LESSON XXXVI.

Scene from “Julius Cæsar."

Rome; a street.

[Study in dramatic action.]

Enter FLAVIUS and MARULLUS R., meeting a throng of citizens from L., who stand across the background. FLAVIUS. (C.) Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home! Is this a holiday? What! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk, Upon a laboring day, without the sign

Of your profession?-Speak, what trade art thou?

1ST CIT. Why, sir, a carpenter.

MARULLUS. (R.) Where is thy leather apron and thy rule? You, sir; what trade are you?

2D CIT. (R. C.) Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.

MAR. But what trade art thou? Answer me directly.

2D CIT. A trade, sir, that, I hope, I may use with a safe conscience; which is, indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles.

MAR. What trade, thou knave, thou naughty knave, what trade?

2D CIT Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me; yet, if you be out, sir, I can mend you.

MAR. What mean'st by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow! 2D CIT. Why, sir, cobble you.

FLAV. Thou art a cobbler, art thou?

2D CIT. Truly, sir, all that I live by is the awl: I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor woman's matters-but with awl. I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger, I re-cover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's-leather have gone upon my handy-work.

FLAV. But wherefore art not in thy shop to-day?

Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?

2D CIT. Truly, sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more work. But, indeed, sir, we make holiday to see Cæsar, and to rejoice in his triumph.

MAR. (L. C.) Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he

home?

What tributaries follow him to Rome,

To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things.
Oh, you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And, when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made a universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath his banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds,
Made in his concave shores ?

And do you now cull out a holiday?

And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?
Begone:

Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,

Pray to the gods to intermit the plague

That needs must light on this ingratitude.

FLAV. (C.) Go, go, good countrymen; and, for this fault, Assemble all the poor men of your sort;

Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears

Into the channel, till the lowest stream

Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.

[Exeunt CITIZENS R.]

MAR.

See, whe'r their basest metal be not moved;

They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness.

Go you down that way towards the capitol;

This way will I. Disrobe the images,

If you do find them decked with Cæsar's trophies.

FLAV. (R.) May we do so?

You know it is the feast of Lupercal.

MAR. (L.) It is no matter;

These growing feathers plucked from Cæsar's wing,
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch;

Who, else, would soar above the view of men,

And keep us all in servile fearfulness.

[Exeunt MARULLUS L., FLAVIUS R.]

LESSON XXXVII.

Supporting the Guns.

-Shakespeare.

[Speak distinctly, in spite of the excitement and consequent rapidity with which parts of this selection must be given.]

Every car

We have been fighting at the edge of the woods. tridge-box has been emptied once and more, and a fourth of the brigade has melted away in dead and wounded and missing. Not a cheer is heard in the whole brigade. We know that we are being driven foot by foot, and that when we break back once more the line will go to pieces and the enemy will pour through the gap.

Here comes help!

Down the crowded highway gallops a battery, withdrawn from some other position to save ours. The field fence is scattered while you could count thirty, and the guns rush for the hill behind us. Six horses to a piece—three riders to each gun. Over dry ditches where a farmer would not drive a wagon; through clumps of bushes, over logs a foot thick, every horse on the gallop, every rider lashing his team and yelling—the sight behind us makes us forget the foe in front. The guns jump two feet high as the heavy wheels strike rock or log, but not a horse slackens his pace, not a cannoneer loses his seat. Six guns, six caissons, sixty horses, eighty men race for the brow of the hill as if he who reached it first was to be knighted.

A moment ago the battery was a confused mob. We look again

and the six guns are in position, the detached horses hurrying away, the ammunition-chests open, and along our line runs the command: "Give them one more volley and fall back to support the guns!" We have scarcely obeyed when boom! boom! boom! opens the battery, and jets of fire jump down and scorch the green trees under which we fought and despaired.

The shattered old brigade has a chance to breathe for the first time in three hours as we form a line of battle behind the guns and lie down. What grim, cool fellows these cannoneers are! Every man is a perfect machine. Bullets plash dust in their faces, but they do not wince. Bullets sing over and around them, but they do not dodge. There goes one to the earth, shot through the head as he sponged his gun. The machinery loses just one beat-misses just one cog in the wheel, and then works away again as before.

Every gun is using short-fuse shell. The ground shakes and trembles the roar shuts out all sounds from a battle line three miles long, and the shells go shrieking into the swamp to cut trees short off-to mow great gaps in the bushes-to hunt out and shatter and mangle men until their corpses cannot be recognized as human. You would think a tornado was howling through the forest, followed by billows of fire, and yet men live through it —aye! press forward to capture the battery! We can hear their shouts as they form for the rush.

Now the shells are changed for grape and canister, and the guns are served so fast that all reports blend into one mighty roar. The shriek of a shell is the wickedest sound in war, but nothing makes the flesh crawl like the demoniac singing, purring, whistling grape-shot and the serpent-like hiss of canister. Men's legs and arms are not shot through, but torn off. Heads are torn from bodies and bodies cut in two. A round shot or shell takes two men out of the ranks as it crashes through. Grape and canister mow a swath and pile the dead on top of each other.

Through the smoke we see a swarm of men. It is not a battle line, but a mob of men desperate enough to bathe their bayonets in the flame of the guns. The guns leap from the ground, almost as they are depressed on the foe, and shrieks and screams and

shouts blend into one awful and steady cry. Twenty men out of the battery are down, and the firing is interrupted. The foe accepts it as a sign of wavering, and come rushing on. They are not ten feet away when the guns give them a last shot. That discharge picks living men off their feet and throws them into the swamp, a blackened, bloody mass.

Up now, as the enemy are among the guns! There is a silence of ten seconds, and then the flash and roar of more than 3,000 muskets, and a rush forward with bayonets. For what? Neither on the right, nor left, nor in front of us is a living foe! There are corpses around us which have been struck by three, four and even six bullets, and nowhere on this acre of ground is a wounded man! The wheels of the guns cannot move until the blockade of dead is removed. Men cannot pass from caisson to gun without climbing over winrows of dead. Every gun and wheel is smeared with blood-every foot of grass has its horrible stain.

Historians write of the glory of war. Burial parties saw murder where historians saw glory.-Detroit Free Press.

LESSON XXXVIII.

Facilis Descensus.

[Study of facial expression.]

"O where are you going with your love-locks flowing,
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?"
"The down-hill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
We shall escape the up-hill by never turning back."

So they two went together in glowing August weather;
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on
The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.