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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at|http: //books .google .com/I THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE JULY — DECEMBER. 1875. I GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE ENTIRELY NEW SERIES. VOL. XV. JULY-DECEMBER. LONDON ; GRANT 4 CO., Ji TO j8, TURNMILL STREET, E.C. 1875- THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE JULY — DECEMBER. J8K. .^3 LONI>ON GRANT AND CO., PRINTERS, 72-78, TURNMILL STREET, B.C. Preface. COUNTRY CRITIC some months ago, com- menting upon one of my half-yearly pre- faces, remonstrated with me for indulging in e^3t^^e^iftS this little bit of periodical gossip with my readers. lie was pleased to speak favourably of the half- year's batch of literature presented in the volume then finished ; but it was his fancy to compare the writings of my contributors to so many dishes served at table, and my readers to the guests assembled round the mahogany ; and in order to complete the parallel he spoke of the editor as the cook, which of course led up easily to the pertinent remark that the guests did not want the cook to come into the room and make complaisant and com- plimentary remarks upon the dishes he had sent up to the dining-room. But there is always a fallacy somewhere in analogical reasoning ; and comparisons are odious. If the similitude of a feast is to be introduced, then I venture to claim — proudly for my contributors and humbly for myself — the privilege of forming with my readers, a sort of intellectual club, in which ideas, fancies, and flowers of thought, observation, and culture — instead of dishes — are discussed. As president of this little literary republic, enjoying with the rest the entertainment provided — for the quality whereof the merit is not mine — I take council, as far as I can, of writers and of readers as to the conduct of our proceedings, and I do not think I am exceeding the func- tions of my position if twice a year I ask the assembly to glance with me at the doings of the last six months or at the programme of the months that are to come. More- over, the GaiflcmarC s Magazine is a very old literary club — the oldest and earliest of its kind ; and through all the generations that have passed away since the first editor vi Preface^ occupied the chair it has been the custom of the president to say a few words at the close of each volume of these transactions. In this half-yearly gossip through the last three or four volumes I have dwelt in a special manner upon the literary fabric of the work, and upon my intentions and hopes for the future, because there has been a purpose that the magazine should pursue in some respects a new career, and win fresh honours to add to its ancient crown. That purpose has now, perhaps, been sufficiently explained. The work has spoken for itself, and has been, I am grateful to know, handsomely acknowledged. It is not needful, therefore, that I should dwell further upon these general purposes and intentions. While I am writing I am happy to learn that Mr. Justin McCarthy's "Dear Lady Disdain," finished in the con- cluding pages of this volume, is meeting with a generous reception in its separate form as a three-volume novel. Some curious speculation has arisen among readers and correspondents touching the application of the title "A Dog and His Shadow" to Mr. Francillon's new story. The^e chapters in the December number will enable the reader to perceive something of a transfiguration of old -^sop's fable in the story of Abel Herrick, though it would be dangerous to speculate upon how far the finish of the new fable will correspond with that of the old. Abel Herrick has this advantage over most heroes of romance, so far as his readers are concerned, that there is no safety in forecasting the final result of his career, and the conse- quence is a more than usual amount of curiosity as to the probable effect of circumstances and the development of character upon his ultimate fortune. "A Dog and His Shadow" will be concluded in June; but before its com- pletion, and previous to its appearance at the libraries in three volumes, my readers' old favourite of last year, **01ympia," will be issued in a popular form in one volume. Prompted by strong motives, I have ventured to depart, in my programme for next year, from the arrangement which has been announced for the publication of a narrative poem by Mr. Buchanan to run through six Preface. vii numbers. For Mr. Buchanan, within the last few days, since his return from his long sojourn in the western wilds of Ireland, has favoured me with an outline sketch and shown me several MS. chapters of a novel — or, to speak more accurately, a poetic romance in prose — upon which he has long been engaged : and my impression of the w^ork is such that I believe the readers of the Gentleman' s Magazine will forgive the postponement of the poem to a future time and gladly welcome in place of it this most promising venture of the poet into the realms of prose fiction. It has been a matter of some surprise to those familiar with this author's poetical writings that he has never written a prose story; and although some years ago a work of fiction from his pen was promised, no such work has appeared, if we except certain strikingly picturesque and pathetic episodes — such as "Eiradh of Canna'' in "The Land of Lome." One of the greatest of living litterateurs, Victor Hugo, is equally great in poetry and fiction, and our own Sir Walter Scott eclipsed his splendid fame as a poet by his transcendent excellence in prose fiction. From Mr. Buchanan, who has pictured the terrible moonlight walk of Nell on the awful night before her husband's execution, who has sung the ** Ballad of Judas Iscariot," and to whom we owe such works as "Meg Blane," "St. Abe," "The Wedding of Shon Maclean," and the romantic story of the " Red Rose/' we may expect peculiar excellence and striking and original effects as a novelist. So the January number of the Gentleman' s JSIagaziiie will commence wnth the opening chapters of Mr. Buchanan's poetic romance, which will be continued till the end of the year 1876. It is scarcely necessary for me to mention this year's extra Christmas number, " Streaked with Gold," for in the three or four weeks that have elapsed since its publication the work has become famous, and has reached many thousands of households in the thiee kingdoms and in the Principality wherein the chief scenes of the plot are laid. Last year we were almost taken by surprise by the immediate success of the first of this series of Gentleman's Magazine annuals, "Like viii Preface. a Snowball," and had to print edition after edition to meet the demand. Profiting by the lesson, we began the cam- paign this year with an edition of " Streaked with Gold " much larger than the sum of all the editions of " Like a Snowball," but it is already doubtfiil whether we shall not be called upon to reprint it while? Christmas Day is yet afar off. I need hardly say that the authors of " Streaked with Gold,*' as well as the writers of " Like a Snowball," are constant contributors to the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine. THE EDITOR. Contents. 99 »» ft » » >f About Great Players and their Art. By H, Schutz Wilson » , About the North Pole. By Walter Thornbury . , A Dog and His Shadow. By R. E. Francillon : — Book I.— Chaps. I.— Ill „ IV.-VI. ' . . tt Vli,— IJv. •••«(•« ,, X.— xn. . ,.xni iL „ I.— n. II. „ in.— V. Adventure of Rob Roy's, An (1745). ^y Walter Thornbury Apropos of the P^ Salon. By <* Spectavi." Are Good Recruits Worth Paying for? By W. McCullagh TORRENS, M.P. Autumn. By the Hon. Roden Noel Back o' Whiddy. By Henry W. Lucy Curiosities of the Geographical Exhibition at Paris. By " Spectavi." . Dear Lady Disdain. By Justin McCarthy :— Chap. XIX. — " Ah, saw ye not fair Inez ?" • . , , XX.—" Professor Nathaniel P. Cramp." XXI. — In the Library of New Padua XXII. — Looking through the Golden Gate XXni.— Nat is Crushed XXIV.— "Go at Once!" . . • . XXV. — Another Pious Parental Fraud XXVI.— Farewell to New Padua XXVII.—" Why weep ye by the tide, Ladye ? XXVIII.— In the same Boat XXIX. — Home Again . . . • XXX. — She would and She would not XXXI.— This looks not Uke a NupUal . XXXn.— What the Sea gave up . XXXIII.—" But no more like ray Father " 1) tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt 91 PAGB. 32 I 129 3SS 513 529 641 159 56 450 432 417 328 88 98 109 220 227 236 244 349 359 370 476 484 494 60s 612 X • Contents. PAGB Dear Lady Disdain — (continued) : — Chap. XXXIV.— One taken— the Other left .... 622 „ XXXV.—" You are and do not know it " . . . 626 „ XXXVI.— They Stand Confessed .... 735 „ XXXVII.—" Content so Absolute " • • • • 745 „ XXXVIII.— "The Astrology of the Eyes" ... 750 „ XXXIX. — Through the Golden Grate together . . . 759 Dream Gatherer, The. By Edward Severn 572 Fire at Tranter Sweatley's, The. A Wessex Ballad. By Thomas Hardy 552 Great People of Yorkshire. By Horace St. John ... 82 Her Answer. By Edward Severn 465 Hertfordshire Valley, A. By " Red Spinner " 199 In the Peak Country. By " Red Spinner " 467 Mediaeval Corporation and Companies of the City. By John Roland Phillips 717 Modern Judaism. By an English Jew 436 Modem Tactical Organisation. By W. W. Knollys, Major 93rd Sutherland Highlanders 574 Modem Yarmouth. By W. Seiwor 694 Old China and Fayence. By a Collector • . , . . .21a Out of the Chalk. By "Red Spinner" 69 Peak of Terror, The. By H. Schutz Wilson, of the Alpine Club . 585 PSre Hyacinth's Brethren. By Roger Quiddam .... 304 Philosophy of the Falk Laws, The. By Herbert Tuttle • . .672 Recollections of Writers known to an Old Couple when Young. By Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke : — Part 1 162 „ ' II. . , l\^ )> III 444 » IV 596 „ V. 726 Rich Hospitals and Poor Homes. By W. Torrens McCullagh Torrens, M.P 292 Robert Buchanan's Poetry. By the Hon. Roden Noel . . . 556 Signor Salvini's Hamlet. By a Parisian Critic . . . . 46 » Sir Perci\'al of Wales. A Chapter from an Old Romance of the Twelfth Century. By Walter Thorvbury .... 686 Contents^ xi PAGB SabJQgaton of an Imperial Race, The. By Roger Quiddam • • 543 Table Talk. By Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman . 122, 250, 381, 509, 636 767 Tonch of a Vanished Hand and the Sonnd of a Voice that is Still, The. By D. Christie Murray 218 Ultramontanism in Ireland. By an Irish Catholic • « • .172 Walton's River. By " Red Spinner " 339 Walt Whitman, the Poet of Joy. By Arthur Clive . . • 704 Way to Fairyland, The. By Edward Severn • • • • • 302 //; Gentleman's Magazine July, 1875. A Dog and his Shadow. BY R. E. FRANCILLON, AUTHOR OF "OLYHPIA: A ROMANCE," " PEARL & EMERALD," " EARL'S DENE," "ZELDA'S FORTUNE," &0. CHAPTER I. Whence Mows It ? Never a man may know ; And whither ? None may say : Yet high and low must come and go Along the Wind's highway. For every blast that lists to blow. Whither and whence it may, Doth strip some leaSet from the bough It gave but yefiterday — Doth waft » soul lo'weal or woe. Or whir] a loul away. t ILLY ! — Oh, you dreadful child ! Can't you let one rest one's eyes a minute from looking to see where next you're going to? And I with all this work to do before to-morrow ! I declare I little knew what a trial I was laying on myself when I promised to look after you. You're brother Sam's child every inch you're high. Milly— Milly — there, if I didn't know it — head over heels into the coal-box again, and your frock clean on this morning — you're enough to tire out Job's patience, that you are— what is it you want now? No, Milly —you mustn't have the carving knife — nor yet the candles— no, nor the beer. My spectacles ?— There they are then, if you must have something to keep you quiet — though how I'm to get through my work without my spectacles " And so, for a good hour or more, rambled the sharp voice of Mis. Vol. XV., N.S. 1875. a 2 The Gentlematis Magazine. TalHs the housekeeper, as she sat over her supper and her sewing in her own snug little comer of the old Manor House at Winbury. She was a stately personage of middle age and of an ancient school, drawing additional dignity from a high cap, then out of date, and a black silk gown. Everything about and around her was in keeping with her air of old-fashioned service — she sat in an uncompromisingly upright posture, as if arm-chairs were made, not for relaxation, but for the practice of self-denial : her figure was tall and lean, and her expression, as well as her features, sharp, formal, and severe, as if she had diligently cultivated a natural genius for unbending gravity. One would as soon look for a smile from her as from that bleak March evening. There was only one note of disorderly discord in the whole room — and that was Milly. Tumbling about all over the floor, now under the table, now half between the bars of a chair old enough to have played with her great grandmother, now clattering with the fire-irons, now threatening to drag down the table-cloth and all arranged upon it with such pre- cision, was that sore trial to a lover of order. She was a very small girl indeed, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed after the ultra-English pattern, just old enough to find life and mischief different words foV the same thing, and not a day older — next to a terrier puppy in being out of place wherever a Mrsw Tallis might happen to be. Nor, while Mrs. Tallis expressed her opinions freely, was Milly silent : but she spoke as yet too much in her own and too little in her nKHher tongue to be readily understood by any but a mother's ears. Nevertheless, Mrs. Tallis, that pattern of mature severity, seemed to understand it as if her own babyhood had been a thing of yesterday : she answered every capricious demand for this or that — so long as it was not for knives,, beer, or lighted candles — as soon as it was made. She translated at once the particular look into her face that meant " spectacles " — and, while keeping up every appearance of dignity^ immediately obeyed. The knife might hurt Milly, but Milly could only hurt the spectacles. No doubt if Milly had not been more than a little spoiled she would have been, in bed and asleep by this time, for the sun had shut his eyes long ago. And if she, with the magical instinct of her age, had not been able to translate the housekeeper's querulous scoldings into a hidden meaning, she could not have enjoyed herself so thoroughly in the stiff* old lady's company. In short, these two unlikenesses were both thoroughly comfortable, each in her own way, though their comfort lay in mischief on one side and in blame on . the other. It was as well they were, for the fire could not keep the A^ Dog and his Shadow. 3 room warm, and the windows rattled in the east wind — March had come in his lion-skin that year. At last, however, the mixture of warmth and cold, of noise and quiet, took one very natural effect — Mrs. Tallis's head gave a liod forward, and Milly was left free to pull oflf the table-cloth, if she pleased, undisturbed. It may be that the old lady even dreamed — perhaps of being called upon to set chaos in order with Milly behind to undo her work as soon as it was done : more likely — for the dream-earth circles backwards round the sun — of days before she was wife or widow, and when she, too, had other matters to think of than keeping things straight and square. But in any case her dream was connected with a crash of some sort, for she woke with a start at the exclamation — " Oh, Mrs. Tallis, ma'am ! Oh, ma'am, if there isn't burgulars at the front door ! " The bearer of this alarming news was a country girl, red-faced and red-haired, who had bounced into the room in all the excitement of terror — not a wholly unpleasant sensation for one of her order when combined with the satisfaction of being the first bearer of ill news. " Burglars ! " exclaimed Mrs. Tallis, starting up and glancing in- stinctively at one particular comer cupboard. " Nonsense, Susan. You're terrified if you hear a mouse squeak, I do believe." " Didn't you hear the bell, ma'am ? " asked Susan below her breath, as if afraid the burglars might hear. *' No — nor you. The idea of burglars ringing a bell !" " The bell did go, ma'am — I heard it as plain as I see you. Pr'aps you was taking a nap, ma'am ? " " I taking a nap ! Gracious ! I never did such a thing since I was bom. It's you were asleep, Susan ; and what's more, you must be asleep now, or you'd never dream such a thing. It's impertinent — why I should have heard a pin drop, let alone a bell. We usedn't to sleep except in our beds when I was a girl — but girls were different then. Look there, if you haven't allowed Miss Milly to tumble into the coal-box again with your nonsensical fancies, and her frock only clean — ah ! " There was no mistake about it this time. A bell clashed and jarred through the house as if pulled by one who wanted to break the wire. Mrs. Tallis started, and Susan shook from head to heel. " There, ma'am ! " she said, with trembling triumph. " That's what I heard ! " " Who in the name of gracious can it be ? " " Pr'aps if we don't take no notice they'll go away. If only John B 2 4 The Gentleman's Magazine, Carter hadn't been but five minutes gone — Oh, ma'am, there it goes again ! " And sure enough the bell clanged for a third time, more loudly than before. " Thieves or no thieves, I must go and investigate who's there," said the housekeeper decisively. " Take Miss Milly while I go to the front door." Susan picked up the unfortunate Milly, who, finding herself neglected in the confusion, set up an unseasonable wail. Mrs. Tallis, for once paying no attention, pulled a shawl over her head and went along a passage into the dark, empty entrance hall, from which led a broad, uncarpeted flight of stone stairs. Having carefully put up the chain, she opened the front door about the space of an inch, and asked, boldly and sharply — " Who's there ? " "Be this here place Winbury, miss?" answered a man's gruft voice, in an accent that did not belong to Eastingtonshire and of a hoarseness known in every shire where spirits are sold. " Of course it's Winbury. A gentlemanlike thing, indeed, to pull people's bells down to ask if this is Winbury." " Hold a bit, miss — don't smash my nose betwixt post and door. Where's the doctor?" " What doctor ? " " The medical practitioner, ma'am — the gentleman that tinkers up the flesh-pots, ma'am, like I do the tin-pots — where's he ? " "There's no doctor." " Parson, then ? " " There's no parson." " Squire, then ? Maybe he lives here ? " " There's no squire." " Who be there then, if there ben't no doctor, nor no parson, nor no squire ? " "There's nobody — that's all. If you want a medical man you must go on to Westcote." " Thankye, ma'am. And how far may that be ? " " Seven miles, if you go the short way." " Seven mile ! Don't nobody live at Winbury, ma'am ? Can't I see the master — or the good lady, if there ben't no squire ? " ' " There's no lady." " Well, I am blessed then ! Ben't there nothing in Winbury, ma'am ? Ben't there never a blessed soul to keep a poor wench from dying like a dog in a ditch nearer then seven mile — the short way p A Dog and his Shadow. 5 Don't Winbury profess and call itself Christian ? I'm Comelius Boswell, ma'am, well known as I may say half over England as renovator of hardware, and, by appointment, umbrella-mender in ordinary to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, as is proved by what's painted on my travelling workshop I've left standing in the road : but I've been a parish clerk, ma'am, so I know what a parish ought to be, and as a travelling tradesman I know what most of 'em are : but if tver I heard tell of so much as a extra-parochial like Win- buiy, smash me flat, ma'am — and I can't say no fairer." Mrs. Tallis had been about to slam the door in the face of so suspicious a visitor when something deeper than her ear was caught by three words that would have made him even more suspicious in the ears of many a person of an aspect far less severe than hers. " What's that — a woman in a ditch ? " she asked, even more sharply than she had answered. " Dying in one, ma'am — that's what I said : not drunk, poor soul — p'raps there ben't no public in Winbury ? " he asked, with would-be biting sarcasm, as if to pique the parish into action by an accusation of having reached the lowest depth of degradation. " And I were told — by — ^by a — sort of a chap as how there was a kind-hearted lady here — ^as might be your own self, ma'am " " Then I'm sure you weren't informed any such nonsense. There's no lady — I'm Mrs. Tallis the housekeeper. What woman? What's the matter with her? Where is she? " " Well, ma'am, she be a dying woman, as I don't know from Eve. As to where, it may be a matter of two mile along the canal. As to matter, a lady that's got one of her own, as I can hear crying out now, bless its heart, might be able to tell better than me, not being in the family line. " " Then why in the name of gracious didn't you inform me at once, instead of prevaricating round about the bushes? Susan! — Run out to the Vane Arms " (" Then there ^<r something in Winbury !" muttered the tinker.) " And request them to send their cart up along the road to discover if there's a young person requiring assistance — tell them to stop at the lodge gate, and Til accompany. And, Susan — when you've been there, run to Mr. Pottinger's — the constable's," she added in a higher key so as to be heard more distinctly through the door, " and request him to come up here at once — it may be a device to get me out for somebody to get in. Then run back and mind Miss Milly while I'm gone. Quick — never mind your bonnet — your apron will do — give me Miss Milly — and go out the back way." 6 The Gentlemati s Magazine. " It's a uncommon cold night, ma'am," said the tinker, encouraged by her sudden and rather impulsive thaw. " If weVe got to wait for a cart, ma'am, I wouldn't mind setting down on a hall chair. The way I've puffed and blew on this here arrant of mercy, ma'am, has gone nigh to split my bellus. And running's but dry work at best," he added meditatively, as if enunciating a general proposition without personal application. But the doctrine was thrown away upon unsympathetic ei^s. " You'll find the pump just round the comer," said Mrs. Tallis, and slammed the door. The tinker did not go to the pump. But neither did he move towards the Vane Arms. He waited on the doorstep, audibly stamping his feet and thrashing himself with his arms, to keep his blood going. After a long five minutes the door opened again to the limit of the chain. "Are you still there?" asked Mrs. Tallis. " Here I be, ma'am," said the tinker sulkily. '* Here be this here species of a travelling tradesman, wet out and dry in." " Then as the constable has arrived, and as I am going to the lodge to wait for the conveyance, there's no manner of occasion for you to hang about my door." " I know that, ma'am, without telling. That be what they call gratitude, that be — a chap gives you a chance of helping a fellow creature, and you send him to the pump to drink your health for it Blessed if I ever ask anybody to be charitable again. Never mind, ma'am. A man that's said Amen as many times as I have gets to act up to it somehow. I'll look to my reward hereafter, and put up with a lift in the cart this go. I've left my workshop standing, ma'am, and being more trustful of human nature than you, ma'am, I didn't think to put up the chain." " Very well, " said Mrs. Tallis shortly, as she at last left the house, carrying a horn stable lantern to light her down the avenue. By its dim light she saw a shabby, slouching fellow in thread-bare clothes, who, counting by the fallacious arithmetic of years, was apparently in the noon-tide of his days, but whose shambling gait, stooping shoul- ders, and cheeks wherein many a tumbler had blossomed, displayed little of the vigour of noon. It is true that a certain amount of personal unattractiveness might be pardoned on a night when even a Good Templar's nose must have looked swollen and blue. But, from many significant signs, the state of the tinker's nose seemed due less to acute cold without than to chronic warmth within. For his part he could not fail to be very differently impressed by the tall^ upright figure now wrapped in a long blue cloak, and the A Dog and his Shadow. 7 hard, thin face surrounded by a bonnet of a fashion as old as his own hat, than which nothing could be ol4er. Though she had assumed only the title of housekeeper, he could not but feel himself in the presence of a personage of consequence — perhaps of the first conse- quence in a village that appeared to possess no regular aristocratic order. Her studied choice of words was calculated to impress an ex-parish clerk, and therefore a scholar : and as a travelled man of the wdHd he must have known that the stinginess which the state of his throat betokened is the very strongest evidence of the very highest respectability. She had made all her preparations for combining charity with the safety of the front door in the shortest time possible : but the quickest action, supposing the tinker's tale to be true, implfed terrible delay. Happily the landlord of the Vane Arms had been able to send his cart promptly : it was waiting at the end of the long beech avenue, with a man in a smock frock to drive it, so that not a minute was wasted in listening for the sound of wheels. There are parishes, must the tinker have thought, where countesses are not obeyed with the alacriiy that Mrs. Tallis the housekeeper seemed to command. He did not think how it is not every great lady, or small lady either, who would have left a warm fireside, late on a bitter winter's evening, and have ridden a couple of miles in a jolting cart to help an unknown wayfarer whose very existence was open to doubt, at the bidding of a strange tinker. He did not try to reconcile her stingy denial of a drop of beer to himself with her readiness to give more than money's worth to another. Without diving into the depths of his mind, this much is certain, for the simple reason that his mind was furnished with more interesting food. The skirt of the housekeeper's cloak partly covered a basket : from the basket projected the neck of a bottle : and the tinker's mind's nose smelt brandy in the air. No doubt the man in the smock frock made all the haste in his power, but the plough horse was leaving his stable behind him, and dragged on the heavy, springless cart as if he thought that the slower he went out the sooner he should be at home again. The road was good enough, being as straight as the crow's flight and as level as the canal that ran with it. But it gave no shelter. It lay between two low cropped hedges, dividing it from the towing path on one side, and firom an unbroken stretch of flat fields on the other, so that the weather had free play to do its worst, and was doing it. The east wind was luckily behind them, but the wind itself was hardly needed 8 The Gentlematis Magazine. to add to the dreariness of that unspeakably cold, dark, and drearyi ride. Mrs. Tallis showed no sign of impatience but silence, though she must have found a new meaning in the phrase '* As cold as charity." The tinker, however, became fidgety, and began to hum through his nose the tune of the Old Hundredth Psalniy beating time with his feet among the straw. The wind, having a clear sweep over open fields, was silent in its strength : nor is the east wind given to bluster before stabbing! The faintest moan by the wayside would therefore have been audible, and it could only have been Mrs. Tallis's thick and close bonnet that kept her from knowing what made the driver pull in the horse sud- denly. The tinker started up, held the lantern above his head, and looked forward. " Hold hard there !" he said. " Don't run over my truck, what- ever you do. Here we are, ma'am." He shambled out. Mrs. Tallis took the lantern from him, and went straight to the roadside. Stooping down and adjusting her spectacles carefully, she saw a young girl lying under the hedge, just as the tinker had said, dressed in a common print gown not over new or over clean, and wearing a straw hat and thin shawl. She could not have been more than twenty years old, and was a complete stranger to Winbury. Indeed, she was obviously not a country girl at all, though to what class she belonged it was impossible to tell, except that she could not have been very high in the scale. Her features were good, but their expression was hard to read, and her eyes were closed. For the rest, she was lying as calm and quiet as if the driving wind were the warm air of a pleasant bed-chamber, and the hard wayside a bed of down. Mrs. Tallis touched her lightly — not even her heart stirred. " Quite cold," said Mrs. Tallis after a pause. " We're too late by a full hour — poor young thing ! Lift her up into the cart — gently, mind. What are you standing like a wooden image for T she said to the carter with extra sharpness to make up for her lapse into pity. " Can't you move ?" " I can move, ma'am. But it aren't what I call straightforward to hear a dead woman squeal. I'd send for the constable, ma'am, if I was you — ^'twas all one as if that there wauled like a child." " What !" said the tinker. " Then I'm " But, whatever he was, he was not afraid of spirits ; perhaps, like another philosopher, he had seen, and swallowed, too many to be afraid, and he did not hesitate to stoop over the girl. Mrs. Tallis also stooped down hurriedly and pulled aside the A Dog and his Shadow. 9« shawl. When she rose up she held a tiny human creature in her arms — perhaps alive. Had not the child already been clothed, after a fashion, it was as if they had witnessed a visible transmigration of souls — as if the spirit of the mother had in the moment of death taken upon itself a new body, unaccountably refusing to part from a cold east wind and a hard highway that some solitary memory had made too beautiful to leave. It was only for a second that the carter or the tinker caught sight of the child. Mrs. Tallis wrapped it up closely in her cloak, seated herself in the cart again, and did her best to warm Mill/s fellow creature against her breast. Maybe it was the ^ncentration of all her warmth there that made her face and her spe^bh so chill. " Do you want us," asked the carter, relieved of his ghostly fears, " to heave that there dead 'un up in the cart along of you T " Yes ; and be quick. How would you like your own corpse to be left on the road out in the cold ? Poor young thing ! a baby not a week old if it's a day, and a married woman too. I wonder where the man is who put on that ring ? 1 must investigate," she went on, now fairly recovering the elegance of diction that plain-speaking pity had interrupted, " and see if there's anything in her pockets that can inform. It's a gratification all the same that we've not been assisting a — Show's this ? Why, I could take my oath and testament — wasn't there now, John Carter ? Wasn't there a gold ring on her married finger this very minute ago ?*' " Sure there were, missis. I seen't." " Where is it now, then ? And where's that man ?" And where was the brandy bottle ? Tinker and truck had seemingly been blown away by the wind, and the bottle and the ring after them. CHAPTER 11. From bidden nooks the dust to sweep, To scrub from floor to beam : To guard the cheese from mice : to keep Grimalkin from the cream : Time by his foremost lock to clutch, Nor fail to bolt the door — A statesman may do half as much — A king can do no more. "Seven times three's eighteen, seven times four's twenty-four, seven times five's twenty-three, seven times six is " " What's that ?" asked the schoolmaster, shordy and sharply, as if to make believe that he had not been in a brown study. " What do you say is six times seven ?" to The Gentlematis Magazine. " Please, sir," stammered the mathematical genius, in an injured tone, " I aren't got to dodging, I aren't, sir. It's in seven times I be —I are." " Begin again, then. Seven times one — yes," reckoned the school- master to himself, as the sing-song drone began again, " Seven times one ! — it's the first step is hardest, I've read ; but, if the world is ruled by numbers, as Pythagoras taught, the first step is one times one — the easiest step of all. Any way, well begun is half done; and nobody that I ever read about, in Plutarch, or the Lives of the Poets, or anywhere, has begun half so well as I. At one-and-twenty to have mastered all human knowledge — to have all literature at my fingers' ends — to be already a man of mark as far as Eastington, and maybe farther, for aught I know — and to be a poet besides, is to begin where others have left off. I have only to put out my hand and lay hold of the prize. Only to escape from this wretched, drudgery was wanting, and now, like a godsend, comes this eighty pounds a year — three times eight is twenty-four — two hundred and forty pounds in three short years. Why, in one year of freedom I shall have finished my Epic, my Wars of the Stars — Far orbed Methratton, whom no weaker gaze Than Seraphs*, eagle-eyed with love, hath seen : Kazael, the lord of Wisdom, darkly known— The seven that sway the world, and they that rule The four times seven mansions of the moon " " Is twenty-eight, five times seven's twenty-nine " Down came the schoolmaster's hand upon the ear of the unlucky urchin who had interrupted his reverie. " Do you think because I haven't stopped your blunders I haven't heard them? Go down, and write out seven times on your slate two hundred and forty times — ^in three short years. It's twelve o'clock — be off with you all." The church clock had not struck, but it was known to be slow, and the schoolmaster was even more eager to get rid of his scholars than they were to be rid of him. They caught up their caps in a moment and were off with a shout : he seized his pen, and jotted down on the fly-leaf of a primer the contribution to his epic wherewith the multiplication table had unconsciously inspired him. Then he dashed off about a dozen more lines of the same sort \ and the church clock struck one before he left the school-room and locked the door. Then he took the path across the fields that leads to a door at which a tinker once stood some twenty years ago. And while he is on his way, with his feet on the dull earth, and his mind, blind to the sunshine A Dog and his Shadow. \ 1 1 round him, among the stars, it will be useful to learn how it came about that any man came to dream of anything loftier than turnips within sound of the church clock of Winbury. For Winbury, where the schoolmaster had just missed being bom, defies poetical description as much as a blank sheet of paper whereon a portrait is only about to be drawn. Nature and history have been transcendently bountiful to England, but both have been step- mothers to Winbury : they have stepped over it, and left no footprint behind. It is just an uninteresting jumble of cottages — village is too picturesque a word — surrounded by wide, staring fields, without hill, wood, river, or sea. It is neither valley nor table land. \\s flora consists of turnips, osier beds, and pollard willows : \X,% fauna of sheep, turkeys, cart-horses, and the men and women who serve them ; its water of a straight canal ; its visitors of bargemen ; its interest of exactly nothing. It has no antiquities, no battle-field, no abbey, no castle, no celebrated tomb. It is the birthplace of nobody. Its church is a bam with a dwarf tower, of no period in particular. Its great men have been great only in the sense in which Daniel Lambert was a great man : for the thick, damp air, blown straight from Dutch dykes by the east \nnds, and from the fens by the others, nourishes bodies but starves brains. Thus, save for the bargees, who are neither observant nor communicative by nature and have few sympathies with the native population, Winbury is given over to the passive contemplation of its own emptiness. The tinker had been told what was practically, if not literally, true, when he heard that its few souls were left uncared for. The vicar was a deaf old man, petrified by the air of Winbury, devoted to one object and one passion. His passion was a detestation of everything that he chose to class under the head of " Whiggery " : his object, to conceal his hardness of hearing. With this view he never appeared except * in church, where he could speak without being spoken to, fed his in- dignation with newspapers for the rest of the week, remained unmarried, kept nor curate, and had gradually forgotten the very names that he himself had given to his own parishioners. The offices of cook and housemaid to the vicar were in the hands of a sort of village clique, that hired or withdrew its own nominees, without troubling the master, according to its own interest or con- venience. There was no doctor, as the tinker had been accurately told, nearer than Westcote, and the great house — the old Manor House, as it was called — belonged to an attorney at the county town of Eastington, who had foreclosed as mortgagee and found himself 1 2 The Gentleman s Magazine. unable to dispose of his undesirable acquisition. Accident, therefore, had conspired with nature to render Winbury a sort of geographical outlaw. Nevertheless here, as elsewhere, the world spun round, though not giddily. Men and women were born, married, and died effectively, though without the sanction of the Times^ supplement Not even the Eastingtan Mercury^ the vicar's bite noir as the organ of county Whiggery, condescended to advertise in the list of births, " On a date unknown, at a place unknown, a woman unknown, of a son." For that matter, notice was never sent ; and, if it had been, it could not have been paid for. A shilling, found in the dead girl's pocket, was absorbed in funeral expenses. Rarely does a flourish of trumpets announce the entrance of a Poet into the world ; but still more rarely has even a poet come down from the stars with less noise than he who, by a Sunday inspiration of the vicar, was christened Abel, as being at any rate a son of Adam. An inquest, at which Mrs. Tallis and the carter gave evidence, re- sulted only in a verdict "in accordance with the facts," as the phrase is. It was held at Westcote workhouse, and the woman was buried in Westcote churchyard. No doubt, had Milly been her own child, the housekeeper would have sent the founcHing to Westcote and have held, not unjustifiably, that her duty was done. The hearts of fathers and mothers seldom contain spare rooms. But Milly was only her brother's orphan, whom she had taken, as she had taken the foundling, straight from a mother's death-bed ; and she, a childless widow, had felt the chambers of her heart open wide, at Mill/s first touch, to all children for ever. It was hardly a year since Mill/s mother had died in Eastington ; and she could not but picture to her- self the thought of Mtlly in Abel's roadside cradle. The apparent injustice of destiny struck her as keenly as it must all who have not learned to combine the broken letters that spell Providence into the whole word. " No," she said, sharply and crossly, when her friend Mr. Pottinger suggested the workhouse as Abel's natural home. "If I thought that was my obligation, I oughtn't to have preserved him. A union's worse than a prison is, and more shame." . "Aye, for you or I, but they that comes of shame must be shamed. Third and fourth generations, the Bible says" " The Bible don't tell us to shame them. And there's no shame when there's a wedding ring. Don't assert there wasn't one, for I saw it as sure as I see you. 'T would be to contradict my own eye- sight to let the child go to the union," A Dog and his S/tadow. 1 3 "Well, the parish won't mind not paying for strays these hard times. But what about the young customer's keep? Won't you have to give a bit of a shake to the old stocking ?" Mr. Pottinger, as an official, might presume to venture upon a playful allusion to the housekeeper's foible, but she was proof against humour. " There are more methods of killing a of doing things than one, Mr. Pottinger. You are aware the young woman I keep to assist me is going to be married to John at the Vane Arms on Sunday week ?" (If the tinker had known this he might have been less surprised at the promptitude with which the housekeeper's message had been obeyed — the message may have been less efficacious than the messenger.) "I have always considered her an unjustified ex- travagance now that Miss Milly wants less momentary superintend- ing : so I've spoke to Mrs. Herrick, who's just lost her ninth, who'll be glad to take the infant to get my charing. So I shall be more profitable than not ' Mrs. Herrick will come to me at odd times for less than I spend on Susan, and she'll earn more by having nine infants to do for than if she possessed only her eight own." " Well, you be a clever one, missis !" said Mr. Pottinger, impressed with this ingenious device for making charity a paying speculation. " I believe if you was to throw that old stocking of yours into the canal somehow or other the richer you'd be. I wish I knew how to spend my half-pence and keep 'em too, that's all." The immediate result of Mrs. Tallis's determination to find a plausible excuse, such as the whole world might approve, for being charitable, was that the mind of the foundling first opened upon the interior of a clay cottage, where he shared slices of stale bread and the surname of Herrick with eight foster brothers and sisters, from whom he was distinguished by his being younger than the youngest by many years, and by answering to the name of Abel. And now. What will become of him ? No human being ever made a cleaner start, less hampered with circumstances of birth and parentage that pull most of us this way or that, and hardly give us a chance of taking a road for ourselves. Winbury was a blank, like the middle of the old maps of Africa. The Herrick family, though numerous, was a blank, like the social and moral map of Winbury. It is on record that somebody once, by dint of exquisitely minute handwriting, enclosed the whole Iliad in a nutshell. Upon this text hundreds of volumes have been written to prove that the entire human character, with all its passions, sentiments, and emotions, can be read legibly in the narrowest of skulls. The old playwrights and 14 The Gentlematis Magazine. romancers, who had no microscopes, studied kings and heroes. We think it higher art to study ourselves. Human nature is human nature, we say, and why trouble history or the great stage of the world for materials of study when the smallest hamlet contains more tragedies and comedies than we can read in a lifetime ? Alas for theory ! — human nature was written upon the brains of the Herrick family in characters so infinitesimally small, and enclosed in shells so prodigiously thick, that forceps and microscope are for once at fault — ^much less could the unaided eyes of a child draw any food for the growth of his own nature therefrom. So it seemed to be decided by destiny that Abel Herrick's biography was to be written thus : — He was born : he scared crows : he hoed turnips : he waited on horses : he married : he toiled in order to eat bacon, and wasted his toil on beer : he grew bent with rheumatism, shook with ague, came upon the parish, and died. Such was the whole of life as known to the Herricks of Winbury ; and, if man was made to live, there was enough tragedy in it to make farther search very needless indeed. Abel began this hopeful career in the usual way. Mrs. Herrick, though burdened with. eight growing children of her own, did her duty by him according to her lights ; for the charing engagement, though it brought her more work than pay, was worth keeping. Mrs. Tallis seemed ever bent upon proving that a kind-hearted skin-flint is not a contradiction in terms. She retained her interest in the child whom she had saved from death and Westcote, and, as he grew old enough to be mischievous without being quite old enough for a scare-crow, she allowed Mrs. Herrick to bring him up to the old Manor House on charing days, so that he and " Miss Milly" could be kept in sight by one pair of eyes at a time. Why the old Manor House stood in need of such perpetual scrubbing and dusting was known to Mrs. Tallis alone. In former days it had belonged to an old Eastingtonshire family of the name of Vane, and one of the family had once lived there — a proof of striking eccentricity. For the Vanes had another place in another part of England ; and no ordinary mortal who had as much as a castle in Spain would have deliberately chosen to live at Winbury. This one Vane of Winbury would have been called a humourist in the days of the Spectator when people were less of the same pattern than they are now : he would have been called crazy in our own. Living somewhere between the two eras people did not know what to call him. Either disappointed love, or misanthropy, or a passion for study, or morbid shyness led him to bury himself with his books out of the A Dog and his S/iadow. 1 5 world — nobody knew, or ever will know, the cause, and very few cared. His heirs were anything but hermits or book-worms; and from them the old Manor House passed into the hands of the Eastington attorney. And in his hands it was likely to remain, a bad bargain, lying like a log on the estate market and producing next to nothing. So it stood without lord or lady, and Mrs. Tallis, who had been housekeeper before the foreclosure, stayed on, only receiving her wages from Mr. Smith of Eastington instead of the Vanes. So long had she lived there that the dream of a possible change never entered her head, while the villagers, easily taking for granted any established order of things, looked upon her as pre- scriptive Queen of Winbury rather than as only vice-reine. She, as an ex-lady's maid and actual housekeeper, belonged to the most aristocratic class in the world. She stood upon every inch of the dignity that had grown upon her like the moss over the old beech- trees in the broad park, wore a black silk gown as its outward and visible sign, and in the same spirit never spoke of her little niece, a small working watchmaker's orphan, but as " Miss" Milly. The one break in her long life of service had been Mr. Tallis, a young tradesman at Norwich, who had married her from her lady's maid's place, and left her a widow many a long year ago. He was supposed to have left her what is called "warm"; but that was her own affair. She certainly did not spend more than her wages, and was not above working hard for them. Whatever her circumstances might be, the old-fashioned servant was an old-fashioned servant still, heart and soul. Never a guest set his foot in the old Manor House from year's end to year's end ; but it was her duty and therefore her pride, her pride and therefore her duty, to keep it as if she were at the head of a great household in full hospitable glory. How else, before Miss Milly came, was she to pass the time ? So, living in two small rooms, she spent from morn- ing till night in the never-ending but congenial toil of a dozen house- maids; and when Miss Milly came, that new interest in life came too late to break through her second nature. Dusting was her career, hoarding her hobby: and Milly was the sympathetic touch, tlie better part, that somehow turned the good woman's oddities and inconsistencies into a harmonious and not unkindly whole. The old Manor House itself, though huge and rambling, took nothing from the uninterestingness of Winbury. It is only to be described by a catalogue of negatives. It was not an Elizabethan romance in grey stone ; it was not a Georgian novel in red brick ; it was not even sham Elizabethan, or mock feudal, or any other insane 1 6 The Gentlematis Magazine. attempt to make raw youth mimic the beauty of age. It was simply very ugly, very large, and belonged to the period of once upon a time. It had a moat without water, a garden without flowers, a stable without horses, and a park without deer. Within, it was convenient enough, but terribly depressing. Its square windows looked over flat fields, its relics of useless furniture were carefully sewn up in ghostly white canvas, its floors and walls were bare. Not even a painted landscape was there to teach a native of Winbury what is meant by a river or a hill. A little natural dust would have been a relief — but that was not allowed. But, for all its overpowering order and cleanliness, it was a splendid place to play in. Nothing is without a purpose ; and hide and seek was the purpose of the old Manor House at Winbury. Milly and Abel, who were much of an age, were playmates on charing da)rs, and did their .very best to give Mrs. Tallis's duster some real work to do. The good woman, being only too well pleased in her heart at finding a new excuse for putting things to rights, grumbled so much over her pleasure that Abel thought her an ogress. Milly, however, was either bolder or sharper-eyed; the more she was scolded, the more she tried to deserve a scolding, and seldom failed. One charing day, however, was destined to stand out from the regular round of playing, falling out, making up, mischief, scolding, and slices of bread and gooseberry jam. Abel, now just beginning to outgrow his first corduroys — " whistlers " they were called in Winbury — went with Mrs. Herrick as usual to the Manor House, and felt that Mrs. Tallis was more than commonly solemn and grim. Her face was doubly hard, and there was extra sharpness in her tone as she b^gan — " I was on the very point of coming to inquire if you were indis- posed, Mrs. Herrick." « Ma'am ? " " Indisposed — ill" " Me, ma'am ? " "Nothing but gross indisposition can pardon unpunctuality. Gracious, can't you comprehend plain words ? I declare the ignor- ance of the people about here I should never find customary if I lived to be a centurion." Mrs. Tallis was clearly put out less with Mrs. Herrick than with the world at large — for Abel's foster-mother, a poor soul with a husband and eight children, who was never in bed after five in the morning even on Sunday, knew neither the word unpunctuality nor the thing. A Dog and his Shadow. 1 7 Her employer would have been as just, and as sensible, if she had scolded a machine out of the dictionary. " Of course it happens," went on Mrs. Tallis without noticing Abel, "just when you're late there's everything wants doing. Only be- cause I chanced to be over at Eastington yesterday for half a day — the first time since my poor sister-in-law died — everything was at sixes and sevens when I returned — and if Mr. Smith had come, as of course he might any minute — but there, it's no manner of benefit standing talking. The best bedroom hasn't been properly attended to for a week at least — and if the moths " Mrs. Tallis and Mrs. Herrick went upstairs to discover, or rather to invent, something to do ; and Abel, being left alone, set out to hunt for Milly. She very often began the day with hide and seek, and every time tried to tax Abel's detective powers more and more. She was fond of teasing him, and he, as a rule, submitted to be teased with much docility. But to-day, after hunting for her in every pos- sible nook and comer both in and round the house — in cupboards, under chair covers, in the well-bucket, in the wood-house, wherever it was possible to hide — his pride began to think that a game in- which he was the loser had been carried on a little too far for his re- putation. Still, she must be hid somewhere, and he was not going to be beaten by a girl ; so, having exhausted all possible hiding places, he began upon the impossible. He opened all the drawers, looked up all the chimneys, and even thought for one wild instant of looking behind the few relics of the only resident master that the Manor House had known — some two hundred decaying volumes that stood upon rotten shelves in a room known as the library, as nearly as Winbury could pronounce the word. He touched one of the volumes, and lo, a miracle — there was dust in the old Manor House after all ! Obviously Milly, bold and careless as she was, would never have dared to carry her frock, always as clean in the morning as the house itself, into such a comer. So he saved himself the trouble of hunting where a mouse could not have hidden itself, and went into the empty drawing-room. Here, upon an old broken what-not stood a cracked china tea-cup ; and into this he peered, not because he expected to find Milly there, but because she might be there, all the same. He did not know how it happened, but suddenly he found himself still holding the handle while the cup lay shattered on the floor. Such a dire mishap had surely never happened since the world was made. What was to be done? According to popular exaggera- tion of the value of the lumber at Winbury, the cup might be worth Vol. XV. N.S. 1875. c 1 8 The Gentleman* s Magazine. shillings and shillings for aught he knew. The finding of Milly was nothing to the immediate necessity of hiding the evidence of such a crime. That was not easy, as he knew only too well. Not a nook of the old Manor House was safe for an instant from Mrs. Tallis's hand and eye, and bits of broken china were not things to be swallowed even by one whose digestion had been trained upon Winbury cheese. If they could be thrown away out of doors the cunning of fear suggested that the peculiar pattern of the fragments would draw the attention of the first passer-by and be brought up in witness against him. If he dropped them down the well, the bucket would be sure to draw them up again. If he put them in his pockets — but alas, his pockets were in one important respect like the pit of Hades. An inspiration ! Since dust lay upon the top of the books in the library, it was clear that nobody ever looked behind them — there was one sanctuary in the house where something might be hidden and never be found. Pale with panic, he picked up the bits of crockery, crept back on tip-toe, shut the library door behind him, pulled out one of the tallest folios, and pushed the murdered body — it was nothing less, to him — behind the row. Having thus disposed of the corpus delicti^ he breathed freely. But hide and seek had lost its savour. He could not push his conscience behind the folios. He was angry with Milly. She had beaten him at the game, and had been the cause of his getting into mischief like a blockhead and of getting out of it like a coward. No — let her wait up her chimney, or in her band-box, or wherever she was, till she was tired, and then let her come and look for him. To pass the time he sulkily opened the volume he had taken down and that still lay upon the floor. Now Abel did know how to read. In the early times of talk about the schoolmaster being abroad Winbury had received a passing tap from his new cane. The vicar had been compelled by public opinion round him, sorely against his will, to establish a schoolmaster. The only candidate who appeared in the field was a broken-down old rascal from Westcote, popularly supposed, in his own country, to have gained his unusual knowledge from a gaol chaplain. He — it is said — taking a hint from the vicar's cook, acted as if he were the patron of the office, presented himself to it, and never even reported himself to his nominal employer till his first quarter's salary was due. " I be John Crook, sir," he announced himself, taking care to shout as loud as he could, so as to flatter the vicar's vanity. "I be the schoolmaster, sir, as you put in to teach A Dog and his Shadow. 1 9 them childer their grammar-learning, at twenty pound a year.'' ** Schoolmaster, are you? How do they get on? Teaching the young chaw-bacons Greek I suppose — that's the sort of thing now. " " Like a house a-fire, sir — like blazes. Got into two synnables afore you could wink your eye." " Before I could wink my eye, eh? We'll see about that, Mr. Crook, before we see about your twenty pounds a year. How do you teach them to spell Eye, if you please?" "I don't know what others may do, sir, but this is how I teaches 'em — H — I." "And a lucky thing for you that you do ! If you'd changed a letter, Mr. Crook, I would not have winked my eye. Take your twenty pounds, and don't bother me for another year. A rub for the Whigs, this time ! " Under this teacher Abel had learned to read better and faster than the vicar would have quite approved — for the old rascal would have soundly boxed the ears of any urchin who spelled Eye to him as he spelled it to the vicar. Whence it may be suspected that Mr. Crook knew something about the length of the vicar's foot, if indeed the whole story was not an invention of the enemy, coined in the office of the Eastington Mercury, But the book whereon Abel's sulkiness had chanced to feed was a very different affair from the primer. Its contents looked as if all the spiders driven away by Mrs. TalHs's broom had spun their webs over its pages and had caught letters of the alphabet for flies that struggled about among wheels 'and waves in bewildering confu- sion. The fascination of mystery caught the boy's as yet unstunted mind like another fly. He forgot all about ^[illy, all even about the broken tea-cup, in puzzling over what these scrawls might mean. "Abel — what in the name of gracious are you doing there?" He started up, shaking from head to foot, not only at the recol- lection of his crime, but at being caught red-handed in what might possibly be another — one also that might lead to a fatal search at the backs of the shelves. " I was afraid you were much too quiet to be out of mischief. Why, gracious, that's one of the books of the library. You mustn't appro- priate the books — think if Mr. Smith was to come, as he might any minute, and was to miss anything out of its proper place, if it was only a book — and after all I've done to make everything suitable for Her Majesty to take her meals off the kitchen floor " The china cup had not been missed, that was clear. His con- science freed from the sin of discovery, Abel, in his all-devouring curiosity, almost forgot to be shy of the great lady of Winbury. " Please, Mrs. Tallis, what's this, m'm, please ? " " Little boys should not ask questions. That's a book, out of the c 2 20 The Gentlematis Magazine. library. And now, you know, you had better put it back where you took it from." " But what's " " Bless the boy," she said, looking at the open book that he had lifted up for her to look at, " why about Sin, to be sure. There — s, i, n, sin." " But what comes after Sin, please ? " " What a young troublesome you are. Log, to be sure." " And after Log, please ? " " M — and that's — dear me, I'm afraid my spectacles aren't what they used to be — that's a cross — and then Tan — Log — P — two strokes — 2l long number. There — now you understand." " But why's it wrote ? What do it mean ? " " Mean ? Why Sin's wickedness : and Log's wood : and Tan's a colour in dogs." " And the cross ? and the lines ? " " Oh, they're inserted to fill up, like full stops. They always put those into books — for ornament, I suppose." "But what's it aU for?" " Oh, because — because — it's a book, you see — people must put something into books, or else there wouldn't be any, and then there'd be no clever men." " And what's that ? What's a clever man ? " " A clever man's a wise man — a man that knows everything, and makes machines, and reads books, and — there, don't trouble any more. It's not possible you should understand." " Do you, m'm ? " " Bless the boy ! As if I had the time to think about cleverness. With a house like this on my hands, I can't idle over reading." " How do people get clever, m'm ? " " Being bom so, I suppose — and some of them go to college — and some of them by reading all the books in the world." All this was pregnant with matter for questioning : but Abel, with precocious aptitude for separating one grain of wheat from a bushel of chaff, only stared at the mysterious volume and said — " Then I'll read all the books in the world. I'll be a clever man." " Well — I don't mind your playing with them so long as you put them back again. It'll keep you quiet, and the books dusted — I've always been meaning to attend to them myself, only the furniture takes up all my time. And you'll want to be kept out of mischief now Milly " (this very sharply, as if to cut off the head of a sigh) — now Mill/s gone to school" « A Dog and his Shadow. 2 1 " Whfit, m'm ! Is Milly "- " People say Miss when they're talking of young ladies, Abel." ''Miss Milly going to learn off old Crook, m'm, with the rest on us ? " " Old Crook indeed ! She is gone to the best academy in all Eastington." " Will she — won't she come back again ? " asked Abel eagerly. "Didn't I order you not to ask questions? She'll come home when she's completed her education, not before." " So Milly's gone for good ! " thought Abel to himself. " Then I'll read all them there books without being bothered, and if the cup's found out I can say Milly did it, and nobody '11 know." CHAPTER III. There have been men who, trained in prison chains, Shrink from the sun, and think the stars are stains : Souls who, from Mother Nature's plenteous hand That rains each mom new manna o*er the land, Loathing will turn aside, and gorge themselves With pecks of dust spread thick on mouldy shelves, Dreaming — for nought they know save how to read — That Printer's Ink was poured by Ganymede. Abel Herrick, it was clear, had already, without the aid of books, taken the first step to being a clever man — he had proved himself a clever boy. If only for this reason he was not popular in his genera- tion : and his unpopularity made itself felt in a singularly disagreeable form. Just as 2i parvenu wTio only knows by hard guesswork that he must have had a grandfather feels like a fish out of water among those who enjoy the inestimable privilege of knowing the Christian names of half a dozen ancestors, so the little village aristocrats, the children of a John Nokes or a Thomas Styles, managed to make their superiority felt by one whose whole pedigree consisted of a mother without a name — who dfd not even belong to Winbury. The taunts levelled at him on this head, with the plain-spoken frankness of pastoral simplicity, and in a vocabulary borrowed from the Bargese, stung him with double force after his short spell of Milly's occasional companionship. His visits to the Manor House and the patronage of Mrs. Tallis were also strong grounds for jealous persecution, espe- cially as he was by no means so ready to defend with his fists his mother's honour or his own skin as a true-born Winbury boy. He was not sorry, therefore, when his education was finished, and he was employed to swell the earnings of the Herrick family to the extent of 22 The Gentleman s Magazine. sixpence a week by shouting at rooks and crows. He welcomed the safety of solitude, and sought no companionship when the rooks went back to their nests and his day's work was done. In many an out-of-the-way village a solitary farmer's or shepherd's lad, if he has the commonest stuff in him, may, and does, learn to be wise. If there had been a hillock or a rivulet within sight of the top of the church tower, if a single rose had shot up in the wasted garden of the Manor House, it would have served as a wholesome loop-hole for Abel's inner spirit to have spread tendrils out into the world. It may be said there were still the sky and the clouds : but these are not the first steps of Jacob's ladder. They must be climbed by slow degrees. And then the skies of Winbury were apt, in their little-varying shades of grey, to suggest a barren extension of space with nothing beyond it, while the clouds generally took the form of low, unbroken mists, that only brought nothingness a little nearer to the world. It was by way of an almost necessary compensation, or rather make-shift, that his caged and companionless spirit had, in one fatal moment, been seized with a sublime and irrevocable curiosity that would not suffer him to rest until he had searched out all the myste- ries beyond the threshold on which he felt himself standing. He was allowed the free run of the Manor House book-shelves because he used his licence by indulging in the worst mischief of which a boy can be guilty — that bf never making a noise. Of course at first, when his debauch, carried on during every spare hour, was new, he had to trust to blind chance for a guide. The very first book he began and finished was the old mathematical treatise, of which the symbols and abbreviations had proved too much for Mrs. Tallis's spectacles. Of course he might just as Well have pored over a Chinese manuscript : but the combinations of letters and the strange figures he found in it were, in some inexplicable way, subtle stimu- lants to his imagination. Anything, so long as it is incomprehensible, will serve to fascinate virgin brains : they read unintended human faces, full of character, in the meaningless zig-zags of a carpet pattern, vague romances in the fireplace, and wonderful new landscapes in the cross-threads of a blank window blind. And of piquant food for such greed of the unknown the Manor House library, with its couple of hundred volumes, furnished ample store. To judge from these fossils of his studies, the only Vane who ever lived at Winbury had measured the worth of human pursuits by their want of practical utility. After wading through his mathe- matical quarto, Abel attacked — because it was the largest and A Dog and his Shadow. 23 heaviest — a folio of heraldry, written for adepts, and gorgeous in the reckless splendour of German blazonry. Here was a new and glorious universe to wander through, if not to conquer. The next volume was too much even for him to attack, for it was printed in Hebrew. The fourth — but it is needless to publish a catalogue raisonni of such relics of wasted time as had escaped the hammer of the auctioneer. Enough that incessant, undirected study, carried out, as Abel's powers of reason grew, by making book bear on book, line on line, and hint on hint, unrelieved by the companionship of any but dead and forgotten authors, and digested by days of open- air meditation, turned Abel Herrick into a monstrosity of learning. He could cast nativities : he had tried to square the circle : he could explain the mystic meaning of the most comple>; coat of arms : he knew the names and powers of all the angels and devils in the universe: he had mastered a commentary on the Cabala, and was versed in the Gnostic heresies. Combining these with Plutarch, he in no time invented a dozen new religions and half a dozen political constitutions all absolutely inconsistent and absolutely true. There was nothing in his library to suggest that it was not an epitome of all human knowledge. It was almost a disappointment to him at first when one evening he fell upon a book that proved almost prosaically intelligible, by the side of the chaos through which he had been wading. This was the " Faerie Queene." A little knot of poets had gathered into a corner together, as if to guard en masse the main gate through which Abel's spirit might escape from Winbury. But he had found the gate, he plunged among its defenders, and then his spirit, hitherto grovelling in dust and rubbish, spread its wings and flew. He seemed to have found a tahsman that gave life and form to his previous reading and that appeared to show the use of it all. Here was something not to be learned only, but to be done. No less eagerly than he saturated himself with verse, he pored over the biographies that in some instances were bound up with it : and the lesson he learned was that poets are the gods and masters of the earth, and that nobody ever thinks of anything from morning till night, or dreams of anything from night till morning, but of spinnmg stanzas or criticising them when spun. Of course it never occurred to him, in a real and definite way, that the men of whom he read had ever lived out of the books they had written or the books written about them. He would have said he knew it if he had been asked, just as most of us know, after a fashion, that there was such a man as Julius 24 The Gentlematis Magazine. Csesar, but feel and think about him as if, instead of making history, he had been made by it Of course Abel was aware of the difference, in theory, between fact and fiction, but in his heart Una and her lion were as real as he who invented them, and, by an inevitable process of confusion, their creator as unreal as they : and all was real and unreal at one and the same time. To live meant to make verses, and he made them : to make verses, he gathered, it was necessary to love a woman — so he made a woman, and loved her in the grand style. It may be that the verses he evolved with much labour were not quite as near Spenser's or Milton's as he believed. But, if not yet a poet, he had the spirit of one, cultivated not by nature, as the poetic spirit is supposed to be, but by years of close familiarity with heraldic nightmares and cabalistic chimeras, all painted in living colours upon Winbury for a background. If he was really to be a poet, for once a poet had not been born, but made. But there comes a time when the most inveterate dreamer ceases to be content with worshipping the ideal princess of an enchanted castle in the air. He was not discontented with his lot. He knew nothing of wealth and fame but as words he had read about — that is to say, as bubbles to be despised. Love and song, he had learned, were the only things to be lived for, and he found nothing in his authors to suggest that these were inconsistent with the daily life of a thatcher and hurdle-maker — for such his foster-father was, and such he himself was to be. Winbury, it was true, had few of the attributes of Arcadia, but that was doubtless owing to the unfortunate accident of its being unprovided with an available Phillis or Chloe. More than once he tried very hard to identify some Susan or Betty with a heroine of pastoral romance, but the attempt had always broken down. But this was not altogether a misfortune. It secured him in undis- turbed empire over his own dreamland, better than any possible reality. He wanted no sympathy. To others, he was a helping- hand to old Herrick the hurdle-maker, and not a very diligent or skilful hand : to himself, he was all that he had ever read of — a romance hero who led a life that was, in the spirit, actually fulfilled, and so beyond the power of any common-place ideas about getting on in the world to disturb. But his genius for dreaming made it only the more uncertain what was to be the end — whether Winbury was to become famous at last, like many another hole and corner, as the home of a great peasant poet, or whether all this promise was to prove a mere flash in the brain-pan, and to be smothered into A Dog and his Shadow. 25 inglorious silence by the fogs that satisfy a man who thinks he has done all when he has dreamed that all is done. Once the young man came across a tattered back number of the EcLstington Mercury — that terrible organ to which he, according to the current legend, indirectly owed his power to distinguish A from B. It may seem miraculous, but he had never seen a whole newspaper in his life before. It was a greater curiosity to him than his own familiar books would have been to any ordinary reader. He read every word of it, even down to the advertisements — leaders, local gossip, time-hallowed puns, and all — and was bewildered. The very English in which it was written was scarcely the English of the Manor House library. Imagine one who has read nothing printed since a hundred years ago suddenly falling upon a country journal of our own day, ignorant of its forms of putting things, its assumptions of familiarity with common topics and allusions, and of the history that has made every printed pen-scratch an efficient wheel in the world's machinery — and such was Abel Herrick the book-worm with the Eastington Mercury in his hands. Some book notices told him that the making of many books had not come to an end. At first he felt himself shrivel up before this first blast from the real world. A crack seemed. to have opened in one of the walls of a close cell and to have admitted, in the form of a chilling draught, what would have been a wholesome and bracing breeze if breathed in the open air. But gradually the amazement wore off, and, for the first time in his career, he felt a touch of intellectual vanity. First, he came upon a misquotation from one of his own authors. Then he read a question from a Constant Reader that he could have answered off-hand. Then the style of the whole thing — especially, he thought, of the advertisements — wanted grace and dignity : if this was the sort of thing people wrote nowadays, they were grievously in want of an Abel Herrick to put them in the right way. And then there were some " Stanzas to Spring " in a corner of the sheet that struck him as falling short of what Spenser had done, and even of what he, Abel Herrick, could do if he tried. Why should he not try ? It was an exciting question. He thought neither of praise nor of pudding — the bare dream of seeing his own verses in print and of their being read by other eyes than his own already promoted him to a laureateship at the Court of Apollo. He had no thought of taking his dreams to market : but for once he was not content with a barren dream. Say, Cynthia, where art thou to seek ? Say, Cynthia, where to find ? 26 The Gentleman s Magazine. I've asked of books — they cannot speak : Of brooks — they're deaf and blind. I've clambered every hillside up, I've roamed around the land : No ocean hides thee in his cup, No mountain in his hand. Say, Echo, where may Cjmthia be, And when will she appear ? "Always, and everywhere," saith she, But never Now, nor Here. If Abel had ever seen the hillside or the ocean of which he wrote so familiarly the lines would doubtless have been better, if not newer ' fashioned. But he thought very well of them himself. Having dropped his poem, as he called it, through the slit in the window of the general shop, feeling as if all the world stood staring round to see him do it, his mind felt relieved of a weight, and he returned to his thatching and hurdle-making for the benefit of his foster-family with as much content as a now professed poet could manage. He did not even work out any plan for watching the future numbers of the Merairy, The very poem sefemed his own no more, now that it had passed from his hands into those of the carrier. But he was not quite so devoted to the library as heretofore. For one thing, he knew the books by heart : and the more he tried to imitate them, the less they satisfied him. He thought, more and more, of the immortal Eve, and less and less of those who have tried to sing of her. But one day — it was in the spring, when the swallows, the only travellers besides the bargees who ever visited Winbury, had arrived — Abel, after sunset, thought he would sup on Hippocrene instead of bread and cheese, and strolled up to the Manor House, now always opened to him. Habits and precedents easily grew up in Winbury. And, as he was crossing the piece of front garden where cabbages usurped the place of cabbage roses, an adventure befell him more extraordinary even than his opening that wonderful mathematical folio. He saw a woman's gown that was not made of black silk. That was marvel enough for one day, but it was nothing to what followed. Within the gown was a woman, who was not Mrs. Tallis the housekeeper. He was seized with a shy fit, for the woman was young — as young as Susan, or Betty — but in most other respects startlingly diflferent from any of the Winbury girls. To a lad who had wasted a great A Dog and his Shadow. 2 7 deal of valueless time in letting his thoughts run after imaginary princesses without ever having seen the ghost of one, she was much more than what she was in fact — a young and tolerably pretty girl, dressed quietly and becomingly in town fashion, but without bonnet or shawl. Abel Herrick the poet knew, far more surely than his own ex- istence, that he saw before him the Cynthia of his dreams. Instinct, inspiration, every orthodox word to express a determination to find what he wanted to find, told him she had come at last, and this was she. In the first moment of his discovery he looked forward to going home and jingling her grey eyes into rhyme with Orion and Ursa Major, her light brown hair with golden threads, and her rosy cheeks with some impossible garden. Nor would he have found the task hard. For her grey eyes were really better worth meeting than if one had been a comet and the other the Koh-i-noor. But if Abel had had his way, he would have rhymed about them first and met them afterwards — a common poetical process that may account for many prodigious and profoundly mystical things that have been said of eyes whether grey or brown. In a word, he was about to turn tail and run — for, in honest prose, the hunter far more often flies from the fawn than the fawn from the hunter. But his step on the gravel had made her turn round, not in a startled way, but simply to see who was there. And, if he was too shy to meet her eyes, he felt that she had no objection to meet his, or any man's. " Good evening," she said, nodding to him. " Do you want to see Mrs. Tallis ? " It was not much of an entrance speech for Cynthia, but the voice in which it was spoken made the commonest speech pleasant to hear. It was soft, sweet, and full : and the faintest note of provincialism — of course unmarked by Abel — was no more than just enough to give it character. " No — nothing, thank you." He could not degrade the situation by calling her Miss, or Ma'am, though her muslin seemed to demand the title from his fustian. ** Ah, you want Mr. Adams, I suppose? If you'll wait a minute" — Was she some Miss Adams then? The name did not please him — he would have preferred a name from his book of heraldry to con- nect her with some less remote but more euphonious ancestor. " No — I only came — Mrs. Tallis knows me — I'm only Abel Herrick " " What ! " she exclaimed, her face brightening, " YouVe Abel Herrick?— Abel?— (^«/k my old playfellow? Why of course you 28 The Gentleman s Magazine. are — only a few yards taller. Don't you remember Milly?" she asked, holding out her hand — not delicately white, but still the whitest Abel had ever seen. He ventured to touch it with his fingers, as if afraid of soiling it. Surprise almost made him forget to be shy — ^almost that he had made up his mind to worship her. " What — you're Milly ! '' he exclaimed, colouring up — let us hope for his old intention of laying his broken tea-cup on her shoulders in case of need. " Why, it's impossible ! " " I suppose everybody had forgotten there's such a being. I haven't, though — this is me, and glad to be at home again. I've had quite enough of school — and aunt would never let me come home even for the holidays, she was so afraid of my not getting all the polish Miss Baxter could give me. She is the dearest old lady in the world — Aunt, I mean, not Miss Baxter. But Tm polished now for good I hope — if I'm not real mahogany they've done their best to make me look so. And what are you doing now you're a man ? You've not been troubled with old Crook as I have with Miss Baxter, I suppose? You see I haven't forgotten anybody's names — not even Jowler's at the Vane Arms — or Mr. Pottinger's Pepper — ^how are they all ? I am so glad to be home again ! " Milly did not speak volubly like a professed chatter-box, but only as if warm-hearted pleasure at meeting an old friend, obliged to show itself somehow, had set her tongue going. But it was all a new strain to Abel, and he found himself seized by a dumb fiend. Milly naturally thought nothing of the embarrass- ment of a village lad before a stranger, and went back to himself — the topic upon which everybody can speak who can speak at all. " You haven't told me what you've been doing ? " " I ? Oh — I've been making — hurdles." " You must show me how they're made. — Please don't let me drive you away — I suppose we must all be well-behaved now, but if I'd only known you were coming I would have hid myself, just once more, like I used to. Won't you come in ? We were just at tea — only I ran out to look round the old place before it got too dark to see. Come in." Abel went in — he was now almost too shy to follow, but he was quite too shy to refuse. Moreover, he was in the condition that is retrospectively called love at first sight when love follows it. Milly led him into the housekeeper's snug little parlour — he would have followed her over the edge of a precipice. " Good evening, Abel," said his patroness. Unable to forget that she had saved his life, she bridged over the natural distance between A Dog and his Shadow. 29 the lady-lieutenant of Winbury and one of the villagers by treating him as a sort of poor relation to the Manor House. " I suppose you have called to pay your respects to my niece, Miss Barnes." (She was to be Miss Barnes, then, to the Winbury people — not even Miss Milly any more : and the name of Adams was not much improved upon.) " You had better remain, and teke a cup of tea. This is young Abel Herrick, Mr. Adams," she said to another person at the tea-table, " who used to play with my niece sometimes, when they were infants together, before she went to the seminary. I suppose you would not have recognised her, Abel? Don't you think she has progressed extraordinary?'* Abel recovered the use of his eyes : and they told him that he was in the presence of a mortal foe. Or rather he knew that war was as necessary as love to the romance on which he was predetermined, and he told his eyes to tell him so. Mr. Adams was indeed well qualified to excite jealousy at first sight in a rustic lover. He was a young man, passably good looking, in spite of a turned-up nose, pinkish eyes, and the pimpled complexion that often accompanies the transformation of down into full blown whiskers. The curve of the nose and the smiling lips signified to Abel a placidly impudent and intolerably exasperating self-satisfaction. His hair was beautifully combed, parted behind and before, glossy with pomatum, and rising from the forehead in elaborate ripples. His shoulders were to Winbury shoulders what a graceful bottle of Rhine wine is to a sturdy bottle of bitter ale. His dress was even more than elegant. His coat was of brown velveteen, his neck-cloth of crimson silk, his waistcoat white, his trousers shepherd's plaid, with a broad bottle-green stripe down the seams. He wore a watch-guard, a scarf-pin, and a ring. Evidently some fine gentleman from East- ington — and what should such a phoenix be doing in Winbury? It was hard\ipon Abel. He fancied that if there had been m>body else in the housekeeper's room he should soon have shown Milly that he was something better than a hurdle-maker, just as the coward always believes that he would have been bold if it had not been for the one little accident that always contrives to happen. Mr. Adams just recognised the introduction by a condescending nod ; Abel, by an ungracious half bow. **I was just telling your aunt. Miss Barnes," said Mr. Adams, " how all your young ladies ran to the windows when I drove up in my trap to fetch you away. I b'lieve they thought you was oflf with a young marquis at least — 'twas a regular fluttering of the dove-cot in Corry Holy.'' " In Corioli," said Abel brusquely. 30 TAe Gentlematis Magazine. The young man stared. " How much a yard?" he asked face- tiously. " Never heard of the party. Give him my best respects when you see him, and say I'm pretty well, thank you. No — no more tea, thank you — unless Miss Barnes will leave out the sugar this time : it comes sweet enough from the pot when she holds the handle. I told all the fell#ws at the office I was going off with an heiress — and split me, if some of 'em didn't believe it was true." " Ah — many a true word is spoken in jest," said Mrs. Tallis oracu- larly. ** Right you are. That's just what I mean to, one of these fine days. An heiress for my money — Self and Co. for an heiress's money, I should say. I'm sorry you're not an heiress, Miss Barnes, or I'd get your aunt to turn her back for just half a minute, and then pop would go the question and we'd be off to Gretna Green." "Thank you," said Milly. "I was never glad that I'm not an heiress till now. When I go to Gretna Green" ** Gracious me, Milly," said Mrs. Tallis, " the young ladies at Miss Baxter's don't talk about Gretna Green, I'm sure." " Don't they, aunt ! That's nothing at all. You should only hear us — when Miss Baxter's out of the way. Why, they call me the mouse, because I only talk eighteen to the dozen, and all the other girls talk nineteen." Humble as were these attempts at badinage, the y were brilliant for Eastingtonshire : and, in any case, they belonged to a language of which the solitary student knew not the alphabet All the talk he had ever heard was sadly serious, even when — or rather especially when — it related to nothing more important than a mug of beer. He did not wish to sit by as a conversational cypher in the presence of Milly and Mr. Adams, so he seized his opportunity, though a little tardily, and struck in — ** I think marrying for money is detestable." • Even such a common-place as this was not to be looked for from a Winbury hurdle-maker. Mr. Adams winked, as if he had heard something very comical indeed, and meant to say, " Now you shall see some good fun — I'm going to draw out this young man." " Quite right, Mr. I didn't quite catch the name ?" ** Herrick, my name is." " Quite right, Mr. Herrick. I quite agree with you. You don't mean to say you found out all that for yourself? Why, the great What's-his-name himself couldn't have put it better. There's a deep question that has puzzled me for a long time, and p'raps, as you think so deep, you can explain. I'm an article to Mr. Smith, of Eastington, you must know, the owner of this very house and A Dog and his Shadow. 3 1 grounds. Now I'm a well-behaved, modest, moral young man ; _■* but some of the other clerks, I'm sorry to say, are not at all what their widowed mothers would wish them to be. Now, I put it to you, what is your deliberate opinion of the effect of evil com- munications upon good manners ?" It was the old story ; the man of Itooks was nobody before one whom he felt to be a fool, but who impressed him as a man of the world. Pomatum is power. Abel, as Mr. Adams had anticipated, was unprovided with a retort; but Milly, instead of paying the tribute of a laugh to his wit, said quietly, and as if no joke had been intended — " Bad manners are better than none. You're quite right, Abel — marrying for money ts detestable ; and I don't see any fun in laugh- ing at what's true, only because it's old." "All right, Miss Barnes — all right," said Mr. Adams, with un- disturbed equanimity. " If Mr. Herrick can't take a joke I'll be as serious as an undertaker. Lucky fellow, to find a champion of the light-weights in Miss Barnes. Let us be sorrowful — what's life but a vale of tears? — Have you heard of the missing woman, ma'am ? Terrible business — they can't find her anywhere." " No !" said Mrs. Tallis, waking up. " A missing woman ? Who — where ? At Winbury ?" " No, ma'am — in the Mercury, They've had a poet down special to put the advertisement into rhyme — a first-rate dodge that, to catch people's eyes. I'll read it to you." And the wit of Mr. Smith's office, drawing a newspaper from his pocket, began to spout theatrically : — Say, Cynthia, where art thou to seek ? Say, Cynthia, where to find ? I've asked of books Abel heard no more. His blood rushed and boiled with angry shame, and, overturning his chair and breaking another tea-cup, he left the room. So this was poetic fame — to be turned into ridicule by any ignorant clerk who wanted an ill-natured joke, and took the first verses that came to hand. The unfortunate poet despised himself, hated his own poem, and, as for Milly — that was all over now ; he could not, after his disgrace, look her in the face again. No doubt, he thought, this cur of an Adams had somehow found out who was the author, and was taking his revenge for a spoiled jest by laughing with Milly over the lines. It was true that Milly had taken his part before, but that only made his present downfall the more bitter to bear. (To he continued,) About the North Pole. BY WALTER THORNBURY. N the latter part of the fifteenth century, when the great discovery made by Columbus had set afl the maritime world of Europe on the ferment, John Cabot, a Venetian pilot, sent on a voyage of exploration under the auspices of Henry VII., lighted upon Newfoundland, and was, indeed, the first European who had landed on any part of the American continent. Cabot's son, Sebastian, eventually discovered Paraguay and the River Plate, and in the reign of Edward VI. helped to start an expedition to reach India and Cathay by way of the north and north-east The com- mander chosen was Sir Hugh Willoughby, a handsome and brave officer, who was accompanied by Richard Chancelor, a sagacious man, and a friend of the f;ither of Sir Philip Sidney. The vessels were soon separated by a storm in the northern seas, and Sir Hugh and his crew were frozen to death somewhere off Lapland. Chan- celor, however, found his way into the White Sea, and, landing there and making his way by sledges to Moscow, he established the first trade between England and Russia. In 1594 the Dutch sent out a northern expedition of three small vessels and a yacht, under the guidance of William Barentz, a brave and experienced sailor, who determined to pass round to the north- ward of Nova Zembla. The vast flocks of penguins and the great herds of walruses astonished the discomfited voyager, whom the ice soon drove back. Another part of the expedition passed the Strait of Waygatz, and coasted part of Nova Zembla, believing they had found an easy passage to China, along the eastern shore of Asia. A second expedition discovered nothing. A third was entrusted to Barentz and John Cornelius Ryp. These more enterprising men discovered Spitzbergen. Attempting in vain to pass the north of Nova Zembla, Barentz was frozen in for the winter. The vessel was wedged close till it was levered up upon the ice, and the crew built a hut on the shore, carrying on their work amid constant conflicts with the Polar bears. The three months' night the Dutchmen passed amid ceaseless cold and hunger. The broken ice, at first only seventy-five paces broad, in front of them gradually widened to 500 paces, resembliai; the towers and steeples of a great city. About the North Pole. 33 In May the brave men cut a way to the sea and escaped in their open boats, Barentz dying by the way. In July they dragged their boats to the open sea, past great herds of walruses, and eventually effected their escape to Kola, where they were shipped for Amsterdam. The London merchants, still hoping to find the North-East Passage, sent out the well-known Henry Hudson in 1608. He struck at once into the channel between Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen, but effected no real advance northward. The Muscovy Company entrusted their next expedition to Jonas Poole, who set sail in 16 10, bent on a little whaling to help defray his expenses, but in this and two other voyages he seems to have done little but hunt moose and capture whales. In 1616 Bylot and Baffin made a voyage more adventurous than those of their prede- cessors. Their directions were to enter Davis's Strait, and push due north till they reached lat. So*' ; then, turning west, they were to round, if possible, the extreme point of America, and bear down on Japan. They discovered several inlets, which they named after Sir Thomas Smith, Alderman Jones, and Sir James Lancaster; but sailed by the stem barriers of ice without any attempt to trace their inner windings. In 1741, after many more of these feeble and unsuccessful attempts to solve the great mystery, our Government gave ;£"! 0,000 for a new expedition, and offered a reward of ;^2o,ooo to the discoverer of a northern passage. After a long lull of apathy and indifference, the Admiralty in 1818 fitted out two vessels, the Isabella and the Alexander^ to once more attempt the discovery of the North-West Passage, and Captains Ross and Parry, both officers of energy and intelligence, were ap- pointed to the command. From Waygat Island they were blocked by the ice, but eventually worked their way along the coast through narrow and intricate channels, and about lat 75 S reached land never before visited. On the 7th of August their perils began. They forced their way through a mile of bay ice, and sawed their way into a pool of open water. The ice then began to move, and, a gale springing up, the floes closed in on the Isabella^ till the pressure grew so tremendous that the beams in the hold began to bend and the iron tanks to settle together. The distressed ship rose several feet, while the ice, which was six feet thick, broke against her sides. She was then dashed against the Alexander with such force that tlie anchors were broken, and the loss of her masts was every moment expected. At that moment of imminent danger, how- ever, the force of the ice seemed suddenly to collapse, the two VOL.XV., N.S. 1875. D 34 Tf^ Gentleman! s Magazine. fields receded, and the Isabella passed the Alexander safely into a clear channel. Soon after this, the gale continuing, the ice began to move faster, and a large field of ice bearing down on them, Ross and Parry resolved to saw out docks for refuge, but the ice proved too thick for the nine-feet saws. This failure was their salvation, for the field to which they were moored began, as they left it, to drift rapidly on a reef of grounded icebergs, and presently it broke on the bergs, rising more than fifty feet up the side of the white cliffs and falling back with crashing ruins on the very spot where the docks would have /been. That evening the vessels were made fast to the land ice, and sought refuge in a bay girt with icebergs, and over extra allowances of preserved meat and grog the tired sailors forgot for a time their troubles. The next day some Esquimaux in dog sledges hailed them. Twenty-eight natives and fifty dogs began clamouring together. The visitors bartered sea unicorns' horns and sea horse teeth for knives, glasses, and beads, and taking the ship for a bird asked it if it came from the sun or the moon. Tne natives, though friendly and good- natured, proved great thieves, and tried to carry off nearly everything they saw, from an anvil to the topmast. Near Cape Dudley Digges the cliffs appeared covered with crimson snow, which has since been proved to be of vegetable growth. Captain Ross now passed the various sounds described by Baffin, and satisfied himself too readily that they were all impassable. Lancaster Sound alone he explored for thirty miles, and then trusting to an assistant surgeon, from the *' crow's-nest," who pronounced the channel stopped by a line of land, turned homewards. Parry on his return expressing a desire to explore Lancaster Sound was sent out with the Hecla^ o^ 375 tons, and the Griper gun brig, of 1 80 tons, with ample stores for two years. He set sail in 181 9, and was soon immovably beset. On the second day, however, a heavy roll of the sea loosened the ice and drove it against the vessels with such violence that but for their strength they would have broken up. Once more free, they steered northward along the edge of the ice searching for open water. They then made a desperate push to the west>vard between detached floes of ice, through lanes of open water, and sawing through one final barrier bore directly for Lancaster Sound, and reached longitude 83° 12', fifteen miles from the mouth of the sound, which was about fifty miles broad, without difficulty. At a point where they believed they had passed the magnetic meridian the compass became useless and the fog About the North Pole. 35 froze on the shrouds, and soon after they reached the longitude of 110° W., by which they became entitled to the Parliamentary reward of ;^5,ooo. The ice now beginning to form on every side of them, Parry resolved to winter at Melville Island. Great care was taken of the men during the winter. Private theatricals were got up for their amusement and a paper was started. Every day the men were made to run round the deck to the music of an organ. Wild animals disappeared entirely in October, with the exception of a pack of wolves which nightly serenaded the vessel. Early in May ptarmigan began to reappear, and sorrel, found in abundance mixed with moss under the snow, proved very useful as a remedy for scurvy, which had begun to prevail among the men. In August the ice by a sudden paroxysm broke up and drifted out, and the ships were once more afloat. They soon, however, found barriers of ice spreading as far as the eye could reach, and seeing no hope of forcing or coaxing a passage they turned homeward. Parry returned with great eclat He had sailed upwards of thirty degrees of longitude beyond any of his predecessors, he had proved the existence of a Polar sea north of America, and after eleven months wintering had only lost one man. In Parry's next expedition it was resolved to trace the great northern sounds of Hudson's Bay and their terminations, there being a hope that in this passage Parry might escape so many large islands, and effect an opening into the Arctic Sea at a lower and safer lati- tude. The two vessels chosen this time were the Heda and Fury^ and Captain Lyon was selected as Parry's companion. At the mouth of Hudson's Strait, a desolate scene, with its icy rocks heavy with fog, the two ships were surrounded by fifty-four icebergs, the tallest of them towering 258 feet above the sea. These bergs were begirt by drifting floes that whirled and ground perpetually round them, agitated by the ocean currents. After trying many inlets fruitlessly. Parry was frozen up for another winter, and this time a school was started to amuse the men, who plied their stiff" fingers at the childish tasks with the utmost enthusiasm. During the long sunless winter Parry and his com- panions were astonished by the incessant flashing arches of the Aurora, by meteors, halos, and mock suns ; six of these mock suns were sometimes seen at once. Occasional visits from the Esquimaux and the sight of their little domed houses, built with slabs of frozen snow, interested the sailors. On the 2nd of July the voyage of discovery was resumed, but in September the troops of deer passing southward and the thin pancake ice forming on the sea determined D 2 36 The Gentleman s Magazine. Parry to winter at Igloolik, where he as usual sawed out a harbour. From a colony of Esquimaux at this place Parry learnt much of the habits of this curious people. The women wore girdles made of the teeth of wolves, foxes, and musk oxen, and one belle had fringed her jacket with fox noses. They can consume enormous quantities of food. One youth is recorded in twenty-four hours to have swallowed ten pounds of solid food, and to have drank more than a gallon of water. The men watch for hours at ice-holes for the seal, and they will often attack singly the Polar bear. Parry had intended to concentrate all his men and stores on board the Fury^ and then brave a third Arctic winter ; but the men's health begin- ning to fail, he reluctantly began his voyage homewards, and arrived in Shetland in October, 1823. The Government, still staunchly bent on Arctic discovery, at once resolved on a new expedition, with a view of trying to penetrate Prince Regent's Inlet, as the western extremity of Melville Island seemed barred up for ever. Parry this time took out the Hecla^ and Captain Hoppner the Fury, The vessels set sail in May, 1824, reached Davis's Strait by the middle of June, and on the loth of September caught sight of the bold shore of Lancaster Sound. The monotony of the winter at Port Bowen was felt more than usual, but the spring was favourable, and on July 19 they started out to sea. However, in lat 72° 42' and long. 91° 50', the Fury was so badly " nipped " by the ice that she had to be abandoned, and the Hecla had no other alternative but to at once return home. This misfortune disheartened our thrifty Government. The North- West Passage was now looked upon as a dream, and a resolution was formed to send no more exploring vessels. The Board of Longitude was abolished, and the reward of ;£2 0,000 withdrawn. Captain Ross being anxious to try a steamer, a Mr. Booth undertook generously to bear the whole expense. He set sail in May, 1829, in the Victory^ a small Liverpool steamer of 150 tons. Provisions were laid in for a thousand days, and the ship's company amounted to the number of twenty-two. At the latitude of 74°, near where the Hecla and Fury had been beset in 1824, no ice could be seen, and the men threw off their jackets to work cooler. Lancaster Sound, which Ross had before but timidly reconnoitred, was now open to their vessel, and with the thermometer at 40** they preferred doing without a fire. Making for Prince Regent's Inlet, the daring voyager now visited the wreck of the Fury^ and obtained a stock of preserves, provisions, and a store of coaL Cheered by this seasonable supply, they now crossed Cresswell Bay About the North Pole. 37 and passed Cape Garry — the farthest point sighted by Parry. The fogs and the danger now began. They were surrounded by floating mountains of ice, which constantly dashed together in rude tourna- ment, till the weaker rent asunder and fell over headlong, ploughing the sea and froth with the roar of thunder. This 300 miles of un- known country, and within 200 miles of the point which Captain Franklin had reached, Ross called Boothia. The path to America seemed fast developing when snow fell thick, and the ice began to close its broad white teeth upon them. Ross at once determined to saw out a dock in Felix Harbour, in a bay between a rocky island and two icebergs. The winter amusement consisted in shooting ptarmigan and willow partridges, in killing white foxes, bears, and seals. The vessel was roofed in and the deck was covered with snow two feet and a half thick, and above that a coating of sand. Every atom of rigging was taken down, cleaned, marked, and stowed away. The sailors became excellent friends with the Esquimaux, and the ship's carpenter astonished the natives by making a wooden leg for a lame native. Their sledges were lined with frozen fish and seal bones, and bound together with strips of the hide of the musk ox. It was in this voyage that Captain Ross reached the side of the Magnetic Pole, lat. 70° 5' 17'' north, on the western coast of Boothia, and the spot was marked by a cairn and a flag. Ross at last resolved to abandon the Victory and spend the winter in Fury Beach, and the next year was taken off at Navy Board Inlet by a Hull vessel. Ross, though dogged enough, had not discovered much, but hope was still entertained that a vessel might in an open season penetrate southward between Bank's Land and Cape Walker, the apparent extremity of Boothia, and would find open an unobstructed navi- gation to Beh ring's Strait. After some shabbiness from the Admiralty, Parliament voted Ross for this long voyage a sum of The first attempt to reach the Pole on sledges was made by Captain Parry, from a scheme suggested by Mr. Scoresby in 1827. He set out from Hecla Cove in Spitzbergen with seventy-one days' provisions, but the arduous attempt proved fruitless, after all, as the snow fields kept continually drifting southward. In 1836 the Government sent out Captain Back in the Terror to complete the discovery of the coast line between Regent's Inlet and Point Turnagain. He took with him a ship's company of sixty men, nearly all volunteers. The expedition was to proceed to the head of Hudson's Strait, and from thence to Repulse Bay or Wager 38 The GentlematCs Magazine. River either directiy through the Frozen Strait or circuitously by River Welcome. The vessel was then to be docked and a body of men sent by land to examine the eastern shore of Prince Regent's Inlet, one detachment going northward to the Fury or Hecla Strait, and a second westward to Point Turnagain. Sledges with iron runners and convertible into carriages were to be used. Above all every effort was to be made to return to England the same autumn. The voyage began ominously, for near Davis's Strait they passed a berg not less than 300 feet high, and near Resolution Island dense floes with high peaks jostled and clashed around them. But Frozen Strait gave one broken mountainous sea of ice, with ponderous masses of floes heaped up thirty feet high. On one occasion when moored to a dangerous and tottering iceberg, a heavy drifting floe struck the berg, part of which fell and all but destroyed the vessel. The Terror^ however, behaved well, and near the Frozen Strait forced her way through a dense unbroken pack. Working their way to Southampton Island, they had to cut a path through the ice with axes, ice-chisels, and handspikes, the sailors dragging the blocks to the nearest pool, like so many laughing school boys, and shouting at the fun when any luckless fellow broke in through the thin ice. Off Cape Comfort Back's ship was suddenly nipped, the ice rising in pointed heaps twenty feet or more in height. The men despairing now of reaching Repulse Bay, Back resolved to cut a dock in the nearest floe, but singularly enough on the very next day the whole body of ice near them burst into pieces and rolled to the west, tossing the blocks in heaps and grinding some to powder. The men soon grew gloomy, abandoned amusement, and became desponding. The vessel was pressed by the ice and daily threatened with instant destruction. It was sometimes lifted vertically and nearly covered with masses of disrupted ice nineteen or twenty feet high, shattered into mammoth mounds, peaks, stubborn walls, and ramparts. Some of the ship's planks shone with the turpentine squeezed out of the wood, and the crushes of ice were attended by groaning and splitting sounds loud as cannon. The vessel was heaved up by the vast force of the ice. One especial day a mass of ice thirty feet high came rjaring towards her on a floe, and escape seemed hopeless. All this time the forepart of the vessel was buried as high as the flukes of the anchor in perpendicular walls of ice. After several weeks of labour Back and his men sawed the tormented vessel out of her ice prison after she had been thrown on her beam ends by submerged ice that clung to her bottom. It was time to turn : the poor vessel stumbled and staggered homeward, reaching Lough Swilly in a state that would About the North Pole. 39 have sunk her in three hours more. Her keel and stem post were found to have been half wrenched off. By the combined exertions of Sir John Barrow and Lieutenant- Colonel Sabine Sir John Franklin was sent, in 1845, with the Erebus and Terror, to once more try and complete the magnetic survey of the globe, and with orders to push through Lancaster Sound and Cape Walker, and from there, if possible, to Behring's Strait. A transport that accompanied them to Davis's Strait left them with three years' provisions and four bullocks. The gallant discoverers sailed away to the dim region of the Aurora, and were seen no more alive. In 1848 the Government, with generous enthusiasm, sent out three simultaneous expeditions in search of Franklin and his com- panions. By Behring's Strait the Herald and Plover were despatched in case the expedition had threaded the North-West Passage and stuck fast in some advanced point of the Polar Sea. The coastland and boat expedition was led by Sir John Richardson down the Mackenzie River to examine the coast eastward to the Coppermine River; and the third expedition, headed by Sir James Clarke Ross, with the ships Enterprise and Investigator, was to pass Lancaster Sound and Barrow's Strait and search for tracks of Franklin westward as far as they could penetrate. The Herald and Plover worked hard but did nothing; the land expedition little more, being unable to examine the shores of Wollaston Land. The third party left provisions in suitable depots, caught white foxes and released them with copper collars on which were engraved notices of the depots, while papers with instructions were daily sent adrift in casks. All three efforts, however, proved useless. In 1849 that noble and true-hearted Englishwoman Lady Franklin offered a reward of >^3,ooo to any whaler which could discover or relieve all or any part of the two ships' companies, and the same year our Government promised ;^2 0,000 to any exploring party that should contribute to extricate Franklin and his ships and crew from the ice. The Enterprise and Investigator, under Collinson and M*Clure, were the next to sail due north. They were to throw over- board o .casionally tin cylinders containing information, and were ^ot to waste time in mere scientific research. They were provided with balloons, blasting powder, ice saws, and a huge pointed iron for dropping on ice floes and forcing a passage. Dr. Rae, left by Sir John Richardson to continue the search, was employed in 1850 in beating the coast round Cape Walker and the north of Victoria Land. The Government expedition (for the nation was now hot 40 The Gentlematis Magazine. upon the search) consisted of the Resolute and the Assistance and two powerful screw steamers, the Pioneer and the Intrepid, Captains Austin, Ommanney, and Sherard Osbom were the leaders of the search. Sir John Ross undertook to bear round Wellington Channel, and to examine all the headlands thence to Banks' Land. The heroic Lady Franklin herself fitted out two vessels, and the Prince Albert y a schooner-rigged craft of ninety tons (Commander Forsyth), resolved to examine to the shores of Prince Regent's Inlet and the Gulf of Boothia. Melville Bay proved that year peculiarly impenetrable, and the largest vessels spent four weeks in effecting thirty miles northward. Blocked by icebergs which threatened to fall and crush the smaller ships or to close and grind them to pieces, the sailors stood ready with their bundles to leap on the ice and escape by sledge or on foot. The Prince Albert once or twrce had to charge necks of ice, and on other occasions huge icy masses were burst asunder with blasting powder, the seamen with warps dragging away the huge disjointed blocks. The Prince Albert then examined the south shore of Lancaster Sound, and stood away down Prince Regent's Inlet, but found all passage beyond Fury Beach impassable. She visited Barrow's Strait, and found Wellington Channel floored with solid ice. But on Cape Riley the sailors saw what repaid them for all the toil and danger. The Assistance and Intrepid had been there before them, and had discovered traces of Franklin's tents : rope, canvas, bones, and three tombstones left<^by the men of the Erebus and Terror during a prolonged visit in 1845 and 1846. On the 1 2th of April, 185 1, six sledging parties started from Griffith Island; three taking the north shore, three the south of Parry's Strait. Lieutenant M*Clintock's party travelled 760 miles, dis- covered forty miles of coast, and was absent eighty days. It achieved the farthest westing ever attained in the Polar seas, setting up marks, depositing provisions, and making observations. Sails and kites were used to drag the sledges, and the men toiled heartily and merrily at the drag-ropes. In the exploration of Wellington Channel Captain Penny discovered Victoria Channel, which he explored by boat for 300 miles. This" the discoverer believed to be the great i^ner Polar basin. The interesting discovery at Cape Riley lit up once more the old hope, and it was thought that Franklin had proceeded up Wellington Channel and enteied the sea discovered by Captain Penny ; and in 1852 Sir Edward Beecher started with five vessels — the Assistance, the Resolute, the North Star, and two steamers, the Pioneer and Intrepid — resolved to sail to Baffin's Bay, and make Beachy Island his About the North Pole. . 41 head-quarters, while Wellington Channel was visited and provisions left on Melville Island. The Prince Albert^ which again joined indefatigably in the long search, determined to thoroughly reconnoitre Prince Regent's Inlet That brave young Frenchman Lieutenant Bellot was one of the crew. They got through the winter as cheerily as they could, and in February, 1852, started on their grand sledge journey. But neither at Fury Beach nor at Cape Walker could they find any traces of Franklin's expedition, and their stores soon got so low that they had to feed their dogs on old leather shoes and the fag ends of buffalo rugs, and returned to the ship after ninety-seven days of danger and toil, after traversing about 1,100 miles. Their departure for England took place soon afterwards. In 1853 national interest was again roused by the actual discovery of the North- West Passage by Captain M*Clure, who had passed through Behring's Straits and sailed to within a few miles of the discoveries made from the east side of America, where he was frozen up and had to abandon his vessel. Lieutenant Cresswell, the bearer of de- spatches, walked over the neck of ice, and returned to England by the Atlantic, being the first man who had ever traversed the long- sought for point of junction. In 1850 M*Clure, on parting from his colleague, the Enterprise^ had pushed gallantly into the heart of the Polar packs, winding through the transient lanes and sometimes charging the close-packed masses. After many new discoveries and a tedious wintering, during which the men made a journey over the ice to Barrow's Strait, in July, 185 1, they began to coast the western shores of Barrig's Island, and were frozen in for the winter in the Bay of Mercy. A party now crossing the ice to Melville Isla^nd reached Winter Harbour, and completed the North-West Passage on foot. Another winter's imprisonment followed, rendered light by joy at the discovery they had effected ; and after receiving relief from Captain Kellet, M*Clure eventually had to abandon his vessel in Mercy Bay and return to England in 1854. It was about this time that that brave, chivalrous young French officer Lieutenant Bellot, who was with Captain Inglefield's party, was lost while taking despatches across the ice to Sir Edward Beecher in Wellington Channel. Of Inglefield's and Sir E. Beecher's expeditions of 1854 little need be said ; suffice it to say that Sir E. Beecher eventually abandoned his five vessels, and, alarmed at the diminution of his preserved meats, took care to preserve himself, and returned to England. 42 The Gentleman s Magazine. While the vexation of this failure was still existing in England, Dr. Rae arrived from Repulse Bay with more news of Franklin. He had been seen alive by Esquimaux in 1850, and the remains of the band had been discovered in 1851. The sailors had been seen by seal-hunters near King William's Land in 1850, dragging a boat and sledges. The bodies of thirty of their party were found the same season, on an island a long day's journey north-west of Back's Great Fish River. Some of the bodies were in tents, others under a boat One body seemed that of a chief, as a telescope was strapped over the shoulders and a double-barrelled gun lay near it From the mutilated state of the bodies it was supposed that cannibalism had been resorted to. There was plenty of powder, and stores of shot and ball were found below high-water mark. Dr. Rae brought with him several spoons and forks, and one small silver plate, engraved with the words **John Franklin, K.C.B." Great disappointment was felt that in his zeal to explore Boothia Dr. Rae did not himself visit the spot where Franklin died, in search of fuller records of his fate. Of the second Grinnell Expedition, commanded by the chivalrous Dr. Kane, who sacrificed his life in the service, I have no room to say much. In many points it was more daring and romantic than any other. Kane's generous efforts to rescue his men when in great peril, his daring sledge journeys, will live for ever in Arctic records. Soul never triumphed more nobly over body than when Kane, swollen with scurvy, his foot frozen, and himself almost delirious, led on his party beyond the farthest limits of Greenland, seeking the mysterious channels that open into the inner Polar Sea, On one occasion he and his men lived eighty-four days in the open air. But for a few seals that they shot and ate raw the whole party must have perished. In 1855 a small band of hardy fellows in a bark canoe furnished by the Hudson's Bay Company proceeded down the Great Fish River to its mouth, Franklin being supposed to have perished of starvation somewhere near Montreal Island. Here they found several relics of the Erebus and Terror^ but no bodies and no papers. And now we come to the final and more successful voyage — that of Captain M*Clintock in the Fox in the years 1857-8-9. It was he who finally proved that Franklin had really discovered the North- West Passage and died on the nth of June, 1847, while working on foot across the ice near the mouth of the Great Fish Rivet. " It seemed," as Mr. Ballantyne beautifully observes, " as if the Almighty had mercifully permitted one mysterious whisper from the unseen About the North Pole. 43 world to reach us," to relieve those who mourned untiringly for the dead heroes and refused to believe that they were taken from us for ever. It appeared that as late as April, 1848, 105 survivors were still on their way to Great Fish River, the very place where Dr. King, on June 10, 1847 (the day before Franklin died), had offered the Government to prosecute a search. Hoping against hope, that lion-hearted woman Lady Franklin instantly purchased the Fox^ a small screw steam yacht, and appointed to the command Captain M'Clintock, who had served in three previous expeditions. The Government assisted with stores and needful material. Volunteers were eager to take service, but the crew consisted of only twenty-one men, including an Esquimaux interpreter. Lady Franklin's wish was to recover relics of her husband, documents of the expedition, and to establish his claim to the first discovery of the North-West Passage. Procuring Esquimaux sledge-dogs and a native driver at Disco Island, M*Clintock pushed boldly into the icy waters of Baffin's Bay, and, landing their last letters for home, the party tried in vain for forty miles to penetrate the middle ice in Baffin's Bay ; then pushing northwards in search of an opening, they reached Melville Bay, where they passed a glacier forty miles long. It was almost hori- zontal, and of unknown extent and elevation. There were few birds and seals, and the only sound was the occasional crashing thunder when an iceberg split off, the wave from which convulsion used to reach the Fox in six or seven minutes and roll it lazily on the cold northern waves. All this time the Fox sailed in perpetual sunshine. Midnight brought only this difference, that the sun skimmed along the horizon instead of across the zenith. The moment they entered the ice the floes closed suddenly up to beset them round. Saws and blasting powder were in vain — they were frozen in for the winter. Like brave Englishmen, the crew of the Fox bore the imprisonment cheerfully. They shot bears and seals, skated, and started a school. The ship was covered in and banked with snow, the sun took his leave for the winter on the ist of November, and henceforth they had to depend on lamp-light, moonlight, and Aurora Borealis when not visited with storms or snowdrifts. White and blue Arctic foxes, bears, and seals prowled round the vessel and supplied them with food. The ice from time to time rent and split with sounds compared to distant surf and trains of heavy creaking waggons. Ice of four feet thick would be ground to atoms for spaces of fifty yards, and blocks 100 yards in diameter would suddenly crack like a spider's web. Gradually in April the ice opened out, and the Fox bored her way out of the pack, not without many a spiteful jog that made her every rib shake. 44 The Gentleman s Magazine. Returning to Greenland to refit, M'Clintock then passed to Baffin's Bay, escaped the dreaded " middle ice," and sailed for Pond's Bay, steering from there to Lancaster Sound. Stopped by ice in Peel Strait, M*Clintock ran down Prince Regent's Inlet, making for Bellot Strait, discovered in 1851 by the Prince Albert, They ran easily for eight miles, when they were checked by six miles of close heavy pack ice, beyond which, however, they saw a clear channel that gave them hope. The ice here was rolling about in great blue masses, that drove the Fox close to the rocks. In vain week after week the Fox strove to win a way : the solid pack westward extended its barriers over Peel Strait, and drove the party to sledge travelling. Winter began again, and the sailors settled down to hunting and depositing caches and stores of provisions on the line of their intended spring route, much annoyed by the constant storms round Port Kennedy and the black vapours rising from the open spots in the ice. Three sledge expeditions were finally projected by M*Clintock. The first, led by himself, was to visit the Great Fish River and to examine the shores of King William's Land. The second was to explore the western coast of Boothia as far as the Magnetic Pole, and then westward from Gateshead Island. The third party was to trace the shores of Prince of Wales Land, and, if possible, between Four River Point and Cape Bird, Two months' provisions were to be carried by each party. Near the Magnetic Pole M*Clintock met an Esquimaux with a naval button on his coat, which had been obtained from some white people who had been starved upon an island. From this man's village they obtained many relics of poor Franklin and his men — spoons, forks, a medal, and portions of the wreck. According to them Franklin's vessel had been crushed by ice near King William's Island, and the crew had perished near Montreal Island, in the estuary of the Fish River. M*Clintock rejoined the Fox after twenty-five days' absence, during which he had travelled 420 miles and com- pleted the discovery of 120 geographical miles of the coast line of Continental America. The mean temperature was 30° below zero. The brave leader then set out for another expedition to the east coast of King William's Land, passing on foot through a North-West Passage, and finding relics of Franklin on Montreal Island. At Point Ogle was found on the beach a skeleton lying upon its face, apparently an officer's servant. At Point Victory, on King William's Land, was picked up a paper dated May, 1847, describing the men as all well, the wintering in Beachy Island, and the ascent of Wellington Channel. On this paper the captain of the Erebus had noted the About the North Pole. 45 desertion of the two vessels in April, 1848, and the starting for Back's Fish River. At Cape Felix a cairn was found, and near Cape Crozier a boat containing two skeletons, watches, prayer- books, and two loaded guns, but no provisions except a little tea and chdcolate. The men had probably been sick, and were left by their comrades, who were too weak to drag them to their ships. Many brave efforts of endurance were made before the Fox turned homeward, one officer in particular sledging for forty days with one man only. He proved Prince of Wales Land to be an island, and discovered M*Clintock's Channel. As for the captain, he worked the engines home himself, both his engineers being dead. Prince Regent's Inlet remained so long fast that he feared another winter's imprisonment, but providentially the ice broke up in August, and the Fox, through many dangers, shipped off for England, where she arrived in September, 1859. The North-West Passage has been to seamen of the nineteenth century what the San Graal was to the knights of Arthur's time. It cost us two centuries to discover the North-West Passage, and, what is more than all, it cost us Franklin and his men. As a soldier's strength is earned by toil and endurance, so a nation's strength is gained by such herculean labours and obstinate struggles as these. One comer of the old problem has still to be solved. Is there a central open Polar Sea ? That the expedition now on its way is to solve. Who will grudge the danger it will cost to even yet decide this ? Who will despair of solving it after what has already been attained ? Past voyages show us that the strait that is adamant this year, the next season can be traversed. Experience has brought to our aid so many ways of conquering Arctic difficulties — sledges, blasting powder, saws, &c. Much we have found can be escaped by cutting ice docks ; so much gained by using ice floes as tugs ; steam has given us such power to force a way; patience so often, we find, produces us remedies, that nothing now can be considered impos- sible. Ice that seems built up for eternity suddenly yields as by a spell and disappears, as troubles do when a brave man advances upon them. Much, too, might probably be done by a band of Esquimaux auxiliaries to manage the sledges and to give their opinions on the weather and the state of the ice. Let the two vessels winter as far north as they can this year, next spring early push on for the great secret, and God helping, we shall solve it yet, map out the whole northern seas, and then buckle ourselves to for other toils that may still further help forward humanity. SiGNOR Salvinfs Hamlet. BY A PARISIAN CRITIC. T was, doubtless, not without misgivings that even the most ardent admirers of Signor Salvini's histrionic accomplish- ments went to witness his first performance in this country of Hamlet — that testing part of a complete actor. His interpretation of Othello was in all respects a masterly achievement, at least for those who cared not to remember the canons set down by former exponents of the part, and who elected to follow their own idea of the manner in which it should be performed. But although it was hardly possible to doubt that Signor Salvini's attempt would be marked by the points in which an artist so accomplished could not fail to create eftect, yet it did not follow that whereas he had rendered the passions incarnated in the Moor, he could succeed in depicting feelings absolutely different. In fact most competent critics were inclined to disbelieve in the Italian tragedian's compe- tency, not to give an acceptable rendering of the supreme drama, but to endow it with the symmetrical beauty of the whole performance of Othello. These fears were not wholly groundless. In the part of Hamlet it was enough to look at Signor Salvini to be aware that his appearance was against him, for in that extraordinary creation it is not enough to have the art : the artist must also have the physique of the character. The essence of the pleasure we find at the theatre is illusion, and if we have before us an actor whose looks are altogether remote from the sentiments he expresses the illusion, except at very rare moments, is all but destroyed. Nothing can be more uncongenial than an elderly lady who enacts a youthful character ; and in no play is the look of the part more necessary than in ** Hamlet." Salvini is tall, powerful, dignified; the stamp of mature talent sits on every feature of his countenance ; he seems far beyond the hesitations and falterings of Hamlet : and as he has, like most Italian actors, an objection to the use, or rather abuse, of artificial means of changing his physiognomy, it appeared still more obvious that the nervous mask of the Prince of Denmark could scarcely sit at ease on his features. Not less specious seemed the allegation of incompatibility of temperament. While Othello is particularly well adapted to a southern nature, Hamlet's acts appear to Signor SalvinVs Hamlet. 4/ belong rather to the scion of a northern stock ; his lymphatic dis- position, his long fits of musing, his outbursts of passion, more tem- pestuous and lasting when stirred up than those of a naturally impulsive man, are characteristics not to be mistaken. This raises a question of some interest in dramatic art It is of course impossible for an actor completely to master his natural leanings and impulses ; but then a point of nicety is to ascertain whether an actor worthy of the name can attain the supreme climax of perfection which consists in all but overcoming these tendencies of blood and race. As for me, I may say at once that I had not two opinions as to the capacity of Signor Salvini to cope with the new part he has lately enacted, whatever odds might be against him : for it appeared to me that his power chiefly consisted in that very capacity. The triumph of acting does not lie in experiencing the feelings that are being expressed. It may appear paradoxical to say so, but emotion is incompatible with dramatic expression. Emotion paralyses, and it is probable that an artist who entirely identifies himself with the part he expounds will find himself powerless when called upon to render it. Deep grief, anger, passion of every kind, when it makes every muscle quiver and every drop of blood in one's veins tingle, momentarily defeat all power of elocution. That the actor should feel once and understand his part is not only natural, but in- dispensable ; but from the moment when he has realised its breadth and spirit all personal emotion should disappear and be simulated by art. It has been said with regard to Signor Salvini that in earlier days his identification with certain characters was such that he was not allowed to wear offensive weapons on the stage. This I have some difficulty in believing ; it seems to me that so perfect an artist could not thus lose his self-control without seriously damaging his success. Signor Salvini has probably studied each of his impersonations and tried his efiects until he attained what appeared to him the dernier mot of truth ; that final form he, as it were, fixed in his mind, and then he made no effort to alter or improve it. Such I infer has been his process with Othello, as with Hamlet. In the former play, although his acting is not always identical in small points of detail, the principal effects are one and the same at every performance. His aim, I should think, is to give vent to all that is most impetuous in passion, while internally preserving a maximum calmness. This view is corroborated by another notable feature of his art : his impersonations are distinguished by a logical uniformity of concep- tion : he does this because he has done that, and from one end of the performance to the other all his actions and effects follow each 48 The Gentlematis Magazine. other like the links of a chain, so that, however different from the general idea of a part, his rendering of it is in keeping with the view he has taken and possesses the harmonious proportions of a work of refined art These remarks are not uncalled for, because, in my opinion, Signor Salvini has approached the part of Hamlet more in the latter mood than with a desire to render it exactly and faith- fully as Shakespeare wrote it. Our tragedian has but an imperfect knowledge of English; and although reverence for genius has nothing to do with nationality, he cannot fairly be expected to show the superstitious respect for the exact text on the integrity of which every cultivated English spectator insists. He knows " Hamlet " only through a translation, than which none could be more recklessly and impertinently bad. Whether the shortcomings of this Italian version have had much to do with Salvini's inter- pretation I do not know ; but his conception of Hamlet's indi- viduality appears to me in some essential points far from the creation of the poet. It may be that Salvini himself is aware of the fact, only that he thinks that, on the whole, " Hamlet " is written more for reading than for presentation on the stage, and that the tragedian should extract the dramatic essence of the creation, and with due respect leave aside that which can fitly be read in the closet. At any rate the Hamlet which he has given us is arranged and curtailed in a manner which leads to such an inference. It would cover space to point out all the excisions, changes, and substitution of certain sayings for weak equivalents that have been made in the Drury Lane version ; but the players' scene, part of the churchyard scene, the conversation between Rosencrantz, Guilden- stem, and Hamlet which follows the comedy, and all the speeches, bits, and scraps of humour have disappeared. If Signor Salvini has acted on the theory just put forth, some of these excisions are not injudicious ; if he has not, then I can imagine no reason why he should have cut out pieces in which his consummate art could not but have served him to great advantage; and this is sufficient to indicate that, as a whole, his Hamlet cannot have the same perfection as his Othello. In local colour, in comprehension, in the slightest details, that last impersonation, to my mind at least, was complete. In the state in which '* Hamlet " is pre- sented at Drury Lane the same conviction cannot possibly be ex- pressed. But this I am ready to grant, that in his peculiar reading of tlie part he does some of the greatest things ever witnessed on the stage, and that his impersonation, though fisu: less complicated Signor SalvinVs Hamlet. 49 and many-sided than the poet's, is perfectly human and feasible. Signor Salvini has not the juvenile looks of the Prince of Denmark, nor yet the slender frame which in most minds is associated with his personal appearance ; and what is more, it has appeared to me that the tragedian was fully aware of it. Forty is inscribed on his face and frame, and that tall, stately Hamlet looks a man who is far beyond doubts and hesitation about the course he has to follow in the revenge of his father's murder. I wish as much as possible to bear in mind the caution given to critics by the late Sainte Beuve, not to attribute to an author or actor that which they feel themselves in trying to construe his performance; but it appears to me that Salvini, knowing that his appearance was not sufficiently youthful, resolved to give a Hamlet of the age of his looks. In this, curiously enough, he has met with M. Faure, and without going into an account of the resemblance that exists between the versions of the two artists in more respects than one, the fact is worthy of record as illustrating the saying that distinguished minds often meet on the same ground. And with the fine artistic instinct which he possesses Salvini has proceeded to give to the whole impersonation of Hamlet a character in exact keeping with his personal appearance. If this hypothesis be correct, then some of the excisions are explained. Such a Hamlet as Salvini brings before us cannot mock and jeer and be hysterical. Nothing can be less assuming than Salvini's gait when he first appears on the stage. The dark hue of his costume shows off the noble outline of the head and face; he is, above all, one who can love and hate; everything in his deportment indicates that. He betrays the signs of deep, dejected grief: grief at his beloved father's death, grief at his mother's frailty ; at the bottom one sees that he has a lurking presentiment that there must be something wrong in this perversion of natural laws in the marriage of Claudius and the Queen ; and I do not remember having seen any- thing more impressive in its way than the manner in which he receives from Horatio the intelligence that he saw a ghost resembling his father. There is no starting back in exaggerated amazement ; no throwing up of his arms and rolling of his eyes ; he looks steadily at Horatio, then at Marcellus, then at Horatio again ; and then, after an interval of silence, he questions them in a low voice, briefly but pointedly, as cloud after cloud gathers over his countenance. All this is truly fine, and prepares the audience for the admirable power of displaying on the face every shade of pungent emotion which he manifests in the platform scene. The start and cry with which he beholds the anoarition appall, and then, Vol. XV. N.S. £875. a 50 The Gentleman's Magazine. the profound grief which grows upon him more and more as he addresses the ghost and every fond recollection of his father returns to him one by one produces due effect on the house. It is then that the unlikelihood of Signor Salvini's powerful appearance of manhood begins to fade away before the superiority of his acting. He follows the ghost, and when he reappears on another part of the platform it is facing the audience, so that not a movement of his features can escape scrutiny. It may be remembered that Mr. Irving, and most of those who recently preceded him in the assumption of the character in which the majority has found him so satisfactory, keep their backs partly turned towards the house, thus concealing their faces and losing an opportunity of impressive dumbshow. An artist must, it is true, be fully confident in his means to make the attempt, for ridicule would attach to failure. Signor Salvini's acting at this juncture could, I imagine, hardly be surpassed. His despair at actually beholding his father, and yet being unable to rush forth and clasp him in his arms ; the way in which he rubs his eyes and shows as eloquently as dumb expression can do his doubt whether he beholds a real vision, or whether he is not victim of some fantastic fancy of his mind ; his stifled sobs as the apparition relates its tale of murder ; the mixture of desolation, rage, and compassion with which he utters the few words he has to say in this scene ; all this, apart firom the other points of the per- formance, is worth seeing to realise the climax of perfection a dramatic artist can attain. Following his system of suppressing all inconsistencies with his idea of the part, he does not indulge in the assumed hysterical force with which he speaks to the ghost when he invites his com- panions never to reveal what they have seen. Although the Italian version of " Hamlet " also does away with part of the dialogue with Polonius in the second act, still some points are retained to which the tragedian does more than full justice. His manner of con- temptuously turning the pages of his book between forefinger and thumb while, shaking his head, he answers — Parole, poi parole, e poi parole, in reply to Poloniiis's query, was so suggestive as to call forth one of those murmurs of approbation far more flattering to the pride of an artist than loud and boisterous plaudits ; and the same murmur interrupted him in several parts of the famous soliloquy which precedes the scene with Ophelia, particularly when, after uttering for the first time the words — Morir! . . . donnire! , • . • Signor Salvinis Hamlet. 5 1 he gave in the eventual repetition of these words a signification entirely different from the first intonation, speaking the word morir still in a tone of doubt and mental query, and then saying dormire with a tone and gesture of decision as if in his mind the second word was an answer to the first In the following scene with Ophelia the tender- ness of his nature moves him to utter all the bitter gall he pours into the poor girl's ear in a voice broken with emotion, and when he saysi — lo non t*amava his accent belies his words, and you feel that it is duty and fear of some deceit that prompts him to reject a girl he cherished and cherishes still. Signor Salvini, or the translator of Shakespeare, has, however, introduced a new feature in the working of this scene which the artist would do well to discard. It is grating enough to the feelings not only of Englishmen, but of all those who dislike meddling with any work of genius whatsoever, that the text of ** Hamlet " should be so cavalierly curtailed as it is at Drury Lane ; but to make additions is really passing the line by a long step. At the conclusion of Ophelia's response, " My honoured lord, you know right well you did," &c., and just before Hamlet inquires, — .... Are vou honest ? Polonius and the King, who retired as Hamlet entered, make their re- appearance, and listen to the conversation between the distracted prince and Ophelia. Signor Salvini quickly turns round, catches sight of the two eavesdroppers, and his tone, which was at first caressing, changes so soon as the likelihood of a plot in which Ophelia may be acting as an instrument shoots through his brain. This is futile and contrary to Shakespeare's purpose, for why should Polonius after- wards persistently say that Hamlet is " harping on his daughter " when he knows for a fact that Hamlet has rejected her? This looks very much as if Shakespeare were being used as a mere means of showing off a " star," instead of the actor remaining what he ought to be — the faithful realiser of the poet's conception : he who has not the genius to create, but who has that of understanding and giving life to what has been created. Fortunately the superb piece of acting which gives the due measure of Signor halvini's accomplishments makes us forget this blur in an otherwise magnificent performance. The comedy scene is the occasion which gives rise to this display. And yet although at the last words he throws up the MS. of the play which he holds in his hands, and exclaims *' What ! frighted with false fire ? " almost in the face of the King, he does not appear the E 2 52 The Gentleman s Magazine. raving and yelling maniac which actors of inferior cast are so fond of in- troducing to us at this juncture, but keeps his violence within bounds in order not to leave the King under the impression that the coinci- dence of a play that pictured his own crime was due to another cause than hazard ; and when, following a natural impulse of human nature, the tragedian, instead of singing, laughing, and bandying words with his friend, rushed into Horatio's arms, as if the truth was too heavy for one man to bear, the audience sanctioned this interpretation by loud and continued applause. From this period, whatever hesitation the actor might yet have betrayed completely disappears. He knows what remains for him to do, and he seeks only an occasion to do it. In his progress towards the tragical conclusion he is, perhaps, more at ease than in the first portion of the drama, and he gives us some pieces of acting which, differing as they do from each other, seem to indicate inexhaustible sources of versatility and power. The last three points especially worthy of notice in the last acts are the closet scene, his struggle with Laertes over Ophelia's grave, and the final display with the foils, in which he does not depend on the accuracy of his simu- lated swordsmanship for the profound effect he succeeds in producing. In the first of these manifestations his rendering is marked by the peculiarity which is also attached to the dialogue with Ophelia and the climax of the comedy trap. Hamlet's blood does rise at first ; the miserable death of his father, the heartlessness of his mother, her indecent haste to marry her husband's own brother — all these exasperating recollections crowd in his brain, and make him clutch and poise the sword with which he has just slain Polonius as if he were going to commit a second murder. But th^ ghost appears, and the shriek and action of Signor Salvini as the apparition rises send a thrill of terror through the spectators. The ghost's exhortation to spare his mother restores him to the mood of love for his parents which is the dominant feature of his performance. He begs, he entreats his mother to return to sentiments of penitence, takes her in his arms, almost caresses her. Again, in the churchyard he does not follow the common path traced by his predecessors. He says the words Wourt weep ? wouVt fight ? wouPt fast ? wouPt tear thyself? &c. with alternate outbursts of pathos and fierceness; but why the perfectly unjustifiable excision of part of this speech ? There is no possible reason for its omission, for it in no wise contradicts the view which, as I suppose, Signor Salvini has taken of the part. The Signor Salvini s Hamlet. 53 last but not least suggestive piece of acting is in the closing scene of the drama. His demeanour is courteous and princely, his action graceful and dignified ; he is just the man brought up on the steps of a throne, indicating by a gesture, by a look, the distance which royal birth places between him and Laertes. He introduces in his pass of arms with Ophelia's brother an innovation against which there is no reason to protest. Laertes wounds him ; he frowns, puts his hand to his breast, sees blood, and, a consciousness of foul play coming to his head, he attacks his opponent in right earnest and disarms him; before Laertes has had time to pick up his com- bated foil, he sets his foot upon it, hands his foil to his opponent as if in courtesy, and takes possession of the deadly weapon ; and when the murderous work is done he falls on one knee, and expires in an attempt to kiss the forehead of Horatio, his only friend. From beginning to end Signor Salvini's conception of Hamlet is thus ever carried out with strict logic. It is not Shakespeare's creation in its full meaning, but it is an interpretation of it which is quite justifiable ; and if in general aspect it has not the symmetry of Othello, it contains histrionic feats as great, and even greater, than the Italian tragedian displayed in his first impersona- tion. It may be added that the members of the Italian company support their parts satisfactorily, although the men have an unpleasant tendency to imitate their leader's style of acting, thereby in some sort giving a kind of caricature of it when he is off the stage. One last word before concluding. I am loth to speak of a personal question, but my readers will find my excuse in the fact that it lias to do with my criticisms more than with myself. It appears that the appreciation I ventured to write in these pages of the quali- fications of Mr. Irving in Hamlet and of Signor Salvini in Othello has given umbrage to some and offence to others. Being merely the result of an individual opinion — and one which, as I am aware, differs from that of many critics — my judgment of these two artists was hardly worth while refuting ; but some fellow-writers have thought otherwise. I cannot really see, since opinions opposed to mine on the subject do not ofiend me, why mine should offend others, since they spring solely from sincere conviction — not from any prejudice or personal animus. Howbeit, one writer has alleged that the *' Parisian Critic " was neither a Parisian nor a critic. I may be deficient in the qualifications of the latter, but as to the former style, my well-informed critic may take my word for it that I am no more an Englishman than he is a Frenchman. This he might easily have discerned by the imperfection of my English. Another 54 T'/i^ Gentlematis Magazine. writer, in the Saturday Review^ under the heading of " Follies of Criticism," has been good enough to include me among those thought- less and hare-brained judges who deserve castigation for unrighteously castigating others. As, however, I understand that the raison (fitre of the Saturday Review is to express in superfine languae;e dis- satisfaction at most men and things, I may take its abuse as a delicate compliment But the Saturday reviewer takes me to task for what I precisely ought not to be blamed, and I will therefore endeavour to make a few professional suggestions that may be of future use to the author of this not very learned nor very subtle article. I say " not very learned " because the Saturday reviewer commits a blunder which would enable any well read and cultivated Englishman to dilate on the follies of his own criticism ; and I regret for him that the task of pointing it out should devolve on a foreigner. He writes, among other things : " The attack of the * Quarterly y so savage and tartarly,' was a terrible thing to Keats ; but Keats's poetry will live in spite of it" Now, n'en deplaise to the writer who makes this statement, the attack of the Quarterly was nothing of the kind to Keats, and it is surprising that the editor of a journal which plumes itself on literary infallibility should have overlooked an assertion the inaccuracy of which is now notorious. It is true that many who should have known better believed that Keats had been killed by the attack of the Quarterly^ and Byron and Shelley among the number. But if there is one fact esta- blished by Lord Houghton in his biography of Keats, it is that the opinion reproduced by the Saturday Revievt was untrue, and that the poet was more indifferent to adverse criticism than most men would be. This has nothing to do with myself ; but 1 am not sorry to remind a writer who professes not only to be a critic but to sit in judgment upon other critics, that he should at least have known such a fact as this. He says, quoting a phrase of mine to the effect that '* it is suflicient to see the manner in which Salvini bears himself to know that you have before you an actor whom you have less the right to criticise than observe," that " this position will save a great deal of trouble, as possibly in future when one has seen the frame of a picture it will be known that one has a right to look at it, but not to judge its merits." He also finds fault with me for saying of Signor Salvini's Othello that "one cannot say too much of such a performance," and styles what he calls my comparison between Mr. Irving and the Italian actor "absurd." As a matter of fact, I never made any comparison between Mr. Irving and Salvini ; and had the Saturday reviewer trusted for his statement on something more reliable than Signor SalvinVs Hamlet. 55 the mere title of my paper he might have seen that I disclaimed any intention to draw such a parallel. I even said that comparison between the Englishman and the Italian was impossible, because one cannot compare talent to genius. As to the other faults found with my criticism which I have mentioned, I submit, in all humility, that they are sufficiently " absurd '' — the adjective is not mine — to call for no refutation. Indeed, although self-criticism is reputed to be all but impossible, I might have pointed out to my detractor far more telling pretences for attack than he has discovered. I might have suggested to him, for instance, that although I wrote that ** one cannot say too much of Safvini's performance," for reasons of my own I said — in length at least — very little about him ; and further, that it was unreasonable on my part to devote seven pages to one I described as a second-rate actor, while I only gave three to the enumeration of the merits of an artist to whom I attributed genius. It is true that to these criticisms I have ready answers. But perhaps the Saturday reviewer did not condescend to hash me into small pieces. In that case he should not have condescended to make mistakes about facts concerning the literature of his own country, and to write in the tone of high-handed authority and omniscience which is more usual with youths of unripe experience and imperfect education when they begin to write for the public, than with the scholarly contributors of a powerful journal. Apropos of the Paris Salon. BY " SPECTAVI." N VESTING in pictures is a great lottery in France. The standard of taste is capricious, and there is no knowing what fancies those rich and uncultivated foreigners who come to Paris to see life and learn bon ton may take to pictures hardly deserving the space they would occupy in a lumber room. Six years ago Fortuny was scarcely quoted in the returns of the fine art market. A month back the rubbish of his studio fetched almost ;^ 16,000 sterling at the auction mart. His sudden death gave his friends an opportunity to puff him beyond measure, and so the purveyors to Muscovite and Transatlantic e;alleries considered themselves safe in paying ;^3oo sterling for a sketch which would fit into a lady's card case. A reduced copy of a Velasquez went at a higher figure. Those obscure shopkeepers of the Rue Saint-Martin who bought landscapes of Corot because he was a neighbour, and because he sold for what they offered him, unconsciously provided large fortunes for their children. There is nothing like the run on the Royal Academy's Exhibition that there is on the Salon. Fashionable and unfashionable society congregate here, to satisfy the eye's lust, to gossip, and to make speculative ventures. The big square room at the head of the stairs, and the double line of oblong chambers to right and left of it, forming the first floor of the Champs Elys^e side of the Exhibition building, having become insufficient for the pictures and the public, the western wing has been added. And still there are days when, to prevent accidents from overcrowding, it is found necessary to shut the doors of entrance early in the afternoon. At such times painters tell visitors that "le Salon est complet" On Whit Monday 31,745 persons went through the turnstile of the Exhibition building. No register was kept of season-ticket holders, the number of whom may be set down at about 6,000. The total of the works of art entered in the catalogue amounts to 3,862, of which 2,827 ^''^ pictorial. Greece and Italy in their brightest periods of artistic efflorescence would have found it impossible to fill the 650 pages of the ofl&cial catalogue. In one notable feature the Parisian Salon resembles a modern church. On free and paying days bonnets immensely preponderate Apropos of the Paris Salon. 57 over hats. In London, or in an Anglo-American city, this would be accounted for by the business occupations ot the male sex, but in Paris this explanation is insufficient, women there taking more than their share in the work of the counting-house and shop. A reason may be that Art has followed Theology in placing itself under a feminine direction. In latter days it has taken a complexion which corresponds to the Mariolatry of the Catholic and the Ritualism of the Episcopal Church. If journalists now write to catch the ear of the advertising class, painters work to please the women, who have grown up in the nineteenth century to be the great spending power of the world. Revolutionary laws, aided by war and the chapter of accidents to which the male sex is exposed, have placed considerably more than half the real and personal estate of France in female hands. The Anglo-American, from gallantry or uxoriousness, or not knowing what to do with his rapidly acquired wealth, pours it into his wife's lap. She hastens to expend it in Paris millinery, Paris gimcrack chairs and tables, and pictures to keep her inconvenient garish furni- ture in countenance. Her ideal is herself as she appears in the looking- glass fresh from the hands of a hairdresser and milliner it la mode. The taste of the Frenchwoman is truer and more susceptible of high culture. It is associated with keen perceptions and with a latent irreverence for the vain shows and trivialities of the world which are venerated by people of Celto-Saxon origin. The Parisienne takes light things in a light spirit, not making a State affair of the exact spot on which a ribbon should be knotted, or the number of pleats in which the skirt should fall. She likes fashion because she likes change, amusement. Moreover, it gives her the means of varying whatever personal charms she is endowed with, and gratifying the amiable vanity she has in common with the rest of her race. It would be unjust to charge her with an unconscious repugnance to what is original, and an indifference to what is beau- tiful, when it does not present itself sealed with fashion's stamp. The Frenchwoman is not, nor can she ever be, a snob. But she can be a Philistine. When she is not bent on making herself the centre of the artist's universe she is fond of racing after the pretty, and the dainty, to the exclusion of the earnest and the pathetic. Under her impulsion, practical is made to dominate fine art. She is indifferent to the ensemble of the church, provided the niche in which she instals her lares and penates is done out with tinsel and artificial flowers. The pictures she orders must also match the Louis Quinze time-piece, the rococo bric-d-brac of the boudoir dressers, the carved 58 The GentlemarCs Magazine. oak of the library and dining-room. She has the virtue to dislike that Book of Beauty prized by her Anglo-American sister, insipidity. Cabinet paintings intended for the home market have all the qualities which cleverness, spirit, anecdotic wit, a fine perception of the pretty and the picturesque, and technical skill can give. These are easily attained in a land where, if poetic and creative genius is rarer than in Germany and the British islands, talent is scattered broadcast. Beauty, as they conceive it in Paris, does not incur the reproach of being silly and lackadaisical. It is a flower of the in- tellect, the perfection of all that Faust was able to command. But it wants the immortal spark of Divinity which the Marguerite and the Mignon of Ary Scheffer caught. The course of a successful French artist of the present day is seldom one of progress, particularly in the higher branches of his profession. Often healthy at the start, though scarcely ever pro- found, his style becomes attenuated as his prices rise. He studies little, and he works incessantly for a frivolous public which does not often know its own mind from one day to another and may at any moment desert him to run after a fresh favourite. A few artists ot humble origin who found greater enjoyment in saving money than in making rapid fortunes have been exceptions. Courbet, Millet, Baudry, and Corot sought after the righteousness of the genuine artist's Heaven. In the end the things for which the less ideal- minded strove were added to them along ^ith fame that is certain to endure. Bonnat may be set down in this category who elect for truth. He is a naturalist, which is not to be confounded with a realist. The realist is like the greyhound in the German story, that laughed at a slow hound for believing in a hare that neither of them could see but which was lying concealed in a thicket hard by. Baudry had the good fortune to be placed above temptation at the beginning of his career. He secured, in his engagement to paint the ceiling of the New Opera House saloon, a wide field for the exercise of his talents before he had an opportunity to work for the export trade. But for this task the great and merited success of **The Pearl and the Wave" might have drawn him into the path followed by Cabanel and Lebfevre. As a lounge there is no more charming place than the Salon in any city that I know. The approach whets the appetite for the pictorial banquet. It is through a vast continuity of shade and* garden which, in the month of May, are in the soft green robe of early summer, yet unsullied by coal smut or dust In the pleasure- Apropos of the Paris Salon. 59 grounds near the Exhibition rise houses which a stranger might take for private villas. They are set in green verandahs, fronted with a thick hedge or screen of roses that bloom early. These fair man- sions are restaurants. Ledoyen's, the nearest to the Salon, keeps up the reputation French cookery earned before Paris grew into cosmopolis. Here congregates the swelldom of the whole city at the noontide dejeiiner, which is served d la carte on little tables among the roses, or in those pretty pokey places dear to Parisians which go by the name of cabinets particuliers. The viands are exquisite, but the bills are raking. Still, Ledoyen's is a place a tourist ought to see if he can at all afford it. With a companion acquainted with the strangely variegated society of the French capital, he could learn a great deal in an hour passed at Ledoyen's, which is, in May and June, a kind of fine art exchange. The entrance to the Palais de ITndustrie was meant to be im- posing. It is only pretentious. The conception is in the spirit of an age which is pre-eminently mercantile. One feels, in passing under the portal, that it leads to a picture fair. On entering this Haile aux Arts there is a pleasant sense of coolness and of elbow room. Arcades of white freestone, rising from the soft sanded floor to what appears half their natural height, encase the stairs and support the landing-place and lobby. Arras tapestries, from the Garde Meuble or Government Pantechnicon where the furniture of palaces is stored, are hung on the walls, and are out of tune with the prosy architecture and the crude new things about. They keep company with the pale, flat, weakly designed pictures of Paris de Chavannes, of the family of a fisherman in the pre- historic time, and Sl Radagunda protecting in her convent learned men against the barbarism of the sixth century. These works were ordered by the Marquis de Chennevi^res, the head of the Fine Art Department, for the Town Hall of Poitiers. We have frescoes in our Houses of Parliament worthy of being their vis-d-vis, A circular ottoman of hospitable dimensions stands in the centre of the lobby, enabling the visitor to enjoy a little fresh air and quietly watch the ascent into the show-rooms of a motley public — foreign, French, and Frenchified. Miniatures and enamelled porcelain in glazed cases court the attention which few pay them in the lobby. Visitors at once proceed to the square saloon at the head of the stairs. It used to be named "le Salon d'Honneur" pre- vious to the last Revolution, and was dedicated to the Court and Camp of the Third Napoleon and episodes in the history of the imperial family. Yards upon yards of canvas covered 6o The Gentleman s Magazine. with battle-pieces in the Versailles style and feeling were annually spread upon its walls. Pils and Yvon illustrated for provincial town halls and museums the military glories of the Empire. Red was then the prevailing colour of the square room : the crimson tide of war, which the painters spared not — red pantaloons, red kepis, red conflagrations, red robes of judges favourably noted at Court, and red- curtained backgrounds to official pictures — dazed the eye at the very outset. A soberly-coloured picture in this scarlet charivari looked pitch dark. Flandrin, in painting a full-length portrait of the Emperor and another of Prince Napoleon, richly meriting the admiration of thoughtful connoisseurs, took into account the violent tone of the pictures he knew would surround them. He introduced into the former the madder red pantaloons of a general of division's uniform, and into the other a crimson velvet fauteuil. Since the disasters of 1870 military paintings have diminished in size, but multiplied in number. They have furthermore ceased to absorb much vermilion. Consequent upon, the captivity of the regular army there are neither red kepis nor trousers in the engage- ments furnishing MM. Beaumetz, Berne-Bellecourt, Neuville, Decaen, Duvaux, Coutourier, Guignard, Jourdain, and Jacquet with their subjects. Their heroes are mobiles, franc-tireurs, marines incorporated into the land forces, and Pontifical Zouaves, dressed in light grey, dark grey, sailor's blue, and sky blue, with red sparingly used in the facings. The winter of the terrible year was long and hard. The sinister Aurora Borealis of October, visible in nearly every part of France, was followed by frost and snow, which only disappeared when the capitulation of Paris was signed. The whitened landscape and dark masses of troops are a picturesque novelty in battle- pieces. I hardly like applying the word novel to things harrowing to a feeling mind. And, treated in a becoming spirit, inexpressibly sad are those little paintings. That snow one might imagine to be the winding-sheet of France, and the raw but gallant irregulars chief mourners engaged in defending the dear remains from the rapacious double-headed Prussian eagle. Ihe advanced guard on the plateau d'Avron is poignant The retreat of the Army of Paris from the Marne, in the blinding sleet, though treated with realistic accuracy, is alniost spectral. Antiquity has not left us any more appalling symbol of Nemesis than is revealed in Guignard's Uhlans flying from franc- tireurs. The horses — of tough Brandenburg mettle — rush down hill, a road overhung by a coppice. One of the Uhlans holds the bridle of his comrade — who has been shot and is falling from his saddle — with one hand, and his own with the other. He bends forward, Apropos of the Paris Salon. 6 1 placing his fiure on a level with the holster of the saddle. The white and black pennons of the lances are violently blown by a cutting wind, and the shadows of the avengers are projected on the road behind. More is meant than meets the eye. The terrified Uhlan's countenance is borrowed from photographs of the Emperor of Germany. This is how, the artist insinuates, Pious William ought to look when called upon to meet the King of Terrors. Progress is unquestionable in the military branch. An artist can no more work well without a genuine sentiment than an American afler- dinner orator can speak. The deeper it is the better. Judging from the spirited little battle-pieces scattered through the twoand-twenty rooms, and the gleams of the pathos which humanises and poetises them, I should say the authors were powerfully moved themselves. Before they made the patriotic chord vibrate in others, it was swept in their own breasts. One of the awful features of the Campaign of 1870 was the invisibleness of the foe. La furia Francese spent itself in dashing at crenelated walls, and in execrating an intangible enemy, from which it was barred oflf by the long ranged rifles and artillery of Prussia. The despair, the impotent rage, the nervous appre- hension, the sullen resignation following on a great expenditure of furious energy thus caused to the young troops, rivet the attention and take a hard grip on the memory. Berne-Bellecourt, Neuville, and the other members of their school whom I have named, are young men and served in the winter campaign of 1870. Noting d^v/sn the effect of the far-reaching needle-gun on their comrades, they rendered it with vi^jour and emotion. I do not agree in thinking that they forbore to give prominence to the enemy from a fear of being excluded from the Salon, or of being ihe cause of an unpleasant diplomatic incident. The Prussians being merely indicated by puffs of distant smoke is due to a sincere reproduction of personal impressions. Once only in the episodes of the war are the French and their invaders brought into personal contact. This happens in M. Neuville's ** Surprise in the environs of Metz, August, 1870," where the heavy, loose-built wearers of the spiked helmets are taken red handed pillaging a chateau. The horrible, the heroic, the humorous, and the pathetic are brought into play in this stirring picture. .■\t the head of what I may be allowed to call the advertisement pictures I shall place the two in the square saloon. One of them niheres to the traditions of the room in being official. Betselifere, a native of the Lower Pyrenees, and probably a friend of M. Chesne- long, the bacon merchant of Orthez, and unfortunate negotiator of the Fusion, is the painter of **En Avant." Marshal MacMahon is 62 The Gentleman s Magazine. charging an invisible but proximate enemy, over his own people, and surrounded by a horde of liners, Zouaves, and dragoons intent on giving him an ovation on the field of battle. " The rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air" light him on. The other big advertisement is signed by George Becker, a young man, shy, mild, and studious, who has heretofore addicted himself to idylls. He sent in this horror not to please himself but to force upon the world the knowledge that he, George Becker, is in existence and has a studio in the Rue Fleurus. The subject of his startling pictorial melodrama is Rizpah chasing the birds from the seven corpses of Saul's sons and grandsons, whom David had delivered over to the Gibeonites to be hanged. M. Becker has a kindness for pretenders. Recoiling from the physical degradation of the gallows, he attaches the princes by the hands to a monster cross until they die. They would be well favoured youths if it wer^ not for a uniformly tawny hue, the colour of a new portmanteau. Rizpah, whose sackcloth bed does not appear, is in gorgeous Asiatic raiment and a forced attitude, driving away with a short stick a vulture. Her action is absurdly stagey, and her likeness to Mademoiselle Agar remarkable. M. James Bertrand*s boy trying to weigh himself in a pair of scales held in his own hands, and Jules Lebfevre's "Dream of Ossian" b,elong to the advertising category. Both meet with the attention which they challenge. " Ossian's Dream " is a blonde nudity, dissolving with the mists of morning. She rises from the nenuphars of a calm lake, and half sits, half reclines on the cloudy emanation from the water. Her attitude is graceful. A lurking smile, and the pose of rose-tipped fingers on which a purely modelled cheek rests, betray the Sweet Dream's consciousness of the admiration she excites. Eerie folk alone are qualified to deal with the supernatural, of which revelations are hardly ever vouchsafed to Frenchmen. Were the inventor of the fragrant floriline in need of a painter as well as a poet he could not do better than engage M. Jules Lebfevre. " Ossian's * flimsy ' Dream " is an example of what comes of working for the export trade. The pencil from which it sprung produced a nude figure in 1867 that would not have been out of place amid the splendid memorials of sixteenth century womanhood in the col- lection of the Pitti Palace. Artemus Ward advised parents never to teach their children music unless they had a special call from the Lord. Painters should con» suit their call in choosing the branch they are to follow. They do best what they like best Degofl*es has a mania for bric-d-brac, Madame Louise Dami, who sends in the peasant's bouquet, loves Apropos of the Paris Salon, 63 grapes and wild flowers ; Hanoteau is fond of ponds and their denizens. His brash caresses ducks and ducklings, and any one who has seen his frogs round a reedy pool will feel a kindness he never before experienced for the leatracian family, so martyrised by vivisectors. Anker's affinities are with the quiet virtues ignored by the world which make nations great and long lived. His old Huguenot is an unconscious hero. The simple maiden reading the Bible at his bedside is, unknown to herself, a household jewel, sweet, strong, modest, and of ready sympathies. Anker was born at Anet, in Switzerland. Can he be a kinsman of Rousseau ? There are passages in his works bearing a family likeness to sketches of homely country life in the correspondence of Jean Jacques. Couturier is faithful to his chubby girls entering their teens. " Dodo, Tenfant do," and " La Petite Maman" have the same heroine. Little Mama patiently rocks in a child's cradle a doll with pro- vokingly staring eyes. Advancing a few years in life she learns to babble with her canary-bird. Birdie cocks his eye, as well he may. He has a rival peeping in at the lattice. There is more refinement in De Coninke's " Pastorella." Why does not the Society for the Pro- tection of Animals try to work more through the artist and less through the policeman? The French are more ready than the English to admit the claims of bird and beast to human sympathy. I admit that we are kinder to our horses, and I should, on the whole, if I were condemned to walk the earth in the form of a sheep, prefer being an English Southdown to a French Merino given over to the guardianship of those four-footed policemen yclept shepherds' dogs. But France is the paradise of the cat and the domesticated soDg-bird. Look at M. Lambert's basketful of kittens in " L'Envoi," and De Coninke's "Amie des Petites Oiseaux," and his Italian peasant child, la Pastorella, and her frolicsome, loving kids. In Leclaire's " September" we have Snap, a paragon of canine virtues. Snap is a pointer. He has been left in charge of a parcel of game and a fowling-piece. His master warned him not to stir from them till he returned. As if on purpose, a brilliant martin fisher comes flying over the swamp where Snap keeps guard. Instinct is strong, but a sense of duty is set off against it. The struggle between loyalty to the master and a pointer's impulses, to which education has given additional force, is beautifully brought out Snap is too good and noble to be flung a bone as a reward. To be called good dog, and patted on the back, will satisfy his ambition. It behoves Jadin not to sleep upon his laurels. Are his Scotch and black and tan terriers really in the land of the living, or the stuffed skins of defunct animals? Dalnoy's rabbit warren is, I take it, 64 The Gentleman s Magazine. somewhere in the forest of Compibgne. The rabbits have got up betimes, and are enjoying an early breakfast of wild thyme and the freshness of early morning. In their natural state the brute creation are only asked to pay the tax of death. When they are domesticated other imposts are exacted. Otho Thoren, of Vienna, in his "Separation," feelingly pleads for a cow which a peasant is cutting off from maternal intercourse with staggering Bob, her calf. In DuDont*s **Un Bout de Conduite" we have the disaster which befell a dancing bear and a party of strolling players on a day in January. Their license was not quite regular, and so a couple of mounted gendarmes obliged them to trudge in the snow to a prison three leagues off from the village where they were to sup and per- form their antics. Bruin is a member of the wretched troupe own- ing him, and, unhappily for him, one of the gendarmes, recognising this status, holds him jointly accountable for the flaw in the license. Garnier's " Execution " makes a pig the centre of a mediaeval solemnity. " In the middle ages,^' says Lalanne, " the tribunals pro- ceeded with rigour against those animals guilty of murder upon which they could lay their hands. They tried, condemned, and brought them to judgment absolutely as if they were human beings. And thus they did unto a sow, accused and convicted of having eaten a child." The porcine convict is at the foot of a gallows, with the hangman in scarlet dress. A priest is in attendance, not to shrive, but to exorcise. The clergy of the town and the members of the tribunal are accommodated with seats in front of the town hall. The Seigneur, his family and retainers, and the townspeople in fourteenth century dresses and holiday humour, have come to see the sow, who has clearly misgivings of what is going to happen, gibbetted. She belonged to the monks of St. Anthony, who exerted themselves to prove that she only committed justifiable homicide. Doctors, judges, and the secular clergy were divided as to whether the plea should be admitted. But the burghers took the bereaved parents' com- plaint breast high. Moral order was for the sow. Advanced opinions were against her. The triumph of the popular side appears in the very speaking faces of some groups in the foreground, joyous in the consciousness of victory and at the holiday. Archaeological details are carefully attended to by M. Gamier, who is a pupil of Jerome, but of the free humour and facile brush of Krause. Didier's long-horned oxen of the Campagna bring us to the landscape department. The Salon is strong in this branch of art. Ddv^ learned how to use his pencil in Flers' studio and his eyes in the wooded hills and fair vales of fertile Normandy. He has often Apropos of the Parts Salon. 65 laid down in the heather and looked up at the deep blue sky through the foliage of oak and birch. If he knows how to keep himself un- spotted from the world of Philistia a great feature is before him. I often wonder Philanthropy never sends to city hospitals landscapes giving out a country aroma. D^v^'s would give a fillip to a whole ward of consumptive seamstresses. We do not get well on beef tea and arrowroot only, and the invalid's brain cannot take in as much tract literature as good people fancy. But it can digest a rural scene which transports us in imagination far away from the smoke and din, the hurry, fever, and turmoil of the factory. The French have eschewed the conventional and sensational style of landscape. Novel and startling effects are not in favour in the atdiers. Before railways they followed Salvator Rosa and Poussin, and sought to render those sites which command the attention and admiration of the tourist Precipices and mountain scenes are no longer in favour. I think the artists and the public right in preferring what tranquillises and seduces to what violently excites the imagina- tion. However imposing the sites presented by Alpine districts, they do not present to the painter the advantage the uninitiated may fancy over lowlands with extended horizons. The play of light and the effects of atmospheric perspective are of greater value in the plains, which also taking more easily the fleeting impress of the cloud's gentle sinuosities, lead quietly from pleasure to pleasure, like a gracious woman indifferent to admiration but solicitous of securing lasting friends. The artist who charms is superior to him who ambitiously aims at heaping Pelion upon Ossa and succeeds in accomplishing this prodigy. It is curious to note how few great landscape painters have come from the Scotch or Welsh mountains, the Alps or Pyrenees, or the sublimely savage coast of Norway. The dells and denes of Kent and Surrey and the river banks round London and Paris have, on the contrary, been a rich source of inspiration. M. Emile Michel, a native of Metz and a pupil of Marechal and Migette, makes a promising debiit in his three souvenirs of his native Lorraine. One is a heath near Bitch, the second a frost- bound river at the foot of a scrubby coppice, and the third the birthplace of the River Nieder, which has for its cradle a natural basin in a stag and grouse haunted forest If D6\6 follows the skylark into the depths of the blue firmament, Michel lovingly culls flowers in the Valley of Humiliation. He is very happy in grapes, ferns, and cuckoo-sorrel. Caesar de Cock repeats himself in his old mill in Normandy. He has been at the same thing time out Vol. XV., N.S. 1875. v t 66 The Gentleman s Magazine. of mind, and each Salon with a new success. People investing, from vanity, fortunes in his landscapes would not think they had their money's worth if he went into another groove. Contemporary painters are doubly tempted to become narrow specialists. Their work grows easier, production is more rapid, and their patrons. Brown, Jones, and Bloodgett, from Manchester and New York, having no doubts as to the authenticity of the pictures offered them, pay freely. Wyld finds it profitable never to stir from Venice ; Guillemin will pass his life on the quays of Paris ; Karl Daubigny is condemned to be heavy-handed. Were he to cultivate a lighter touch he might be taken for a Claimant, and be relegated to the purgatory of poverty-stricken geniuses. Xavier de Cock is only at home in the rich sylvan scenery of Belgium, where nature has a fine broad breast. Appian is v/ell master of his hand this year. He betakes himself to the Mediterranean, and gives views of the coast taken from the sea. The Dutch and Belgians distance the French in marine views and in people who make their living out of the ocean. Clays, Van Hier, and Cogen are first in this line. The shrimp-gatherers of the latter flying from a heavy sea, and the women and children of a fishing village watching on a sloppy wooden pier the day after a storm for their husbands' yawls in the offing, tell well their story. Two Belgian painters, Weertz and Wauters, carry off second-class medals. Brabant from time immemorial has been the elysium of mad people. In 1482, when the painter Vander- goes retired to Rouge Cloitre, he went out of his mind. A leech recommended sweet music and amusing spectacles as a remedy. Wauters shows the first experiment in a composition of great simplicity. He places Vandergoes sitting in an oak stall, a prey to insane frenzy, as the central figure. Near him, on the left, choral children, directed by a monk and accompanied by lute-players, sing a melody. The prior, seated to the right on a three-legged wooden stool, , watches the face of the crazy painter to see how the cure works. In the background three lay brothers pray for the un- fortunate painter. Here all things are used gently. We find nothing forced or exaggerated. We are soothed in contemplating this picture. The tradition is that Vandergoes recovered in his monastic Gheel. Goupirs "En 1795" wins the first medal. It is the full-length portrait of a lady dressed firom head to foot in brown. She is young and pretty, with an amusingly old-fashioned expression of coun- tenance, accentuated by the costume of the Directory she wears. In the matter of " En 1795 " being designed to force attention, it is an # Apropos of the Paris Salon. 67 " advertising picture," which, perhaps, also, is the already famous portrait of Madame Pasca. The portrait is the touchstone of a painter's capacity. No amount of technical skill or mastery of his hand will enable him to turn out a chef (Txuvre^ if he have not the gift of divining spirits. He must penetrate the mask which the frankest of us, from modesty or necessity, is obliged to wear, and which probably nobody has ever entirely re- moved, even in the presence of the confessor. If it were not so the Salon would abound in perfect works, the honours of which the photographer ought in justice to share. The enormous rise in the picture market has brought out a new school of portraitists who say to a sitter, " Monsieur,'* or " Madame, I have literally not a moment to call my own. The sole condition on which I can undertake your order is your getting yourself photographed by L , who keeps a laur^at of the tine Arts Academy to poser customers I send. • He will transfer your carte to a canvas of the size you desire. If I can possibly make time I shall ask you to favour me with one or two sittings. Send me the dress you wish to wear. If you choose, a lady artist whom I can recommend will for a fee of three hundred francs aid you with her advice, and help you choose it and the coiffure. Worth has a manufacturer who, if you give him the measure of your corset, will supply a gutta-percha lay figure, mounted on joints, with all the pulpiness and suppleness of the real thing." This division of labour is excellent for trade. If the painter has the science of the chiffon — that is to say, if he has that art for arranging and showing off silks and satins which the Paris silk mercers possess in so remarkable a degree, and reproduces exactly the trimmings the lady artist recommends, he may, if he wears a decoration, ask from 30,000 f. to 40,000 f. for a portrait. And why should he not? Worth takes 10,000 f for a ball dress which will be hacked out in a few nights. This method explains the great multi- plication of clever, middling, and bad portraits. Some done by first- rate hands according to the old slow-coach system are not better than the best of those photographs enlarged, transferred to canvas, and coloured in oils. Jules Delaunay's " Dame en Jaune," Leb- fevre's " Princesse C ," a full-length in black velvet and blue satin, mellowed with cascades of yellowish point lace, and Carolus Duran's lady in black silk and a jet tunic, are merely valuable for their clothes. But what else can be expected ? A painter can never work con amore at a fashionable woman who has nothing but fashion to recommend her. It has been noticed that the portraits of men and plain women no longer young are best this year. The reason F 2 68 The Gentlemati s Magazine. is, they have more character, and of a higher kind, than light-brained beauty, which is easily drawn and strongly tempted to run after what is ephemeral. You wish to know Henner's Madame H , and this wish grows stronger every time you see her. Dubufe's strong- faced, brown-eyed Madame B , who leans with her arms crossed and looks you full in the face, is an example of how the intellect and feelings can transform an originally ugly face. The portraits which command applause inculcate the moral that " Pretty is that pretty does," if not at the start, in the long run. Madame Pasca is queen, by right of self-culture, of the Salon. She is given full- length, in a white sweeping robe. A border of sable fur the colour of her dark heavy braids of hair, which are coiled round her head, garnishes the corsage, crosses the breast, runs down the front of the skirt, and follows the edge of the ample skirt. The sleeve presented is long and wide, cut open from the shoulder, displaying a strong but finely-formed arm and hand. The left hand rests upon a slender gilded chair, half hidden by the lady. What is so remarkable in this portrait, apart from the modelling, is the im- pression it gives of energy held in reserve. Madame Pasca is not handsome, but she has the gift of fascination, and will improve with time. Critics object to the uncertainty in which we are left as to the tissue of her white dress. Is it cashmere, silk, satin, or velvet ? Voltaire, a very superficial judge in matters of art, and whose eye was made to the charming Court realisms of Boucher and Watteau, broke out at Raphael because nobody could say in what sort of stuff he dressed his Madonnas. Raphael was one who never exactly saw how a woman he admired was dressed. He gave ihe impression she produced on him^ and left the scanning of her clothes to her rivals. The princesses whom he did not care about he clad in unmistakable satin and velvet. Should Bonnat*s oversight lead to a reaction against pictorial millinery we shall have reason to congratulate him on not having noticed whether Madame Pasca wore a llama or a satin dress. Becoming garments are not to be despised ; but are they becoming when they reduce the wearer to the subordinate status of a lay figure? Claude's ladies on horseback, so flexile, so well poised and well proportioned — so straight about the waist, as old Mazy would say — are an example to civilised belles, and a convincing demonstration of the needlessness of over-dress. Out of the Chalk. BY "RED SPINNER." |H£ Wandle and the Darent both rise in the chalk downs on the border land of Surrey and Kent : the former to run its short course of ten miles to the Thames at Wandsworth, the latter to run much in the same fashion through Kent to the Thames at Dartford. Both are trout streams of the first quality ; both are most difficult to fish, more difficult, perhaps, than the limpid Itchen, of whose tantalising eccentricities in the matter of fish I feelingly wrote in the May number of this magazine. The Wandle has probably excited more hopes and caused more disappointments in the heart of the angler than any other stream that could be mentioned. Standing upon any of the bridges that over- look the private grounds at Carshalton and Mitcham, large fish may be discerned by the score. They make no effort to conceal them- selves for more than a moment at a time, and if, through some bolder attempt than usual to scare them from the clean bedded runlet which they have selected for the poising of their plump bodies and the graceful waving of their orange fins, they dart for a moment to the shady bowers of a neighbouring waterweed, they return again even before the pretty ranunculus blossoms have ceased to wave to and fro, brushed rudely aside by the vigorous intruder. In deeps and in shallows, in the open streams, and between shelves of aquatic vegeta- tion, close to the rushes and flowers of the margin, or in the centre of the broadest portions of the river, what matters it ? the con- centric rings are everywhere to be seen, first as specks, then as gradually enlarging circles to which the banks are the only limit Let us suppose — and I know of many worthy gentlemen who would be delighted if I could apply my supposition to them as a reality — that you behold this inspiriting sight as one who has a personal interest in it : as, let us say, the general, who rides out of camp to the eminence trom which he watches the gathering of the foe until, hemmed round as he fondly believes on every hand, he joyfully returns to quarters exclaiming that, his enemies being delivered into his hands, nothing more remains than to arise and smite them hip and thigh with great slaughter. So the angler, full of confidence as man 70 The Gentlematis Magazine. can be, waits eagerly for the morrow, and hies to the Wandle. Yes ; there lie the trout with scarcely an altered position. The big fellow that you are prepared to bet is of two pounds weight still keeps the eddy which commands the finest position — for him — ^in the river, the position towards which the sftream, without any interference or coaxing of his, will bring food, substantial and luxurious, into his mouth. There, too, lie the smaller fish on the alert for whatever Providence will send them. Putting the joints of your rod together, you fear that the creel will scarcely hold the trout you are certain to slay : you affix your winch, and, while you pass the line through the rings, generously distribute your finest fish — a brace to this lady, two brace to that gentleman, and so on. As you unwind the cast fi-om your hat and fasten it neatly to the line you have the flush of victory on your noble brow. And you deliver your first cast. Hem ! But the link, of course, requires preliminary moistening, and the hand a little practice, before it will fall with that delicacy and precision essential to si;ccessful fly-fishing. Therefore you try again ; once more ; again ; seven times, aye and seventy times seven; but the adult trout in the eddy winks at you, if that stately wave of the tail is the way in which fish wink, and never turns aside at the tempter. Do your best by all means, but you by-and-by begin to suspect that a smaller creel would have answered just as well, and that the lovely Mrs. R. and the hospitable Mr. K. will have no need to write and thank you for those delicious trout. Ask any Wandle fisherman whether this is not a fair picture of his earlier experiences by that delightful Surrey stream. It, alas ! too often by half tells the story of visits to other rivers ; but it has a peculiar application to the Wandle, until you know the mental and moral character of its trout. Roughly speaking, the Wandle has its origin near Croydon. So much you may learn from any geography book that condescends to notice so juvenile a member ot the world's river family ; perhaps the last paragraph, as a sort ot afterthought, after the manner of severely abbreviated treatises, will let you into the secret that "this river was anciently called the Vandle*' ; as I daresay it was. As to its precise origin, I should not like to be bound to place my foot upon the exact spot, not so much because a boot-full of water is a thing to be as a rule avoided, as because there are several springs which might claim the honour. From the heights from which an enemy might shell Croydon with terrible effect there issue many crystal springs, which forthwith, without shaking hands with each other, or in any way exchanging the time of day, proceed to hurry downwards until they approach a Out of the Chalk. 7 1 spot where a long while ago there stood the palace of their graces the Archbishops of Canterbury. In presence of so solemn a spot the rivulets become conscience-stricken, embrace each other, and, united, form for ever after the Wandle, with such additions as they gratefully receive from a branch rising at Waddon, and another that joins fortunes at Shepley House. A very useful stream is the Wandle, and an object of beauty everywhere, at least above the point to which the turbid Thames sends its daily tides, with shoals of coarse-minded roach and dace that go up with it to hanker after companionship with the troiit in the upper Belgravian regions, to which, however, they luckily do not succeed in penetrating. The Wandle grinds immense quantities of flour; it has an intimate and valuable connection with the snuff trade ; paper, rough and smooth, is manufactured by Wandle- tumed machinery. There are works of a very miscellaneous kind, in short, along the little river, and some of the mills are most picturesque additions to the beautiful park scenery through which it flows. Not having editorial permission to write four octavo volumes upon this subject it will be incumbent upon me to deal briefly with the historical associations of the Wandle. Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth is supposed to have ascended its channel at various times in her state barge, and until very recently there was a venerable tree known from time immemorial as Queen Elizabeth's Oak ; but a local board happened to pass that way, and the revered patriarch was lopped, felled, and carted to a Croydon sawpit. The Queen used to love the neighbourhood of Mitcham. Sir Walter Raleigh dwelt there in some of his calmest days before the shadow of adversity crept over his bright life. Dr. Donne lived at Mitcham too, and Dr. Donne was said by Dryden, who probably was not an indifferent authority upon such a point, to be " the greatest wit, though not the greatest poet, of our nation." It was better anyhow to live at Mitcham, where he could teach the trout a little piscatorial theology, than to take leave of his head in the Tower, as he very narrowly escaped doing for privately marrying the lieutenant's daughter. This, how- ever, it should be said, was soon after he became a " vert," and while he was private secretary to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, a period of the witty man's life not to be confounded with the days when, becoming suddenly famous as a preacher, he had fourteen livings offered him in one fell batch. Sir Humphrey Davy intimates that Dr. Paley, the gentleman dear to students of theology, did something with the Wandle trout, and states that the piofound 7 2 The Gentleman! s Magazine. divine was so thorough an angler that when the Bishop of Durham asked him when one of his most important works would be ready for an expectant public, he replied, " My lord, I shall work steadily at it when the fly-fishing season is over!^ Admiral Viscount Nelson lived at Merton, and was a fly-fisher in the Wandle, even after he was reduced to one hand. The great hero fished in more troubled waters sometimes than **the blue transparent Vandalis,'* as Pope loftily puts it. And referring to the author of " Salmonia,'' it will no doubt be remembered that the four gentlemen who are made to interpret the author's ideas upon angling opened their discourse, or to use the correct description "Introductory Conversation — Sympo- siac," with a fine-flavoured Wandle trout on the table around which they sat. The Wandle country (valley we can scarcely term its course) is sur- passingly charming. Beddington Park is open to the public with its rare trees, fine church and churchyard, and the red brick building which, once famed as Beddington Hall, is now used as a Female Orphan Asylum. Queen Elizabeth was a visitor to the Carews at Beddington, where the first oranges ever grown in the country — the fniit having been brought hither by Sir Walter Raleigh — were to be seen. Poor Lady Raleigh in the later days of gloom and death wrote to Sir N. Throckmorton, asking that " the worthi boddi of my nobell hosbar Sur Walter Ralegh " might be buried in Beddington Church. The church, whose tower is seen peeping above the grand tree-tops, is a restored building, but some of the venerable trees around the churchyard must have weathered centuries of storm and sunshine. A large, perhaps the major, portion of the Wandle country is enclosed with park palings and high walls. It is a country that teems with villas and "desirable residences"; with highly cultivated grounds which an ordinary pedestrian would find it as difficult to enter as Parlia- ment (perhaps as things go he would find it much more difficult), while an angler would risk instantaneous cremation if he dared to look through the hedge. It is, of course, very natural that when a gentleman has spent money and time in beautifying his country resi- dence he should wish to keep it to himself; and equally natural that the owner of a well-stocked trout river should not insult his fish by allowing every pot-hunter to thin them out. There is to my knowledge one bit of free water on the Wandle, and one only, namely, the ford at Hackbridge. The space at the angler's disposal is not vast, and there are inconveniences natural to the position ; small boys claim a share in the fisherman's privileges, and lessen his chances of sport by their clumsiness, and still oftener Out of the Chalk. 7 3 by their deliberate attempts to disturb the water ; and al) the waggon and cart drivers who journey that way make it a point of honour to drive through the stream rather than keep to the high road. This they have a perfect right to do, and the legs of the horses, it is true, receive no injury from a temporary lave. As a lesson of patience, I never saw a finer trial of temper than came under my notice while lolling over Hackbridge, observing the trout, especially the beauties rising and frolicking in the upper and forbidden part. A gentleman, who had been drawn all the way from London by the rumours he had heard of the trout to be caught in the Wandle, was most skilfully whipping the ford. The water rushes in the finest style from beneath the bridge, where it escapes in force from an obstruction on the private side, and there were three or four trout, as one would expect, on the look out for a meal. An idle urchin, however, took it into his head to perch upon one of the parapets directly above and swish the stream with a heavily-leaded line, to which I discovered (having nothing better to do than interfere with other people's business) he had no hook attached. As in duty bound I promptly informed the angler that the young scoundrel was not even pretending to fish, and the latter was requested to desist He refused, and was threatened with switching ; in reply to which he insolently laid down the law to the angler, discussed general principles of " right," and defied the aggrieved fisherman on pain of the " perlice " to lift hand against him. The gentleman, seeing the manner of creature the boy was, turned to the lower part of the ford, and by a series of artistic casts managed to throw the fly at least fifteen yards down the stream. By this change of policy he got amongst the trout, and killed three, averaging perhaps half a poimd, in the course of the two hours during which I was a silent observer. The boy, as I was leaving, returned with four others worse than himself and a hideous-looking stableman, and commenced aggressive action by shying pebbles and volleys of dry peas into the water. I should hope for the sake of the free fishers who take advantage of these few yards of open ford that this annoyance does not often occur, for I have been told many enthusiasts walk a dozen miles in order to be at the spot by daylight Driving over the bridge more recently, I saw some very good fish rising within the compass of a long downward cast. The Wandle trout require the tiniest of flies and the finest of tackle. With these and with the utmost skill you seldom obtain much sport during the daytime. It is an error to suppose, as I have repeatedly been informed, that the river is never discoloured. The 74 The Gentleman s Magazine, water flows from the chalk strata, and receives but little addition from immediate rainfalls ; but drains and gutters communicating with the roads cannot fail to bring down a certain amount of discolouring matter, and at times, soon after heavy showers, the water becomes foul. But near its sources to an extraordinary extent it speedily resumes its normal clearness. Mr. Alfred Smee, to whose efforts in fish culture I shall refer presently, in his delightful book entitled " My Garden " says : ** The Wandle taken as a whole is the perfection of a river ; its water is as bright as crystal, and is purity itself. It does not overflow with rain, nor is it deficient in dry weather. It does not freeze in winter, nor does it become very hot in summer. It has existed through all historic times ; and as long as the chalk retains its porosity and is protected by a bed of clay underneath and a bed of blue clay on that portion of its upper surface which is most depressed, and as long as rain falls upon the more elevated portion, so long will the water continue to ooze from the earth by day and by night, by summer and by winter, and to run its course as the River Wandle, and it may thus exclaim in the words of the poet : — Men may come, and men may go, but I go on for ever." The inherent clearness of the river is doubtless one reason why the Wandle trout have a reputation among anglers for most un- christianlike obstinacy and immoral shrewdness. Another cause is the exceeding smallness of the flies which haunt the river; after dark you may venture upon moths and hackles of fair dimensions, but so long as daylight glints on the stream, midge-sized flies, and those only, must be used. To imitate these tiny insects is not so difficult as to employ the artificial imitation with effect after the fly-maker has constructed a perfect specimen. There is, I believe, a special kind of fly manufactured for the Wandle, and a neater article could not be conceived. The most commonly used varieties are a red spinner, a quill gnat with red hackle, a governor, a coachman, and a blue floating fly which you may term either an upright or a dun; but whichever description is used it must be considerably smaller than a young housefly. Having induced your trout to rise at one of these specks, you are confronted with the problem how to land a lusty fellow of over a pound in weight with tackle thinner than single hair and a hook which under the most favour- able circumstances cannot be imbedded much more than the sixteenth of an inch in his mouth. The Wandle trout are fond of merrily leaping out of the water when they feel the barb, and if the first flight does not release them from their enemy they try a second and Out of the Chalks 75 third ascent into the air. Lucky indeed are you if by a timely lowering of the point of your rod, and a masterly coolness of mind, you do not in these trying moments part company with your captive. But there are other dangers ahead. The line tightens, yet the well- tempered gut has not parted, and the hook, Liliputian though it be, has not been torn from its hold. That is encouraging : you think your friend is as good as netted when he goes off with a steady strain ; and you allow the top of your supple rod to do all the work. The weed forest, however, is a refuge for the hunted, and towards it the fish, butt him as you may, intends to go. If you turn him and deal firmly in your resolve not to permit him to take cover the fish is yours, but the chances are five hundred to one in his favour should he push so much as his gills into the tangled growth. Your line comes loosely back, and you are left lamenting. And it is astonishing how few rises one obtains compared with the number of fish to be perceived. It is probable that there is a vast quantity of natural feed in the river. Minnows are rare habitants, and in many portions they are not found at all ; but there is a great wealth of insect life. At odd times — and they are the anglers' golden hours — the fleeting opportunity when he receives compensation for a hundred blank days — the fisherman has nothing to do but to arise and slay. In dull warm weather this may occur in the fore or afternoon, but generally it is found to be at and after dusk. Then a single fly carefiilly dropped above the fish will be certain to seal his fate if the caster have the skill to retain the prize which fate has given him. The fun is very fast and furious while it lasts, and you have no time to pay attention to any other object. Your friend, wandering up and down in that restless manner with which a non-angling companion at the waterside provokes you, flicking off the heads of the purple loose- strife and oxeyed daisies, comes and bids you admire the glorious tints of the sky, newly forsaken by its tyrant king. " By Jove, sir ! " he says, " it's just the sort of thing Turner would have painted.'* This is said at the moment when you have found glad occasion for rapidly removing your thumb from the rod — any fish may be struck by that simple process — and Turner and sky and restless friend are as nothing against this twelve inch salmo fario. He is all the world, and the rest is a China orange. The best angling portion of the Wandle is that which is preserved by an association, numbering a few gentlemen, who take the greatest care of their treasure, and conduct it upon the soundest of principles. They are to be envied in their possession, for, as any one standing on Mitcham bridge and looking up to the picturesque mill, and sluice 76 The Gentlematis Magazine. • running heavy with trout down by the garden side, may see for him- self, it is full of fish. Each member is bound by certain rules, and it is enough to make a hapless outsider's mouth water to read that all fish of eleven inches and under must be returned to the water ; that no member must take more than three brace per day, and that the limit of fishing after dusk must not extend over one hour. Three brace of fish between a pound and a quarter and two pounds should, as the association very properly deems, satisfy any man blest with an ordinary appetite for sport Walking over from the Bath and West of England Agricultural Show on an idle afternoon, I found one of the members — and a very accomplished fly-fisher he was — in despair be- cause he had caught his three brace in an hour and a half, and now sighed, like the ancient monarch, for more worlds to conquer. The fish were rising " permiscuous." It appeared as if they would have gulped a buttercup, or a fusee, or anything that came floating down the stream. And then, obeying some unseen law that always puzzles the angler,, in a moment everything was quiet. There was not a rise to be seen. Who or what issued that sudden command " Stop rising " ? By what unknown system of telegraphy could the trout in the mill sluice fifty or a hundred yards off" be brought into the same frame of mind, on the instant, as these other trout close under the bridge? This is a phenomenon the trout-fisher often observes, but can never explain ; nor can he explain why by-and-by, perhaps in an hour, perhaps in six, the fish in every part of the river simultaneously resume their rising. The Wandle association artificially breeds thousands of fish by which the water is constantly replenished. Having had the secretary's courteous permission to walk through the grounds in the company of the bailiff, I was recently much interested in inspecting the boxes in a byewater, where the young fry were dining heartily ofi" liver boiled, hardened, and powdered fine upon a nutmeg grater. The keeper spoke of his trout in terms of almost paternal affection, and apparently longed to take each mite out of the shoal in order to pat its head and otherwise bestow upon it proofs of his undying attach- ment. The Wandle generally owes a good deal to this association, which carefully breeds and guards the fish for the benefit of the entire river. The most memorable treat I can remember in connection with the Wandle was a visit paid to Mr. Alfred Smee's garden. " My Garden," I presume, few who have read it will have forgotten. Though ostensibly concerning a small plot of ground in the hamlet of Wallington, in the parish of Beddington, in the county of Surrey — Out of the Chalk. 7 7 a plot which, according to the Ordnance map, consists of 7*925 acres of land and water — it is a charmingly written and carefully studied description of the botany, natural history, and much of the geology of the whole country. The admirable illustrations with which the book abounds indicated to me that the garden was a desirable Eden to see ; it proved itself to be Wonderland outright But I dare not trust my pen to linger over it — over its glorious roses, its miniature valleys and glens filled with ferns of the choicest kinds gathered from all parts of the world ; over its thousands of fruits \ over the grand effect produced by allying the natural colours and forms of flowers and vegetables ; over the faint scent of the tea-rose, the odour of the sweetbriar, and the honeyed perfume of the jasmine ; over the romantic vistas, and giant trees waving on the boundary ; over the wild flowers blooming everywhere, even to the humble but beautiful plants accursed by the modern gardener as noxious weeds ; over the shrubs, birds, and reptiles whose habits have been watched for many a long year, to be now recorded for our benefit. In " My Garden " there is a chapter entitled " My Fishery," and it is that which has tempted me to refer to Mr. Smee*s Wonderland by the Wandle, converted by him out of a piece of unprofitable bog. The river enters his grounds from Beddington Park, and forms a lake of considerable area and depth ; it also communicates with a number of brooklets which are made to minister to the general beauty of the design, and which tend to the maintenance of various water-plants which could not otherwise find a place in the garden. Into the lake or river, for it partakes of the characteristics of both, ornamentations of various kinds have been introduced — rustic bridges and various aquatic plants. The dreadful Anacharis has, as usual, without being invited, thrust its snake-like branches into the domain, and thriven, as it thrives everywhere, in the wildest plenitude. There were when Mr. Smee first took possession of the garden two kinds of trout — one short, with white flesh, which was in season in May and June; the other longer, with large head but with red flesh, which comes in season in July and August. From time to time Mr. Smee has made experiments in pisciculture, adding to the native fish trout, and other members of the salmon family, brought from other parts of the country. Dr. Giinther of the British Museum points out in his official catalogue that there are seven distinct breeds of trout in this section of the Wandle, and adds "It must be remembered that Mr. Smee has introduced into this river numerous trout artifi- cially bred from ova received from numerous sources." Mr. Smee 78 The Gefitlematt s Magazine. made a gallant attempt to introduce grayling, but the experiment failed. At first he raised young ones from ova, but to no purpose. Then he conveyed twenty brace of mature fish from the Derbyshire streams, and put them safe and sound into the water. It was a costly and difficult undertaking, but though many of the fish lived on for years, and made a show of spawning at the gravel beds, no young fish were ever seen, and by this time not a grayling is by any chance observed. The Wand le is too shallow and gentle probably for this interesting fish, and the success of the endeavour made to introduce grayling into the Clyde (which was referred to in one of the " Waterside Sketches " of last year) may be £Cttributed to the suitability of the Scotch river for that particular kind of fish. In like manner Mr. Smee failed to breed the burbolt or eel pout, and he reared thousands of salmon trout and char in his fish house and turned them into the water, thus claiming the honour of placing the first salmon into any tributar}' of the Thames. After all the labour, thought, and outlay expended upon these difficult processes Mr. Smee finds that the trout and eels — ^and Wandle eels are as deliciously flavoured as Wandle trout — remain in sole and undisputed possession, if we may except, as unworthy of mention in the same breath, the pugnacious little half armed stickleback which is found in great quantities in the river. The Darent, or Darenth, as it is often written, though it rises in the same hilly formation, sees the light at some distance from the cradle of the Wandle. Its course, which is a trifle over fourteen miles in length, is north-east, through a broad vale smiling with rich pastures, and adorned by many a noble country seat. By Wandleside you are never wholly free from the associations of town ; the enclosed grounds give a suburban character to the surroundings, and indeed a drive through Clapham to Mitcham and Carshalton suggests that in process of time those genteel places will be part and parcel of the metropolis. The Darent on the other hand brings you into the pure open country, and into the sunny districts where hops entwine and cherry-cheeked fruits ripen for distant markets. Spenser, who took more delight in the English rivers as a whole than any other poet except Drayton, says : — The still Darent, in whose waters clean Ten thousand fishes play and deck his pleasant stream. Ten thousand might almost be taken in a more literal sense than Spenser intended, for the Darent is nearly as good a trout stream as the Wandle. The fish are thought to be more numerous in the latter river, but some critics pretend to have discovered a finer flavour in the Out of the Chalk. 79 Kent bred fish. Remembering how near London is to the Darent, it is scarcely necessary to add that the water is most strictly preserved by the landowners. There is, however, a fair stretch of fishing allowed to visitors at the Lion Hotel, Famingham, and a more delightful summer resort you shall not find so near the Royal Exchange as this quiet old fashioned litde town which the railway has riever yet invaded. The great chestnut tree and the antique brick bridge, the old church and the rookery, are pictures upon which the eye never tires of dwelling, and the country around, rising boldly into sweeping downs, is full of lovely prospects, very varying in character, but always grateful to the observer who appreciates nature in her soberer and more contented moods. In the mill stream, above what is known as the Lion water, there are stores of trout which no man is permitted to disturb. At the head of this stream there stands a great white mill that supplies the town with the music of rushing water, which issues with great velocity from the wheelhouse, gallops along by the side of the road, dis- appears under the roadway, and comes into view again considerably sobered down ; thence it flows in tranquil ripples through the hotel garden, through private fields where it is heavily fiinged with trees, and by-and-by it meanders prettily through half a mile of meadow land which also belongs to the hotel fishery. Fortunately for the Lion water, the intervening section between the bottom of the lawn and the end of the private fields is carefully preserved, and so overhung with trees that many of the fish can defy the angler. The trout, following their natural instincts, work their way up stream and so come within the fair range of the hotel angler. As for the little millstream beyond the bridge, though it is less than a hundred yards long, it literally swarms with large well-fed fish, which are one of the sights of the place, and which are so used to the profane eye of the public that they bear it with philosophic equanimity. At the lower end a notice board is affixed to the wall, requesting the passer-by not to feed the trout You may look over the iron railing and see three or four heavy specimens directly beneath you, while close to the sides, and in perhaps not more than three inches of water, there are hundreds of herring-sized fish lying head to stream. On Good Friday I went to Farningham to see the "opening day" of the Lion anglers, and among other sights I must include large trout taking bread cast upon the water by an ostler. The fish leaped boldly at the crusts and turned down again with a mighty lash of the tail. An old man emerged in alarm from a neat little cottage opposite and sternly bade the osder to desist He was 8o The Gentlematis Magazine. the guardian of this show place for trout, and right faithfully did he insist upon obedience to the orders painted upon the notice-board. On the face of it this regulation seems absurd ; but trout are worth so much per pound, loafers are to be found even at peaceful Faming- ham, and it is sad to know that during ihe last two years the vile art of fish-stupefying by poisonous compounds has been growingly practised. The May-fly does not visit the Darent any more than the Wandle, and the most successful anglers at Famingham use the Wandle flies, swearing especially by the Tom Thumb governor and quill gnat. It is but reasonable to expect that the privilege to be obtained in the Lion water is not thrown away. On most days there are some rods at work early or late, and after the beginning of June, though June and July are probably the best months in the season, the most sensible expectations will be those which are restricted to a very modest limit On those golden occasions which are so few and far between, and so impossible to foretell, three or four brace of fish may be taken, but the man who can bring away his one or two trout need not mourn over his ill-luck. There are several very remu- nerative "stickles" just below the antique brick bridge, but the angler, if he would do anything, must keep far out of sight and be as still as a mouse. There are several gentlemen who have not failed to appear regularly at the Lion on the eve of many successive Good Fridays, and the veteran tragedian Mr. Phelps was one of these, recognised always as an eminent actor, but also as a masterly killer of trout. Last Good Friday fourteen fish were taken by one angler, almost before any 'other fishermen were stirring, though I myself was one of half a dozen who saw the sun rise on that bright holiday. The others fared badly, but on the following Monday a London angler again killed seven brace of trout, as if there were some mutual arrangement among them as to the maximum number permitted to one rod in the space of one day. In the very early morning or late evening there is generally a heavy trout to be picked out im . mediately under the spreading chestnut tree, for the plump fish in the millstream, in spite of the keeper and the notice-board, drop down from under the bridge to feed on the shallows, and may be com- municated with if no person has passed along the brink before the fisherman's arrival. The first labourer crossing the bridge to his field-work will frighten all the fish, and before his heavy boots have ceased their ponderous thud you will have noticed the clear water ploughed in four or five different places by prowling truants Out of the Chalk. 8i scuttling home to the cool retirement of the dark arches and the protection of the notice-board The Darent, before it reaches Farningham, has passed through the finest portions of its valley. Beginning its career at Wester- ham, hard by the North Downs, it touches the villages of Brastecf, Sundridge, and Riverhead. Near romantic Sevenoaks it flows in a more northerly direction to Lullingstone Park, and by old Eynsford Castle. Mills are to be found at short intervals, there being to my own knowledge fourteen paper and flour mills worked by the Dare&t At Dartford, with a parting bit of very fine scenery, the rivtf widens out into Dartford Creek, and is a navigable branch of the Thames during the remainder of its course. About midway between Dartford and the mouth the River Cray firom the south-west falls into the creek. In the neighbourhood of Famingham the hop-fields, nut, cheny^ and plum orchards are highly cultivated, and well worth a visit where feasible. The ornithologist also should be in his glory here. Mr. Dray, a resident landholder, who has shot over the district man and boy for forty years, has in his possession a valuable case of birds, killed and preserved by himself, as an illustration of the various feathered visitors to be found in the neighbourhood. Besides the more familiar kinds I noticed the landrail ; the buzzard, which, not uncommon fifty years ago, is never seen now ; the handsomely-marked butcher-bird, a yearly visitor, which never fails to make its appearance in the wake of the nightingale; the Dartford warbler, a brace of kingfishers, two of which not long since were captured opposite the hotel, so furiously fighting that they allowed themselves to be taken into custody ; skylark, titlark, and woodlark ; the bonny bullfinch, and the curious snake-bird ; the delicate little white-throat, and the tiny golden wren ; and many other examples of our British birds. Vol. XV.. N.S. 1875. Great People of Yorkshire. BY HORACE ST. JOHN. WING many acknowledgments, as pilgrim and guest, to the triple shire, having been up and down, by firesides and in churchyards, in old manses and among sacred ruins, I have gathered the names and memories of the distinguished men and women born of this robust soil whose local has often been lost in their general reputation. Some one has called Yorkshire the Normandy of England, and the expression, fit or not, is rarely forgotten when conversation takes a turn in which ancestral voices may join. This is a species of pride perfectly intelligible upon a higher principle than that which proclaims every separate constituency of the kingdom to be more intelligent and independent than all the rest, and in the case of the big county amply justified; as it was in June, 1682, when Dr. George Hickes — himself a Worthy — at the Yorkshire feast in Bow Church, London, said : — " Our county, as the anxious observe, is the epitome of England; whatsoever is excellent in the whole land being found in proportion thereto." Further : — " God hath been pleased to make it the birthplace and nursery of many great men." It is a little surprising at first to remember how many, and who they were. In the foreground stands a headless, but none the less con- spicuous, group of patriots and traitors — not to confound the two : — Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, " who died the death of a noble" in 1572; Christopher and Thomas Norton, rebellious gentle- men, executed in 1570; Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, impeached by Parliament and beheaded on Tower Hill in 1641 — Strafford, of whom the only relics left at princely Harewood were, a hundred years ago, his initials cut on the altar-rails in the chapel ; John Lord Lumley, indicted with Thomas Lord Darcy and others for high treason and sent to the scaffold in 1544; and poor Sir Henry Slingsby, created a baronet by Charles I., and author of " A Father's Best Legacy," whom the Commonwealth called to the block in 1658, but whose name, unforgotten of Finsbury, united with that of Duncombe, is so prominent among the memorials of Knares- borough. Many another fame associated with the epoch of the Revolution belongs to Yorkshire, and some to Leeds especially. Great People of Yorkshire, 85 Thus, that of Calverley, " potent and high-pedigreed," stamped on street, and terrace, and tavern-sign, is as common in the busy cloth town as Hughes at Holyhead, Jones at Swansea, Todd or Poad at Scarborough, or Trevelyan in Cornwall. There were **the great Lady " Ann, her wrong-headed son William, and the first Sir Walter, who murdered his wife and children, and was crushed beneath a toa of stones in York Castle A.D. 1605 ; also another of the same posterity who sat in seven Parliaments ; his wife, who " disgraced the lineage " by painting " like a common artist-person " ; and his son, the spendthrift builder of Esholt The Fountaynes, too, of Fountayne Abbey — once the stateliest structure in all that region of pK>rtcullis and cloister — ^have left their mark, and have their memo- rials on the comer houses of cities which were hamlets in their time ; particularly of him who, like a dignified Vicar of Bray, was a Commissioner of the Great Seal in the Long Parliament — a Parlia- ment of which a Yorkshireman was the first elected member — and a Wolsey of loyalty under the Restoration. As for the Fairfaxes, the huge county wears them as a part of its escutcheon : — he who was knighted, and fought with the hilt of his sword at the siege of Rouen ; he who commanded at Marston Moor ; he who refused to sit on the trial of Charles I., <and whose wife gave so spirited a reason for it ; he who was surnamed " Fire-and-Steel Fairfax " ; he who tried to check the fury of the Bourbon at the siege of Rome ; he, the fifth baron, who made a last attempt at reviving the hereditary splendours of Leeds Castle ; he who, disgusted with the Old World, emigrated to the New ; and she who in an evil hour married George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, the English Cagliostro of Alexandre Dumas. There were several others, each with an anecdotal episode in his life ; but the Yorkshire pedigrees are long — as those, for example, of the Halifaxes, who took so prominent a part in settling the union between England and Scotland ; of the Savilles of Halifax, where the Cloth Gallows once stood, and where a remarkably livel)^ thoroughfare is to this day known as Gibbet Street — of whom one wrote, when a famine threatened, " The cry of a hungry multitude is the bloodiest noise in the world '' ; and many another, whose shields are rich with the trophies and achievements of hundreds of years. But they must be left to heraldry and their epitaphs except when their claims to attention are peremptory ; for who could slight Edward Parker, who, whatever else he may have been, was at any rate " Hereditary Bow-bearer of the Forest of BoUand"; or Roger Gale, first President of the Society of Antiquaries ; or Sir Marmaduke, G 2 $4 7^ Gentlemafis Magazine. ''last of the Knighted Constables"; or Charles Lord Clifford, who is reputed^ though erroneously,^ to have laid the first stone of Bolton Abbey ? These Clitfords bore, in other dajrs, a dark renown, ttotably " Black Clifford," nicknamed " the Butcher of Wakefield,'" Ihough in contrast with his infamy is the tender tradition of '* the Shepherd Lord." The banners of Yorkshire churches or private mortttary chapels, long disappeared, hung over the effigies — many of them scarcely recognisable^ if not entirely mouldered away — of not a few men whose names are imprinted on far other pages than those of the Yorkshire annals : Thomas Lord Wentworth, who surrendered Calais to the Due de Guise, thereby bringing tears into Queen Mary's eyes ; Sir Henry Montague, who witnessed the signature of Henry VI n. to his will ; Sir Charles Howard, Lord High Admiral of England, who claimed credit for defeating the Spanish Armada, though it has since been thought that Drake and Effingham had something to do with it ; Lord Scrope, already, in 155 1, ninth baron of the name, wha tilted at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and was gaoler to the Queen of Scots at Bolton Castle ; and Lord Baltimore, who obtained the original grant of Maryland. The Yorkshire divines, who Caleb Stukely thought, on ac- count of their fat faces, could never have &gged at school, form such a group as, perhap>s, no other county in the United King- dom could produce. Their lives would fill one of Captain Marryat's ^quartos without margin," and foremost stands John Wycliffe, tke Richmond Reformer, whose monumental brass in Wycliffe Church has been, with many others, ovtrrlooked by Mr. Boi»ielI (Ml. Boulell, indeed, only mentions those of Sir John deSt Quintin and his lady, at Harpham and at Bransherton) ; then Toresla^ Bishop of Durham, twice deprived ; Tilson, the ejected of Elphin; Edward Uillingfieet; Richard Sterne, who read prayers with Laud uposf the scaffold ; Lawrence Sterne ; Bowles, author of the famous Catechism ; Burnet, the learned chaplain of William III.; Tiltc»tsoa^ wkose sennons are among the '^ Sacred Classics'' so choicely edited 1^ Dr. Stebbing ; Sanderson, the blind Algebraist ; Dr. Radcliffe^ who erected his own monument in the great library at Oxford ; Joseph Priestley, whose pen very nearly approached tho •ecret of perpetual motion ; Dr. Paley, and Ranald Heber. It is interesting to observe this mighty kinsmanship of genius and erudi^ tion in a single shire of England. We pass that vevserend band, and enter the Yorkshire Walhalla of Arts and Letters^ It is not very spacious. Here are John Gower, of the ^' Conlessio Amanti," and Sir Thoma» Herbert, of the ''Threnodia Caiolina/ confironiing Great People of Yorkshire. 85 Andrew Marvel, Barbara Hofland, and Lady Mary Wortlcy Montague, whose portrait, at the age of sixteen, is human sweetness idealised, and reminds you of Mrs. Jordan when a girl. The Worthies running rather short in this direction, we may as well adopt for the occasion James Montgomery and Ebenezer Elliot, '*the Corn-Law Rhymer " ; but, as a matter of course, the Brontes are included, and it is a touching thing to note how still at Haworth^ their home, the word '^ she '' passes for *' Charlotte " among the simpler people. Now it will not do to linger in too historical a spirit among these Worthies; so that, after congratulating the great siiire upon Fiaxman, the most Greek of all the English sculptors, Cfaantrey, Beckwith, Schwantalder, Jackson, ** the Yorkshireman of the Royal Academy '' — whose one wise saying was that '* friends are miseries " — and Abraham, the Anglo-Franco- Fleming, who designed the medal for the Knights of the Order of the Royal Oak, and was starved in a garret, we may take a tiurn among the traditions ; and here it should be remarked that Yorkshire, not satisfied with its own sons and daughters, illustrious though they are, is constantly affiliating children to itself from across the county borders. She would, if she dared, adopt the Stamp Distributor of Cockermouth, but, in default, puts up with the White Doe of Rylstone. Nobody begrudges her '' Drunken Barnaby," who was incontestably a York- shireman ; or Zachary Moore, of Lofthouse ; or the wealthy and plethoric East Indian Sir George Colebrooke, of Sandsend, who obtained an alum monopoly, and was thenceforth for evermore dubbed " Shah Alum " ; or St John of Beverley (though his miracles may be doubted) ; or Mother Shipton, the prophetess, who in 148S married iobias Shipton, of Knaresborough Rock, and whose memoirs are declared to be still extant in MS. ; or Eugene Aram, who, how- ever, need not have been a Yorkshireman, although he buried his victim in a Yorkshire cave. But when it comes to insisting upon George Fox at Filey, upon the ancestors of the Bruces and the Baliols, Paul Jones and Robin Hood (Scarborough men, if you will believe it), and the Dragon of Wantley — these Worthies might be made the subject of a Homeric contest Homer himself, indeed^ said that it is not given to every country to bring forth men of all the heroic types ; and Yorkshire ought to be satisfied. She has Smeaton, the builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse ; Birkbeck, the founder of mechanics' institutes ; and Tancred, of Whitby, in whose coat-of- arms were three escallop shells, and whose charity has been a Chancery afiair ever since the day when by a will the bitterness 86 The Gentleman's Magazine. bred whereof he could not foresee he, the seventeenth of the lineage (all duly blazoned on the staircase wall), bequeathed his house and estate to "twelve decayed gentlemen," each to have £2^ a year and a separate room, and all, if in health, to dine together. She has, moreover. Chief Justice Gascoigne, who committed the Prince of Wales and refused to try, upon a charge of treason. Scroop, Arch- bishop of York, who owed him his death in consequence. I have referred to sign-boards — great tests of influence or popu- larity everywhere, together with portraits in tavern-rooms. Henry Calverley is very conspicuous in this far-scattered realm of art ; he was the original of a character in "The Yorkshire Tragedy," which it will not do, in Yorkshire, to assign to any author but Shakespeare. But he is, of course, as nothing compared with Captain Cook, York- shireman and circumnavigator, of whom the county is deeply, dearly, and generously proud. The people point out where his birthplace stood at Marton ; his baptismal register in the church ; the graves of his schoolmistress at " Canny Yatton," of his father, the day labourer, who learned to read at the age of seventy that he might spell out his son's adventures, and who died in ignorance of that son's death six weeks after it had taken place; and of his mother, at "Canny Yatton " also, I think. Scoresby, who took his ship so near the Pole, was " Yaarkshire " too ; and the Scoresby Arms, at Woxley, is a comfortable hostelry enough. Yet no sign in the shire approaches that of " Tom Brown," the hero of the basket-hilted blade, who at the battle of Dettingen cut his way single-handed through the enemy's lines to win back the standard of his troop. There he stands, in his old uniform, brown and grizly, above the mantelpiece, boldly coloured, upon a surface resembling vellum rather than canvas, with the extraordinary legend beneath — Homo quiapulvis est. The Earls Fitzwilliam are similarly popularised, especially one who was dis- missed from the Lord-Lieutenancy by King George II L for "proposing an offensive toast " at a public dinner. Then you have, swinging in state, Henry Jenkins, of Fountaynes, who carried "a horse-load of arrows for Flodden Field," and who lived to " the amazing age " of 169. It is utterly useless to doubt it His epitaph may be read at Ellerton-on -Swale, written by Dr. Thomas Chapman, Master of Magdalen College, Oxford, and I should no more think of question- ing the Doctor's authority than of hinting that all the bedsteads hung with blue damask, which are shown by housekeepers who move and stoplike mechanisms — ^for half-a-crown — in ancient Yorkshire mansions^ were not once the sleeping-places of queens or kings ; that the mounds pointed out in Wilstrop Wood are mole-hills, and not the graves of Great People of Yorkshire. 8 7 Marston Moor; that a clerg)rman, whose name, had it been preserved^ would have ranked with those of the Worthies, did not stand admiring the Dripping Well at Knaresborough until he became a petrifaction himself; or that the bees left off hiding in Fountayne Forest and the cherry-trees from bearing when the refectories of the Cistercian monks were broken up by evil-minded generations. Nothing is more ungrateful than to wander about, a sceptic of all the lore that breathes from ruins, the ingle-nooks of Nature, the stories told by ancient ladies, portraits, sign-posts, and the other irregular archives of times and of people passed away, in a spirit as callous as a Cadastral Survey. There is a piece of ground at Mynton, in this shire, known as " The Field of the White Battle," and what good would it do to history or humanity to deny that it was so named from the number of ecclesiastics who were killed there, fighting in their surplices under an Archbishop of York in 13 19? On a particular day of the year in a certain neighbourhood the young men steal the young women's shoes, and on the following day the young women steal Ihe young men's hats ; and, in default of a better, it is wise to accept as an explanation that this is in honour of a Brereton, whose very brass cannot be found, though he was " a Yorkshire gentleman of ancient family and competent fortune," and a public benefactor, after his kind, but whose will is not registered at Doctors' Commons. Stripped of tradition many a Worthy, in other parts of the world besides Yorkshire, might not deserve to be celebrated in a portrait- gallery or mentioned in the thousandth column of the ninth volume of a county history in-folio^ or even by having his likeness as he looked swung from the roof of a tavern of a Briggate ; for, so far as I know, there is not a town in Yorkshire without a Briggate, a Kirkgate, or a Calverley Head. Dear Lady Disdain. • BY JUSTIN MCCARTHY, AUTHOR OF "LINLEY ROCHFORD," "A FAIR SAXON," "MY ENEMY'S DAUGHTER/ &c CHAPTER XIX. "O, SAW YE NOT FAIR INEZ?" iHE Saucy Lass bore Christmas Pembroke one evening of early summer to the Durewoods pier. He had not visited Durewocds since his first stay there, and he had often been smitten with a sense of ingratitude towards his friend Miss Lyle. There were reasons why for some time back he had rather shrunk from coming under her eyes, and having perhaps to answer the kindly peremptoriness of her questions. But she, he thought, knew nothing of his excuse for avoiding her, and he feared she must think him ungrateful. The fear was confirmed when on writing to ask her if he might pay her a visit, he received a reply, which he could not but regard as a little cold and curt for her, telling him that he would be welcome. He started for Durewoods next day. The Challoners had left England. They were to reach New York before the heats of summer set in, and after spending a few days there and in Boston, to cross at once to San Francisco, where the months intolerable in the Atlantic States would be delightful; and when autumn came they were to return to New York again, visiting many places on their way. Christmas had not seen Marie before her leaving London. Sir John had taken care to keep him en:^aged in expeditions hither and thither in the northern cities; and Christmas knew it was for the best, although he chafed at it too. But he had made up his mind now that he would not see the Challoners any more. He would not see her married. He would return to Japan. It was especially to tell Miss Lyle of his deter- mination to leave England that he was now visiting Durewoods. '' Durewoods has been my Sedan," he said to himself. The heart of the poor youth swelled cruelly with emotion as he began to see the pier at Durewoods, and the cottages and the trees on the hill, amid which Marie's home was standing. Durewoods Dear Lady Disdain. 89 without her was like the forlorn chamber when the coffin of the loved one has been carried away. It was like the ghost of Dure- woods. Pembroke felt a pang of remorse at the thought that the dear, kind friend who still lived there was after all so little to him — ^that her presence did not remove the death-like atmosphere which for him now hung over the place. But when the boat touched the pier, and he leaped ashore, and saw old Merlin waiting to carry his portmanteau, he brightened up, and gave the brave Breton a cheery shake of the hand, and asked him voluble questions about Miss Lyle and about himself, and the boat and the garden and the fisher-folk. " Miss Leel well — beaut'fool well — alway well. Merlin take care of her. Miss Marie gone to Amerique— over the great sea — ^near the fisheries of the Newfoundland — many fishers go there, / know." ** Miss Lyle is lonely, perhaps, without Miss Marie ?" "No — no, no — not lone. Miss Leel not lone — for Merlin take care of her. Merlin not gone to Amerique." And Meriin chuckled much over this pleasantry, and smote his brave breast " You grow tall," said Merlin, as they walked along. " Tall, Meriin ? Not taller than before." " Oh, yes. / know. Tall ! — More like man. Tall— old ; very old. You grow very old !" Christmas smiled at this tribute to his completed manhood, for so he understood Merlin's words. But Merlin meant too to convey the idea that Christmas was looking paler and thinner than he had expected to find him. Miss Lyle received Christmas with sweet and gracious courtesy. They dined together, and Janet waited, and everything was just as it used to be. But the news which Miss Lyle told him now and again suggested change. Marie Challoner had been in Durewoods for two or three days before her voyage, and Miss Lyle had seen her several times. There was discouraging news from Natty Cramp, whereat his poor mother was greatly concerned. He was not getting on so well as he had expected to do. Then they went into the balcony, and Christmas praised the beauty of the scene, and thought to himself of the little hollow in the woods, lonely to him for evermore, as everything seemed to be now. Then he said to Miss Lyle that he had something to tell her, and she showed a friendlier interest, and listened while he explained, as well as he could, that a life in London did not suit him ; that he didn't think he was a big enough man to make much of a success 90 The Gentleman^ s Magazine. there, and that he thought he could do better on his old ground in Japan. At last he got to the end of the story somehow. " Is that all ?" Miss Lyle asked. That was all. Christmas thought it was a good deal. "I didn't want to say anything until you had finished. Have you finished ?*' " Yes, Miss Lyle. That is all I wanted to say. As some of our American friends would say, I'm through." "I don't understand slang," said Miss Lyle — "even English slang. I am not fond of it" There was a pause. Christmas wondered if she were going to say nothing more on the subject of his resolve, and if the matter were to drop there. For a while she had seemed to be growing more fiiendly, but again there came a marked coldness in her manner. Christmas did not wonder at that. He felt with renewed pangs of conscience that he had been but an inattentive friend for some time, and must not expect instant pardon. " Then you have made up your mind to renounce London and go back to Japan ?" she said, at last, in a tone of some dissatisfaction. "I have," Christmas. answered, glad that she had said anything. " I am afraid you will think me a variable personage. Miss Lyle, without much of a mind to make up." " It is strange," she said, following up apparently some train of thought of her own. " Your father was above all things a man of steady purpose. I begin to think you are not like him at all, Mr. Christmas, and that I have been rather mistaken in you." "Well, Miss Lyle, you will do me the justice to admit that I never claimed to be like my father, or fit to be compared with him." "Still," she said, in an almost irritable way, "it w strange how the sons degenerate. I don't understand it. Where did you learn these fickle ways, and that want of trust, which I can tell you I like still Jess r Miss Lyle, as Marie Challoner had said long ago, was picturesque in everything she did. Few people look dignified when out of humour, but in the gesture with which she drew her white shawl round her shoulders, as if wrapping herself in a garment of ofifended pride, there was something effective and dramatic " Want of trust — in you, Miss Lyle ?" "In me, yes. Do I not deserve your confidence? Did I not offer myself to you from the beginning frankly as your fiiend, and how could you doubt that I was so? I tell you, Chris Pembroke, I should almost have loved a lap-dog called by your father's name, Dear Lady Disdain. 9 1 not to speak of his son ; and I did so wish to be your friend, for his sake ; and this is what comes of it ! To you, perhaps, it may seem ridiculous that I should feel in this way. Very well — at least you see that I do feeL" " But you are entirely mistaken, and you do me a great wrong. The thought of going back to Japan was only flickering in my mind for some time : and Sir John Challoner asked me to put off deciding for a Httle while. I did so. But now I have made up my mind, and I came to tell you. He does not know of it yet — I mean I have not yet written to him." " You choose your confidants well," Dione said scornfully. " I don't mean merely your going to Japan, Christmas ; but you con- fided to John Challoner your reason for flying out of England — you never told that to me, I waited to-day patiently to see if that would come out even now, and it didn't ! No ; your full confidence is kept for him." Christmas grew red and hot He could hardly believe his ears. Could it be possible that Sir John Challoner had actually betrayed his confidence— and for what reason ? He looked at Miss Lyle in positive alarm and began to speak, and then became silent " I will spare your blushes," Dione said — feeling some pity for his confusion — "and I am glad you have the grace to blush, Chris ; but you might have told me of this as well as John Challoner." Having, as she thought, compelled the young man to feel confused, she began to soften to him. "Did Sir John tell you — Miss Lyle, are you serious? I can't understand this ! But if he did, then at least you must know why I felt bound to tell him and not you " " I don't see that, Mr. Christmas. But let me ease your mind. It was not from Sir John I first heard the story — although when I asked him he didn't deny it" ** Not from Sir John ? Then from whom — for no one else on earth could have " " You ridiculous boy, don't you know that men of the world never keep anybody's secret absolutely? They always let drop hints. Why you should have insisted on any particular secresy in this affair is as great a wonder to me as why you should have chosen him for a confidant. I presume you didn't suppose that the thing could have been kept a secret firom us all for ever, even if you did retreat to Japan with her." Christmas was now utterly bewildered. There was evidently some extraordinary misunderstanding somewhere. 92 The Gentleman's Magazine. " I don't know what to say," he broke out at last. " We don't understand each other, Miss Lyle." " Come, I really begin to think you are more foolish than dis- trustful, Christmas. I suppose boys are shy of talking of these things even to elderly women. But you could have found no trustier friend than me — nor one less likely to care for social prejudices and that kind of thing. I don't believe your father's son could make a very bad choice. Well, I forgive you your secresy. And so you have fallen in love, my poor boy, and are going to be married ? So soon?" Christmas started with such evident and genuine surprise that Miss Lyle was startled in her turn. " Is this not true ?" she asked, sharply — " are you not going to be married? Are we playing at cross purposes?" " We are indeed," said Christmas, with an aching heart "There never was such playing at cross purposes ! Who told you that story, Miss Lyle ? Not Sir John Challoner, at all events." " But is all that really not true ? Have you not fallen in love ; and are you not going to be married ?" " A man less likely to be married. Miss Lyle, is not to be found anywhere between this and Japan." Oh ! Have you quarrelled ?" Quarrelled with whom ? " With the young lady, of course. I suppose we needn't now make any mystery of her name — Miss Jansen." Christmas rose from his chair in amazement In all his trouble of heart he was boyishly inclined to laugh. " Is that the story, Miss Lyle — is that the mystery — the confi- dence?" " But is it really not true ? Is it all a mistake or a delusion ? Are you more deceitful than I could have believed, or are people going out of their senses ? Do let us come to some understand- ing." " Miss Lyle, there isn't one single particle of truth or meaning or anything else in that story. I know Miss Jansen ; but I never felt anything for her but friendship — and there is even much about her that I don't like; and I am not certain now whether she is not rather unfriendly to me than the contrary. As for any other idea, it never even occurred to me until this moment ; and it would be ever so much less likely to occur to her. To begin with, she hates the whole race of men." " Yes ; I don't mind that," Miss Lyle said, quiedy. " They soon Dear Lady Disdain. 93 get over that — girls, I mean. But if you tell me seriously that this is not true " (i But, Miss Lyle, to say it is not true is nothing. There isn't the faintest conceivable foundation or excuse for it. The wonder is how any one could ever have thought of it Did you say that some one told you this ?" " Oh, yes," Miss Lyle answered, composedly : " Marie Challoner told me." " Miss Challoner !" Again Christmas's face burned with emotion ; and at once there flashed upon his memory the fact, hardly noticed at the time, that Marie had sent with a peculiar expression of look and voice her friendly message to Sybil Jansen through him. He felt unspeakably wretched. Strange contradiction of human im- pulses ! The one thing he dreaded most an hour ago was that Marie Challoner should know of his love for her. Now it seemed a thousand times worse that she should believe him to be in love with another woman. " This is terrible," he said. *' Of course such things are always provoking ; but one can't help them. This seems to have been a very singular misunderstanding." Did Miss Challoner speak of this as a guess on her part ?" No. Marie Challoner, Chris, is an impulsive girl, so truthful that it is hard for her even to keep a secret : and she said something here which aroused my curiosity, I can tell you, and I am afraid I extorted the rest Then she said that her father had enjoined •ecresy on her — but Marie was never exemplary in the way of obeying injunctions." " But it was not Sir John Challoner who told her this story ?" " Indeed it was." " Miss Lyle," Christmas said gravely, " you are mistaken in that, I assure you." ^ My good boy, T am not mistaken. The poor girl, conscious of having broken her father's trust, insisted, in her proud honesty, upon telling him that she had done so and asking his pardon, and I in- sisted on telling him that the fault was mine, and of course the whole story came out then." ^ Sir John Challoner said I was in love with Miss Jansen? Sir John said that ?" ** He did. At least I told him what Marie said ; and he said Marie ought not to have told it to anybody, and he seemed greatly ▼exed at the whole affair." Christmas was lost in confusion. It seemed natural enough that 94 The Gentleman's Magazine. if Miss Challoner or Miss Lyle had made a guess of any kind, Sir John might have allowed her to remain under a delusion rather than give any clue to the truth. But, as he understood Miss Lyle, there was something more than this. " Did I understand you rightly. Miss Lyle ? Did you say that Sir John told this story — told it himself— to Miss Challoner?" " Certainly, Chris ; he and she both spoke of it in that way. Sir John said, more than once, that he was to blame for having revealed to his daughter what you told him in confidence." Christmas leaned upon the balcony and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He was perfectly bewildered. " But there must be something in all this," Dione said impatiently. "It can't be all Midsummer madness. You did, surely, tell John Challoner something in confidence ?" " I did." " And had it nothing to do with Miss Jansen ?" " Nothing." " Was it any sort of love-confession ?** With eyes doggedly downcast Christmas answered, " It was." " And in heaven's name, Chris Pembroke, why did your father's son select John Challoner of all men on earth as the confidant of his love story ?— Oh !" The exclamation broke from Miss Lyle because of the sudden expression with which Christmas had looked up when she put her imperious question — an expression which was a revelation. " You unhappy boy," she said in a low tone and leaning towards him, "wasMfl/it?" " That was it. Now you know all. Now you know why I told him, and why I didn't tell you." " Did you not know that she was engaged to young Vidal ?" " I did. I guessed it." " Then what on earth was the good of your speaking to her father ? What did you hope to get by that ?" " Nothing." "You had better have told me a hundred times. You didn't suppose that John Challoner was a person to be touched by your romantic attachment, and to say * Take her, my boy I Bless you, my children ' ? " " Miss Lyle, I imagined nothing and hoped nothing. I couldn't endure the place any longer. I tried hard, and I found that I couldn't do it, and he had been so kind to me that I didn't like to seem ungrateful or changeable, and I couldn't invent lies. I thought Dear Lady Disdain. 95 the best thing to do was to tell her father all, and beg of him to help me, and to — to cover my retreat, in fact I suppose it was an absurd thing to do — I thought it the most honest way." There was a moment's silence. The evening was darkening. The scents of the flowers came more richly out, and the plash of the water below sounded sadly in the eats of the poor youth on whom Dione turned her pitying eyes. " I am glad you did whatever you thought was honest, my boy," she said. " You never can be sorry for that. Well, well !" Christmas did not speak. He could not pour out his soul readily, even to her. He was at once frank and shy, as nature and his early way of life had made him. " This is a great misfortune, Chris ! Tell me— do you know yourself — will this last ?" " Oh yes,'* he answered in a low tone, and without looking at her. " It will last my time, Miss Lyle." " Of course all young people say that ; and I shouldn't mind it much in your case, my dear, but for what I know. And so you got this wound under my roof, my poor boy ? I wish I had never found you out, Chris, and brought you here, for this." "No, no!" he said, eagerly; "don't wish that. Miss Lyle — don't wish that. I have your friendship — I couldn't wish to lose that, and I don't want to lose — the memory even of — anything that happened. I'll come all right — I mean I'll fight my way on through life." " You would not be without the memory of your dream, then ?" " Would my father have given up the memory of his ?" Dione's lips trembled. She leaned back in her chair, and remained silent for a moment. " Now, Miss Lyle," said Christmas, " you know all ; you have got this all out of me somehow, which I never meant to have told to anybody but one. I am not sorry, but I don't mean to plague you any more with my troubles. I didn't come here to make you un- comfortable. I'm not going through life with an everlasting lament in my mouth. I am no worse off than ever so many better fellows." " I thought it a bad omen at the time that you should have met her the very first moment you stepped ashore here. I didn't want you to meet her. Then, when the thing was done, I thought it best to say as little as possible, and seem to make light of everything. But I did give you a warning, Chris." '* You did, I remember. But it was too late then, and it wouldn't have been of any use in any case — not the least." " I suppose not You don't blame her, Chris ?" 96 The Gentleman s Magazine. " Blame her ! Her ! For what ?" " You don*t think she meant this — or trifled with you ?" ** Oh, no. She is as true as light She was my friend always ; ishe is now. It is no fault of hers. She never suspected." " I am glad 1 should have thought so, but I am glad to hear you say so. One word more. You have not any lurking hope — about her ?" " Oh no ; no hope." ** You are right, Chris. I know Marie as well as any one can, and I know that hU the world could not make her engage herself to Mr. Vidal if she cared for anybody else. But I am glad you have the courage to look that straight in the face. The only thing now is — ^what is to be done ?" *' My mind is clear," said Christmas ; '' I'll leave England and go back to Japan." *' But why do that ? why not stay firmly here and make an honour* able career for yourself? A man has some other business in life than falling in love and brooding over it" " I have other business, and I mean to do it. Miss Lyle, and not to brood. But if I remained in England I should be likely to brood on to the end of the chapter." " There are other women too, Chris." *' There are no other women for me, Miss Lyle, and good advice is thrown away on me I am afraid. Sooner than stay here and see her — see her married, Miss Lyle, I would leap off the pier below and swim straight out to sea as far as ever I could go and sink quietly down when I could swim no farther. It wouldn't be half a bad thing to do — ^go down with the setting sun." " You won't do that, 1 know," Miss Lyle said. " You'll not do that cowardly thing, Chris. That might do for Natty Cramp, perhaps, or some egotistical fool of his kind ; not for you. But we'll say no more of this just now. It's a surprise, and I must thipk it over. You used to like to smoke a cigar in the evenings ? " Christmas understood the very dear hint She held out her hand to him, and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears. Heaven knows what boyish impulse made him kneel beside her chair aad press her hand to his lips. Then she gently laid the hand upim his head. There passed through Dione's mind at the time the sweet, strange, unspeakably tender saying of the Duchess of Orleans 4|^at Dunois — that he was a child stolen from her. She was glad when Christmas left her, for there was samething which puzzled her in all this,, and which she had no^ spoken of ipuch Dear Lady Disdain. 97 to him. Indeed, the moment the question arose in her mind she kept the talk, such as it was, away from that. Cliristmas had told Sir John Challoner that he was in love with Marie. Sir John had voluntarily, distinctly told Marie that Christmas had made to him an acknowledgment of love for Miss Jansen. There was no possibility of mistake or misapprehension on either side, on any point. Why did John Challoner tell his daughter that lie ? Strange, she thought, if John Challoner's deceits should have come between the son, as they did between the father, and the woman he loved and might have married ! For there could be to Dione's mind no explanation possible of Sir John's proceedings but an anxiety to render it impossible for his daughter to think of Christmas, and thus to hurry her into a marriage with Lord Paladine*s son. He must have feared that Marie might fall in love with Chris. That must have been his motive. But then Dione had talked with Marie only the other day in full and warm friendship and confidence about her marriage, and Marie had not given the faintest indication of any feeling that could stand between her and it. She did not seem to have any delight in the prospect, and it was only too clear that she had no romantic attach- ment to Mr. Vidal. But even when Dione spoke to her in some wonder of her seeming coldness and lack of interest in her future, Marie assured her again and again that she was marrying of her own free will, and at no one's persuasion, and that since she must marry she knew no one so acceptable for a husband as Mr. Vidal. Again and again, too, had Marie told her that she did not think she had a nature formed for the kind of emotion which is described in books as love. " So many girls say that," Miss Lyle thought, " until the time comes. But I think it must be so with her." John Challoner then must have been deceived — such was Dione's conclusion — out of excess of caution, as was his wont. Poor Christ- mas was right — Marie felt nothing for him but an easy friendship. There was nothing to be done. The boy must take his fate and bear it. The less said now about the misunderstanding and the perverted confidence the better. Let that all seem to be a misunderstanding,, and let it drop. She would not argue any more against Christmas's resolve to go back to Japan ; all things considered, it would be the best course he could take. But she could not still help wondering over the strange stroke of fate, or whatever it was, which had brought the son of her old lover across so many thousand miles of earth and sea under her roof to have his heart pierced there by the daughter of his father's old rival. Vol. XV., N.S. 1875. h 98 The Gentleman* s Magazine. CHAPTER XX. " PROFESSOR NATHANIEL P. CRAMP." The Genius of young Liberty had indeed not yet proved propitious to Natty Cramp. He landed at Hoboken, on the New Jersey shore of the North river at New York, one sunny and lovely morning, and he gazed across at the somewhat confused and unalluring river front of the great city with the air of a conqueror. The fresh breath of freedom, he proudly said to himself, was already filling him with new manhood. But New York is in some ways a discouraging place to land at. There are no cabs ; and there are no street porters ; and to hire a " hack " carriage is expensive ; and to track out one's way in the street cars and the stages is almost hopeless work for the new comer. Then the examination at the Custom-house was long and vexatious ; and yet, when Natty got through the Custom-house, he felt as if he were thrown adrift on the world without any one more to care about him. As Melisander in Thomson's poem declares that, bad as were the wretches who deserted him, he never heard a sound more dismal than that of their parting oars, so, little as Nathaniel Cramp liked the brusque ways of the Custom-house officers, he felt a sort of regret when they had released him and his baggage, and he found himself absolutely turned loose upon the world and his own resources. This small preliminary disappointment was ominous. Natty had come out with a little money and a great faith in himself and his destiny. He had the usual notion that New York and the United States in general are waiting eagerly to be instructed in anything by Europeans, and especially by Englishmen. Having failed utterly in London, he thought he must be qualified to succeed in New York. His idea was to give lectures and write books — poems especially. He soon found that every second person in America delivers lectures, and that every village has at least three poets — two women and one man. He had brought a few letters of introduction from some members of the Church of the Future in London to congenial spirits in New York, and he made thereby the acquaintance of the editor of a Spiritualist journal, of a German confectioner and baker who had a small shop on Fourth Avenue (and Fourth Avenue is to Fifth Avenue as Knightsbridge is to Park Lane or Piccadilly), and of a lady who wore trousers and cajled herself the Rer. Theodosia Judd. The influence of these persons over New York, however, was limited, and although they endeavoured to get an audience for one of Natty*s lectures at a very little hall in a cross street far up town, the public Dear Lady Disdain. 99 did not rush in, and Nat delivered his lecture so feebly that a few of the few who were in went boldly out again, and one elderly man produced from his pocket a copy of the New York Evening Mail and read it steadily through. Yet the Spiritualist journal had had several little notices preliminary of Natty, whom it described variously as Professor Cramp and Doctor Cramp, the celebrated author and lecturer, from Ix>ndony England ; and this was a secret delight to Nathaniel, for the blind Fury with abhorred shears might slit away his audiences, but not the printed and published praise. It cheered him for a little while to be thus publicly complimented, and he said to himself, with great pride, that that came of being in a land of equality, and that he would have been long in London before the hireling and subservient press of that city would thus have spoken of him. Still New York as a community was absolutely unawakened to any recognition or even knowledge of Natty's existence, and his money was melting away. He *' boarded " very modestly in a quiet little cross street where he paid but a few dollars a week, but he was earning nothing. There were awful moments when, as he passed some of the showy hairdressing shops in Broadway, and saw the richly dressed ladies going in and out, he began to wonder whether he had not better take at once to the single craft and mystery whereof he was really possessed, and do for the ciurls and chignons of Broadway what he had done in other days for those of Wigmore Street But his pride would not as yet suflfer this. He went home to his bedroom in the boarding-house and read over again the paragraph in the Spiritualist paper which spoke of his literary gifts, and he vowed that he would never stoop to curl heads of liair again — never. Suddenly another chance opened up for him. His friend the editor of the Spiritualist journal came to him one day with the grand news that he had procured him an appointment to deliver a lecture in the Lyceum course of Acroceraunia, one of the rising cities on the north-western confines of New York State. Acroceraunia was beginning now to hold its head pretty high in the world. It had already celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its foundation, and OS its neighbour and rival, Pancorusky City, had long been having its Lyceum winter course of lectures, Acroceraunia had at last made up its mind for a winter course of lectures as well. All the leading citizens had come forward most spiritedly, and so liberal were the promises of assistance that Acroceraunia put itself in communication at once with the American Literary Bureau of New York to engage H 2 lOO The Gentleman s Magazine, a certain limited number of " star " lecturers, the other nights of the course to be filled up with local and volunteer talent, and any rising young lecturers who might be known to private members of the committee and might be willing to offer their lecture for a modest sum in consideration of the opening thus afforded. Now the brother of the Spiritualist editor was one of the most important men in all Acroceraunia. He edited the Republican journal of that city. He wrote to his brother in New York requesting him to recommend some promising young lecturer who would not object to take twenty-five dollars and his expenses. The " stars " would not any of them shine for an hour on Acroceraunia under a hundred dollars, and many of them could not even be tempted out of their ordinary spheres by such a sum as that ; and some again were so heavily engaged in ad- vance that Acroceraunia would not have a chance of getting thera on any terms for many seasons to come. In fact, Acroceraunia had only engaged two genuine stars for her course, one to open, and one to close it. There seemed a great deal too much local talent and Singing Society in between, and therefore some padding of a less familiar kind had to be sought out. Hence the offer to Natty Cramp. Nathaniel jumped at it. He was beginning to fear that he never again should have a chance of testing his rhetorical skill ; and be- sides twenty-five dollars, look you, are equivalent to five pounds, and would be a substantial gain to Nathaniel Cramp. It so happened, too, that Nathaniel suited the conditions of the Lyceum course of Acroceraunia very well. That season, and indeed for some seasons back, all the Lyceums had had some lecturer from London, Eng- land, in their course. But when Acroceraunia had secured, and with immense difficulty, its two American stars there was not nearly enough of money still in prospect or possibility to enable it to get one of the British luminaries as well. Therefore Nathaniel Cramp was positively a godsend. " The celebrated English orator,. Professor Nathaniel P. Cramp, from London, England," would look very well on the placards and advertisements. The people of Acroceraunia were in general a steady-going, home-keeping com- munity. They rose early, they worked hard, and when the gentle- men of a family came home in the evening they generally went to- sleep on the lounge after supper, and were awakened by their wives in time to go to bed at a proper hour. They never dreamed of trips to Europe in the summer, and they did not take in the British> journals. For half of them, then, the name of Natty Cramp would- do just as well as that of any of the more distinguished Britons who. were stumping the States that fall. • • • • • , Dear Lady Disdain. loi So Nathaniel accepted the offer, and when the time came he took the train for Acroceraunia. He travelled all night and arrived at Acroceraunia about eleven o'clock next morning. He was straining his eyes anxiously for the spires and domes of the city where he was to make what he really held to be his debiit as a lecturer in the States ; but when the train stopped he could see no spires, no domes^ no city. The land wherever his eye could reach was covered with snow ; he saw nothing but snow. Natty was beginning to think this could not be the right station at all, when the brakesman at the upper end of the car, who had been madly straining and tugging at his piece of mechanism like a sailor set all alone to work at a cap- stan, suddenly dashed open the door and shouted " Acrccerauny !" and Nat had to bundle himself out, portmanteau and all, as quickly as he could, on the wooden platform of the station. He stood hesitatingly a few moments, expecting to find some one to receive him. But there was clearly no one there to escort him, and the train had gone its way. He took up his portmanteau and walked slowly, doubtfully out of the station, wondering what he should do next Outside the station he saw two staggery and ramshackle lookmg omnibuses waiting. One had in its day been a Fulton Ferry omnibus in New York, and bore on its side the well-known pictorial ornamentations, a little (aded, which distinguish that conveyance as it rumbles up and down Broadway and Fulton Street This omnibus now belonged to the " Acroceraunia House." The other was in the service of the "American Hotel." Natty thought as he had to choose he ought to give the preference to the hostelry which assumed the name of the city which had honoured him with its invitation, and so he got into the carriage of the Acroceraunia House, feeling very much out of spirits, and divided mentally between an anxiety to know where Acroceraunia was and a feeble wish that the moment of his arrival might be postponed as long as possible. There was no other passenger in the omnibus as it jolted away. Nat was rather glad of that He was rattled along white road after white road until he began to wonder whether the town had any right to consider itself as in any manner connected with the railway station which bore its name. At last a few houses appeared, each standing separately in its piece of ground. Most of the houses were built of wood and had bright green shutters and littie Grecian porticoes, and every house had a clothes-line. Natty must appa- rently have passed in review the " pantalettes " of the whole female population of Acroceraunia as he drove along. At last the omnibus I02 The GentlematCs Magazine. turned into something which bore resemblance to a street, or at least was like a high-road with houses at each side. But Natty saw a little placard on a wall as they were turning into this street or road which for the moment withdrew his attention from everything else, and made him blush and feel shy, proud, terrified, and delighted. For he could see on it the words " Lyceum Lecture Course," " This Night,** and " Professor Nathaniel P. Cramp, of London, England.** Natty positively drew himself into a comer of the omnibus as if every eye must have been looking out for him, or as if he were I^ady Godiva riding through Coventry and had just been seized with a suspicion of the craft of Peeping Tom. But pride soon came to- Natty*s rescue again, and he felt that at last he was coming to be somebody, that this was the beginning of fame, and that the world comes to him who waits. He delivered to himself in a proud under- tone the closing sentences of his lecture. The omnibus stopped at last in front of a house of dark brick, with a sign swinging above, and after a good deal of clattering and stamping on the part of the horses, and cries of " Git up " on the part of the driver, it backed up to the porch and Professor Nathaniel P. Cramp got out. He made his way into the office of the hotel, a gaunt, bare room with a stove in the midst, a counter at one side, and a grave man behind the counter. When Nathaniel walked up to the counter the grave man turned round a huge ledger or register which lay before him, pushed it towards Nat, and handed him a pen without saying a word. Natty knew the ways of the New World well enough now to know what this meant. He inscribed himself in the book, Nathaniel Cramp, London, England. The grave man marked a number in the book opposite to Nat's name, and handed a key with a corresponding number to an Irish porter who took Nat's portmanteau and preceded him upstairs. The porter opened the door of a small bare bedroom in a gusty corridor, and showed Natty in. •* Guess youll want a fire built ?" said the porter. " I should like a fire,** Nat mildly answered. The attendant put down the key of the room on the table, and Nat observed that the key was stuck or set in a large triangular piece of metal like the huge and ill-shaped hilt of a dagger. " What do you have that thing on the keys for?" Nat asked. "To keep the guests firom putting 'em in their pockets — don't ye see ?^ " And what matter if they did put them in their pockets ?" " Then they forget 'em there, don't you see ? When a guest is in a \¥; Dear Lady Disdain. 103 hurry he never reelects to give up his key. Last fall every key in the Acrocerauny House was carr'd right off one morning. Now we fix 'em that way, don't you see? They can't put *em in their pockets anyhow." And the porter took himself off, loudly whistling as he went " The Wearing of the Green." Presently he came back with wood and lit the stove. Natty was too dispirited to talk. He looked out of the window at the one long street white in the snow. Opposite was a " dry goods " store with a liberal display of red and white "clouds" (light soft shawls 'of fleecy worsted or some such material) for women, and with some spectral crinolines dangling at the door. Next was a shop where "rubbers" — indiarubber overshoes — were sold; next was a hard- ware shop ; next a grocery store ; then a blank wall ornamented with a huge announcement of some sort of pill, and a small square bill which Natty knew to be the placard of his own lecture. It was now barely noon. Dinner, he had been informed, was at two ; suppei at six. What was he to do in the meantime ? A tap at the door. Natty called "Come in," and two men — one young, bright-eyed, handsome, and awkward : the other tall, hard-featured, and of middle age — came in. Nat bowed. " Professor Cramp, I presume ?" the elder visitor said. Nat intimated that his narne was Cramp, but he did not make it clear that he had no claim to the title of professor. " Professor Cramp," the younger man struck in, " I have the pleasure of making you acquainted with the president of our society, Mr. Fullager." Mr. Fullager and Nat solemnly shook hands. " Professor Cramp," said Mr. Fullager, " I have the pleasure to make you acquainted with our secretary, Mr. Plummer, junior." Nathaniel and Mr. Plummer shook hands. " There was a little mistake with regard to our meeting you at the depdt^^ Mr. Fullager^ explained ; and Nat luckily remembered that " depdty^ in Mr. Ful- lager's sense, corresponded with "station" in Nat's. "The train was on time to-day, which it usually is not, and when Mr. Plummer and I got to the depdt you were gone, sir." Nat affirmed that it didn't matter at all, and that he was much obliged. His visitors were now seated, and were waiting calmly in silence, evidently understanding that the responsibility of the con- versation rested on him. He felt that he must rise to the dignity of the situation somehow. A sudden inspiration possessed him, and he said — I04 The Gentlematis Magazine. "Yours is a very charming town, Mr. Fullager. It seems to grow very fast" " It is quite a place, sir — quite a place." " What population, now, have you T And the wily Nat crossed one foot over the other knee, nursed the foot with his hand, put his head sideways, and waited for an answer with the air of one who had studied populations a good deal. "Well, sir," Mr. Fullager said, after some grave deliberation, " we have forty-five hundred persons in this city." " Forty-seven hundred," Mr. Plummer said. " I guess not, sir — not quite so many." "Not if you take in the houses on the other side of Colonel Twentyman's lot, Mr. Fullager?" "Ah, well; yes — perhaps if you do that we should figure up to forty-seven hundred." "That is a remarkable population," Mr. Cramp said, patronis- ingly, "for so young a town." Nat hardly knew one population from another. " We are only twenty years old, sir." "Twenty years only I Wonderful !" Nat observed, with an air of dreamy enthusiasm. Then there was another pause. The two visitors were perfectly composed. They gazed at the stove, and did not feel that they were called upon to say anything. They had come to pay their respects to the foreign lecturer as a matter of courtesy and polite- ness, and when they considered that they had remained long enough they would rise and go away. There are plenty of talkative Ame- ricans no doubt, but the calm self possession of silence is nowhere so manifest as among the men of some of the States. But Nathaniel was much discomposed, and racked his brain for a topic. "What kind of audiences do you have here, Mr. Fullager?" he asked, in another rush of inspiration. " Well, sir (after some deliberation), I should say a remarkably intelligent audience. You would say so, Mr. Plummer?" ** Decidedly so," said Mr. Plummer, with a start, for he had been thinking of nothing in particular at the time. " Decidedly so, Mr. Fullager. Several gentlemen have told me that our audience is far more intelligent than that of Pancorusky City." "Oh, yes. I should certainly have expected that," said Nat, with the air of one who was rather surprised to hear the com- parison made, and who would not on any terms have consented to Dear Lady Disdain. 105 bring himself down to an audience such as that of Pancomsky City. Nat was really developing a considerable aptitude for playing the part of distinguished foreign visitor. "Would you like to see some of our institutions, sir?" Mr. FuUager asked. "The City Hall, the ward schools, our water power, Deacon Renselar's sawmills?'* Nat said he should like it of all things, and he remembered that he must call on the editor of the Republican journal, to whom indirectly he owed his renewed chances of fame. " Well call on them both, sir," said Mr. Fullager— " we'll call on the editors of both our journals — the Democrat and the Re- publican. We have no politics, sir, in our association, and they both, sir, have said kind words about your visit and your lecture." Nat professed himself delighted to have the chance of being presented to both the editors, and felt indeed a great deal more proud than he would have cared to telL If the people at home could only see him thus treated like a distinguished stranger and made a regular lion of, what would they say ? So Natty was conducted over the town and had all its growing wonders pointed out to him, and was presented to the editors of the rival journals, and was not invited to "liquor up," or, by any form of phraseology, to drink anything. This latter fact we mention with some hesitation to English readers, being aware of their preconceived opinions on the subject of American usages. It is an article of faith in England that every conversation in America opens with an invita- tion to drink. Nathaniel had already discovered that, outside the great cities where the foreigners abound and diffuse their customs, nine out often Americans rarely taste any liquid stronger than tea. The day thus wore away pleasantly enough for Nat, who found it more and more agreeable to be allowed to play the part of dis- tinguished stranger. But when he returned to his room in the hotel, and the evening came on bringing the hour of his public appearance terribly near, his spirits sank dismally. When the gong sounded at six o'clock for supper, and he went down to the lighted room where the guests were refreshing themselves on tea, hot " biscuit," and pre- serves, he had a nervous consciousness that every eye was turned upon him and that he was looking awkward. He thought it a very objectionable institution which obliged the lecturer to take his meals in public and to be seen swallowing hot dough, denominated biscuit, immediately before his appearance on the platform. He would have liked so much better to burst upon Acroceraunia all at once, and for the first time, when stepping forward to deliver his harangue. He io6 The Gentlematis Magazine. nearly choked over his biscuit with blended nervousness and self- conceit. Opposite to him at the same narrow table Nat saw a handsome man with soft blue eyes, a bald head, and a full fair beard and moustache, who was evidently regarding the distinguished lecturer with interest. When Nat looked towards him the blue-eyed mai> said — " I think, sir, I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Cramp ? " Nat started and awkwardly admitted the fact. "I have heard you lecture already — in the Avenir Hall, isn't it called? — in London." " Oh, indeed,** Nat replied, with an effort to be calm and dignified, which was combated by three emotions rushing upon him at once : a pang of home-sickness at the sound of the word " London," a dis- tressing consciousness that the stranger must have heard him make a sad mess of it, and a sickening dread that the stranger must have also learned that he was once a hairdresser. " I was on a visit to Europe for some years," the new acquaintance said, " and I spent a considerable time in London, and I went into- Avenir Hall one Sunday and heard you lecture." " I didn't do very well that day," said Nat " You were evidently not used to public speaking, and you were nervous, but I shouldn't think the worse of your chances for that. If a man has anything in him he is sure to be nervous." Nat was glad to hear that anyhow, although there was an easy patronising way about his friend which, as a distinguished lecturer,, he hardly relished. " You live here, I presume ?" Nathaniel said, anxious to turn the conversation from his oratorical deficiencies. " In Acroceraunia ? No ; I live farther westward," and he men- tioned the name of a town which Nat had heard of, and where there was a large and well known State college ; " I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you there." And presently the blue eyed man, having finished his supper, rose from the table, bowed to Nat, and left the room. If Nat had been a little less deeply engrossed in the thought of his lecture he might have been struck with the strange and picturesque sights which met his eyes as he proceeded with his fiiends Mr. Fullager and Mr. Plummer to the hall where he was to confront his- audience. The earth was white all around with the crackling and glittering snow. The ** red-litten windows " of the hall seemed to have an unearthly colour as they shone between the white of the Dear Lady Disdain. 107 ground and the blue of the moon-lighted sky. The street and the houses were but sharp black lines and cubes against the snow. The daik belt of a pine wood, from whose depths, much thinned lately^ the bear had more than once made his way into Acroceraunian streets- in Acroceraunia's earlier days, girdled the valley all around, and then above and behind it rose the hills, through the clefts of which a melancholy wind swept down along the frozen roads. The sleighs came rattling up to the hall from outlying farms and villages, and the sleigh bells tinkled merrily, and the lights in the carriages sparkled like fireflies out of season. Never had Nat seen such a waste of brilliant white as that upon the earth, such a profound blue as that in the sky ; for the sky was not black with the hue of the night, even low down on the horizon where the moon least lighted it, but a deep- purpling blue. It was strange to turn one's eyes up to what seemed the awful solitude of the hills, and the belt of pine woods and the horizon, and then to drop one's gaze suddenly to the little luminous and bustling space just around the hall. As Nat stood on the steps of the hall, which was on the side of a slightly ascending street, the town was lost, swallowed up in shadow and darkness, and outside the sphere of light which radiated from the windows of the hall there seemed nothing but the hills, the pine woods, and the snow. Where did they come from — that cluster of people with their sleighs and sleigh-bells, and lights and flirs, and rapid feet and pleasant talk? From the drear waste of snow around, from the black pine woods, from the cold far hills ? There was something strange, unearthly, uncanny, in the sudden crowd and the twinkling lights thus starting up out of shadow, out of darkness, out of nothing. At a breath one might have thought the whole vision would disappear, the lights would go out, the bright-eyed lasses and tall sinewy lads, the sober elders with the set faces, the stamping horses with the ratding bells, all would vanish and leave the stranger alone with the drear hills and the moaning pines. But Nat Cramp did not give many thoughts to these things. His may be called a subjective mind, and he only saw a hall where he was to give a lecture and a little crowd of people, whom he thought with a certain terror he should presently have to address. He had chosen a theme which he considered must especially appeal to the sympathies of a Republican audience. His subject was "The Worn-out Aristocracies of Europe." The hall was tolerably well filled, for people in Acroceraunia went to every lecture in their winter course regularly as a matter of duty. But they were, to Nat's thinking, sadly undemonstrative. American* lo8 The Gentleman s Magazine. audiences, especially in country places, hardly ever applaud. They listen, if they are really interested, with a motionless and an awful interest. Nat kept his manuscript open before him, but tried to speak as far as possible without consulting the paper. But he soon began to feel afraid of facing the grave and silent audience. The echo of his own words alarmed him. He lashed the weaknesses and excesses of the effete aristocracies of Europe, and the calm audience betrayed no fervour of Republican enthusiasm. * He narrated what he held to be a very good story, and on ne rit pas^ as the French reporters used to say sometimes when an orator's joke failed to draw fire. He paused for a moment in one or two places for the expected applause, but it did not come, and he had to hurry on again abashed. He became cowed and demoralised. He forgot his task, and he hid his face in his manuscript and read, conscious that he was reading a great deal too fast, and yet thirsting to get done with the now hope- less effort. The essay was awfully long. Several persons quietly got up and glided out of the hall, the soft fall of their indiarubber- covered feet having in Nat's ears a spectral sound. There was a pretty girl with beaming eyes whom Nat had noticed as she leaped from a sleigh at the door when he was entering the hall before the battle. He saw her too when he began his lecture, and the beaming eyes were turned upon him. Alas! the beaming eyes were now covered with their heavy lids, and the pretty girl was asleep. To add to his confusion and distress, Nathaniel saw that his friend of the supper was among the audience, and was broad awake. At last the final word of the discourse was pronounced, and the released audience began to melt away as rapidly as possible. Nat sat upon the platform with downcast eyes, utterly miserable. " Our audiences, sir," Mr. FuUager explained with grave politeness, " are accustomed to lectures of about three-quarters of an hour in length. You have occupied an hour and a-half. They are early people here, and they make their arrangements accordingly. You will therefore not attribute the premature departure of some of our citizens to any want of respect for you. I have no doubt they all enjoyed the lecture very much." " It was remarkably instructive," said Mr. Plummer. Instructive ! Nat had intended it for a burst of brilliant and impassioned eloquence, blended with scathing sarcasm. As they came out Nat heard a young lady say — " It didn't interest me at all ; just not one bit." ** English orators don't amount to anything, I guess," was another commentary which Nat caught in passing. For him the sky seemed Dear Lady Disdain. 109 to have turned from blue to black, and the moon to have willidrawi> her light. He was sitting in his bedroom cold and wretched. He had got rid of his friends of the committee, and the fire in the stove had got rid of itself, when a tap was heard at the door, and his bald and blue-eyed acquaintance of the supper-table came in. For some un- accountable reason Nat particularly detested this man. " Come," said his visitor cheerily, and going to the very heart of the subject at once, "you must not be cast down. You are not used to this sort of thing, and you don't understand our people here. In places like this they have forgotten all about the effete aristocracies of Europe, and don't care, as they would say, a snap one way or the other. I suppose an English village audience wouldn't care much for a lecture on the dangers of our Third Term system. Half our Acroceraunian folks have no other notion attaching to England than the thought that your Queen is an excellent woman and a pattern- mother. Are you going to try again ?" " No," said poor Nat bluntly ; " I'm not." " Well, you know, it isn't every one who can hold an audience. I'm a wretched speaker myself, although I'm a professor. The mistake you English people make — excuse me if I say it — is in thinking that anything will do for us here in the States. Now I am a blunt man, as you see. Can I serve you in any way ? I sec you have got on a wrong track, but I think there's something in you, and I love London, so what can I do for you ?" " You are very kind — but there is nothing." " Oh, yes, there is. Let me see. I am Professor Clinton, of the University of New Padua ; and I am going home to-morrow — a few hours in tlie cars. Come and pass a few days at my house, and we'll talk things over. We want all sorts of clever young fellows about our university, and who knows ? Come with me to-morrow." Pie clapped Nat on the shoulder : Nat burst into tears. CHAPTER XXL IN THE LIBRARY OF NEW PADUA. The soft sunlight of the sweet melancholy Indian summer is^ already passing like the dream of a poetic renaissance over the woods and fields and waters of the town — the city we should rather say — of New Padua, in one of the middle States of America, when we meet Natty Cramp again. Several months have gone since the 1 1 o The Gentleman s Magazine, «cene described in the last chapter, and Nathaniel is settled in New Padua under the friendly protection of Professor Clinton. New Padua is a university town. But let not any one be deceived -by the name into fancying that New Padua is anything like Oxford, or Bonn, or even for that matter like Cambridge in Massachusetts, where the University of Harvard is situated. New Padua is the seat of wjiat people in England would call a great popular college rather than a university ; a college founded by the State of ^ich it is the educational centre, with special reference to the needs of the somewhat rough and vigorous Western youth who are likely to pour in there. The city of New Padua belongs to a State which not very long ago used to be described as Western, but which the rapid upspringing of communities lying far nearer to the setting sun has converted into a middle State now. The town is very small and very quiet; remarkably intelligent ■and pleasant. The sodety, and indeed almost the population, is composed of the professors and officials of the college, with their wives and daughters; the judges and magistrates; the railway authorities ; the Federal officials ; the students ; and die editors of the newspapers. It is a sort of professional populati(Hi all throughout. The professors of the univa:sity are mostly men of naaik and high culture. One or two are Germans, one or two Italians; one is French. Of the American professors, two at least bear names dis- tinguished even in Europe, and one of these is our friend Mr. Clinton, who is Professor of Astronomy and is in charge of the Observatory. Like almost all Americans, Professor Qinton is something of a politician. He contributes occasional articles to the North American Review^ and writes not a little on European afi^rs in one of the New Padua journals. It was this latter connection which enabled him to be of service to Nathaniel. When the young man had been a few days in his house, and he saw that there was really a certain amount of literary capacity about him with a great deal of energy, Clinton obtained for him an engagement on one of the New Padua papers, told the editor he would find a useful man in Nat provided he worked him hard enough to work all Uie nonsense out of him and get pretty quickly down to the good stuff at the bottom. Thus Professor Clinton started Nathaniel fairly in a new career, liking the lad with a sort of good-humoured and half-contemptuous feeling, and continuing always kind to him. Professor Clinton's house was always open to Nat. Many a night whai Clinton's wife and sister-in-law (he had no children) had gon^ to bed, he would start out with Nat for a long Dear Lady Disdain. 1 1 1 ivalk by the river, and would listen with kindly tolerance to Nat's theories and hopes, and ambition and nonsense. Professor Clinton had made in his own way all the success that was open to him, and he regarded it modestly, knowing that in the world's eyes it was not much, but finding it enough for him. It pleased him to do kind things and to note the human weaknesses of those whom he served, .and Natt/s absurdities had a sort of interest for him. Nat might have been happy enough in New Padua. He did all manner of work for the paper — reviews of books, descriptive reports of local events, and leading articles on European affairs — ^which latter seemed, to many people in New Padua, t6 show quite a wonderful knowledge of the famous personages of the Old World. His pay was small, but he could live on it and wear decent clothes. He " boarded " at the " Franklin House " for so many dollars a week, and had no cares in the way of making the two ends meet. He went about a good deal in the pleasant society of New Padua through the influence of Professor Clinton's introductions, and was thought by some persons to be quite a remarkable and promising young man. He was constantly presented to strangers as "Mr. Cramp, one of the editors of our leading journal," for in most of the American States any one who contributes regularly to a paper is popularly rated as one of its editors. He was the equal of any- body ; and in New Padua no one knew anything of his early career in Wigmore Street. He began to concern himself greatly in State politics, and aheady to lay down the law thereupon. He ought to have been content with himself and happy. One day, when Nat was at the office of his paper looking over tlie *** exchanges," he suddenly saw a paragraph in a San Francisco journal which made him start and flush and tremble, and see the chairs and desks around him flicker and rock in supernatural fashion. For the paragraph announced that among the last arrivals in San Francisco were the distinguished English financier and member of Parliament, the Hon. Sir John Challoner, accompanied by his daughter ; and then there were a few lines descriptive of the programme of civDities and attentions which the leading financiers and others of San Francisco were preparing for their visitor. In another journal of the same city Nat saw a long leading article about British capital and Califomian resources, d propos of the visit of the eminent British financier. Poor Nat ! He hardly knew at first whether he felt delight or agony. He hardly knew, to use a vulgar phrase, whether he was on his head or his heels. Perhaps the predominant sense soon became 112 The Gentleinatis Magazine. one of pain. She was on the same American Continent with him : and he had not got over his insane passion for her one single bit. Was it possible that they might meet ? — and if they did, would she speak to him as to an equal ? He could feel, he could hear, a heavy, distinct throbbing in his head. He looked to the coming weeks now with heart-sickening longing and craven terror. From that moment he studied the Califomian papers with eager curiosity, and was rewarded now and then by a paragraph further reporting the doings of Sir John Challoner — ^and once by a line, a thrilling line, of " personal " news which concisely set forth that " Miss Challoner, the great English heiress, is said to be the most beautiful Englishwoman who has lately visited the West." Nat seized the sub-editorial scissors, cut this paragraph out, and kept it for himself. Nat made " copy," however, and rather successful " copy," of the distinguished visitors. He wrote a long account of Sir John Challoner ;. his wealth, his dignity, his splendid country seat at Durewoods (which Nat described very fully), his town house (which Nat had not seen), and his beautiful and brilliant daughter. Even Professor Clinton was taken in and assumed that Nat must have been among the in- timate friends of the Challoners in London. Another occurrence greatly raised Nathaniel's credit as an authority on European affairs. This was "The Cameron Affair," which seemed to New Paduan eyes likely to embroil Europe. It was the case of the gallant Captain Cameron, who, having in some way fallen into dispute with his Carlist chiefs, had flung up his commission, and was returning home in disgust when he happened unluckily to fall into the hands of the other side, and was in a fair way to be shot as a spy. Would England claim him as a Civis Romanus ? Would she look tamely, aye, basely, on and submit to the murder of her gallant though mistaken son? This was the question which Nathaniel put in tones of varying indignation day after day in the pages of the New Paduan journal. Natty wrote columns about Captain Cameron, and was rather sorry when the news came one day that the gallant Legitimist had been allowed to return quietly home. It was a great thing for Nat, however, and he made the veiy most of it, speaking, when the news of the captive's release came, as if it must have been the articles in the New Paduan journal which, flashed across the cable wires to Madrid, had effected the release of the hero. ** I was glad to say a word for poor Cameron," Nat would observe loftily to all listeners in turn. " He pressed me very hard to take service with him under Don Carlos. He was kind enough to think Dear Lady Disdain. 113 highly of my military capacity : but of course my Republican principles rendered that impossible. He is a man of ancient family, Cameron, an honest fellow and a thorough soldier." So Nathaniel was winning quite a reputation in New Padua as a man who had been pretty intimately concerned in the great political movements of Europe, and he began to take on airs of authority eve 1 with Professor Clinton. One memorable day Nathaniel walked from the office of his journal towards the university grounds. These stood on an elevated plain a little outside the town, a simply laid out enclosure with bioad oblong blocks of building, bare almost as a barrack, but deriving a certain picturesqueness from the situation. For standing on almost any spot of the university grounds one could look on the river winding between the hills and bluffs, and dotted here and there with little islets, each feathered and tufted with trees. The peculiarity of the scene was that the town was set back from the river and sheltered in between the bluffs which made the river's bank, and an inland range of low and rolling hills. So when you stood upon the university ground and turned your back upon the university buildings you saw only the river, lonely, with no sign of growing civilisation on its banks, looking as it must have looked when the red man shot along it in his canoe. The very soul and spirit of solitude might at certain soft sweet evening hours have seemed to abide there. The melancholy beauty of the Indian summer was on the foliage and the water and in the sky this evening when Nat Cramp entered the uni- versity grounds. As he passed along a glimpse of the river attracted him, and he stood at the edge of the collegiate demesne and looked upon the scene. Its beauty touched him. He did not in general think much about inanimate nature : his own concerns occupied him far too much. His little self-conceits and strivings and humiliations filled his eyes and blinded them against the charms of trees and water, skies, stars, and flowers, as dust might have done. His poetry had always been only egotistical emotion put into inflated rhythm, and his eloquence was phrase. But he was for the moment stolen from himself by the quiet charm of that scene. The river flowing slowly eastward seemed to speak to him somehow of home, and there began to descend into his soul, mingled up with much feeling of baffled egotism and of hopeless love, a kind of salutary sense that he, Nathaniel Cramp, was in general little better than a sham and an Ass. How far this healing mood might have grown upon him is not likely to be known by us. A friendly hand touched him on the shoulder and startled him. Vol. XV., N.S. 1875. ^ 114 1^^^ Gentleman s, Magazhie. u I have news for you,*' said Professor Clinton, his large blue eyes smiling benignly. " Your friends the Challoners are coming to New- Padua." Had Professor Clinton announced to him that his crimes were dis- covered, and that the English detectives were in New Padua to arrest him, and had he committed any crimes to merit arrest, pooi Nathaniel could not have looked more confused. He had now and then contemplated this as a possibility. New Padua lay not far out of the track of the great Western highway, and it was a place that strangers liked to visit Nat had had secret visions at night of Marie Challoner coming to New Padua, and of his meeting her there — ^he no longer a London barber, no longer the mere son of a Durewoods housekeeper, but the son of his own works, and a rising citizen of the rising university town — a man who might hold himself as good as the best. But when the event seemed close at hand his nerves were shaken. Would Sir John Challoner speak to him? Would he tell people who Nat was? Would Marie call him "Natty," and bring him, coram publico^ news of his mother and treat him as a kindly, proud English girl treats the son of her old ser\-ant ? And the unfortunate lad felt, amid all these ignoble con- siderations, that he loved her more wildly than ever. The one manly, unegotistic, refined emotion of his whole nature was just his absurd passion for her. He stammered out some awkward word or two expressive of delight " Yes, they are coming to stay for a few days with our president*' (the president of the university), " and they are going to see all our sights. Professor Benjamin is to tell Sir John Challoner all about the mining resources of our State, and show him everything. You didn't know of this before ?" " No," said Nat, simply ; " how could I have known ? I didn't see anything in' the papers." " I thought they might have written to you, perhaps." " No, they haven't written — yet" " But they know you are here, I suppose ?" " Well ; I don't quite know," Nat answered slowly. " You see I left England rather suddenly, and my people didn't half like my coming out here. I was always a Republican. I resigned my rank in the Volunteers because I couldn't bear arms in the service of a monarchy, you know," the young Republican added proudly. " But why shouldn't you bear arms in the service of your own Government and your own country ?" Dear Lady Disdain. 1 1 5 " Because I am a Republican, as I have told you." " Stuff and nonsense ! What's the use of being a Republican when you haven't a Republic ?" " I remember poor Cameron saying just the same thing to me one day," Nat remarked with a forced smile, *' when he was pressing mc to take service under Don Carlos with him. But he couldn't per- suade me, A principle is a principle. So I came out here." " And very good of you, too," said the blue-eyed Professor, with a smile ; "just like the others." " The others ! What others ?" " Lafayette^ you know, and Kosciusko — and the rest ; don't you see?" Nat did not see, and did not like that sort of thing. " The president's going to have a grand reception for them," said Clinton. " I mean for your friends the Challoners, Cramp, not for your lamented pwredecessors Lafayette and Kosciusko ; and you are to have an invitation." "Am I?" said Nat, with a growing redness and dampness ascending to his very hair ; for every other emotion whatever was for the moment absorbed in the wild joy of the thought " Then I shall certainly see her and speak to her." " Yes, I took care of that. I told him that you were a personal friend of the Challoners, and that of course they would expect to see you. I didn't do wrong in that, did I ?" For Nat's face betrayed the most unmistakable embarrassment. " No ; oh no. But I think, you know, I would rather nothing was said about me until — ^just until we meet. You see I don't know Sir John so very well, and I'm not so absolutely certain that he likes me — and he's an odd sort of man — and I know her much better." "Oho," said the Professor, prolonging the word into quite a cadence of meaning — "is that the way? Now I begin to see — but you don't want to avoid them ?" " No ! no ! no !" Nat exclaimed with the most genuine eagerness, a horrible alarm seizing him that perhaps Clinton would tell the president not to invite him. " I want to see her — them, I mean — of all things. Oh, she is a lovely girl ! And she was so kind to me ! " he added in an involuntary triumph of his better nature and of grateful feeling. " Well, well ! all right," the genial Professor said. " You'll meet them ; and the president, you know, isn't likely to say anything about you beforehand, for he. hardly knows you, and he's all full of his own concerns; and I could give Benjamin or Benjamin's wife a I 2 1 1 6 The Gentleman s Magazine. hint if you like that you'd rather see how the old man was disposed towards you before you were brought back to his recollection. Yes ! I'll give Mrs. Benjamin a hint She's a bright little woman, and she'll understand the whole thing." Professor Clinton had found a ready explanation of Nat's em- barrassment A good-looking, cleverish, romantic lad, very poor ; a pretty and doubtless romantic girl, very rich ; a father purse-proud and great in finance and Parliament — it is easy to see why the lad should be at once longing to meet the girl and a little alarmed about the father. He whispered his ingenious romance to his wife and her sister, and to Mrs. Benjamin, the wife of the mineralogist, and it was generally understood that there were reasons why Mr. Cramp did not wish to be brought immaturely under the notice of his distin- guished countryman, but that these reasons did not imply any rooted antipathy between Mr. Cramp and his distinguished countryman's daughter. The result of all this was that at least half a dozen ladies of New Padua had their interest in the approaching reception at the university considerably quickened by the hope of seeing at least a page from a living romance brought under their eyes there. The day came. It was known through New Padua that Sir John and Miss Challoner had arrived at the house of the president the previous evening, but were not to be, so to speak, on exhibition until the reception in the university rooms. Society in New Padua seldom spread itself out much. People had pleasant evenings in each other's houses, where they ate ice-creams even in the depth of winter, and apples, and drank tea, and looked at engravings, and had bright genial conversation — such genuine conversation, fair interchange of ideas on letters and art and things in general, as one only reads of now in England ; and they went home early. The ladies came very plainly dressed on most of these occasions, and if a lady who had walked with her husband from her own home appeared in the drawing-room in her hat or bonnet nobody con- sidered it odd or unseemly. Only on rare occasions did the gentie- men come in evening dress. But this reception of the English travellers at the university rooms was to be quite an exceptional thing, and every lady who had been to Europe that year, or who had got any dresses home from Paris, was delighted to have an oppor- tunity of making a little display. Really the feminine beauty of New Padua was well worth looking at, even in its undress. Perhaps it ought not to be called New Paduan beauty, for there were no bom New Paduans yet grown up. Twenty years ago there was no such place as New Padua. The university had gathered a community Dear Lady Disdain, 1 1 7 about it from all quarters. The principal judge and his wife were natives of the State indeed, but came from its largest town a hundred miles away. The president of the university came from New York. His wife, still a fine woman, though passing her prime, was from Maryland. Professor Benjamin was from Ohio ; his wife had drawn her early breath within sight of Boston Common. Our friend Clinton was a Vermonter, married to a lady from Illinois. The various foreign professors already referred to had some of them foreign wives : and the editor of the journal to which Mr. Cramp was attached had once been United States consul at Athens, and had brought home to New Padua a countrywoman of Sappho as his wife. Nat was invited to accompany the Clintons on the momentous evening, but he preferred to glide in to the rooms of the reception alone. Need it be said that he dressed with care ? He had always saved and scraped enough out of his earnings to keep himself well dressed, but his pride was his evening costume, which he had hither- to had no occasion of displaying in New Padua. In his bedroom by the ineffective light of a kerosene lamp he took this evening costume out and surveyed it with a melancholy aftection. When all his preparations were nearly made for leaving London he indulged in the wild luxury of ordering a full suit of evening costume from a first-class tailor. Then he believed himself going out to conquer the New World. It did not seem unlikely that the costume would dis- play itself at the dinner table of the White House at Washington. It appeared certain that it must delight the eyes of many a brilliant assembly crowded in lighted halls to hear the young Republican orator from the Old World. Alas ! Nathaniel had never yet had a chance of displaying that well-made suit of clothes. In the States there is no uniform proper to lecturing, and audiences rather mock them- selves of the white tie and the dress coat — despite the singular theory so devotedly maintained in England that American men always wear dress coats. There was something Nat thought strange, significant, weird, fateful, in his putting on that costume for the first time that night What might not that portend ? Nat studied himself fondly and yet critically in the glass. He certainly was not a bad-looking fellow, and he looked browner, straighter, more independent, and less sheepish than he was wont to do under the burthen of his detested occupation in England. The coat was superb ; the trousers were faultless. As to the vest there was so little of it that it hardly called for remark ; but the expanse 1 1 8 The Genileman' s Magazine. of snowy and glossy shirt front was unexceptionable. The little studs of pink coral had a sort of poetic or romantic aspect, and the flower in the buttonhole spoke of emotion. Natty felt almost as he used to feel when he was new to the uniform of the West Pimlico Volunteers, and the parades in Hyde Park and on Wimbledon Com- mon, under the eyes of royalty. It was a pity that he could not call a hansom cab, leap into it, and rattle up to the hall of the reception. But there were no han- som cabs in New Padua, nor as yet even street cars, and people who had not vehicles of their own went afoot into society. In winter they put on " rubbers," but it was not winter as yet, and the night was fine and the roads were dry. So Natty issued forth in his shiny boots and with a heart quick beating. Would she know him ; would she recognise him ; would she be friendly ? Would Sir John snub him and let every one know of poor Nat's humble beginnings ? The gravel of the walks within the university enclosure was echoing everywhere to wheels and hoofs and hurrying feet as Nat entered the grounds. The reception was to take place in the library, which was blazing with lights : its windows were squares of flame against the night. Many guests were going in, and the sounds from within indicated a crowd already. All the graduates had had invitations, and such of tlieir female relatives as happened to be resident in New Padua, and so there was a goodly gathering. Nat had re- mained purposely late.. As he set his foot upon the steps of the outer door a terrible thought pierced him. Suppose he had come too late ; and that she had already withdrawn ? Or suppose she was unwell or fatigued, and could not make her appearance at all ? With a freshly perturbed heart he entered the library, greeted as he entered with a friendly shake of the hand by the president and his wife, both of whom shook hands as a matter of course with every one, and neither of whom at the moment remembered who Nat was. Nat was not sorry for that He glided past into the crowd. He actually passed Sir John Challoner, passed him quite closely, brushed against him, and was not recognised or even seen. Sir John was engaged in animated conversation with two or three pro- fessors and a judge. Nat breathed more freely. Had he had time for such emotions he might have wondered at the transformed appearance of the library ; at the lights, the flowers, the green wreaths and festoons of leaves — above all, the company. Could these be the quiet and unpretentious dames and demoiselles of New Padua, these ladies of the floating silks, the jewels, the bracelets. Dear Lady Disdain. 119 the laces, the wonderful structures of hair? Nat felt doubtful whether he should be justified in speaking to Professor Clinton's sister-in-law, unless she should previously recognise him — she looked such a different sort of personage in a blue silk dress and a train, and with white arms bare. True, he had often seen the white arms still more bare than that, when she was engaged in her simple and undisguised occupation of helping to make bread and piecrust and to cut up apples in Professor Clinton's modest household. What a giand lady she looks now, Nat thought. But, indeed, she looked a lady always, he said to himself; and in her home of late he always called her " Minnie," as her folks and friends did. AVhile he was thinking whether it would be right to call her Minnie in her blue silk, and while he was still casting uneasy eager eyes this way and that, it suddenly seemed to him as though the lights danced and twinkled, and the floor rocked, and some heavy, dizzying sounds were dinning in his ears. For in one of the recesses in the library — a recess set out with a table, whereon were engravings and photo- graphs, and gaily ornamented with ferns and flowers — there at last he saw Miss Challoner. She was seated, and was looking, or affecting to look, at photographs, and Professor Benjamin was acting as showman ; and a thrill of absurd delight went through Nat's heart as he saw that it was Professor Benjamin and not a young unmarried man. Mrs. Benjamin was there too, and round-eyed little Miss Benjamin. It was clear that Miss Challoner had withdrawn for the time with these two or three friends from the central throng. She looked weary. Natty thought, and distraite^ and very pale. But how beautiful she seemed to him, with the dark hair thick around her neck, and coming somewhat low upon her forehead ; and the eye- lashes long and dark, under which now her eyes were hidden ! " Isn't she real splendid?" a youth near Nat asked of another. ** I expected to see an English girl more ruddy-like," the other replied, a young Western giant overlooking the crowd. " She looks proud and stuck-up rather." '* Mrs. Benjamin says she's just lovely," the other rejoined, em- phatically, and using "lovely" as English people employ "amiable." '*She don't seem like it," the young giant remarked. Natty turned round and glared on him, but the young giant did not observe the glare. Now, Nat said to himself, was his time — now or never! Now, while she was thus secluded and only the kind Benjamins were near. He pushes his way through the crowd; he is near; he is 1 20 The Gentlematis Magazine. nearer ; he is within the recess ; he is close to the table ; the Benjamins already see him, and smile on him, and interchange significant glances with each other. Nat's forehead is hot, and his tongue is dry, and falters ; but there is no escape now, and he desperately says " Miss Challoner !" and Lady Disdain looks up and turns the deep light of her eyes on him. A moment of doubt and wonder, and then " Natty !'* comes from between the surprised and parted lips, and Dear Lady Disdain, all astonished but kindly, holds out her friendly hand to the palpi- tating youth. "You didn't expect to see me here," the tremulous, delighted Nathaniel said. " No, we have been so long away from home, and your mother did not know when I saw her last. But I am glad to see you, Natty — Mr. Cramp, I mean." Lady Disdain corrected herself with a gleam of brightness coming into her smile. Then she bade Nat to tell her all about his adventures, and said her father would be glad to see him, and in a moment was con- versing quietly with him like an old friend. But in the inter- vening moment the Benjamins had seen enough. For nothing could be more clear to them than the fact that the first sight of Nat had filled Miss Challoner with emotion. Confused and pal- pitating as Nathaniel was, she was far more obviously and deeply moved. The colour rushed at first into her cheeks, and her voice failed her, and then her eyes drooped and her lips trembled, and Mrs. Benjamin declared afterwards that she saw the tears come into the dear young lady's eyes, and that she thought she was then and there going to faint. Marie did not faint, however, but recovered her composure very soon. Yet was kindly Mrs. Benjamin not wholly mistaken. For the unexpected sight of poor Nat had been to Marie like the arising of a ghost from some far dim grave. It was not Nathaniel Cramp she saw, but the place, the past, the memories of which Nat's was a chance and incidental figure, yet charged with all the full force of irresistible association. She saw Durewoods and her home and her girlhood; she saw again her dreams and longings ; she saw youth and emotion and the hope of love, and Dione Lyle, and Dione Lyle's warnings, and the hollow in the woods — and Christmas Pembroke ! — and at the same mo- ment there came on her drawn by an inseparable link of contrast tlie shadow of the life that was awaiting her in London, the marriage, with no love in it on her side, the barren ambition, the dull self- Dear Lady Disdain. i 2 1 repression, the drilled and disciplined heart, and all the unsatis- fying succession of empty, monotonous to-morrows. All this and much more came rushing on Marie as she saw the poor lad from Durewoods standing there before her, and her colour did deei>en, and her lips did tremble, and it may even be that a tear did start into her eyes. But a very pretty little chapter of loninnce began to circulate in the library of the New Padua University that night. (To he continued.) r'\^ >k^ xy ^^/ ^•> TABLE TALK. BY SYLVANUS URBAN, GENTLEMAN. The " Knight of Innishowen " is at issue with English usage on the pronunciation of "Monaco." He complains that our people, who in large numbers visit the historic Genoese rock in the gambling season, shorten the a and put the whole accent on the first syllable, so that the first two syllables are not distinguishable to the ear from those of the word " monogram " for example. He favours me with a learned letter on the subject, set with Latin quotations as with jewels ; and I am sorry I cannot find space for the whole of it. I do not propose to dispute the point with him that the fashionable usage is without proper warrant, but in fairness to my countrymen and countrywomen who learned their geography in this island before they began to travel, I must remind him of the fact, which he does not mention, that the English geographies and encyclopaedias agree in placing the accent on the first syllable, which, in accordance with the habit of English speech, settles the length of the second syllable. Insular authority, however, is of no account on this subject, and I •can easily imagine that, as the "Knight" states, the Prince of Monaco and his accomplished secretary the Marchese di Prato, whom my correspondent remembers in brilliant Parisian society twenty years ago, would have been shocked at the British pronunciation of the name of the classic rock, which travellers then pronounced, Italian fashion, with a, " Two well-known passages in Virgil and Lucan," says my correspondent, " attest the fact that the second syllable was in their days the (b diphthong, and in each case it forms the penulti- mate syllable of hexameter verse. Anchises, pointing out to ^neas and the Sybil in the Elysian Fields the shades of Caesar and Pompey consorting as agreeably as if the great civil war had not taken place between them, recalls to mind the son and father-in-law marching at the head of their respective armies to fight each other, the former from the east, and the latter from the western heights that bounded Jiis Province of Gall from Italy — Aggeribus socer Alpinis atque arce Monceci Descendens ViRG. IE. vi. 830. From Alpine heights and from Monoechus Fane, The father first descends into the plain. Table Talk. . 123 The Fane was the temple of Hercules on the top of the Arx Monoeci. It was dedicated by the Greek founders of the ancient city to Hercules Monoecus (Hercules Alone) and was hailed, no doubt, with reverent salutation and prayer by the seaman from the mast when first sighting it along that coast of the Gulf of Genoa. Lucan, in his *Pharsalia,' describes the harbour and the great rock, called the Scogiio by the natives : — Quaqne sub Herculeo sacratas numinc portus Urget rupe cavd pelagus : non Corus in ilium Jus habet aut Zeph3niis : solus sua littora turbat Circius, et tutd prohibef staiionc Monoeci. Where winding rocks the peaceful flood receive, Nor Corus there, nor Zeph)rnis resort, Nor roll loud surges in the sacred port : Circius' loud blast alone is heard to roar, And vex the safety of Monoecus' shore. Of all the barren rocks of Liguria the Rock of Monaco is the most barren, according to the proverbial triplet of the locality, which commemorates the tlirift of its inhabitants, and elongates its second syllable : — Son Monaco supra un Scogiio ; Non semino, e non recoglio ; £ pur mangiar io voglio. Monaco seated on a rocky steep, I neither corn may sow, nor harvest reap ; And yet 'j^ainst hunger I my watch must keep." I AGREE with a correspondent who expresses some impatience at the argument of M. Viollet le Due, in a recent controversy in Paris, to the effect that the well-known tomb of Abelard and Heloise in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise should not be repaired because of a <loubt as to whether the remains of the ill-fated pair lie buried in that spot. I am not sure that a memorial monument which does not jirofess to mark the small space of earth where the hero lies buried will evoke the same emotion or the same tone of reflection that is awakened by a tomb j but when a spot has become consecrated by time and feeling as the last resting-place of the dead it seems idle to raise, as in this particular case, the question whether a sufficient <iuantity of earth was brought away from the original place of sepulture to satisfy the mere material inquiry whether the remains of the hapless lovers are really there or not. The tomb of the curiously 124 The Gentleman s Magazine. gifted French scholar and his most faithful and long-suffering wife was removed to P^re la Chaise nearly seven hundred years after the burial of Helo'ise, who survived her husband more than twenty years. What of the earth in which the monument stood ought to have been carried from Paraclet to Paris after seven hundred years ? If M. le Due has any feeling to bestow on the memory of Abelard and Heloise he may surely take his inspiration from the token which he may see in that beautiful cemetery of the survival, through more than seven centuries, of a national sentiment in con- nection with the memory of the tragic love of this hero and heroine. .It matters little now whether the actual dust lies beneath. Without entering into an inquiry which neither Hamlet's gravedigger nor the utmost effort of modem science could satisfy, the sentimental visitor to the tomb of Abelard and Heloise may moralise with the French poet Colardeau, who said, perhaps in mere echo of Pope's letter of Heloise — — lis aim^rent trop, ils furent malheureux ; G^missons sur leur tombe et n'aimons pas comme eux. Touching upon the recent philological controversy between the Rev. W. W. Skeat and other students of the anatomy of language in Notes and Queries^ on our noun suffix ster as an index of gender, a Dutch scholar asks attention to the fact that in Holland all names implying avocation or qualification and ending in ster are feminine, while those ending in er^ with one seeming exception, are masculine. And this exception is a philological curiosity. It is the word bakct\ which in Dutch means a monthly nurse. Here is my correspondent's anatomy of baker : — " The primary signification of the Anglo-Saxon word from which we get the English verb to bake^ was the wider meaning oUo heat and to ivarm, and this meaning still lurks behind the English verb in its reflective form to bosky which is intensified in the Dutch word bakeren, meaning to wrap up nice and warm. So we arrive at the low (ierman baker^ the monthly nurse, the word and its original meaning being in perfect keeping with the old Batavian notion of the science of health : that it consisted in keeping the patient warm. In strict- ness the nurse ought to have been called a bakerster, but the seeming contradiction of an apparently masculine and a feminine suffix coming together would not be acceptable to Dutch ears, and it was thus, no doubt, that the ster fell out of use. If the change had been made by grammarians, and not by common usage, the word would no doubt have been bakster^ the equivalent of the English proper name Baxter, which in its origin belongs to this philological family." Table Talk. 125 " The death of M. Charles de R^musat," writes M. Camille Barr^re in a note of the month addressed to Sylvanus Urban, " forcibly recalls recollections of the manner in which Balzac, a contemporary of his, although he has been dead these five-and-twenty years, wrote the characters of * La Comddie Humaine,' that gigantic conception to the realisation of which the great romancist may be said to have sacrificed his life. Balzac's attention was naturally directed, in his search for types, towards the promment politicians, as well as towards the most eminent literary characters of the day. M. Thiers was not to be forgotten by him ; and probably few persons, either in England or France, know that he described that eminent man, then a thrifty and rising statesman, under the features of Rastignac, who appears in several of his novels, notably in * Le Pbre Goriot' and *La Peau de Chagrin.' Balzac, however, was too much a man of the world, and he was too inveterate an enemy of personalities and allusions, not to merge his original with another man, and thus to render him almost unrecognisable for the mass. Charles de R^musat in his turn became the object of Balzac's attention ; and those who are at all familiar with the temperament and political life of this singularly fascinating and amiable man will recognise him in the Henry deMarsay who plays a part so prominent in Balzac's reflection of human life. As in the case of Rastignac, Henry de Marsay is not wholly a description of Charles de Rdmusat ; but all the man's main features are reproduced with rare skill and penetration. The faculty of * hitting off' men of the day, of analysing them as a chemist analyses a chemical composition, Balzac indeed possessed to a marvellous extent He has taken down the portrait of old Rothschild in the depiction of the Baron de Neucingen ; and his creation of Canalis, the poet, is an admirable full-sized portrait of the poet highest in sublime commonplace : Alphonse de Lamartine. But his best character taken from life is that of Georges Sand, who appears in * I^ Comedie Humaine ' under the name of Claude Vignon. It would be worth the while of one of Balzac's personal friends to write an account of all the originals whom Balzac thought worthy of his pen. A great many of these are still living ; but no offence could be given, for very seldom, if ever, has the novelist been acrimonious and bitterly satirical at the expense of his contemporaries." My correspondents have not yet discontinued the discovery of literary echoes, and though I feel that the subject of " unconscious plagiarism" and "coincidence" is getting a little outworn, I have scarcely known how to resist the temptation to reopen the topic from 126 The Gentlematis Magazine. time to time, influenced, I think, more by the charm and allurements of the gems which are quoted than by the fact of the correspondence which the lines are quoted to prove. When lovers of literature draw round the table to talk and to quote fine bits from their favourite authors, but little excuse is needed for the repetition of sentences and stanzas which are music and something more to every one of the listeners ; and so I hardly care how small is the excuse for quoting these two exquisite scraps, the first from Keats's " Ode^to the Nightin- gale," and the second from Longfellow's "Flowers," placed before me ^by Mr. Benjamin Corke, of Bristol, for the purpose of calling attention to the echo of the one in the olher : — The voice I heard this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown : Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth when sick for home She stood in tears amid the alien com. « « « « « « Everywhere about us are they glowing, Some, like stars, to tell us Spring is bom : Others^ their blue eyes with tears o'erflowing. Stand like Ruth amid the golden corn. Thoughtful readers, seeing Keats and Longfellow thus brought side by side in singular similarity of mood, will probably be led to reflect rather upon the difierence between the men, thus so distinctly demon- strated, than upon the technical coincidence of illustration ; and un- measured admirers of Keats, of whom I confess myself one, will dwell upon the exquisite music and the beautifiil metaphysical sad- ness of the allusion to the ancient maiden in the " Ode;" while Long- fellow's special champions will insist upon the perfection of the picture of Ruth as a dew-laden corn-flower in the harvest-field. A French scholar and critic who, like M. Taine, takes a pride in being as well acquainted with English as with French classics writes to me on the controversy which has for so many weeks been carried on in the columns of the Athencmm with respect to the publication of an English edition of the works of Rabelais. How shall I venture to say a word on this delicate subject to-day, even in a magazine which in its early youth was contemporaneous with Jonathan Swift ? I confess I am always puzzled by the modem aspects of questions touching the coarse- ness to be found in the writings of the great masters of literature in past periods, and I sometimes think that we are just now in a transi- tion state about such matters. The current feeling with regard to pro- priety in literature is, I believe, very genuine. I do not join with those Table Talk. 127 who allege hypocnsy against it Refinement wears difiSerent com- plexions in different ages, and there cannot be a doubt that the re- finement of our own time is offended with much, in subject-matter and in language,^ that did not annoy the refined feeling of past generations. But while every sensitive person among us who has grown up under the influences of this age must sympathise with the forms of delicate feeling of our own generation, I cannot accept the hypothesis, which seems to be put forward as a truism, that our own fashion of refine- ment is really superior to that of our progenitors to the full measure implied in the changes which have come over it ; and I cannot be quite sure that this form of refinement, however genuine while it lasts, is permanent. I do not say that it runs into a great extreme ; but we must all allow that if it were carried much further it would be liable to fall into the redtutio ad absurdunty and to create a reaction which might be mischievous. It would be very early to assume the permanency of the general feeling about " coarseness," since it is of so very recent origin. It is really but of yesterday, and hardly seems to have come upon ]us by steps like other matters of growth in civilisation. Through the ages of progress in social life from the renaissance until the time of our own grandfathers there does not. appear to have been any very great change in this respect. Swift, who died only a hundred and thirty years ago, was coarser than Rabelais, whose career was two hundred years earlier ; and in the works of the great and popular writers of any age it would be difficult to find coarseness surpassing that of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, who were the immediate forerunners "of Sir Walter Scott, the first great master of the strictly modem refined tone. The mistake, it appears to me, of those who, like the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, work themselves into a fever of moral agony and denunciation over the coarseness in the literary productions of men of genius of past times, consLjts in confounding coarseness with vice. It is very much a matter of time and custom whether certain subjects are freely spoken of or ignored in society and in literature, and not necessarily a matter of morals. Fine dis- tinctions have to be drawn in such questions, but it is a mistake to assume that certain forms of sensitiveness such as prevail in the pre- sent day are a measure of morality. I may respect the feeling of the man whose mind revolts from " Gulliver's Travels," or who is too much shocked at passages in "Tom Jones" or "Amelia" to enjoy those books, but I cannot admit that there is the slightest presumption in favour of his being a better man than one who does not feel with him 128 The Gentleman s Magazine. on the subject. I am, however, doing all the talking while my French correspondent is waiting to speak ; and where the question relates to Rabelais, a literary fellow-countiyman of the great author whose "Gargantua" and " Pantagruel" are the progenitors of "Gulliver's Travels " has a right to be heard. I will not, however, repeat my friend's indignant words with respect to Mr. Collette's discovery that Rabelais will conduce to the perdition of public morals and his attempt to close before the giant French satirist of the sixteenth century the gates of the English language, but will content myself with quoting him on the character and tendency of the great man's works. " All except Mr. Collette," he says, " know that Rabelais did not write for the sake of depravation, and that he coated his satire in a coarse and often repulsive garb because it could never have passed muster had he expressed it in plain and downright words. Rabelais' sayings have become proverbial, and no serious critic ever thought of taking his reckless flow of words au serieux. If his works are to be burked in England by a society that seems to think it has a right to interpose in questions far above its ken there is no reason why a third at least of your old English literature should not be burked in the same manner, and it is in the name of common sense that such attempts as that which has been ventilated in the Athcnccuni should be laughed away." One of my correspondents calls my attention to the fact that a writer in Blackwood's Magazine^ treating of the conduct of the South Wales miners in fighting to the bitter end a losing battle on the ques- tion of wages, speaks of this line of action on the part of the men as a mistake so monstrous, and folly so egregious, that the mere state- ment of the story in categorical terms ought to be enough to bring conviction home to the minds of all workmen and to prevent for ever after the recurrence of such strife. My friend lakes no side in the question at issue between workmen and masters : he is content to express his wonder that any writer should expect from working men a continence from strife for reasons which it is notorious do not deter other men, of whatever class or order, from challenging and accepting challenges and fighting losing battles to the bitter end. " Do not producers and merchants/' he asks, " strive and suffer in a similar fashion ? Do not people go to law sometimes even when neither of the litigants can hope to make anything by the process ? Do not nations go to war, and expend vast treasures of wealth and blood, and end by leaving the matter where it was at first ? It is, of course, a fair matter for speculation whether workmen would not be better off, even in the matter of wages, without strikes ; but afler all a workman is a human being, and is it not a little unreasonable to go on describing this feature of strikes as if it were a sort of diablerie inherent in workmen? To my mind the whole business is only another proof that the British workman is a nian and a brother." I rather like my friend's genially philosophic view of the subject, and commend it to the consideration of the author of " Thoughts about British Workmen, Past and Present." THE Gentleman's Magazine August, 1875. A Dog and his Shadow. BY R. E. FRANCILLON, AUTHOR OF "OLYMPIA: A ROMANCE," " PEARL & EMERALD," " EARL'S DENE," "ZELDA'S FORTUNE," &c. CHAPTER IV. The Swallow shakes his wings, And the Nightingale she sings, And the Skylark up he springs, And the brown Bee hams : And the Owlet echoes, " Why With the others should not I Sing, and up to heaven fly When the Spring-time comes ? i^EXT morning Abel Herrick was ill of the first wound felt by his self-esteem. He had not known that he had such a thing as pride about him until he felt the wound, just as healthy men know not they have digestive organs till they get out of order. His princess had turned into Miss Milly Barnes, his romance into a joke, and himself, the poet, into a thatcher and hurdle-maker. A cloud had covered the world because a lawyer's clerk had made fun of Poet's Corner. But dreaming is a habit not so easily broken. Out of the ruins of his castle he built just one more last cottage in the air. He fancied himself alone with Mr. Adams, both stripped to the shirt, and with none but nymphs and fauns by to see which was the better man. Or, better still, both on horseback and in mail, with vizors down and lances in rest, and Milly Barnes in a balcony to judge the prize. Down, of course, would go the clerk before the peasant's Vol. XV., N.S. 1875. k 1 30 The Gentleman s Magazine, strong arm, and his snub-face would smile no more. Milly would hand the laurel wreath to the victor, and he would dash it back in her face. He dreamed and breathed impotent revenge^ he would have given twenty years of his life for leave to slap the clerk's smirk face or pull his impertinent nose before all Eastingtonshire and Winbury. He was in ihis amiable mood when a more substantial shadow fell between the door of the shed where he was pretending to work, and the sun, who shone on regardless of even a poet's frown. " Good morning, Abel," said Milly, softly and cheerfully, for the shadow was hers. "Good morning, Miss Barnes," said Abel, crossly, and without looking up. If she was to be Miss Barnes, let her be. " Aunt sent me to see if you had been taken ill, and if you were better. No, she didn't — I came to see, without being told. Are you r " I'm quite well, thank you." " And that wasn't exactly it, either. I came to beg your pardon. Mr. Adams behaved like what he is — a very foolish young man who thinks himself a very clever one — but I'm afraid you thought it was all our fault because we were civil to him. He came on business about the house, and aunt took the chance of getting me driven over. You oughtn't to be so touchy, Abel. Why did you run away because you were laughed at by a man like him? A real man ought to be able to hold his own." Milly, if not the phoenix that Abel had been going to paint her, had not only a sweet but an honest voice, and her blame felt as bracing as sunshine. Abel would have been more sullen than a bear had he been able to find a cross thought for her after her first word. He was touched by her frankness and brave outspokenness, as men mostly are by qualities they would like to be their own, especially if such qualities are not their own. This, by the way, is not intended to explain why frankness and brave outspokenness are popular in fiction. " I did not run away," said the scholar-knight, thus put on his mettle. "I" he longed to torture himself by learning what had been said of the poem behind his back, and did not know how to fish for it. Of course the opinion of Mr. Adams, being a hostile and malicious critic, was nothing — that is to say, the favourite food of a self-torturer. " It was very like a flight, though, all the same," sard Milly with a smile, in which it was impossible even for him to read the contempt he feared. '' But Mr. Adams is an aggravating young man, I own, to A Dog and his Shadow. 1 3 1 anybody who minds him. That's just what he tries to be. You ought to have stayed — he's very good-natured, really, and he reads poetry charmingly. Didn't you see how he was leading up to reading those lines from the paper? I knew he had made up his mind to show off when he made a fuss about putting it in his pocket before we left Eastington. He always comes to our school parties, and always reads. He's very much admired by some of the girls, though some of us laugh at him shamefully, and Tm afraid I'm one of them." " What !" said Abel, thrown out of his sullen reserve. " Then he read the verses because he liked them ? He didn't know whom they were by ?" " I don't know about that — T expect he read them to show how well he could read. He didn't say who they were by ; why do you want to know ?" " What did you think of them ?" " I thought they were beautiful. I always like poetry when it's read for one, and isn't in blank verse, and isn't about people's re- flections, and has a sort of a story in it, and is over as soon as it's begun." The word " beautiful " deafened him to all that followed it. The cloud rolled away — he had tasted fame — and he said proudly, and with the calm dignity befitting the announcement — "They are mine." Milly looked at him wonderingly. Now she thought of it, his speech — at least his choice of words — was more like that to which her ears had grown accustomed at Eastington than the homely dialect and limited vocabulary of Winbury. Without reasoning, she felt that the Winbury hurdle-maker who had gained admiration from an Eastington lawyer's clerk could be no common man. Of the long years of thought and study necessary to enable one of the Herrick family to achieve two or three stanzas that would parse, rhyme, and scan she could not be expected to form any idea. It looked to her like the unknown thing that she had heard of as " genius " : being only a pupil of Miss Baxter in the art of criticism, she sup- posed that all poetry stood on the same level in point of value ; and never having seen a poet in her life, was awed. I fear it must be owned that Milly, though anything but a stupid girl, would have classed the author of the cracker mottoes and Shakespeare himself together as poets, and have been unable to appreciate any fine-drawn critical distinctions between the two. But this did not prevent her from sharing the impressment wherewith the announcement " He is a K 2 132 The Gentleman's Magazine, poet" would have been received by Miss Baxter's young ladies. Abel Herrick had published a poem : the Laureate could do no more. " Why— 'why, how did you ever leam?** " One does not learn to be a poet One is bom." He instinct- ively felt that some straw or other had turned the tables, and that she was beginning to look up to him. He was getting ready to fall over head and ears in love a second time. " And — who is Cynthia ? It isn't a real name, I suppose ? And have you r-eally felt all you say in the lines ?" " I don't know — it's impossible to tell how the inspiration comes. You see, I never saw a hill or saw the sea in my life : and yet they come into my poetry as straight as if I saw such things every day. They must come from somewhere, but from where ? I believe in in- spiration— direct from the stars. And about my feeling what I write — I never felt any of it about any real woman — unless — ^unless indeed — I somehow fancied that I should see you again one of these days." This was a bold and sudden speech for a shy man ; but he was shy no more, except with the shyness that looks like the conscious- ness of superiority. It is unfortunate that, for once, truth did not go with courage, for the truth was that he had not until yesterday fancied or thought anything about his playfellow since he broke the tea-cup. Now, however, things were changed ; and, with his growing faculty of believing whatever he wished to believe, this well-trained dreamer did not tell a conscious lie when he told himself that Milly, who thought his poetry beautiful and Mr. Adams a foolish young man, had been his queen of dreamland ever since she was a child in pinafores. Winbury being what it was, it was inevitable that the only two human beings in it who could converse with one another should meet frequently, even though he was only young Abel Herrick, the hurdle- maker, while she was Miss Barnes, an ex-pupil of Miss Baxter at Eastington, and niece of a tradesman's widow. Mrs. Tall is thought no harm of conversations carried on in her own domain of the Manor House, for the thought that her Milly would ever marry beneath her- self was too monstrous a notion to be feared. For the rest, Abel went up in her estimation. His strange devotion to the book-shelves appeared to be something different from an unaccountable craze, now that Milly, with all Miss Baxter's polish fresh upon her, proclaimed it wonderful. After hearing what Milly had to say on the matter, she agreed with her niece that hurdle-making was not a suitable career for a genius ; and, before long, a very natural circumstance seemed to A Dog and his Shadow. 133 show her a way in which Abel's prodigious learning might, be made profitable. Meanwhile the days passed on with Abel himself in a monotony of uneventful excitement. How they passed with Milly is a matter with which we have nothing to do : we are seeing her for the present as Abel saw her, and no stretch of privilege will allow us to see her with two pairs of eyes at one and the same time. By-and-by she may take her turn. In these dream-days, however, she is a muse, with a poet for her worshipper. She is sublime in moral grandeur and mental glory — and a woman besides. Not even Abel could dream away that indisputable fact ; and, as the days passed on, the fact became a substantial part of the dream. Before he was aware of it, the poet began to dream of marriage with his muse, after the man ner of the mere men and women of Winbury. But alas, a real poet might marry a real muse more easily than a hurdle-maker might win the hand of the watchmaker's daughter who condescended to be his friend. It was not that Milly made him keep his distance, or that he despaired of winning her — on the contrary, he felt that she looked up to him. But he was poor, and there was Mrs. Tallis in the way, and he sighed to think how much easier is poetry than plain prose. How long this state of things would have gone on in a place where the smallest event was almost a miracle is beyond the reach of speculation. But one day — indeed every day, for that matter — Milly was sitting over some needlework at a window which, as it had a view of a sheepfold in a turnip field, gave her a more lively and varied interest than could be obtained from any other point of view. Winbury was certainly admirably adapted for a prosperous courtship. The Beast himself might have wooed Beauty there with- out the faintest fear of rivalry or of having her interest withdrawn from him : his attentions, however clumsy, would be the only, and therefore an always welcome, break in the monotony of her days. She must think and dream either of him or of nothing at all. We have waived the right to look into Milly's mind ; but we may be , sure that while her eyes wandered to and fro between her needle and the sheep, the genius by whom her girVs heart was honoured — or flattered : it matters not which — was not far away. Though he was but old Herrick's foster-son, he was better than any man in all Eastington : cleverer, handsomer, stronger, and — now that his shy- ness had worn off — a better if less brilliant talker : he talked serious sentiment, which most girls, in their hearts, prefer to wit or humour : he was a poet, a genius, one who believed in himself and must assuredly become a great man. And then he was beyond the 134 ^'^^ Gentleman's Magazine. slightest question over head and ears in love with her — in itself a virtue of virtues to the now full-fledged young lady from Miss Baxter's, eager for all the experiences of young ladyliood and ready to welcome the first that came. Save that he was neither a peer of the realm nor a captain of dragoons, Abel Herrick had all the personal qualities that go to make up a school-girl's hero. It was now she who coloured, ever so little, when after these many days he came to her side as she sat at the window of the empty drawing-room in which he had once hunted for her and found him- self— the Abel Herrick that he had become through looking for a child in a tea-cup. But he was not thinking of these things : his rather heavy brow was far too gloomy to be thinking of anything but the present, and that in no pleasant way. " Milly," he began without preface, " I have just been talking to your aunt She has been advising me.'' " What about ? Fancy aunt advising you I" "She means it well, I suppose. But it can't be done, all the same." " What is it ? Do you want me to advise you too ?" " Yes — that is — but I know what your advice will be. You know old Crook has drunk himself at last into Westcote Union ? So what do you think your aunt proposes ? that I should ask for the place — that I should be the schoolmaster." " That would be splendid ! And of course asking would be having with you." " I don't know about that The people who put in old Crook arc not very likely to know good from bad, I should say. And people don't like to have their betters under them. But it doesn't matter. I shan't ask them." " What ! — wouldn't it be a great step for you ?" " That's just it, Milly. Heaven knows I want to climb high, and so I won't take a step down. I must be what I am. I am a scholar and a poet : I don't want to be known as the village schoolmaster." Milly looked puzzled. " I don't understand, Abel. Your having to work with your hands doesn't keep you from being what you are — why should having to work with your head? Being a school- master's almost like being a clergyman : and anyhow people — I don't mean me — ^would think more of you" " Not they. For a working man like me to be what I am shows genius — but the higher I go by paltry little steps the less I should be thought of. Nobody thinks anything of a schoolmaster for being a scholar. I should sell my birthright of fame for twenty pounds a A Dog and his Shadow. 1 3 5 year. I must make one bound into glory, Milly, or do what's next best — ^wait at the bottom, and be famous after I die. There's nothing between." " Of course you know best But still — you say the schoolmaster gets twenty pounds a year T " And the cottage to live in, if you think it's worth while to set out all the wonderful things I shall find on the shelf to console me for having stuck myself there." " Oh, I didn't mean that — of course one oughtn't to think of money " " Your aunt does, though. She seems to measure the worth of everything by what it will fetch — but I suppose that's the way of some people. It's miserable to feel that there's anybody in the world who would think twenty times as well of me if I had twenty pounds a year — but I won't degrade myself by giving way to such sordid views, nor should you." "Indeed I don't, Abel — I only want everybody to think their best of you " " I don't, then. I want to be believed in for myself. If it was less money with nothing to do for it, I'd take it — perhaps — because it would set me free to finish my great poem without having to waste my days over work that any common farm-labourer in Winbury could do better than I. But to be a schoolmaster would be the end of me — yes, if it brought me in forty pounds a day." " The end of you ?" " Haven't I told you how ? Till I knew you I lived in a dream — I was content to plod on. But I am awake now," said the dreamer in his sleep. ** You have taught me what ambition means — and it is not the dream that they say." " I, Abel r " You. Nothing will content me till I am one of the great poets of the world — the greatest of them all. I have already mastered all learning : it is time to show the world what is in me. My poem in the Mercury was a step, if you please ; but to be a schoolmaster — like old Crook ! My epie wants all my time and strength — am I to waste both on dunces ? What matters it how I live so long as my mind is free ? It would be better to beg in the road. A school- master ! Nothing is a step that does not bring me nearer to you." "To me? I'm afraid that wouldn't be very far." " Don't you understand yet, Milly ? I am a labourer — a found- ling picked up in the road, whom even your aunt holds to be miles beneath her. I may be the son of the greatest in the land, and 1 36 The Gentleman's Magazine. something tells me that it is more than a may-be — how else should I be so different from all other men ? Even when I was a child the other children treated me as if they were no companions for me. But what then ? If I were a king's son I should scorn to wear a crown not made with my own hands. But even as a peasant I scorn anything short of a crown. All or nothing — that is my motto, Milly ! I will not cheat the world by wasting the time due to my epic in teaching babies how to spell — for twenty pounds a year. I must become great — I have told you what has made me what I am — ^and then, I may tell you what has made me what I shall be." Milly did not even smile at this heroic tirade. Nor did she trace in his balanced sentences the effect of book-language assimilated by a long course of self-conscious soliloquies. To her, it was sponta- neous eloquence worthy of the crack preacher of Eastington. And, since his whole heart was in his words, it was eloquence in a way. Abel had gone the right way to win a woman's ear ; he had blown his own trumpet with all the force of his lungs, and had given her to understand that he was blowing it for her. What would her school-fellows have thought to hear her courted after this fashion ! How they would have envied her — with what jealous gossip they would have flattered her — Mr. Adams himself would cease to hold the apple of discord. It was like a scene in a novel — but common-sense stepped in, and she sighed. She was her aunt's niece, after alL; and something whispered in her ear that a man who scorns a bird in the hand generally wants a great deal of waiting for, however great his genius for catching birds in the bush may be. Abel read her eyes in his own way ; and the dreamer felt more like a real man of flesh and blood than he had ever felt before. He was drawn towards her by the sigh that, meaning little, seemed for that very reason to signify a thousand things. He felt, truly and in his heart, that while he had become what he was for his awn sake he must show the world what he had become for hers. If hope could only be changed into certainty, felt the dreamer after the if-loving manner of his kind, there was nothing he had not the strength to do. ** It must be all or nothing — and it shall be all ! " he thought to him- self ; and he said, as simply as if it were the natural and spontaneous expression of the thought — " Will you be my wife, when I am a great man ? " How is it possible to contrast strongly enough what we do with what we think we do ? Abel Herrick believed that he had laid one of the elect souls of the Universe before the feet of its Queen — while, in sober truth, a young man had made a young girl her first A Dog and his Shadow. 1 3 7 offer, and that was all. Milly, startled by such abruptness, could only let her work fall from her hands, and exclaim — " Oh, what on earth would aunt say if she heard ? " " Never mind what she'd say, Milly. What do you say ? " " Oh, I wish you hadn't asked me — no, I don't mean that, for I'm glad — but how — when this happens people can't ever be friends again." " I don't want to be friends. I want you to promise to marry me" Whenever he had imagined this scene beforehand, he had seen himself wooing Milly in the style and language of chivalry, pouring out his passion to her in strong and glowing words while she was half drawn to him by the tenderness of her own heart, half conquered by the storm of his own. And now, in the most heterodox way con- ceivable, he had made simply a plain offer of marriage, without having even mentioned the word "love," and as apparently the result of a discussion about a place and a salary. The purblind young man, for all his poetic learning, did not recognise that it was because for once he had felt the thing called love, and therefore had no need to name the word. But Milly had just received her first offer; which means, she had translated his words into finer eloquence than could have belonged to any possible words. " Will you promise me that ? " he went on, more eagerly, but a little more anxiously, for he had wandered into an unknown country, and her silence was hard to read. " Can you see how much I love you ? " " I must tell aunt, Abel. She has been a mother to me ever since I was bom." " Do you love me, Milly? — I don't want to marry your aunt — I want to marry you. I only want you to promise — I know I can't marry you as I am" "I wish — I wish you hadn't asked just now — ^why didn't you wait " " Wait — till I became great ? Milly — would you have me wait till it is too late to say we belonged to one another when we were humble and poor ? I swear to you I cannot and will not become great except by you and for you. If you won't promise now — I'll " " Abel ! Surely such a little while " " I'll bum every line of my poem, and go for a soldier." " Don't say things like that — don't frighten me. If you could only speak to aunt " 138 The Gentleman's Magazine. "Why should she know tilM can claim you?" " Because she must. I wouldn't do anything without her. And only to speak to her — it would be so easy, if you only were " " Not a hurdle-maker. I know." " You know what she thinks about such things " " Milly ! You mean to say your promise depends on her, who knows as much about love and ambition as — surely if we love one another nothing ought to come between us two." " She has loved me ever since I was bom, Abel, and I've loved her." "And IVe loved you ever since the world began. If she allows, then will you promise me?" " Indeed you must ask her before you ask me." " And that you say is not for a hurdle-maker to dare." They seemed stopped by a stiffer fence than Abel had ever made. But at last, said Milly, shyly — for how could she fancy herself cleverer than a man of genius ? — " Abel — perhaps she meant more than she said when she talked about your getting made schoolmaster." She blushed deeply. The woman was doing what the man should have done — suggesting the means by which the difficulties of winning her might be overcome. But there was much in what she said. No doubt Mrs. Tallis ought to have seen, even with her dim spectacles, which way things were going. And, if so, what more natural sign of her approval could she give than doing her best to put her future nephew-inlaw in a position to ask for her niece without obliging her dignity to say No ? ** Ah — the schoolmastership ! — It goes agiinst me — I despise making my place ask for you. But if that is the only way to gain your promise — I'll show you I think more of your love than you do of my fame " "Abel!" " And I shall be refused, you will see. Never mind — I will go to the vicar this very day. I will sacrifice everything for you." " If you only knew how I want you to be everything you can wish for 1 I do want you to get the schoolmastership — and if it's beneath you, you'll soon be above it, never fear." " Mind, Milly — you know why I am going to ask — ^that it's for you " " I shall remember," she said. And so — hardly knowing how — Abel and Milly, without any needless formal promise, found them- selves engaged. A Dog and his Shadow. 139 And now a new and inconsistent fear seized upon Abel. What if he should really be refused the offer that he scorned ? For the first time he realised that the piece of pulpit furniture called the vicar was a very formidable piece of humanity. So diligent a student of occult mysteries could not fail to be tainted with superstition ; and the fate of the schoolmastership had now assumed the importance of an oracle. His future glory depended upon Milly, Milly upon the favour of Mrs. Tallis, the favour of Mrs. Tallis upon the school- mastership, and the schoolmastership upon the vicar — that invisible being who exercised over Winbury the awe inspired by the unknown. Scarcely Milly herself was worth purchasing at the price of a visit to the vicarage ; and Abel was in this respect worse off than the other villagers. The vicar's servants and he were not on gossiping terms; and he could not condescend to ask them what steps he ought to take or how he should behave.