the store. Portoghese flew in anu demanded to know what Ammella was doing with his boy. The grocer was in a bad humor, and swore at him. There was an altercation, and Ammelia attacked the barber with a broom, beating him and driving him away from his door. Black with anger, Portoghese ran to his room and returned with a revolver. In the fight that followed he shot Ammella through the head. He was arrested and thrown into jail. In the hospital the grocer hovered between life and death for many weeks. Portoghese lay in the Tombs awaiting trial for more than a year, believing still that he was the victim of a Black Hand conspiracy. When at last the trial came on, his savings were all gone, and of the once prosperous and happy man only a shadow was left. He sat in the court-room and listened in moody silence to the witnesses who told how he had unjustly suspected and nearly murdered his friend. He was speedily convicted, and the day of his sentence was fixed for Christmas Eve. It was certain that it would go hard with him. The Italians were too prone to shoot and stab, said the newspapers, and the judges were showing no mercy. The witnesses had told the truth, but there were some things they did not know and that did not get into the evidence. The prisoner's wife was ill from grief and want; their savings of years gone to lawyer's fees, they were on the verge of starvation. The children were hungry. With the bells ringing in the glad holiday, they were facing bitter homelessness in the winter streets, for the rent was in arrears and the landlord would not wait. And "Papa" away now for the second Christmas, and maybe for many yet to come! Ten, the lawyer and jury had said: this was New York, not Italy. In the Tombs the prisoner said it over to himself, bitterly. He had thought only of defending his own. So now he stood looking the judge and the jury in the face, yet hardly seeing them. He saw only the prison gates opening for him, and the gray walls shutting him out from his wife and little ones for-how many Christmases was it? One, two, three-he fell to counting them over mentally and did not hear when his lawyer whispered and nudged him with his elbow. The clerk repeated his question, but he merely shook his head. What should he have to say? Had he not said it to these men and they did not believe him? About little Vito who was lost, and his wife who cried her eyes out Decause of the Black Hand letters. He There was a step behind him, and a voice he knew spoke. It was the voice of Ammella, his neighbor, with whom he used to be friends before-before that day. "Please, your Honor, let this man go! It is Christmas, and we should have no unkind thoughts. I have none against Filippo here, and I ask you to let him go." It grew very still in the court-room as he spoke and paused for an answer. Lawyers looked up from their briefs in astonishment. The jurymen in the box leaned forward and regarded the convicted man and his victim with rapt attention. Such a plea had not been heard in that place before. Portoghese stood mute; the voice sounded strange and far away to him. He felt a hand upon his shoulder that was the hand of a friend, and shifted his feet uncertainly, but made no response. sponse. The gray-haired judge regarded the two gravely but kindly. "Your wish comes from a kind heart," he said." But this man has been convicted. The law must be obeyed. There is nothing in it that allows us to let a guilty man go free." The jurymen whispered together and one of them arose. 66 "Your Honor," he said, a higher law than any made by man came into the world at Christmas-that we love one another. These men would obey it. Will you not let them? The jury pray as one man that you let mercy go before justice on this Holy Eve." A smile lit up Judge O'Sullivan's face. "Filippo Portoghese," he said, "you are a very fortunate man. The law bids me send you to prison for ten years, and but for a miraculous chance would have condemned you to death. But the man you maimed for life pleads for you, and the jury that convicted you begs that you go free. The Court remembers what you have suffered and it knows the plight of your family, upon whom the heaviest burden of your punishment would fall. Go, then, to your home. And to you, gentlemen, a happy holiday such as you have given him and his! This court stands adjourned." The voice of the crier was lost in a storm of applause. The jury rose to their feet and cheered judge, complainant, and defendant. Portoghese, who had stood as one dazed. raised eyes that brimmed with tears to the bench and to his old neighbor. He understood at last. Ammella threw his arm around him and kissed him on both cheeks, his disfigured face beaming with joy. One of the jurymen, a Jew, put his hand impulsively in his pocket, emptied it into his hat, and passed the hat to his neighbor. All the others followed his example. The court officer dropped in half a dollar as he stuffed its contents into the happy Italian's pocket. "For little Vito," he said, and shook his hand. "Ah!" said the foreman of the jury, looking after the reunited friends leaving the court-room arm in arm; "it is good to live in New York. A merry Christmas to you, Judge!" (The next installment of these "Life Stories" will appear in The Outlook for December 28) A FEW BOOKS OF TO-DAY R BY HAMILTON W. MABIE EADERS who are in search of men rather than books will find them in Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine's "Mark Twain" (Harpers) and the "Letters of George Meredith" (Scribners). The two men are as far apart as the Thames flowing through London Town and the Mississippi running amuck through half the conti nent. Meredith was the most sophisticated of English novelists; no finer intellectual force ever made itself felt in English fiction; nor has a more penetrating analyst of character appeared in that fiction. One may quarrel a hundred times with his art, with the soundness of his psychology; one can never question the sheer brain power of the author of "The Egoist," nor escape the fascination of his distinction. He is the exponent of a culture which has wholly escaped provincial limitations without loss of that power of portraiture which lies in intimate contact with near and familiar things. Pos Will some one explain why there are no Meredith clubs? There is as much matter for discussion in the novels as in Browning's poetry, but there is not the same gay courage in attacking the Meredithian problems. sibly the novelist does not yield himself so easily to generalization as the poet; possibly he demands a closer scrutiny than the majority of readers can give his work; possibly his analysis is more searching than Browning's, and the lines of character which it develops are neither so distinct nor so strongly massed as in the poet's studies. It is significant that nobody is interested in the geography of Meredith's stories; and this is because they have no local back grounds. Thackeray will bear the aid of maps, and Dickens stands almost in need of a London directory; Mr. Hardy's moors are so potential in some of the novels that we are eager to "locate" them, and Mr. Phillpotts has come very near putting guide-books to Dartmoor in our hands; but the Meredith novels are in a country of their own. Even the Meredithian cares little where the novelist lived, or what his manner of life was; the relations between his books and his readers is intimate, but curiously impersonal. These two substantial volumes are far more communicative with regard to the man than a formal biography could be. Meredith does all the talking, and he does it naturally, frankly, and with no lurking consciousness of posterity in the back of his mind; and so he gives us unconsciously the atmosphere of his mind. There is no professional pose, no sense of making a contribution to epistolary literature, in these intimately informal letters; but there is the tireless use of a faculty of observation which was at times uncanny in its sharpness of sight, the flow of deep feeling, a delightful habit of friendliness, and many bits of selfrevelation: One result of my hard education . . . has been that I rarely write save from the suggestion of something actually observed. I mean that I rarely write verse. Thus my Jugglers, Beggars, etc., I have met on the road and have idealized but slightly. I desire to strike the poetic spark out of absolute human clay. And in doing so I have the fancy that I do solid work-better than a carol in midair. Meredith's criticism was not awed by great reputation, and he was in agreement with Carlyle and FitzGerald in his feeling about the verse of Tennyson's middle period : The "Holy Grail" is wonderful, isn't it? The lines are satin lengths, the figures Sèvres china. I have not the courage to offer to review it, I should say such things. To think-it's in these days that the foremost poet of the country goes on fluting of creatures that have not a breath of vital humanity in them, and doles us out his regular five-feet with the old trick of the vowel endings-The Euphuist's tongue, the Exquisite's leg, the Curate's moral sentiments, the British matron and her daughter's purity of tone-so he talks, so he walks, so he snuffles, so he appears divine. . . . The man has got hold of the Muse's clothes line and hung it with jewelry. But the "Lucretius" is grand. I can't say how much I admire it and hate the Sir Pandarus public which has corrupted this fine (natural) singer. In his degraded state I really believe he is useful, for he reflects as much as our Society chooses to show of itself. The English notion of passion, virtue, valor, is in his pages, and the air and the dress we assume are seen there. I turn to Rabelais and Montaigne with relief. These letters are as individual and at times as irritating as the novels, and they are also as interesting. They will not be read in their own light and for their own quality, as are the letters of Gray, of Lamb, of FitzGerald, but they will find their place beside the novels, and that means long life and very good company. Mark Twain, on the other hand, developed his biographer and gained the effectiveness of autobiography without the labor of writing it. Mr. Paine stuck to his task with Boswellian persistency. But he was too deeply interested to be judicious in the matter of space, and the record runs to great length. It is easy to understand why Mark Twain was difficult to edit. He was so full of vitality, so unexpected in thought, so bizarre and often so grotesque in phrase and mood, that to report him adequately it seemed necessary to report him in full. But he needed to be edited in life, and he needs it now that he is gone. For many years his beautiful and devoted wife was his editor, and in her going he suffered an incalculable loss. Her exquisite nature was not only a foil for his coarser fiber, but a standard of taste and of speech. With fine discernment she called. him "Youth;" and to the end of his days, under the shadow of a sorrow which searched him like fire, his was the spirit of youth. For the best of Mark Twain, man and writer, was his report and illustration of those pioneer qualities which are characteristic of young societies. It was the Mississippi that floated him to fame, and to the life of the great river, and his unhackneyed and highly vitalized report of that rough, free, pictorial life, the readers of the future will turn for the genius of a man who won the world because he offered it a kind of writing that it had never had before. He was more unliterary than Whitman, who assumed the literary pose even while he denounced it. There is no evidence that, so far as his manner of speech was concerned, Mark Twain owed anything to books. Later in life he knew and loved certain writers, Browning among them; but neither his material nor his style was gained by reading; when he was asked, as everybody was asked a few years ago, what books had helped him most, he promptly replied, "My own books." He said frankly that he had never tried to help the cultivated classes; that he had neither the gift nor the training for it; that he always "hunted for bigger game-the masses," and that he had tried to entertain them and let them go elsewhere for instruction. His instinct was sound, and it gained both audiences; for he was a natural force in literature, and there are few qualities which attract cultivated readers more than naturalness and force. Andrew Lang declared that he did not lay down "Huckleberry Finn" until he had read the last page; and that story and its companion," Tom Sawyer," met the tests by which he judged fiction: vivid and original portraiture of life, and character naturally displayed in action; if there is "an unrestrained sense of humor in the narrator, we have a masterpiece." It would not be easy to put the elements of Mark Twain's genius and art with more precision. For he had art, if by art we mean the most vital and effective use of material for presentation. It was not the art of the great novelist, nor of the "little masters" like de Maupassant; it was an instinctive sense of what is characteristic in time and place, observed, chosen, and dramatized in a spirit of buoyant, independent, and self-respecting humor. No man could be more at home with his people and with his readers than Mark Twain, and he wrote as if there were not another book in the world. The indifference to conventions, the feeling that whatever was most easy and convenient was best, the deep-seated sense of the right of a man to be 'mself, which were the special qualities of the pioneers, were characteristic of Mark Twain, with the humor |