Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/24

 16 failures in this field, was wholly due to the skill with which the 'translator' adapted this fiction 'made in Germany' to the English-speaking world. Five years ago this brother and sister were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the proof-sheets of her fortieth German translation, 'The Lonely House,' by Adolph Streckfuss, and he on the proof-sheets of Antony and Cleopatra, the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first translation, 'Seaside and Fireside Fairies,' from George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared forty-three years, and his Romeo and Juliet thirty-six years, before. His brother, Frank Furness, whose death preceded his by so short a span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush's Lancers, and all his life looked the cavalryman, with his drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face. He retained to the end the walk of a man who, for years together in his youth, has felt the saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever's hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barnyard fence no other man would have dared or persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By carrying powder to a battery not only under fire, but through burning woods, he won a medal of honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly and flagrantly by walking out between two firing-lines a few rods apart to give a wounded Confederate a drink of water. Years later, when there came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, he solaced himself by finding through a