success at the Spanish university was as great as that which he had formerly obtained in Belgium, and for a little he was charmed by the idea of taking a permanent chair at Salamanca and lecturing on Greek, while he pursued his Arabic studies. He thought it would be a fine plan, also, if his accomplished friend Vasæus, to whom there are some very lively letters, would qualify himself for a Latin professorship in the same place. "And have done with your compliments," he entreats," and all that nonsense about being my client ! We will have all things in common." This pleasing plan was never realized. Vasæus, who had also been engaged by Don Fernando, and was now at Seville, came later to Salamanca, lectured for many years, and, at an advanced age, died there; but before the end of 1533 Clenardus himself had moved on to Portugal, having accepted from the king, João III., the place of tutor to his younger brother, Dom Henrique.

From Evora, where his royal pupil lived, Clenardus wrote back on Christmas Eve a long and warm letter to Vasæus; pleading the prudential motives which had constrained him to accept the

Portuguese offer, describing his new installation, and prognosticating great success as a lecturer at Salamanca for the friend whom he had left behind.

"Methinks," he says, "I see some such notice as this put up on the door: Johannes Vasaus of Bruges will lecture to-morrow on Plato's De Legibus, which he proposes later carefully to expound for the benefit of those interested. Presently a crowd collects. Vasæus, - who is he?' 'Oh, don't you know? He is a young man who is tremendously learned in both Latin and Greek. We had here, not long ago, one Clenardus, of whom we expect ed great things at first; but he had nothing to give us beside grammatical rules and stuff out of Chrysostom, which he expounded as if it had been a sermon instead of a professorial discourse. As if we had n't preachers enough already! But this Vasæus is going to tell us about Plato, - Plato, do you hear? What do we care for Chrysostom on the method of prayer? If Clenardus wants to pray, he can read his breviary; Vasæus and Plato are the men for us.'"

Dom Henrique was ten years younger than the reigning king of Portugal, and had attained the respectable age of twenty-three before Clenardus came to put the finishing touches to his education. He was already titular Archbishop of Braga, and was destined to be both Grand Inquisitor and Cardinal before he himself ascended the throne of Portugal, forty-five years later. When Clenardus first came to Evora, he lodged in the house of some excellent people, who, he assures us, became very fond of him. Afterwards he had a house of his own, where he remained during the rest of his five years' stay. The decaying little Portuguese town, situated some fifty miles inland from Lisbon, still contains, beside the indestructible relics of its Roman occupation, some interesting memorials of the years of Clenardus' residence. The great Church of San

Francesco, architecturally very curious, was just completed at the time of his arrival, and King João was busy repairing the Roman aqueduct, in the rough but serviceable fashion which may still be noted. It was Clenardus' pupil who founded the university of Evora, and the ruins of the palace where they pursued their studies still constitute one of the ornaments of the pretty public garden.

In March, 1535, Clenardus sends from Evora two long letters to his former professor of theology at Louvain, Jacobus Latomus, a celebrated controversialist, whom he seems rather to have neglected up to this time. He beseeches his old master not to think that he is losing sight of the main object of his exile, the study, namely, of the Arabic language, with a view to the ultimate conversion to Christianity of the Mohammedan world. He has taken this place in the royal household at Evora precisely because it affords him so much more leisure for his own studies than he could ever have compassed at Salamanca. Here his duties as a pedagogue do not begin before two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and for the rest of the day his time is his own. He has found a learned physician at Evora who can speak Arabic, and in his society he feels that he makes rapid progress in that tongue. And at all events, he declares, he is glad to have quitted Salamanca, "where one must live always in broad daylight, and either make, or pretend to make, no end of those vulgar friendships which consist entirely in mutual salutations; and which, as they are conciliated by a single pull of the cap, are broken forever if you neglect to return a salutation."

Clenardus, however, does not care much for the manners and customs of the people of Evora, concerning which he soon rambles off into gossipy details, as it is his amusing wont to do. finds living very dear in Portugal. Na

He