since his second marriage, he had merely earned a comfortable livelihood by diversified industry; but now he possessed a secured capital in addition to his farm and his buildings. At last, he was highly content, but nevertheless ready as ever for new undertakings. His mind was active, and his eye and hand were steady.

When three cottages had stood for several years on the eastern foreside of North-East Harbor,-the nearest point of the shore of Mount Desert to Sutton's Island,-John Gilley, at the age of seventy-one, undertook to deliver at these houses milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables every day, and chickens and fowls when they were wanted. This undertaking involved his rowing in all weathers nearly two miles from his cove to the landings of these houses, and back again, across bay waters which are protected indeed from the heavy ocean swells, but are still able to produce what the natives call "a big chop." Every morning he arrived with the utmost punctuality, in rain or shine, calm or blow, and alone, unless it blew heavily from the northwest (a head wind from Sutton's), or his little grandson-his mate, as he called the boy-wanted to accompany him on a fine, still morning. Soon he extended his trips to the western side of North-East Harbor, where he found a much larger market for his goods than he had found thirty-five years before, when he first delivered milk at Squire Kimball's tavern. This business involved what was new work for John Gilley, namely, the raising of fresh vegetables in much larger variety and quantity than he was accustomed to. He entered on this new work with interest and intelligence, but was of course sometimes defeated in his plans by wet weather in spring, a drought in summer, or by the worms and insects which unexpectedly attacked his crops. On the whole he was decidedly successful in this enterprise undertaken at seventy-one. Those who bought of him liked to deal with him, and he found in the business fresh interest and pleasure. Not many men take up a new out-of-door business at seventy, and carry it on successfully by their own brains and muscles. It was one of the sources of his satisfaction that he

thus supplied the two daughters who still lived at his house with a profitable outlet for their energies. One of these— the school-teacher-was an excellent laundress, and the other was devoted to the work of the house and the farm, and was helpful in her father's new business. John Gilley transported the washes from North-East Harbor and back again in his rowboat, and under the new conditions of the place washing and ironing proved to be more profitable than school-keeping.

In the fall of 1896 the family which had occupied that summer one of the houses John Gilley was in the habit of supplying with milk, eggs, and vegetables, and which had a young child dependent on the milk, lingered after the other summer households had departed. He consented to continue his daily trips a few days into October that the child's milk might not be changed, although it was perfectly clear that his labor could not be adequately recompensed. On the last morning but one that he was to come across from the island to the harbor a strong northeast wind was blowing, and some sea was running through the deep passage between Sutton's Island and Bear Island, which he had to cross on his way to and fro. He took with him in his boat the young man who had been working for him on the farm the few weeks past. They delivered the milk, crossed to the western side of NorthEast Harbor, did some errands there, and started cheerfully for home, as John Gilley had done from that shore hundreds of times before. The boy rowed from a seat near the bow, and the old man sat on the thwart near the stern, facing the bow, and pushing his oars from him. They had no thought of danger; but to ease the rowing they kept to windward under Bear Island, and then pushed across the deep channel, south by west, for the western point of Sutton's Island. They were more than half-way across when, through some inattention or lack of skill on the part of the young man in the bow, a sea higher or swifter than the rest threw a good deal of water into the boat. John Gilley immediately began to bail, and told the rower to keep her head to the waves. The overweighted boat

The

was less manageable than before, and in a moment another roller turned her completely over. Both men clung to the boat and climbed on to her bottom. She drifted away before the wind and sea toward South-West Harbor. oversetting of the boat had been seen from both Bear Island and Sutton's Island; but it was nearly three quarters of an hour before the rescuers could reach the floating boat, and then the young man, though unconscious, was still clinging to the boat's keel, but the old man, chilled by the cold water and stunned by the waves which beat about his head, had lost his hold and sunk into the sea. In half an hour John Gilley had passed from a hearty and successful old age in this world, full of its legitimate interests and satisfactions, into the voiceless mystery of death. No trace of his body was ever found. It disappeared into the waters on which he had played and worked as boy and man all his long and fortunate life. He left his family well provided for, and full of gratitude and praise for his honorable career and his sterling char

acter.

This is the life of one of the forgotten millions. It contains no material for distinction, fame, or long remembrance; but it does contain the material and present the scene for a normal human development through mingled joy and sorrow, labor and rest, adversity and success, and through the tender loves of childhood, maturity, and age. We cannot but believe that it is just for countless quiet, simple lives like this that God made and upholds this earth.

IO. Thomas R. Lounsbury (1838- ) is a professor of English at Yale. He has written much about Shakespeare and Browning and made many contributions to the study of the English language.

BROWNING'S UNPOPULARITY

(From The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning)

We know now that Browning felt keenly the injustice with which he was treated. We learn much about his

attitude from his wife's correspondence. Her resentment of the neglect he experienced was greater than his own; at least it has reached us more definitely. "To you," she wrote to Browning's sister in 1860, "I may say, that the blindness, deafness, and stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing. Robert is. All England can't prevent his existence, I suppose. But nobody there, except a small knot of pre-Raffaelite men, pretends to do him justice. Mr. Forster has done the best in the press. As a sort of lion, Robert has his range in society, and, for the rest, you should see Chapman's returns; while in America, he's a power, a writer, a poet. He is read— he lives in the hearts of the people. The contrast between the estimate in which she and her husband were held in their own country and the feeling entertained about them in this, she expressed with a good deal of bitterness. "For the rest," she continued, "the English hunt lions too, but their favorite lions are chosen among 'lords' chiefly, or 'railroad kings.' 'It's worth eating much dirt,' said an Englishman of high family and character here, ‘to get to Lady 's soirée.' Americans will eat dirt to There's the difference."

get to us.

A year later Mrs. Browning records an instance of the ignorance prevailing about her husband and his work which, did it come from any other source than herself, it would be hard to credit. It occurs in a letter sent to her sister-inlaw from Rome in 1861. In it she speaks again of the attitude of his countrymen toward her husband and his sense of its injustice. "His treatment in England," she wrote, "affects him naturally-and for my part I set it down as an infamy of that public-no other word. He says he has told you some things you had not heard, and which, I acknowledge, I always try to prevent him from repeating to any one. I wonder if he has told you besides (no, I fancy not) that an English lady of rank, an acquaintance of ours (observe that!) asked, the other day, the American Minister whether Robert was not an American. The Minister answered, 'Is it possible that you ask me this? Why, there is not so poor a village in the United States where

they would not tell you that Robert Browning was an Englishman, and that they were very sorry that he was not an American.' Very pretty of the American Minister-was it not?-and literally true besides."

Undoubtedly the popularity of Browning in this country was exaggerated by his wife to give point to the contrast. But there is no question that the reading public in England remained for a long time scandalously indifferent to his achievement and showed but slight appreciation of its greatness. The fact of the neglect must be conceded. Is there any explanation of it, any palliation for it? Is there in particular any ground for the charge of unnecessary and wilful obscurity of meaning and harshness of versification, which whether really existing or merely asserted to exist militated constantly against the acceptance of the poet as poet? Browning himself was from the beginning well aware of his reputation for lack of clearness. In a letter sent in April, 1845, to his future wife he remarked that something he had written to her previously was "pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings -you will ask what it means." At times this complaint of obscurity afforded him matter for jest. He was fond of repeating a remark of Wordsworth about his marriage to Miss Barrett. "I hope," said the veteran poet, "that these young people will make themselves intelligible to each other, for neither of them will ever be intelligible to anybody else." The woman soon to be his wife admitted her own liability to this charge of obscurity. Occasionally too she herself found her future husband unintelligible. "People say of you and me," she wrote to him in the beginning of their acquaintance, "that we love the darkness and use a Sphinxine idiom in our talk." She went on to make a personal application of this view to something which he had been writing to her. "Really," she said, "you do talk a little like a Sphinx."

), for many years a

II. George Herbert Palmer (1842professor at Harvard, is a frequent contributor to educational periodicals. His prose translation of Homer's Odyssey has become an English classic.