further safe in saying that he published a reconstructed correspondence with Wycherley. This he did, according to his own account, "to rescue his memory" from the hands of "an unlicensed and presumptuous mercenary"-by whom he meant Theobald. He forgot, however, to mention that this unlicensed and presumptuous mercenary was the very man who had been selected by the family to edit the posthumous works of the dramatist. We can feel altogether confident it was by interpolations and alterations and omissions in this correspondence that he succeeded in producing upon the world the impression that the man whose memory he set out to rescue was a vain, contemptible, and irritable old dotard, who resented the good advice given him by his young friend. Still we cannot overcome entirely the influence of the printed page. To this the publication of the original letters, whenever they existed at all, would have unquestionably furnished an ample corrective.

The correspondence itself of Pope is not really interesting. His prose was much inferior to his poetry; but the prose of his letters was much inferior to his other prose. A large number of them, indeed, hardly deserve the name of letters. There is nothing about them at all spontaneous. They are little moral essays which produce the impression that the writer had set out to think noble thoughts in order to utter them. But they fully accomplished for him the object for which they were intended. Even before they were published he had largely succeeded in creating the belief that he was animated by the most exalted motives. Virtue and verse, wrote one of his contemporary panegyrists, were the objects that filled his soul. But his manifold correspondence now proved, in a way that could not be gainsaid, that the claims he had made for himself in his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" were fully justified. Here was what must have seemed to them the unanticipated revelation of what was in his inmost heart, which had been disclosed to those he loved in the artless confidence which is begot of the sanctity of private communication. Who could rise from reading these unguarded effusions of the soul poured forth in the privacy of intimate friendship, but now exposed to the world by the machinations of a scoundrelly publisher, without feeling that

in their writer was revealed one of the most unselfish and benevolent of men, one of the purest and loftiest of natures, indifferent to mere literary fame, but consumed with a sacred love for the advancement of morality and virtue?

The result of these machinations, manipulations, and fraudulent devices was that during the last years of his life Pope occupied a position in popular estimation that has never been held by any other author in our literature. He was regarded as not only the sublimest of poets, but as the best of men. In the eyes of his admirers he was given up to the pursuit of virtue. In the seclusion of his home rolled unheeded over his head the din made by those who resented the fact that he was the unflinching foe of the vain, the proud, and the wicked. Never before or since has moral pre-eminence been obtained by means so immoral. He stood forth to his admiring countrymen as the champion of virtue and the scourge of vice. In the opinions of large numbers his utterances made or unmade reputations. So great is the power of self-delusion that it is not impossible, perhaps it is probable, that Pope believed fully in himself. At an: earlier period he assured Swift, in all apparent sincerity, that he would not render the characters he portrayed "less important and less interesting by sparing vice and folly or by betraying the cause of truth and virtue."

But whatever in his secret heart he thought of himself, there is no question as to what was thought of him by his multitude of readers. In their eyes he was one who loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore he was an object of hatred to wicked men. There was a minority-and during his life a strong and not uninfluential minority-who saw through the hollowness of his pretensions and recognized the wide difference between his professions and his practices. Their feelings were well expressed by Curll, who, as a rascal himself, had a keen scent for rascality in others. In a letter to Broome he expressed the then not uncommon opinion that Pope was as well acquainted with the art of evasion as he was with the art of poetry. "Crying came our bard into the world," he said later in print," but lying, it is greatly to be feared, he will go out of it." But the opinions of those who disbelieved in him carried little.

weight outside of the circle to which they belonged. Any voice lifted up in protest was largely drowned in the clamorous enthusiasm of his admirers. As those, too, who were fully acquainted with his devices left behind them no record of what they knew, and rarely even of what they thought, the information they possessed and the beliefs they held usually died with them. Pope's reputation for virtue came in consequence to increase after the death of himself and of those who knew him too well.

So well and widely established became this estimate of the purity and loftiness of his character that, if we can trust the testimony of the swarm of elegies that followed immediately upon his decease, and indeed continued for several years afterward, the death of Pope was not so much to be deplored as a loss to English literature, irreparable as that was, as it was a loss to English morals. To adopt the language of a writer who was so little one of his devotees that he mingled censure with his praise, "universal goodness felt the shock." It was the prevalent feeling that now he was gone, wicked men would come forth from their hiding-places and wickedness would once more abound in the land. Dodsley burst out in a eulogistic elegy upon the dead poet, in which he gave vent to his grief at this particular prospect. According to him,

Vice, now secure, her blushless front shall raise,
And all her triumphs be thro' Britain borne,
Whose worthless sons for guilt shall purchase
praise,
Nor dread the hand that pointed them to scorn.

The following epigram conveying the same idea is reported to have been spoken extempore on the death of the poet:

Vice now may lift aloft her speckled head, And front the sun undaunted: Pope is dead.

The periodical publications of the time and the times immediately succeeding contain plenty of revelations of this sort of feeling. According to contemporary testimony there was no longer any possible escape from the reign of wickedness. More than a year after Pope was dead, a bard who called himself "a young gentleman" attempted, as he said, an epitaph on the poet. He was manifestly a very young gentleman. The idea pervading his piece was the hope lessness of saving the world from ruin, since

themain bulwark against the encroachments of iniquity had been taken away. In the following lines the writer gave expression to his sense of the peril that was threatening the future of the nation:

Now thou art gone, O ever wondrous bard, Who shall foul vice's rapid course retard? Who shall in virtue's sacred cause arise? Who lash the villain who the law defies? Or brand the atheist who his god denies? These did thy volumes, fraught with vast delight, And virtue shin'd by thee supremely bright. And now she droops, flown is her pleasing hope, Virtue now mourns that e'er she lost her Pope. About this same time William Thompson, a poet once somewhat highly thought of, but now forgotten, announced that the dreaded calamity had already arrived. There was no longer any chance for virtue to maintain her ground. The mournful result is indicated in lines celebrating the intellec- › tual greatness of Pope, but diverging in the following words to his moral greatness:

Born to improve the age and cheat mankind
Into the road of honor!-Vice again
The gilded chariot drives:-For he is dead.

This view of the poet's character was neither confined to a limited number nor to a limited period. Plenty of illustrations of it could be quoted. Several years later the Rev. John Delap, a writer never much regarded, and now never remembered, reflected the general sentiment in one of his elethe "sole terror of a venal age." Mason, in gies, in which he referred to Pope as being that dreadful monody entitled "Musæus," not content with celebrating the poet's greatness as a poet, extolled the courage he had evinced in carrying on his warfare against vice in the highest places. He had been the one author who

could brave

The venal statesman or the titled slave:
Brand frontless vice, strip all her stars and strings,
Nor spare her basking in the smile of kings.

This belief in the myth of Pope's virtue, though doubtless having many private disbelievers, met with scarcely an expression of public dissent till the last decade of the eighteenth century. Indeed Hayley discovered that it was philanthropy pure and simple that had led the poet to the composition of his satires. For the sake of overthrowing vice he sacrificed the performance of what he could have achieved in the higher

fields of literature. "His moral virtues," wrote Hayley, "have had a tendency to diminish his poetical reputation." Faith in this fiction of his surpassing virtue gave way with the better knowledge of the period

which men came to possess. But how late it retained its hold anyone can see for himself in Thackeray's "Lectures on the English Humorists," a work belonging to the middle of the nineteenth century.

T began while Brice, the general manager of the D. & U. P. Short Line, was two thousand miles away, getting married; and Upham, whose hold on the men would have counted for something, was also out of reach, figuring as Brice's best man. And it was as far beyond any rational explanation as a panic among the horses in a burning stable.

Its heralding was in mid-afternoon of a perfect day in June. Brice and Upham were a week gone on the wedding errand, and Rader, the general manager's assistant, was carrying double; keeping his chief's office in touch with the traffic world, and holding down the details of the operat ing department for Upham. Incidentally, everything on the three divisions of the Short Line was on the hilltop of disciplinary good behavior; trains running on time, employee loyalty on its mettle, the various cog-wheels of the traffic machine intermeshing without a jar, and as smoothly as the mechanism of the electrically synchronized clock on the wall of Chief-Despatcher Dawson's room in the Castle Cliff headquarters.

At the fateful moment Rader was in the superintendent's office, arranging, with Reddick, the general passenger agent, a special schedule for a train-load of Iowa excursionists due to arrive from the East the following morning. Into the schedulemaking broke little Cranston, Upham's chief clerk, carefully closing the door be hind him.

"There's a solemn old crank out yonder who refuses to do business with me, says

it's him for the biggest boss in the outfit. What shall I do with him?" was Cranston's wording of his dilemma.

"What does he want?" queried Rader, keeping his place on the Iowa schedule with the pencil point.

"I'm trying to tell you that's what I can't find out," complained the chief clerk, who was ordinarily a past adept at prying into the inner consciousness of the visitor with a grievance to air or an axe to grind. "He says his name is Hinchcliffe; and he looks as if he might be the father of all the cattlemen, with a claim for a whole herd kilied on the right-of-way."

"Oh, well; send him in," grumbled Rader. "There is no choking these claimpushers off till they've climbed to the top round of the ladder."

Cranston disappeared, and a moment later the door opened to admit the supposed claimant. He was an old man, white-haired and bearded like the caricatures of the Populist Senators; decently clothed, but with the white dust of the desert thick on shoe and trouser-leg.

"Well, Mr. Hinchcliffe," said Rader briskly, "what can I do for you?"

The old man's voice went with his bent shoulders and way-wearied attitude. "Air you the gineral manager of this here railroad?" he began.

"No; but I represent him. Mr. Brice is away. Rader is my name."

The "father of all the cattlemen," as Cranston had dubbed him, stood awkwardly fumbling his dusty hat. Reddick, looking on, marked the blue powder burns in the weathered face and the battered knuckles of the drill-holding left hand;

miner's tokens, these, and no stockman's, he decided. And the old man's next word confirmed the shrewder guess.

"My claim is up yonder on Sombre headwaters, and I've been sont here," he went on in the shaken voice. "I allowed to the good Lord that it wouldn't make no differ' to a faithless and onbelievin' gineration; but He laid it on to me, and I had to come. I reckon you all don't believe none in visions o' the night ?" he concluded, with an appealing look from one to the other of his auditors.

Neither of the two laughed outright. Age is in some sort venerable, even in this the century of the young. But Rader shook his head.

"I don't know about Mr. Reddick, here. He is a passenger man. But I have never had one that a late supper wouldn't sufficiently account for."

"I was lookin' to be scoffed at," said the graybeard patiently. "The Good Book say, 'There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.' Nev'theless, I must cry aloud and deliver my own soul. Harken at me, young man, and ricollect that I've tromped twenty-five mile in the cold o' the mornin' and the heat o' the noonday to bring the shore word of prophecy. There's goin' to be a terr'ble smash-up on your railroad at four o'clock to-morrow, jes' before day."

Rader's thought went instantly to trainwreckers. How else could a disaster be so confidently predicted? "Go on," he said, gravely. "How do you happen to know this, Mr. Hinchcliffe ?"

"I've seen it in a vision o' the night," was the solemn rejoinder, and Rader breathed freer. "I was settin' on top of a high rock, lookin' down into a narrer slit of a gulch. Down at the bottom of the gulch was a river, bigger thern the Sombre, a-foamin' and tumblin' over the rocks; and a railroad track twisted down one side o' the gulch and crossed over on a slanch-wise bridge to the other, so"-illustrating with the work-worn hands on the flat top of the counter-rail.

Rader and the general passenger agent exchanged glances of startled intelligence. The old man was describing very accurately Black Rock Canyon and bridge, on the upper Boiling Water.

"One moment," Rader interrupted.

"You know our line-you've been over it, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"

The old man shook his head.

"I been six year in the Sombre country, and I came in afoot acrosst the Taylor range before your road was built. I never sot eyes on a rail of it till to-day—that is, not in the flesh," said the seer. "All right; go on."

"Well, as I was sayin', I sot on top o' that high rock, lookin' down at the river and the railroad and the bridge. Bimeby I heard a train comin' from somewheres up along in the gulch. Down she come, rippin' and snortin' and th'owin' fire; and when she hit the bridge-bing! there she was! a mixed-up mess o' broke-up keers and twisted irons piled down into the river. Hit was a passenger train, and I could see 'em tryin' to climb out through the winders; and-and say, I can hear 'em groanin' and shriekin' even to this minute!"

Reddick got up and walked to the window. After a little he heard Rader say: "But about the time-how do you know this is to happen to-morrow morning?"

"I cayn't tell," was the muttered reply. "But when I waked up with the cold sweat standin' out all over me-them figgers was runnin' in my head: Four o'clock, June twenty-three. That's to-morrow, ain't it?"

When Reddick faced about Rader was filling out a pass in his book of blanks, and saying, "I wish our Dolomite line ran right up to your cabin door, Mr. Hinchcliffe. But we can give you a lift as far as the camp, anyway. That will still leave us under the greatest obligations to you; you'll understand that, won't you?"

"But you don't believe a single word I've been tellin' ye," said the old man suspiciously.

"Don't I? I can assure you there will be no accident at Black Rock bridge tomorrow morning if we can prevent it. Here is your pass to Dolomite. Good-day, and good luck to you."

There was silence in the superintendent's office while the shuffling footsteps of the prophet of evil could be heard in the corridor. It was Reddick who broke it with a remark critical.

"There is one screw loose in the prophecy, and it's a rather important one, when you come to think of it. If our trains are

anywhere near on time, we shall have no passenger within thirty miles of Black Rock bridge at four o'clock in the morning."

Rader smiled and tossed the pencilled schedule of the Iowa excursion special across to the passenger

agent.

"If you will

run your eye down that string of figures, you'll see that we have timed the special to a dot. If it leaves Bent's at three twenty, it will pass the bridge in the canyon with

in a minute or two of four o'clock."

Reddick was visibly impressed for a

moment, but he

shook himself

free with a

laugh.

"It is only a raw coincidence. You don't let that old man's fantastic pipe-dream

their own little private hoodoos which they worship like so many Voudooists." "Nonsense!"

"The superstition is, but the fact remains. Only yesterday, I overheard as sober a man as Mac Bostwick telling Haskell, the roundhouse foreman, that there were Fridays when the 1219 would not mind throttle or brake." "Oh, pshaw! I know the men say such things. But they don't really believe them."

weigh an ounce, and you know it, Rader." "Perhaps not. But you are opening up a big vein when you sling a pick on that claim. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred will laugh and tell you that superstition has been choked out and reasoned out long since, with witchcraft and all the devil-business of the ignorant ages. Yet ninety-eight of the ninety-nine have

VOL. XL.-54

"Don't they? Possibly not. Just the same, I wouldn't have this old fellow's dream story get wind on the line for a farm in God's country. It might be laughed at; and then again it might not. Even you were a little startled when he described a bit of scenery he has never seen."

"Bosh! Assuming that he wasn't lying, therearea dozen

ways in which he might, consciously or subconsciously, have obtained his picture of

Black Rock bridge without having actually seen it. I saw a very striking photograph of it in a shop-window the last time I was in Dolomite; and you forget that our own advertising matter, which is scattered far and wide, carries many cuts of our scenic points. But to come back to business: you won't change the schedule of the Iowa train? The Dolomite Board of Trade is to breakfast