on, yet
his fame seems destined to rest on it, and especially on his "Tom
Brown," which has been pronounced "the best description of public
school life that ever has been, or is ever likely to be, written."
This famous work, published in 1858, was followed the next year by
"The Scouring of the White Horse," a story of his favorite White Horse
Hill. Three years later came "Tom Brown at Oxford," then "The Life of
Alfred the Great," and lastly his "Memoirs of a Brother" and his
"Manliness of Christ," besides scores, if not hundreds, of magazine
and review articles and letters to London and American papers.

In 1870 Mr. Hughes made the tour of this country, receiving such a
welcome from his many friends as "Tom Brown" was sure to get from both
old and young. Ten years afterward he undertook to establish an
English colony in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. It was
called Rugby, and it was founded in the hope that it might be useful
to many educated young men of good families who could find no opening
worthy of their powers at home. As he said, "Of the many sad sights in
England there is none sadder than this, of first-rate human material
going helplessly to waste, and in too many cases beginning to sour and
taint, instead of strengthening the national life." A hundred years
before, Franklin had expressed the same conviction in his pithy maxim,
"'Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright." It was to fill these
vacant lives with honest work and its rewards that Thomas Hughes
started his emigration to the wilds of Tennessee. There, co-operation
was to be tried in farming, cattle-raising, lumbering, and trade, thus
saving the community of workers from that "infinite terror of not
making money," which Carlyle declared was the only thing that now
stirred deep fear in the souls of his countrymen. Many an ardent young
man fresh from the old Rugby of "Tom Brown" fame fondly hoped that the
new, western Rugby might enable him to say with Tennyson's "Northern
Farmer," as he listened to the music of his horse's hoofs on the road
home from market,--

"Proputty, proputty, proputty,--that's what I 'ears 'em saaey";

but, unfortunately, the "proputty" will not always come even at the
bidding of hard work and active brains. The Tennessee enterprise has
not commanded success, though doubtless, as Addison would say, it has
done better--it has deserved it.

Since the inauguration of the movement Mr. Hughes has been appointed
c