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plicable to extraditions made from one State to another, under the Constitution and laws of the United States.

A word should be said with regard to Mr. Fish's views on the subject of expatriation, before taking leave of his work as foreign secretary. Without going at length into it, it is sufficient to say that he gave a new direction to political thought and to executive instructions on this subject, from which they have not since diverged. He maintained that citizenship of the United States, as it confers privileges, also requires the performance of duties. He held that while the powers of the government ought to be exerted in defense of the right of a naturalized citizen as fully and as potently as they should be in defense of a native citizen, yet that naturalization imposes duties to the adopted country; and then when it is sought only for the purpose of residing in the land of nativity discharged of the obligations of citizenship there, and without the performance of such duties here, the naturalized citizen, if he fails to do his duty after due notice to him, is not worthy of protection.

The Franco-German war gave ample scope for the application of such a canon of international law. Holding these views, he always refused his consent to the appointment of a naturalized alien as consul at a place within the land of his nativity.

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make the necessary appropriations, he reorganized the Department of State, bringing men to the fore whose minds and hearts were in their work. seven hundred volumes, made up from loose and unindexed miscellaneous correspondence, were then brought together, indexed, and bound. Simultaneously with this he introduced in the department, for the first time, a system of general indexing, which, as improved by experience, now enables the clerks to find papers without unreasonable delay.

In his administration of the Department of State, Mr. Fish anticipated the reform of the civil service. He instituted a rule requiring an official examination of all candidates for consulates. Under its operation, a person named for a consulate was sometimes found not fitted for the place he sought. In no instance was the member of Congress who favored him able, conscientiously, to object to the result, when the written answers of the applicant were shown to him.

Mr. Fish had a large acquaintance among members of Congress. His house was the scene of a generous and gentlemanly hospitality, never lavish or ostentatious, which brought men of all parties and of all tones of thought into touch with him. His influence upon them cannot be exaggerated. His genial ways, his polished manners, his strong character, his wide range of reading, especially in American political history, his remarkable memory, and his unusual power of conversation fitted him to make the best use of such opportunities.

Mr. Fish had no superior as an executive officer. His great ability made itself felt in every room and at every desk. He knew every clerk personally, and seemed to find out instinctively their habits and ways of life, whether they The same causes operated in the same were prompt or dilatory, attentive to way in his intercourse with his colwork or disposed to shirk it. While leagues and with the President. On all firm in his requirements, he was just to subjects which affected the general polall under him, and patient in listening icy of the administration or the general to their grievances. He was rewarded welfare of the country he had decided by their confidence and respect, opinions, which he expressed with freehaps it is not too much to say, by their dom, and upon which he was always affection.

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When he could induce Congress to

ready to act.

Fortunately for the country, Mr. Fish

enjoyed the entire confidence of President Grant, who felt that in his Secretary of State he had a man of honor, conscientiousness, and truth, unselfish, and with no purposes of his own to advance; who had no whims or changing fancies; who was devoted to the best interests of his country, and understood those interests well; who had a clear and welleducated intellect, peculiarly adapted by its knowledge and training to serve the state, and fully equipped for the performance of every duty of his office, social, intellectual, or political; whose large faculties were always at ready command; who had unusual habits and power of work; and who was, withal, a man of the world, yielding in unessentials, but firm as a rock when duty and his sense of right dictated. This man - his personal selection for the office, and entering unwillingly on its duties. to please him-Grant from the outset trusted and leaned upon. In all his troubles — and they were not few-he never withdrew that confidence. In a letter from him written to me in October, 1877, after he ceased to be President, he said, "Give my love to Mr. Fish." The affection implied by such a message was fully reciprocated by the person to whom the message was sent.

A notice of Mr. Fish would be incomplete which failed to speak of his devotion to the Protestant Episcopal Church. Baptized into that Church in infancy, and trained in its ways and faith in childhood, in manhood he accepted it from choice, and gave up the best portion of his nature to it and its service.

Throughout his long career he was one of its most trusted servants. A lay delegate, both in the conventions in his own diocese and in General Conventions, no layman had greater influence in its councils than he. Among its bishops and clergy he found his dearest friends at all times of his life.

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The general appreciation of such a character a character unfortunately too rare in public life is shown by the many positions of trust and honor to which he was called. In addition to the political offices already referred to as held by him, he was president of the General Society of the Cincinnati for nearly forty years; a trustee of Columbia College for fifty-three years; chairman of its board of trustees for thirty-four years; a trustee of the Astor Library; one of the presidents of the New York Historical Society; and a member of the Committee of the Protestant Episcopal Church on the Revision of the Prayer Book. Columbia conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 1850, Union in 1869, and Harvard in 1871.

The home of Mr. Fish was a centre of family affection and love. Without venturing to intrude upon its sanctity, it may be said that it was the abode of education, culture, and refinement, in the best sense of those words, allied to the directness and simplicity of character which come from training a gentle and loving nature in the and loving nature in the way of uprightness and truth. The influence which such a home exercised in Washington has become historic.

J. C. Bancroft Davis.

FRANCIS PARKMAN.

HE rests from toil; the portals of the tomb
Close on the last of those unwearying hands
That wove their pictured webs in History's loom,
Rich with the memories of three distant lands.

One wrought the record of the Royal Pair
Who saw the great Discoverer's sail unfurled,
Happy his more than regal prize to share,

The spoils, the wonders, of the sunset world.

There, too, he found his theme; upreared anew,
Our eyes beheld the vanished Aztec shrines,
And all the silver splendors of Peru

That lured the conqueror to her fatal mines.

Nor less remembered he who told the tale

Of empire wrested from the strangling sea; Of Leyden's woe, that turned his readers pale, The price of unborn freedom yet to be;

Who taught the New World what the Old could teach;
Whose silent hero, peerless as our own,

By deeds that mocked the feeble breath of speech
Called up to life a State without a Throne.

As year by year his tapestry unrolled,

What varied wealth its growing length displayed! What long processions flamed in cloth of gold! What stately forms their flowing robes arrayed!

Not such the scenes our later craftsman drew;
Not such the shapes his darker pattern held;
A deeper shadow lent its sober hue,

A sadder tale his tragic task compelled.

He told the red man's story; far and wide

He searched the unwritten records of his race;

He sat a listener at the Sachem's side,

He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase.

High o'er his head the soaring eagle screamed;

The wolf's long howl rang nightly; through the vale Tramped the lone bear; the panther's eyeballs gleamed; The bison's gallop thundered on the gale.

Soon o'er the horizon rose the cloud of strife,

Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize,Which swarming host should mould a nation's life, Which royal banner flout the western skies.

Long raged the conflict; on the crimson sod
Native and alien joined their hosts in vain;
The lilies withered where the Lion trod,

Till Peace lay panting on the ravaged plain.

A nobler task was theirs who strove to win

The blood-stained heathen to the Christian fold, To free from Satan's clutch the slaves of sin; Their labors, too, with loving grace he told.

Halting with feeble step, or bending o'er

The sweet-breathed roses which he loved so well, While through long years his burdening cross he bore, From those firm lips no coward accents fell.

A brave, bright memory! his the stainless shield
No shame defaces and no envy mars!
When our far future's record is unsealed,

His name will shine among its morning stars.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

XVI.

HIS VANISHED STAR.

JASPER LARRABEE stood transfixed, gazing at that tremulous, luminous astral presence with a strange superstitious thrill at his heart. It hardly seemed merely a star, so alien to his mind was its aspect in the erst untenanted spaces whence it blazed, so freighted with occult significance. Had the moment been charged with some wonderful apotheosis, some amplification of its pure white lustre into the benignant splendors of a vision of angels, the transformation could scarcely have exceeded the capacities of that breathless, insistent expectation which the ignorant mountaineer lifted toward it. For his was a simple faith, and his untaught mind had learned no doubts.

And had never these nights of ours communion with celestial pursuivants? Did never the flutter of an angel's wing illumine far perspectives that darkle heavily over the earth? Was this rare fluid, which we call the air, so dense; were its sensitive searching vibrations, known as waves of light and sound, so dull, that it should feel naught, reveal naught, when the angel of the Lord flashed through the stars and the wind, through blossoming woods or bleak snows of deserts, and into the haunts and the homes of men?

So many had come! He did not know that they were alien to the nineteenth century, and that the most spiritual-minded of to-day would account for their sudden vision as from prosaic natural causes, as mental aberration, or

the distortions of a diseased fancy, or the meaningless phantasmagoria of somnolent cerebration. To him it seemed that they had been with man from the very beginning; and why should their presence here be stranger than his own ? Their very numbers served to coerce credibility. So many had come! To kings, to wanderers in the wilderness, to prophets, to children, in dreams and in the broad daylight, they came: to stand with a gleaming sword before the gates of Paradise, and to sing in the starry advent of a new day, - Peace on earth, good will toward men; to bring the immortal lilies of the Annunciation, and to tread the ways of the fiery furnace; to touch the bursting bonds of saints in prison, and to roll away the stone from the sepulchre of all the world; to minister to the Christ alike in the shadows of Gethsemane and amongst the splendors of the Mount of the Transfiguration!

He was trembling in every limb, as the scenes trooped out before him in the vivid actuality of his recollections of the pages of the much-thumbed volume which he had left behind him when he had fled from the still in the Lost Time mine. He sank down upon the rocky verge of the precipice, amongst the clinging verdure of its jagged crevices. Some sweet-scented herb sent, out its delicate incense under the pressure of his hands. A drowsy twitter of half- awakened nestlings came from the feathery boughs of a cedar-tree that a niche in the cliff hard by half nourished, half starved. The melancholy antiphony of the voices of the wilderness rose and fell in alternating strains, and at long intervals in a vague undiscriminated susurrus the night seemed to sigh.

He heard naught; he heeded naught. His unwinking gaze was fixed upon the wondrous star in the heavens, with that thronging association of angelic ministrants so definitely in his mind that he might have thought to see an amaran

thine crown expanding from the rayonnant sidereal points, or the outline of a nearing pinion stretched strongly to cleave the ether. For so many had come!

But no!

His imagination could compass no such apotheosis. The star remained a star. The exaltation of that moment of wild, vague, and breathless expectation exhaled slowly. A poignant sense of loss succeeded it. The prosaic details of the actual outer life pressed once more on his realization. He looked about him on the sombre wilderness, the black surly mountains, the itinerant mists, heedless whither, the steely glimmer here and there of the ponds where the water made shift to catch the reflection of the sky amidst the dun shadows, and sighed drearily with the sighing night.

He was penniless, shelterless, his life at the mercy of any chance that might favor his crafty enemy, his confidence betrayed by the fugitive whom he had succored, his liberty endangered, already a criminal in the eyes of the law, -an outcast, in truth, within a league of his home.

From the nullity of the begloomed landscape the glance naturally rebounded, and the very obscuration of the earth lent glister and definiteness to the wonderful precision of the march of the constellations, as, phalanx after phalanx, they deployed, each in its allotted

space and sequence, toward the west. And again his eyes dwelt upon that new splendor in the midst of them. How strange that it should suddenly blossom whitely forth among these old, old stars that had lighted the bosky ways of the garden of Eden! How strange that the sight of it should be vouchsafed to him - and why!

His pulses were tumultuously astir. All at once the thought that had been slowly framing itself in his mind took definite form. He wondered if it could be a sign for him, and of what!

In the arrogations of poor humanity of the higher things, in the infinite

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