Ours is not a new reading of the earlier relations of the United States with the Barbary powers.  The story can be found in the Collection of State Papers, and more easily in the excellent little books of Messrs. Sabine and Felton.  But a “popular version” despises documents.  Under the pressure of melodrama, history will drift into Napoleon’s “fable agreed upon”; and if it be true, as Emerson says, that “no anchor, no cable, no fence, avail to keep a fact a fact,” it is not at all likely that a paper in a monthly magazine will do it.

* * * * *

SUNSHINE.

I have always worked in the carpet-factories.  My father and mother worked there before me and my sisters, as long as they lived.  My sisters died first;—­the one, I think, out of deep sorrow; the other from too much joy.

My older sister worked hard, knew nothing else but work, never thought of anything else, nor found any joy in work, scarcely in the earnings that came from it.  Perhaps she pined for want of more air, shut up in the rooms all day, not caring to find it in walking or in the fields, or even in books.  Household-work awaited her daily after the factory-work, and a dark, strange religion oppressed and did not sustain her, Sundays.  So we scarcely wondered when she died.  It seemed, indeed, as if she had died long ago,—­as if the life had silently passed away from her, leaving behind a working body that was glad at last to find a rest it had never known before.

My other sister was far different.  Very much younger, not even a shadow of the death that had gone before weighed heavily upon her.  Everybody loved her, and her warm, flashing spirit that came out in her sunny smile.  She died in a season of joy, in the first flush of summer.  She died, as the June flowers died, after their happy summer-day of life.

At last I was left alone, to plod the same way, every night and morning,—­out with the sunrise from the skirts of the town, over the bridge across the stream that fell into our great river which has worked for us so long, to the tall, grim factory-building where my work awaited me, and home again at night.  I lived on in the house we all of us had lived in.  At first it was alone in the wood.  But the town crept out to meet it, and soon but little woodland was left around it.  “Gloomy Robert” they called me, as I walked back and forth upon the same track, seldom lifting my head to greet friend or stranger.  Though I walked over well-known ground, my thoughts were wandering in strange romances.  My evening-readings furnished the land I lived in,—­seldom this Western home, but the East, from Homer’s time to the days of Haroun Alraschid.  I was so faithful at my work that my responsibilities were each year increased; and though my brain lived in dreams, I had sufficient use of it for my little needs each day.  I never forgot to answer the wants of the