We must not leave the reader under the impression that this man's life, so full of hardship and perils, was a gloomy or unhappy one. There is an element of human pride in all martyrdom, which, if it does not soften the pains, stimulates the power of en autumnal night, when Johnny, who always camped out in preference to sleeping in a house, had built a fire near which he intended to pass the night, he noticed that the blaze attracted large numbers of mosquitoes, many of whom flew too near to his fire and were 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 laughingly asked him why he did not kill it. To which he gravely replied that "It would not be right to kill the poor thing, for it did not intend to hurt me." ment?" When this interrogation had been repeated beyond all reasonable endurance, Johnny rose from the log on which he was reclining, and advancing to the speaker, he 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. 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 annoy 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 transac-ance was really the result of his belief that tion 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. 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 himdying, 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 forests, 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 During the succeeding nine years he pur- fruitful. Now "no man knoweth of his sepsued his eccentric avocation on the western ulchre;" but his deeds will live in the fraborder 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. He 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 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 he a group of peated again and again every 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 líttle 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, down 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 GULF-WEED. bered with complaints, and one would never suspect from the genial flow of his narrative that he ever encountered extortionate landlords, bad beds, poor coffee, and other evils so constantly berated by the common English traveler. His cheerfulness is perennial; his enthusiasm fresh and constant as a child's. He observes nature with the eye of an artist, and describes with all the glow and ardor of a poet. It had been, he says, the dream of forty years to visit the West Indies, and "at last" the dream was fulfilled. On a chill December day he set sail from Southampton, and passed out by Hurst Castle and the Needles into the sea, whose friendly waves, racing southward before the violent northeastern wind, gave him onward lifts toward the land of his desire. It was all like a dream -the shores and headlands of old England lying cold and colorless in the December twilight; the broad waves, their heads torn off in spray; and, far ahead, seen only in imagination, the fair land of perpetual summer toward which he was bound. His active mind, however, could not subsist upon dreams even for a season, and with the eye of a skillful naturalist he scanned the sur face of the water, discovering evidences of noctilucæ and other tiny ocean life, until after days of delicious repose, during which the gradual change of temperature gave unmistakable tokens of nearness to the home of the summer and the sun, the first fragments of gulf-weed drifted past, and quite a little excitement arose on board ship, specimens being eagerly fished for over the bows. Clinging to the sprigs of gulf-weed, or sargasso, are whole families of tiny crabs, zoophytes, mollusks, and other small specimens of animal life, which, like the plant which shelters them, are found nowhere else in the world. But, owing to the speed of the vessel, Mr. Kingsley was unable to obtain many specimens, twelve knots an hour being a pace sufficient to tear off the weed, as it is hauled alongside, all living things which are not rooted to it. He got, therefore, no crustacea; neither did he get a single specimen of the calamaries, which may be described as cuttle-fish, whose arms carry hooks as well as suckers, the lingering descendants of a most ancient form, which existed at least as far back as the era of the shallow oolitic seas, z or y thousand years ago. The only parasites he obtained were a tiny curled spirorbis, a lepraria, with its thousandfold cells, and a tiny polyp, belonging to the campanularias, with a creeping stem, which sends up here and there a yellow-stalked bell. This gulf-weed has not, as some might fancy from its name, any thing to do with the Gulf Stream. It is found floating between the Gulf Stream and the equatorial current, drifting slowly about on the surface of the water, and is totally unlike, both in its nature and its habits, any weed found in other waters. A theory exists, which Mr. Kingsley calls "not altogether impossible," that the floating fields of sargasso mark the site of an Atlantic continent, sunk ages since, and the traveler looks upon it poetically as a waif which has lost long ago the habit of clinging to a rock or sea bottom, and propagates itself forever floating, drifting restlessly back and forth, as if in search of the rocks where it once grew. The sargasso is of a rich orange hue, and when seen floating in fields on the surface of after touching, and only touching, the surface would seem to show that it was not due only to the original impetus, for that would be retarded, instead of being quickened, every time they touched." the water appears like a tangled mass dotted possess a merely balancing power, as has with tiny yellow spots; but when drawn been stated in much learned writing on the fresh from the water and carefully exam- subject. It is hardly possible that so long ined, it resembles not a sea-weed so much as a flight can be obtained by a forward rush a sprig of some willow-leaved shrub, burden- under water; and, as Mr. Kingsley remarks, ed with yellow berries, large and small." the plain fact that they renew their flight Every broken bit of it seems growing and throwing out ever new berries and leaves, or what, for want of a better word, must be called leaves in a sea-weed. It must be remembered that the frond of a sea-weed is not merely leaf, but root also; that it not only breathes air, but feeds on water; and that even the so-called root by which a sea-weed holds to the rocks is really only an anchored hill some fifteen hundred feet high, which clinging mechanically to the stone, but not deriving, as the root of a land-plant would, any nourishment from it. Therefore it is that to grow while uprooted and floating, though impossible to most land-plants, is easy enough to many sea-weeds, and especially to the sargasso. The flying-fish, those tiny elves of the sea, next attract the attention and awaken the delight of the tourist. Who among those familiar with tropical seas has not spent hours of lazy enjoyment, lounging on the vessel's deck, watching the flight of those airy creatures, passing from wave to wave like a flash of silver? We scarcely believe that any one who has carefully watched their habits will affirm that their wings After two weeks of pleasant sailing Mr. Kingsley obtained his first view of tropical shores. The first land sighted was a round was the end of Virgin Gorda, St. John appearing next on the horizon, then Tortola, and, last of all, St. Thomas; all pink and purple in the sun, and warm gray in the shadow, which, on nearing them, changed to the richest green of scrub and down, with bright yellow and rusty rocks, plainly lava, in low cliffs along the shore. Every where the lava cliffs appeared freshly broken, toppling down in dust and boulders; but there had, apparently, been no upheaval since the land took its present shape. There is no trace of raised beaches, or of the terraces which would have inevitably been formed by upheaval on the soft sides of the lava hills. The numberless deep channels which part the isles and islets would rather mark |