QfortteU Itttocraitg Slihrarg FROM THE BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY COLLECTED BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY BB c^rA Cofnell University Library rrl 5154. P4 People, places, and things. 3 1924 013 533 652 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3533652 PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS. BY THE AUTHOR OF 'LOST SIR MASSIN6BEED," & "MMRIED BENEATH HIM.' Ta^ ' ^'-^ V\ LONDON: S. O. BBETON, 248, STRAND, W.C. ^ "^ LIL'U/UCY cox AKD WTMAIT, OBTESHA.!,, CLASSICAL, AKD GtEN'EBAL FBIIfTEBS, GBEAT QUEEX 8TBEET, W.C. TO WILLIAM BAYNB RANKEN, THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, BT Eia ITBIEinD, THE AUTHOE. vil ) PBEFAGE. fjnffU sympathies of the Public are earnestly requested on hehalf of these Twenty-five Little Ones, who have never, until now, been achnowledged by their Pcurent. It is but fair to state that Mr. diaries Dickens and the Messrs. Gha/mhers did their best for them (by admitting them into their respective periodicals), at a time when they most needed protection ; • but mcmy of them have lached for yea/rs the comforts of a Binding, amd some a/re out of Print. ( ix ) CONTENTS. PEOPLE. I. Our Curates Page 1 II. Two First-class Passengers ... 13 III. Our Foreign Relations ... 23 TY. My Friend! s Friend, ... 38 ■V. Mrs. B.^s Alarms ... 45 VI. Amaleh Bagon ... 57 VII. Jones's Greatness ... 67 VIII. TheMa/rher ... 75 IX. Hmv Jones got (he English Verse Medal ... ... 82 PL A GES. X. Double Glo'steir ... 91 XI. Our Back Garden ... 104 XII. No. 19, W. ... 112 XIII. The Blamkshvre Thicket ... ... 122 xrv. Pargate-super-Ma/re ... 134 XV. A Bull Day on Exmoor ... 146 Contents. THINGS. XVI. Our Jerusalem Pony XVII. To Persons about to Furnish xvTii. Picnics ... XIX. Cormnon Sense ... XX. An Exceedingly Cheap Tour XXI. Th^ Gentle Header XXII. The Next Presentation . . . XXIII. Bowls and Bowling Greens XXIV. By Limited Mail XXV. A Meally Good Day's Fishing Page 163 175 188 199 208 218 224 240 248 263 OJJB CURATE 8. "\T7E have had a great number of Curates in our parish, and from my position as churchwarden, I am tolerably well fitted to speak upon the subject. Under " Preferments and Appointments," in the church newspapers, you may have seen, about once in every six months or so, " the Eev. Some- body Something to the curacy of Little Biddlebrigham, Devon," and have been under the mistaken impression that the young man had got a good thing ; but this is far from being the case. '"A title given" and a "sole charge" are the baits with which we allure juvenile divines into our parish, and we have found them very killing — the baits, I mean, not the divines ; but since we are upon that subject, I may state at once that the word might have been not seldom applied to our Curates themselves. Perceval Smarte, B.A., of the university of Oxford, was a great example amongst us of this sort. It was almost a pity that a gentleman with so accurate an eye for colour, and with so chaste a notion of costume, should have been restricted in the choice of vestments by the nature of his profession. The canon relating to ecclesiastical attire might have been suspended in his particular case with the greatest safety, and Our Curates. without risk of the anomaly so carefully guarded against, of a scarlet clergyman with yellow stripes. He once showed me a whole drawerful of lemon-coloured kid gloves, almost all new, which he had amassed during his lay career, and which he had no intention whatever of wearing again. " It seems hard, does it not ? " sighed Perceval Smarte — and I think there was a dewiness in his large blue eyes when he said it — "but we must all make our little sacrifices.'' What, however, the strict letter of the highest church discipline did permit him in garments, he took the fullest advantage of. I never yet saw a curate in canonicals who had such an exceeding resemblance to a bishop. Upon one occasion, when the clerk was indisposed, I went iato the vestry with our Curate to assist him in attiring himself, and I shall not easily forget it. I only wish I knew the technical names for half the things — the undergarments — in which I invested him. A certain black sflk waistcoat, which reached down to his hips, was fastened — I remember that — at the back of his right shoulder ; and there was an enormous agate brooch, with a black cross upon it, the pin of which, in my clumsy attempts to fasten it, I ran into his neck. His surplice was of finest lawn and of a dazzling whiteness, made to stick out in all directions, as though inflated : this, while he remained at Little Biddlebrigham, was washed every week. His immediate predecessor had not been so particular m this matter, and wore one of a very diS'erent material. Perceval Smarte, who assisted him upon the last Sunday of his stay with us, is said to have observed to him sarcastically : " I think, my friend, if I did borrow a, table-cloth to read prayers in, I would try to procure a clean one." Besides attending to his duties in Our Curates. the parish very assiduously, Mr. Smarte took the taste of our young ladies under his entire control ; not a gown was chosen without an eye to his approbation, not a bonnet selected without the inward reflection : " Now, I wonder what will our Curate say to this 1 " I must confess that I think he abused his elevated position in the pulpit to scrutinize, before the service commenced, the " novelties " recently imported by his fair parishioners, for I always noticed that he was most severe upon them on Monday mornings. He was not a poor man, or he could not have stopped so long as he did at Little Biddlebrigham, where a non-resident rector offers the hope of " a recompense far higher than any mere pecuniary reward," and, indeed, does not, I believe, ever insult our curates by the proffer of a stipend. He had a very comfortable little bachelor establish- ment ; and his sister sometimes came and stayed with him, who was the superior of some sort of amateur convent in the north, and wore a very becoming dress, which dis- tinguished, as she loved to call it, her "order." While she remained, there was a series of festivities given by Mr. Perceval Smarte : such snowy napkins, such glistening plate, ay, and wine, too, of such first-rate excellence, as was not to be surpassed at the squire's (Mr. Broadland's) own table at the haU. I remember but one mischance at these entertainments of our Curate, and that, I think, happened the winter before last. Mr. Smarte had an infinite deal of trouble in getting men-servants to his likiiig out of our parish, and the one he had then, a certain Samuel Scroggin, was only upon trial. This poor fellow had never seen such things as hot- water plates before, nor did he at all imagine that their duty was to keep our food warm ; he opined, E 2 Our Curates. indeed, from their form and character, that they -were intended for quite another purpose, and when we trooped down into the dining-room, we found them garnishing each individual chair. Samuel thought they were to sit upon in. that cold weather. That was the only occasion upon which the Eev. Perceval was ever known to use a naughty expression, and the lady-superior strove in vain to drown it by a CQugL He was a very good man, and a very kind man, I do believe, although he had not much judgment in managing the vestry, and made a great deal of fuss about a parcel of saints and martyrs, of whom nobody at Little Biddlebrigham had ever so much as heard the names. I, for one, was very sorry when that tremendous disturbance took place about the wax-candles, with which the whole world is now sufficiently acquainted, and our parish in particular was convulsed. He was a better man, I believe, after all, than the Rev. Curte Sharpely who succeeded him. Mr. Sharpely was a scholar of that magnitude, that' one could never understand above half his sermons, and the other half was devoted to personalities. Upon the very second Sunday of his preaching, he flew at the poor squire for having a guest in his house who had peculiar opinions, and did not come to church. He asked us all what was our opinion of that man who could take tea with a Deist ; and the squire and his family walked straight out of their pew at once, followed by all their servants, and by the sexton, who is also the squire's gardener. The clerk himself was seen to vacillate at his desk, doubtful whether his allegiance was most due to his temporal or spiritual head. Altogether, the scene was of a character not easily to be erased from the Our Curates. mind of a Little Biddlebrighamer. Mr. Curte Sharpely liad a great deal to contend against in our parisli after this ; and it was wonderful that he effected so much good as he really did. He had, -however, a very strong wUl, and frightened our village schoolmaster a great deal more than the school- master could ever frighten the boys ; the mistress alone stood up against him womanfully, declining to work his somewhat exacting behests, upon the ground that she " was not a clergyman, and able to perform impossibilities." He made himseK acquaiated with the weak poiuts of every- body's character, with the skeleton in everybody's house, vidth the unpleasantnesses that had taken place in every family in Little Biddlebrigham, and by these means attained considerable power without making a single friend. The neighbouring clergy disliked our little Curate ; but at their district theological meetings he took the lead, and was by no means to be put down. The Bishop, it was rumoured, had asked his opinion upon a Hebrew passage, when he came down hither to confirm ; the Aichdeacon did not venture to patronise biTn ; the Rural Dean desisted from his usual rubber upon the night when our Curate dined with him. Nobody dined with Mr. Curte Sharpely ; he had cold meat at his meals in preference to hot, and drank with them some peculiar effervescent mixture of his own contriving, which, I believe, turned acid upon his stomach, and in some degree accounted for his disposition. His study and accu- rate knowledge of the classics and divinity did not soften his manners, nor, indeed, prevent them from being abso- lutely ferocious. People seldom voluntarily addressed him more than once ; nobody ever differed from him after the first time. He had a rug at his front-door with Gave canem Our Curates. stamped upon it, and Mr. Broadland used to say it meant, "Beware of the curate;" most of the Little Biddlebrig- hamers adopted a stUl freer translation, and held it to signify, "Please to wipe your shoes." When Mr. Ourte Sharpely left us, we were certainly most of us pleased, but were yet obliged to confess that he had taken the parish by the shoulders, and shoved it along the roads to health and education further than any curate who had come before him. A very horrible thing happened in our parish after his departure. A young gentleman, the Rev. Julian Montacute, tutor in the squire's family, consented to take the services for a few weeks, until we got a minister to suit us, for our non-resident rector had been too terrified by the letters of Curte Sharpely ever to appoint another man without some trial. Mr. Montacute was handsome, elegant, and had attained high honours at the universities ; but he was of very tender years. We doubted whether, transferred as he was about to be from private to public life, he would muster courage enough to read and preach before Little Biddle- brigham ; it was agreed among the most influential families that it would be quite excusable if he declined preaching a sermon at all. We need not, however, have given our- selves any concern about this matter, as Mr. Julian Monta- cute not only read with great judgment and perfect nerve, but also astonished us with one of the most beautiful flights of extempore pulpit oratory with which our parish has been favoured. As learned as Curte Sharpely, as dignified as Perceval Smarte, this young man had, besides, a store of pathos and a charm of deKvery that were peculiarly his own. There was scarcely a lady without a handkerchief to Our Curates. her eyes ; and in the squire's pew, Miss Eleanor But there, I will repeat no domestic scandal ; the misadventure of our whole parish with Mr. Julian Montacute is surely of itseK sufficiently interesting. The whole congregation, in short, was delighted ; nor was there a tea-party in Little Biddlebrigham for weeks where the eloquence of our young divine was not the unfailing theme of praise. On the next Sunday, the Wesleyan chapel was deserted ; and the Ranter at the slate-quarry on the hill preached to empty air. The church was filled to its porch with a crowd of eager listeners, and again the Eev. Julian Montacute won every ear and moistened every eye. Two young ladies, who were about to be married in our parish, entreated as a particular favour that they should be united by his graceful hands ; but he delicately declined to perform this ceremony for them. Several young ladies not about to be married but, again, let me confine myself to our public misfortune. In a word, our minister was the idol of Little Biddlebrigham, and the epithets applied to him ranged through the whole pet-curate scale, from "so unaffectedly devout," down to " such a dear darling duck of a man." What need for any more advertisements ? Was there any man, whether " strictly Anglican'' or " purely Evangelical," for whom we would ex- change the Eev. Julian Montacute 1 Most certainly not ; but as he stiU refused either to marry, to bury, or to christen, upon the alleged ground of his mere temporary appointment, and as self-willed persons went on marrying, and dying, and being born in the parish just as usual, it became necessary to look out for another curate. Our secret design, indeed, was to restrict the new man to the performance of these routine duties, and to keep our cherished Montacute on, if it were Our Curates. possible, for preaohing purposes. Upon the very day, how- ever, that the Kev. Deoimus Green and his mother — ^who was almost another curate, dear, good soul, as it turned out after- wards — came down to Little Biddlebrigham, Mr. Montacute fled. He left a letter upon the squire's breakfast table to say he was very sorry, but that he had never been ordained at all, and was not a clergyman ; and the squire brought it down to the vestry, and almost turned us into stone with the news. The two young brides congratulated themselves very con- siderably that " the wicked wretch, about whom, to say truth, they had always had their suspicions," had not performed that ceremony about which they had been so anxious. The Wesleyan minister remarked with a chuckle that he had always understood that clergymen of the Church of England were recognisable to the faithful by some infal- lible sign ; while the Eanter assured his again overflowing audiences that the whole aflTair was a judgment upon Little Biddlebrigham. Nobody else, I tope, was pleased in our parish. Poor Mr. Deoimus Green, than whom no mortal was ever simpler or more truthful, was pestered to death about his credentials after this, and our theological stable-door most carefully locked after the stealing of the steed. _ He had not the eloquence of the late usurper of oui pulpit, and we were inclined to be dissatisfied with him just at first ; but when we got to know his earnestness and intrinsic merit, we some- how learned to like his discourses too : they were good, in- deed, of themselves, only he could not preach them, on account of his being so shy and nervous. It was one of the pleasantest sights in the world to look at dear Mrs. Green while her son was delivering his sermons ; her pride in Our emirates. them and him was so entirely unaflfeoted and undis- guised, and, at the same time, as it seemed, so right and agreeahle. " What did you think of my son Mus this morning ? " was what she would say to me every Sunday while we waited for him to come out of the vestry, after service, in order that we three might walk home together, for we lived in the same quarter of the little town, quite in the midst of it, and away from the sea : or " Mus is rather long at times ; don't you find him so ? " she would now and then observe ; and when you said, " No, certainly not," as of course you did, she would smile as only mothers can when their hoys are praised. In the summer time, when little Biddlebrigham was rather fashionable, and strangers came down to bathe and enjoy the sands, she was doubly interested in what the congregar tions thought about him ; and it was our delight to represent them as being enthusiastically admiring ; for we all loved Mrs. Green, I think, and the poor most of aU. WhUe Decimus went out among them with hi§ supply of spiritual comforts, his mother made her regular rounds with a great basketful of temporal ones, and she was certainly not less welcome than her son. Of all the curates which Little Biddlebrigham ever had, indeed, these two, who worked so well together, were certainly the best. The old lady had no fault — or at least, now that she is gone, we will not confess that much — the young man had but one. Mus or Decimus Green was obstinate — obstinate as a pig, as a jackass, as a man with a scientific theory ; in fact, despite his modesty, no man who did not know him could teU how obstinate Decimus Green was. Last summer, our town became so fashionable, that its ordinary accommodations proved insuf- 10 Our Curatca, Ment for its throng of visitors. The gentlemen, therefore, gave up the use of our half-dozen bathing machines entirely to the ladies, while they themselves migrated into a neigh- bouring bay, taking their own towels with them, and keep- ing their sixpences in their pockets : among them, of course, was the Eev. Dooimus Green. Being somewhat delicate, and having a good deal of indoor work to do, he had lately possessed himself of a horse, in which. he took much pride and pleasure. It was a handsome, well-bred mare, but exceedingly self-willed; and our Curate, although a tolerable rider, was not quite the man to subdue her. She was some- what tender in the legs, and salt water had been recom- mended for them daily by the equine faculty. " You may bring a horse to water," says the proverb, " but you can't make him drink ;" and you may also bring one to the sea beach without getting it into the sea. Mr. Green's man had been thrown in pretty deep places more than once already, and had given it as -his opinion that he was engaged to be a groom, and not to be a merman. The mare, he said, was quite unmanageable in the water ; and our Curate, of course, said she was nothing of the kind. To prove this, moreover, he determined to ride the mare in himself. She was to be brought to him while he was bathing, which by the bye wa« not very early in the morning ; and then, whether he stuck on her or not in the sea, it would be but of little consequence. ' Myself and several other friends were present upon the first occasion, curious to see whether the trial or the Curate would come off. The animal was led willingly enough to the sands, and suffered her master— who, however, had to swim in and land Out Curates. 11 for that purpose — to mount her unresistingly ; but hor com- plaisance oxtondwl no further. Now with her fore-feet phuitod resolutely on the beach, she protested with hor hind- logs against moving seaward, 'and now rampant upon these hind-log's, she sparred furiously at oCean with her remaining two ; but the Eev. Deoimua Green sat her like a oontaur, or as if he had been fastened on Mazeppawise with oords or cobbler's wax. At length, putting her head right for the wavos, ho called out to the groom to give her the whip ; the order was obeyed by a most tremendous cut with a hunting thong. Griselda — that was the docile creature's name — gai'e one terrific bound into the air, turned short about almost before she touched ground again, and flew, with the unfor- tunate unclothed Deciuuis upon her, straight back for her stable in the High-street. The poor fellow had no time to tlirow himself off : past the beach where the ladies Mere sitting and Itnitting ; by the post-oflice, where the mad had just oome in, and the crowd were inquiring for letters ; through the little square, where the market women were bargaiiung with the fashionables ; by the squire's lawn, where Mrs. Broadland and the Miss Broadlands were gardening after breakfast ; by the National School, just emptying its tlirong of pupOs and amateur teaehei's ; and so to his own stable door, where the sagacious Griselda stopped. This is what I hear from other sources. I did not see Deeimus Green upon that occasion, nor has he been since beheld by morttd Little Biddlebrighamer. For the remainder of that day, he shut himself up in his own house, and departed from us, with his mother, imder cover of the ensuing night, for ever. Ho derived, or seemed to derive, no comfort from my wi'itten suggestion that the tiling was, after all, not so 12 Oiir Curates. unusual, or had been done before at least, for a good purpose, by Lady Godiva. " Never," he writes, " never can I look that congregation in the face again." This was the last but one of our Curates at Little Biddlebrigham ; and a delicacy, which I trust will be appre- ciated, causes me to postpone for a while any description of our present one. ( 13 ) TWO FIRST-GLASS PASSENGUES. T EESIDB upon the great South Angular line of railway, -^ and go to town, and return from it every day ; the two journeys consume about two hours, and having taken them regularly for the last fifteen years, I must have spent at least a twelvemonth of my existence in a first-class carriage ; I, therefore, may be supposed to know a little about the passengers. I am acquaiuted with almost everybody's name who gets into the train at the half-dozen stations between my own and London, and whether he will return by our 5.30, or not, to a dead certainty. I know who are the stockbrokers, and who the lawyers, and who the bill dis- counters, and the places of business of every one of them, although our acquaintance is only acknowledged by a nod, nor ever extends' beyond the terminus at London Bridge. When A or B is not in the 11.45 "up'' twice running, we look for him in the Times, and find him under Deaths or Bankrupts ; and when I myself, X, am missing, I feel confident that the rest of the alphabet will as easily under- stand what has become of me. We do not pretend to entertain the sympathetic feelings of a Rousseau, or a De Lamartine, towards our friends of the South Angular ; our 14 Two First-class Passengers. conversations — which are carried on under cover of our respective nevrspapers^are kept studiously general, for there is no knowing what religion or politics any of us may profess, or whether we profess any at all ; we generally discuss the money-market only, and the murders — trust- ing that, if there be a homicide or two in the same carriage, any offensive remark may be understood not to apply to the present company. We season-ticket holders are, of course, well known by sight to aU the company's oflScers, so that they rarely give us the trouble of producing our passes at all, nor is one of us more easily recognisable than C, the leviathan banker, who makes the train stop in front of his own house, where there is no station, to the concentrated disgust of the three classes. He is called by us familiarly " the Old Cock ;" but, although he knows this, it is not, of course, customary to address him. by that appellation. My brother, however, who is a stranger to the South Angular, going down with me once upon a visit by the 5.30, remarked, unhappily, upon occasion of the usual stoppage in front of the huge red house, " Oh, this is where the Old Cock lives, who causes you so much annoyance, is it ?" Whereupon, the great C, who was sitting opposite, crimsoned excessively, got out slower than usual, and has never nodded to me since. A little after this, a new ticket-collector having been appointed by the company, he called upon the whole carriage-full, which included but one casual passenger, to produce our tickets ; which, with the exception of the Old Cock, we readily did. He confessed that he had it in his waistcoat pocket, but that no hmnan power should induce him to exhibit it ; he harangued the unfortunate coUeotor for nearly a quarter of an hour (during which the train was, of course. Two First-class Passengers. 15 delayed, and the business-passengers goaded to frenzy), on the absurdity of his (C's) being unknown to any person on the South Angular railway, no matter how newly-ap- pointed, or how forgetful by disposition ; he took the official to task, just as though he himself, the Old Cock, were the aggrieved party, or as if he were the Lord Chief Baron addressing some great offender against the law. " Nay, but," urged the poor man, "it is my duty to see your ticket, sir, whether you have compounded for the year or not. You may, for all I am supposed to know to the contrary, have lent, or even sold your " " I sell my ticket ? I abuse my privilege ?" cried the old fellow in a terrible voice. " Give the rascal into my hand, John." (This to his son, who was sitting opposite.) Where- upon the collector got off the step with great agility. "What am I to do?" said the Discomfited, appealing to the rest of us, " I ought to take the gentleman into custody." C had relapsed behind his paper in high dudgeon, and would reply to no man's intercession upon this subject further, while his son John shook his head very de- cidedly, saying :— * " He won't give it up. I have known him for forty years. He won't give it up : I know him so well." Indeed, so it happened, and after a consultation among the officials upon the platform, and a very prolonged stop- page of the train, the Old Cock was carried on in triumph, still stertorous with indignation. These little incidents are the only ones, as I have said, which to my knowledge ever interfered with the strictly business character of our daily transits ; but when I have 16 Two Firsirdass Bassengers. chanced to be detained longer than usual in town, and to miss the 5.30 " down,'' I have met with more interesting companions. Three times, by the evening express, I have travelled with a gentleman bound for the other side of the Channel, from whom I always parted with regret : a middle- aged, rather ruddy-complexioned man, spare and tall, with an intimate acquaintance with foreign countries, and a fund of stories and adventures, which it was very pleasant to draw upon. Though we exchanged cards, Mr. Settler never told me what was his profession ; but I set him down as a tra- veller for some great house, at a salary, perhaps, of seven hundred a year, and I am seldom wrong in such calculations. He carried a particularly beautiful Geneva watch, vrith tur- quoise figures on it, which must have cost forty guineas at the very least, but his dress was otherwise plain and insig- nificant. About a week after I had met him for the third time, I took a house at Dover for the season for my wife and family, to whom I used to run down from London every week. I was returning to the City by an evening train, soon afterwards, for which the poor voyageurs from Prance were, as usual, not in time, in consequence of the delays at the Custom House, when I heard my travelling friend's voice outside the window, and instantly looked forth to welcome him in. Somehow or other, however, he had disappeared at that very instant, and I seemed doomed to ride the whole way to London in company of a solitary stranger, who entered at the opened door instead. He was big enough for two, indeed, but singularly uncom- municative, replying to the few civilities which I ventured upon, in gruff monosyllables ; and, coiling himself up in a corner, with his cap over his eyes, in the manner of / Two First-class Passengers. 17 the true passenger ruffian. Still, I could not help thinking that at some time and place, both forgotten, I had seen this man and spoken to him before ; the remembrance of him was Hke one of those mysterious experiences which we all have of having previously witnessed some passing scene, which our mortal eyes can never in reality have beheld ; but indistinct as this was, it was strong enough to drive aU thoughts from my mind, except the absorbing one, — " To whom is he like ? and where have I met this sulky fellow before ? " Presently, however, my mind reverted to the voice I heard at starting, and immediately this idea combined with it, and I said to myself : " Why it is Mr. Settler himself to whom this man is some- how like after all ! " True, my old acquaintance was a spare man, and this a person stout even to, obesity. The former had a voice espe- cially pleasing, and the latter a grunt that could scarcely be reckoned human ; that a convivial visage, and this a face from which ill-health and ill-humour together had expelled every trace of jollity. Still, having acquired my idea with so much trouble, I was not the man to let it easily go again, but flattered and nourished it in my mind, until it grew larger and stronger, and at last shot up into the full belief that this uncommunicative stranger was not only like Mr. Settler, but was Mr. Settler himself ! No other than he, I now felt persuaded, could have presented himself at the carriage window so immediately after my hearing his voice close beside it. " Sir,'' said I, composing myself in my corner, as if to sleep, " I should like to know how long I may hope 18 Two First-class Passengers. to rest myself. Will you kindly favour me with the time ? " I shot through my fingers an eager glance, as the stout gentleman pulled his watch out, with an expression of im- patience at being roused. My scheme had succeeded ; my suspicions were confirmed. It was the old Geneva watch with the turquoise figures. " Mr. Settler," said I, quietly, " why do you wish to cut my acquaintance ? " " Why, the fact is," replied he, in his natural frank voice, and not without a touch of pathos in it, " I am so ill, and such an object, that I am positively ashamed to be recog- nised ; do you observe how tremendously stout I have grown ?" " Of course I do," said I ; "it would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise ; why you are three times your usual size at the very least !" " There is no need to exaggerate, goodness knows," re- joined he, gravely ; " a man with such a dropsy as this is no fit subject for joking." My old acquaintance indeed exhibited so much acrimony and bad humour that I was sorry I spoke to him at all, and felt quite relieved when, wheezing and grumbling to the last, he parted company from me at the terminus. On the next Saturday I again went down to Dover, and only reached the station just m tune to hit the train. I therefore threw myself into the nearest first-class carriage, and was off before I ever looked to see who was my companion. " How are you, my boy ? " cried Mr. Settler, for he it was, spare and hearty as ever. " I am afraid I was rather cross with you the other day." Two First-class Passengers. 19 " Cross !" said I, a little grimly, " is not the word for it ; you were a bear of the first water ; and, by the bye, wliat has become of your dropsy V " Well," rejoined he, " I have been tapped since I saw you." " Tapped ! " cried I, laughing, " why you have been emptied — drained ! " " Yes," answered Mr. Settler evasively ; " I dare say it seems so. I am subject to these attacks. They're heredi- tary. Have you seen to-day's paper ? " So we turned the conversation to other subjects, and spent the time between London and Folkestone as pleasantly as usual. A month elapsed, and then I met my friend once more •in the up-express, going to town for the best advice, he said, and stouter than ever. However, he was very good- humoured this time, observing that he was not going to suffer the disease to prey upon his spirits any longer ; only from Ms late voyage and its accompaniments he was really very exhausted, and presently fell asleep, looking, as I thought, like PalstafF after a fit of sea sickness. As I sat close by Mm, whistling softly, and staring at his right leg, a very singukr sight presented itseK. I saw Mr. Settler's right calf sink gradually down, and presently repose about his ancle. I stooped down to investigate this sliding phenomenon, and discovered it to be entirely composed of the best French kid gloves ; the other calf I pricked with my scarf pin, and concluded it to be composed of the same unfeeling material. Elated by these revelations I cautiously applied the same ingenious instrument to my c 2 20 Two First-class Passengers. friend's waistcoat ; it penetrated at least three inches, up to the fox's head which surmounted it, without meeting with any flesh and blood ; the sleeper never so much as winked an eye. I then took the liberty of unfastening the first and second buttons about his ample chest, whereupon I came upon fine cambric ; I turned back case after case, and there peeped forth an end of Valenciennes lace. I took hold of this very delicately and gave it a gentle puU — one yard ! two yards ! ten yards ! twenty yards of such a trimming as I have only seen in books upon the fashions rewarded my dexterity. Throughout this operation the stout party, sleeping Kke a chUd, , reminded me of the spider who, out of his own interior, supplies such charming gossamer work. Then, having pocketed the Valenciennes, replaced the cambric,* and fastened the buttons, I woke my stiU stout but somewhat reduced acquaintance, and observed, " I beg your pardon, but your right calf has slipped down from the usual place, Mr. Settler." " It is a false one," answered he with frankness ; " it is, in fact, French kid gloves. Mrs. Settler compels me to do it, although I abominate the practice. A man in my dangerous state of health should think of something else than defrauding the revenue." " Don't you feel somewhat relieved, though ? " inquired I, producing the Valenciennes. " Sir," said he, in some confusion, and twitching at his waistcoat, " I am sure that I am in the hands of a man of honour." " Perhaps," said I, blushing a very little ; " but I have the sternest possible sense of duty." Two First-class Passengers. 21 " Custom House duty ?" inquired he, good naturedly ; then, with his old pathos he added, " You have a wife, a loving wife yourself, sir.'' " I have," said I ; and I confess I was a good deal moved. " How well she'd look in that old Valenciennes ! " urged Mr. Settler, and that with an air of such sincere admiration, that I really could not find it in my heart to give the poor fellow up. I never saw him again from that day to this, and there is no reason to suppose that after that clemency of mine he did not give up his contraband habits, and be- came an honest man. It was in a coUar and sleeves trimmed with that Valen- ciennes that my wife went up with me to town for the Handel Festival ; we were a large party in the carriage, and enjoyed the journey very much. Amongst others was a strange young gentleman, very well-informed and agreeable, who kept us in peals of laughter with his lively sallies. Mrs. X. had seen the address upon his portmanteau, and whispered to us that he was a viscount, and perhaps we did not appreciate him the less upon that account ; he had all that abandon and keen animal spirits which distinguish the young English aristocracy, and make them the pleasantest fellows in the world to travel with, and he had also a diamond ring which he was kind enough to let us examine, of very great brilliancy and value ; such a hand too, delicate, graceful, thin, and such an exquisite curling ear ; in short, as my wife, judging from these symptoms, observed, with an irrepressible enthu- siasm, " a youthful Cavendish, all over." When we arrived at London Bridge, he bade adieu to us in the most affable manner, and drove away in a simple Hansom, with all the air of a man accustomed to keep his 22 Two First-class Passengers. carriage. On our road to Sydenham we were all loud in his praises, when suddenly my wife threw up her hands, and cried out that her purse was gone, with half her quarter's aUowanoe in it ; there must have been a hole in her pocket, or one of the railway porters had taken it, or she had never brought it with her at all ; she would believe anything in fact, rather than suffer the breath of suspicion to sully that mirror of nobility, the viscount. Judge, then, our surprise when at the bottom of this pocket was discovered the identi- cal ring, which had evidently slipped off those aristocratic fingers while they were appropriating the purse. Upon our return to town, I took the trinket to a jeweller's, fully expecting to find that the precious stone was made of glass, but to my astonishment and pleasure it turned out to be a real diamond, and that of a value very considerably greater than the stolen money. We advertised it for a few days in the newspapers, but, as we expected, without its being inquired after by its late proprietor ; so, besides the Valen- ciennes trimming for her coUar and sleeves, my wife has a handsome diamond ring for her middle finger, both pre- sented to her, indirectly, by two of my feUow-passengers. ( 23 ) OUB FOREIGN RELATIONS. TTTE have the privilege, or esteemed it so until lately, of living in one of the pleasantest spots of the plea- santest country in the world. Our village of Kiversmeet has nothing but picturesque dwellings in it, although not two of them are alike. Here, for instance, is Seaview Cottage upon the very brink of the beach, and in a line with the little pier- head, very elegantly but strongly buUt of flint-stone — as it has need to be when the nor'-easters set this way — with a stone balcony running round the upper story, from which there is a grand view of the high white cliffs about St. Bride's in Wales, the green Glamorgan Mountains, and the crowded Channel ; and at night a no less interesting one of moving lights at sea and stationary lights on dangerous rooks and at the mouths of harbours. There, again, is Marine Villa with its union-jack upon the lawn in front, a boat stuck up on end for a summer-house, and walks behind that run zigzag up the cliflf. Then, as we get more inland by some fifty yards, there is, close by the stream. Bridge Hall, a four- roomed little doll's house of a place, with a flight of steps down to the water's edge, and a little maid upon them always washing dishes ; then Eoae Bower, whose lattice windows 24 Omj- Foreign Relations. can scarcely be shut for the white and red blossoms that will push their fragrant faces within ; and then — one, two, three, yes, fifthly — there is Woodbine Lodge, iu magnificent grounds of its own, nearly half an acre, with honeysuckle, and wood- bine, and sweetbrier running riot all over the place, as though Mrs. Pairseat did not keep a gardener — which she does in common with ourselves and the rector — working for each of us on alternate days ; sixthly, comes our own dear darling home, " the Fishery," which, from the east, looks down upon the river, and from the south right up the wooded gorge over the Ivy-bridge and the salmon weir to Lillie's Leap, that great dark pool among the shadows, where the Cavalier lady drovmed herself when her lover married some other pretty young person — as was the custom, it seems, in the Stuart times. Prom those of our upper windows which look northward, we catch glimpses of the Channel through the trees ; and if you want a whiif of the heather and the finest air in Devonshire, you have only to cUmb the hill behind the house to get it. "Henrietta" — that's me — " Henrietta always gets prosy over the scenery," my brother says ; and, indeed, I do like to dilate a little about the Fishery and Eiversmeet, I'll own ; the very street is so charm- ing in its quaintness and irregularity — here a bow-window and there a bay, and here again the simplest little diamond panes, through which you can scarcely see what is for sale inside. Riversmeet is not London, to be sure, nor Paris ; but it supplies all we can require ; and as for scenery ! — well, until Cousin Clara and her niece came down to stay with us last month, I thought oui scenery peerless. They had been on the Continent exactly a yeax ; but one would have thought, to hear them, they were some of those unhappy Our Foreign Relations. 25 foreigners whose mission is to prophesy, with such infallible accuracy, the date of Perfide Albion's downfall, and to under- rate every excellence she boasts. " my dear Henrietta," said Clara, the instant her arms were off my neck at our first meeting, and the kissing was over — " we've got so much to tell you that I don't know where to begin ; we've had such a delightful year, such a charming expedition ! Italy, Austria, the Ionian Islands, Greece, Constantinople, Switzer- land, and France (but that's nothing) ! Nice place you've got here ; but you must not expect us to admire English scenery, after what we've been used to. Must she, Char- lotte ?" Charlotte, her niece, is a round piece of luggage, with a single sentence attaching to her by way of address, which she exhibits very good-naturedly whenever spoken to — " I'm sur I don no, auntie." The rest of her labels — for she had some others before she started, I know — have been torn off and utterly lost in change of trains, diligences, steam- packets, vetturinos, and the like, and in conflicts with extortioners and oifioial persons. She remembers dimly some of her foreign sufferings and discomforts, but has forgotten everything else. " I 'm sur I don no, auntie." " Well, cousins," said I, laughing, " since you have never been at Eiversmeet before, it will be strange indeed if we can't show you something here both new and striking." " What, my dear ?" said Clara, stopping on the landing, halfway to the bedroom, which we had prepared for her, and which looks on one side to the river, and on one side to the sea — " what can you possibly have to show me ? Temple, whirlpool, ruin, cathedral, picture-gallery, snow-mountain. 26 Our Foreign Eelations. geyser, volcano— we've seen them all. Ah, my dear Henri- etta,'' she -went on, sitting down upon the fifth step from the top, "you should have climbed Vesuvius. These stairs remind me a good deal, do you know, of Vesuvius — only there are no steps there, of course, and no carpet, for the ground is red-hot to tread upon ; and there was a naked man, or nearly so, pulliug me up by a rope, and another pushing me behind. Some were carried in a sort of sedan ; but that 's dreadfully dangerous, your heels being higher than your head, and the bearers wanted two pound ten, or it might have been two and tenpence, for we could never calculate those scudi .... Well, what a nice little bedroom ! Ah, but you should see the bedrooms in Ger- many, snowy white and eiderdown ; the bed is a-top of you, and the furniture just like that of a sitting-room.. Gedenken Sie unser Bedroom zu Cologne, Charlotte 1" " I 'm sur I yes, it was where we got taken up by the police. Wasn't it, auntie ?" " What was that ?" said I, beginning to feel interested. " nothing," said Clara ; " only a ridiculous business about passports. Charlotte, in my absence, was asked if we had got passports, and she very foolishly said that she was sure she did not know, and they locked us up. It was nothing. What a pretty little river ! Ah, you should see the Moselle — you pronounce it wrongly in England — fifty times its breadth, and with ever so much bigger rocks in it than these, shooting, whirling, fizzing .... There now, that little bay across the Channel reminds me immensely of the Gulf of Catania, in Sicily, only, of course, on a very humble scale. This sort of thing seems all so dwarfed and insignificant after having been so much abroad — that's the Our Foreign Relations. advantage of foreign travel, it enlarges your mind so muoli. What a little tuppeny-hapenny pier you've got ! Ah, you should have seen the Dear me ! that's the second diimer- bell, isn't it ? Do you know, in some places ui the Tyrol we were summoned to table by a horn — so romantic, was it not ? And so were the pigs. We'll be down directly ; we never took more than five minutes to dress when we were traveUing — tables d'hote never wait, you know. La, Henri- etta " — as I was leaving the room — " how queerly your dress sits behind ! I never saw a dress set so iri my life, except once, at the baths of Leuk, in Switzerland ; but there they wore crowns on their heads, and you don't do that, of course.'' She had got her face in the water, but was talking on for all that, when I went down. It is a thousand pities, thought I, that Cousin Clara, who has been a pleasant person enough for thirty years, should be so changed by thirteen months of foreign experience, as not to permit me to get a word into the conversation — the monologue rather — edgeways : and I wickedly called to memory JNIr. Hood's similitude of some travelled minds to copper-wires, which get the narrower by going further, for I was outraged by the comparisons which put our dear Rivers- meet so completely in the shade ; however, determining not to annoy my brother John with complaiats, and trusting that memory would fail our guest .at last, I came smUing down to dinner. John had been out all the afternoon providing for our table ivith his rod, and there was a very fine salmon and some trout. " Trout ! I adore trout," Clara began ; "and these, for then- size, are excellent ; but you should have seen the trout at " 28 Our Foreign Relations. I managed to get a bone in my throat, and to enlist Clara's services in patting my back and giving me bread, just here, or John, who is an enthusiast about his trout, would have been much annoyed, I 'm sure, by the promised comparison. On she went again ! " Roe ? No, thank you ; salmon-roe is nothing after caviare. 'Caviare to the multitude,' you know, because everybody eats it on the west coast of Italy.'' " I thought caviare was a Russian dish ? " said I, innocently. " Well, yes, it is in some sort a Russian dish ; but it is also a very favourite food with the Italians. Anchovy ? Please. Anchovy comes from Italy too, as you may have heard, and gives its name to the island of No, that 's sardines, by the bye. But it don't matter. Thank you, yes. This mutton reminds me : did you ever happen to taste sheep's ribs dried in the sun. Cousin John?" (My brother, who is fond of delicate eating, here gave a little shudder.) " WeU, you've no idea how good it is ; we had it in the Tyrol ; no — at St. Quirico, in Italy. Didn't we, Charlotte ?" " I 'm sur I don no, auntie." " Nonsense, child ! Don't you remember how angry you made the woman by offering to count her beads for her, if she would only cook our dinner 1 Charlotte was such a plague that day to us, and would not sleep at night." " Mosquitoes," murmured the niece, " and a tarantula.'' " yes, of course,'' said Clara, just glanciug at the inter- ruption, " we had our pains as well as our pleasures ; nay, privations at times ; but then at times what luxuries ! Why, this light wine here, which I daresay you give five shillings a bottle for " Our Foreign Relations. 29 " I give ten ! " shrieked brother John, " and it's real Johannisberg." " Bless me, is it, indeed ? Well, now, that stood us in Florence about a quarter of a scudo — about a shilling." John to himself, but very audibly : " That's a whopper.'' " These are capital dumplings, however, of yours ; you never get a dumpling out of England, that I will say for it ; and the grapes, I suppose, from your nice Httle hothouse yonder. Ah, if you went to Rome, you'd never touch a grape at home afterwards." "What are you eating them for, then?" demanded brother John rather rudely ; but as he spends half the day in pnming them, it was enough to put him out. He was not at aU recovered, I could see, when he came to us ladies in the drawing-room, but Clara did not perceive it. " Well, John, I've been talkuig to Henrietta, and I must say I think you ought to take her a little ramble abroad next summer — just into Switzerland, or to the shores of the Mediterranean.'' "I'm " I dropped a cup here, with a great noise, and so lost brother John's answer, but I'm pretty sure he said " no " by her reply. " Well, I'm surprised at you, cousin ! Men with only one lady to take care of, think themselves exceedingly fortunate abroad, I promise you. Your sister need not have another bonnet, and but very little luggage : it's not usual, I assure you ; Charlotte and I travelled all over the south of Europe with a carpet-bag between us. And you can buy your shirts — I heard this from a very nice man whom I sat next to at the Switzer Hof at Lucerne — buy a shirt when you want it, wear it as long 30 Our Foreign Relations. aa you can -without a hlanehisseuse, and then buy another. Ah, John, you'd so enjoy NapoK ! " " What's that ? " growled brother John. "What you Enghsh call Naples, to be sure. Such an enchanting place ! Everybody a nobleman, excejDt quite the rabble ; and such macaroni ! you have to hold it ever so high in the air, throw your head back, and let it settle down gradually upon your stomach. Tea ? Thank you. You should taste the Russian tea.'' " This is the Russian tea, my dear Clara," said I, " for we are extremely particular about this matter." " dear no ; nothing of the sort. Excuse me : your London tradesmen are such cheats. It comes upon camels the whole way, and therefore it is absurd that you should think to get it in England. I like your cream, though, very much. You should taste the goat's milk upon the Wengern Alps ; shouldn't they, Charlotte 1 " " Sour," said Charlotte with a jerk, but very sleepily. " Yes ; there is a piquancy about goat's milk which requires a continental taste to appreciate it, perhaps. But how late you are," she broke out ; " it's nine o'clock. We rarely, or never, were up after eight, abroad — seven hours' travelhng, seven hours' sight-seeing, and a Mttle time for meals. (John groaned.) Oh, we never stinted ourselves, I assure you ; we almost always had one good meal in the day ; didn't we, Charlotte ? There she's asleep. I've got so much to tell you to-morrow. Buono notti, as we used to say at Florence. Gute nacht. Good night to you." " Thank Heaven ! " said brother John with earnestness. " Hi 1 there's no key to the door," hoUowed Clara Our Foreign Belations. 31 presently over the banisters. " I can't sleep without a key, ever since that adventure we had among the Euganean HiUs, on the road from Padua to . Oh, never mind, thank you ; Charlotte has found our door- fastener ; we never travelled without it when we were m the " " Shut the door ! " roared brother John ; and I cut short the reminiscence accordingly. • It was pitch dark when I was awakened by my brother's getting up in the next room. I heard him take down the sword that hung over his mantel-piece, and knew at once that there were robbers in the house. I was too terrified to artionlate, but I got out and bolted the door. Presently he went down very cautiously, and immediately afterwards there was a dreadful scream. He had come suddenly with his nighf>cap and his sabre upon Clara and Charlotte, who, having been accustomed to rise regularly at four o'clock, in order to pursue their journeys, could not now rest in bed after that hour, and were reading by the moderator lamp in the drawing-room. Though the room had not been touched, of course, and everything was in the last stage of discomfort and disarray, they did not seem to mind it in the least. " La, bless me, John," I could hear Clara cry, "how you did make me jump ! Well, I dare say you English people do think us strange ; but you don't know what you lose by getting up so late." " Late ! why it's the middle of the night, woman," said John. " Bless you, no ; it's long past four. Oh, don't mind ; we're quite used to seeing people in dishabille : how queer 32 O-uir Foreign Relations. you look, though, with iJiat thing tied under your chin. Now, you won't heKeTS-ftj-but at Venice I wore just such a thing as that, with a mask for the face besides, on account of t^ mosquitoes ; but we could never keep them olf. It was rather interesting to watch them thrusting their delicate httle proboscides, like stings " Here my brother ran upstairs three steps at a time, slammed to his door, and tossed and tumbled upon his bed, as though he were at Venice himself, until it was reaUy morning. Directly after breakfast — during which we had a few passing observations'ljipon the Campagna, the Engadine, and the Dardanelles, which seemed to escape less by the opening of any particular valve than through the absence of any sort of plug whatever — brother John rode oflF to Stapleton to fetch Dr. Bland. He is the cleverest person about Riversmeet, by far the best read and the most anxious for information ; and John thought he would be a sort of conductor to Oousin Clara, who had evidently a huge mass of intelligence to let oflf still. He offered to pay the doctor just the same as for his professional services, if he would consent to remain at the Fishery until Clara should go, wlft'ch she had pyomissd to do upon the fourth day. In the mean time, poo^/Riversmeet and I suffered terribly. I took the two tiOTellers to every spot which I thought interesting, and each reminded them of another spot which was twice as good : the Ivy Bridge was condeinned by a comparison with that of the St. Gothard Pass ; LiUie's Leap was likened to some place upon the Rhine, where another young lady had committed a much more deter- mined suicide ; and as for our little town, what was it to Our Foreign Relations. Interlacken ? All these home beai:;ties, which were once so dear to me, are now inseparably associated with unseen, perhaps imaginary, splendours, before which they pale and shrink. Beside our little mountain tarn, I dream of Como ; and when I look up to our church's oaken roof, I sigh for the Vatican. My brother brought his prize, the doctor, home with him to dinner, and the campaign, as I expected, was opened with the soup tureen. " These beautiful Devon scenes," said Dr. Bland, " must be a pleasant relief to you. Miss Clara, after the more brilliant pictures you ha,ve met with in foreign travel ? " "Ah, sir," replied my cousin, with a pitying shake of her head, " you have evidently never been in the Tyrol." " Nay," said he, " I am perfectly acquainted with every detail of that country. Does not this very spot remind you somewhat of the Valley of the Inn, near Innspruck ? What a charming convent that is of Landeck, which looks down upon just such a scene as the Fishery looks at from below ! " " Well, perhaps it does,'' confessed Clara ; " but then, how small, how confined ! " " Nay," urged Dr. Bland, " but I think a cabinet picture has its charms as well as a cartoon : Grassmere is, for instance, to the full as lovely as Lake LemanJ and infinitely more complete. Must beauty, then, as well as grandeur, be always 10,000 feet above the sea 1 Look at Suss now, in the Engadine Oberland. You have not seen it ? Ah, then, you have missed something indeed." "I should like to see Suss exceedingly," said brother John, rubbing his hands. 34 Our Foreign Relations. " To tell you the truth," resumed Clara (rather vexed, I thought), " Italy, and more particularly Turkey, effaced a good deal of the Swiss scenery from our recollection.'' " Indeed ! " said the Doctor, in a tone of curiosity, dangerous, as' it seemed to me, in the extreme, " what places particularly struck you ? " " Well, the village of Eocca di Papa, for example, that is exceedingly wonderful, but out of the ordinary (stress upon this word) tourist's way.'' " yes ; the little place at the foot of Mount Caro. Did you stay at the ' Sons of Italy ' inn ? and have the charming how-windowed room over the river ? Ah 1 that spot reminds me very much of Lynmouth, do you know ; but it wants the sea, which makes Lynmouth finer.'' " But, after all," resumed Cousin Clara, after a pause, " Italy has something soft and effeminate about it, which you must penetrate still more eastward to lose. Now, I suppose. Dr. Bland, you never got so far as the Temple of ^gina?" " There are two," said the Doctor. " Do you mean that in the Saronio Gulf, opposite Salamis ? Ah ! well, should you call that particularly magnificent 1 1 know many spots in Great Britain grander than that, and equally lovely." I confess I began to feel a good deal pleased. Brother John hung upon the Doctor's words, as though a relation of foreign experiences was the subject that was deaiest to him beneath the sun. There was, too, I think, a sort of dull ray of satisfaction emanating from Charlotte, as though she had never seen her aunt catching a Tartar before. That persevering lady, however, was not going to be beaten without another struggle. Constantinople — she called it Our Foreign Relations. 35 Stamboul — was the very extremity of lier travelling tether, and the time had now arrived to stake her all upon the chance of the Doctor's wanderings not having extended quite so far. Like all travellers who teU tales, she would have much preferred relating them to stay-at-homes, just as Box in the play desires to fight only when he has made himself certaia that Cox doesn't know how; if she could but get in an unknown land, the Doctor would be as much at her mercy as we. We could see by her collected appearance that she was now about to dispute some last position with all the tenacity of despair. " Well, Dr. Bland, there is a good deal in what you say ; neither Greece nor Italy can be said to combine every excellence of natural scenery ; it is reserved, I think, for Turkey, the Garden of the World, to surpass aU countries in that particular grace wherein each boasts." " You don't say so. I should like to hear you speak of two or three of the more remarkable Turkish places, for I have but a very small experience of the empire of the Crescent myself." " Well, then, I should say the finest spot in the world — (Cousin Clara kept her eye steadily fixed upon the Doctor, and spoke very slowly) — in the whole world for scenery, is, withoilt exception, Buyuk Tchekmedge, upon the Sea of Marmora. Its mosque, its minarets, its kiosk, I shall never forget them ; shall you, Charlotte 1 " " I'm sur I don no, auntie. yes, I do — the cucumbers. Tou wouldn't get up there, you know, nor so much as look out of window." " Pooh, pooh ; I don't mean the eating. Do you remember the beautiful solemn burial-grounds and the " 36 Our Foreign Belations. " Pardon me," interrupted the Doctor, " I think you must mean Kutchuk Tehekmedge, not Buyuk Tchekmedge. I know one as well as the other ; they are both pretty, but the former has the burial-grounds. The whole mere tourist ■ — (the stress returned with interest) — part of Turkey is as familiar to me as that of France or Belgium, but I thought you might have seen some more of the Balkan than I. A walking tour over those mountains is the pleasantest thing one can imagine ; but mine was scarcely worth mentioning, it was so short. I know nothing like them in Europe, except the hills about Wastwater in Cumberland, which have nearly the same effects. Indeed, after all our toils. Miss Clara, we must agree, I fear, with our two untraveUed friends here, that there is no place like home. From Switzerland, from Turkey, from Eussia even — although there is a good deal of fine hill-scenery about the Don — I return to Stapleton and to Eiversmeet, having found nowhere anything more charming." " Thank you. Doctor," said brother John, with fervour. " There's a great deal in what you say, sir," said Cousiu Clara, perfectly humbled. She never used her memory, " that tremendous engine of conversation," despotically from that date ; and although we kept Dr. Bland in the house until the last, for fear of a relapse, his remedies were no longer found to be necessary. The moment she had gone, brother John and I began to thank him warmly for his services. " It was the luckiest thing in the world. Doctor, that you happened to be a traveller ; we had not the least idea of it when we sent for you." Our Foreign Relations. 37 " No more had I," said he, laughing in his queer silent way. " I have never been out of England in my life, but I have read a good deal about foreign parts ; and if you really do want any ' mere tourist ' information about them, I can lend you the whole of Murray's Handiooks.'' ( 38 ) MT FRIEND'S FRIEND. "IVTEXT to our friend's relatives — whoin -we never saw, and -^^ trust we never shall see — next to his father, who is a military person of distinguished appearance, and the most heroic character, and who ought to have been knighted by his sovereign ; next to his mother, who is a woman of queenly dignity and a star in fashionable spheres ; next to his brothers and sisters, who are all charming people, it seems, and possessed of the cardinal and other virtues, besides property in the Three per Cents ; next to our friend's relatives, we repeat, of whom he is constantly relating some eulogistic and extraordinary anecdotes, we dislike, and are utterly weary of, our friend's Friend. If death were a likely thing to separate him from us, we should cordially wish that the family vault, after receiving aU our friend's relatives, might have a spare corner com- fortably filled up by our friend's Friend also ; but we are very well aware that we should not get rid of him by any such method. Anything like a happy release in the obituary sense is not to be expected of our friend's Friend. Even in his ashes would not only live his wonted fires, but our friend would probably take advantage of his decease to be My Friend's Friend. 39 the more commendatory and Boswellian. He would not edit his Life and Remains, and there have done with him, but he would go about like a walking cenotaph, celebratiug to everybody, everywhere, the wonderful properties of his great departed. There would also be a sort of indelicacy in questioning the wisdom or virtue of the man, being dead, which we are certainly very far from feeling under the present circumstances. It is certainly better that he should Uve, but live as he shall do after the publication of this paper, attached to the dead walls in popular places, like carrion on a barn-door — -pilloried in the largest type on every pfllar — Our Friend's Friend ! If we could only get to know him personally, aU would be well ; we would then either insist upon his retailing his own stories, boasting of his own achievements, and in every particular discharging the duties of his own trumpeter ; or — better still — we would pick a quarrel with him, engender a coolness, and decline to have his name mentioned in our presence so long as we live. Unfortunately, however, and singularly enough, mortal eye, save that of our friend, has (as far as we know) never yet seen his majestic proportions ; nor mortal ear, save that of our friend, yet listened to his fascinating tones. Copious extracts from his letters, indeed, are often read to us, exquisitely characteristic of him — radiant, as our friend says, of the graceful writer, but still they are not himself. If they were, we should not hesitate to affirm that our friend's Friend was rather a dull person, rather a heavy person, and rather, in short, a person to be avoided than to be made into a Juggernaut idol, and drawn about with us for the indiscriminate crushing of our acquaintance. As it is, however, we miss certain 40 _ My Friend's Frieiid. things, it seems, which would more than redeem everything. We can have no idea of his surpassing eloquence, of his genial disposition, of his keen appreciation of humour (we are told), from his mere writings. Just to give us a, feeble example, a shadow from the brilliancy of this first gift of his, our friend recites a speech made by his terrible ally at the Grocers' Hall, perhaps, upon the late monetary crisis. If this does not seem to us to be of a nature to carry a listener off his feet, our friend is ready at once to take the blame upon himself ; the manner, the air, the tones are wanting, which would have ravished eye and ear. He regales us with such anecdotes illustrative of this unapproachable person as make him almost expire with laughter in the relation, but of which we ourselves cannot see the fun for the life of us ; and teUing him so without much ceremony, we produce a quarrel. Otherwise (and we were delicate in this matter at first) he can scarcely be stopped in these biographical ana, nor is it of any use to suggest to him that we have heard any particular anecdote before, inasmuch as he has a score of others quite as long, and bearing equally well upon the matter in hand ; it is better, rather, to suffer him to exhaust himself upon the most wearisome, from which he wiU sometimes drop ofi', after five-and-forty minutes or so, Kke a boa of another description, gorged. If our friends Friend is a person of elevated position, and (which is not uncommon) has a title, or handle, to his name, the work which that handle is made to do is something astounding. The bucketfuls of aristocratic intelligence which are wound up by it, from the best My Frientrs Friend. 41 sources, to sluice us with, wlietlier he will or no, are countless ; and whOe we drip from head to heel, and pain- fully shrink in our social dimensions under its influeiice, our friend wiU continue to play upon us without the least remorse, like some mad garden-engine, that has the end of its hose in a river. Not only does our friend make light of us, his companions and associates, through the odious comparisons which he draws between us and the unknown, but the worth and wisdom of even public and renowned persons are made to pale before this sfcir, of whose radiance we know nothing at all except by reflection. It seems to be positively ofi'ensive to our friend to hear of a cheap edition of the works of any author, and gall and wormwood to him to see them sold at the railway stations, whOe those of his own vmappreciated favourite are left without a public, and even without a publisher. " Why this person," cries our friend, denouncing some popular writer, " I know for a fact, is considered to be the dullest, by many degrees, of the literary club to wliich my Friend and he both belong : he is only maudlin when he thinks he is sentimental ; he is never amusing save when he is intoxicated ; whereas, the man of whom I have so often spoken to you is rich in fancy, scintillating with wit, withering in sarcasm, and superhumanly keen in detecting the springs of human action. I don't profess to be a critic [he makes use of this phrase when he considers himself to be essentially infallible, and out of the sphere of human contradiction] ; but when he comes to conceding to a fellow like that [popular author] the title of a great "Writer, while such a sublime spirit [our friend's Friend] 42 My FriencCs Friend. is, on the other hand, seeking acceptance from the world in vain, it is time indeed for me to put in my protest." He is always putting in his protest on behalf of this unknown protegd. Our friend's Friend happens, in the above instance, to be a novelist ; but he is oftentimes the greatest poet of the age (although the age is not aware of it) ; also a mechanist, and the original, though, unacknow- ledged, inventor of the electric telegraph ; a painter, but who has a quarrel with the Eoyal Academy (who are jealous of him), and therefore does not exhibit ; an engineer, with a submarine tunnel to Sydney, upon paper, about the details of which (thank Heaven !) our friend is bound to secrecy ; and an officer in the Bengal army who has merited the Victoria Cross, without getting it, more than any other man in all India. If our friend were not really our friend, and a person in every way admirable except for this one hallucination, we should entertain the most inimical feeling towards him. As it isj we cannot turn an altogether deaf ear to his detractors. It has been suggested to us, not without some colour of probability, that this extreme partiality for an unpresentable person may be assumed for reasons. May not this insensate praise for a being whom none can appreciate save oneself, be, after all, a safe form of self- laudation ? Shall we boldly state our suspicions that the afiFeotion bestowed on our friend's Friend by the proprietor is something like that which Mr. Punch, in the puppet- show, exhibits towards his inanimate spouse, when he takes her up in his arms and kisses her, the better to use her poor head as an instrument wherewith to knock down the clergyman ? My Friend's Friend. 43 There is still another solution of thia mystery, but it is ahnost too terrible to write. It was uttered, probably, with bated breath, at some convivial meeting over which the shadow of our friend's Friend had been cast, and of course after the departure of his reflector. We will confine ourselves to saying that the same awful suggestio]), was once made in connection with the elucidation of another social problem of a simDar nature, by Mrs. Betsey Prig, over pickled salmon, in the apartment of Mrs. Gamp, but in that case the elucidator was under the influence of spirits. If this be the very truth ; if our friend's Friend have in reality no existence, except in the scheming brain of his confederate and originator, we have been victims indeed. He has taxed our belief, and imposed upon our creduhty to a greater extent than any superstition of the darkest ages ever ventured upon with the most savage mind. His attributes, which have been of the most impossible kind, we have never so much as questioned ; his exploits, before which those of Munchausen pale, we have listened to, if not with entire faith, at least with courteous attention. When, years ago, we were told that our friend's Friend was at once a practical Christian and a Palace Court attorney, we exhibited no distrust : when we were assured that he was a family man, living on three hundred a year, and yet keeping his carriage and pair without driving into debt, we only remarked that it deserved the name of Economy's Triumphal Car. What if we had been made to do all this, and more, by a Creature of Mythology, a Non-existence, a Mrs. Harris, of no parts and of no magnitude ! The idea is indeed humiliating. At all events, we hereby pubKsh our protest against our 44 My Friend!s Friend. friend's Friend, whether he be in the spirit, or whether he be in tlie imagination only. When a man marries a living woman's daughter, he knows that the elder female will be henceforth his mother-in-law, and makes up his mind before- hand to resistance or to submission. The object — sometimes the person— of liis antagonism is plain, and (generally) substantial, and he has seen it in aU its length aijd breadth from the beginning. Again, — to take a still stronger case, — when a gentleman marries a widow, he is aware that certain comparisons will be drawn at certain times from the silent tomb, and cast at him, decidedly to his disadvantage, from which it wHL be difficult, if not impossible, to shelter himself — spectral virtues, which no exorcism of his can ever lay. Still, he puts his head into a tangle of widows' weeds with his eyes open ; and, if the gods have not wished to ruin him and made him mad beforehand, he soon finds out how unplea- santly tight a matrimonial noose of that material can be drawn. In the choice of our friend, however, no foresight of this can be used, and therefore the strictest watch should be kept against his first introduction of that ghostly enemy his Friend, of whom we have been thus discoursing. " Love me, love my dog," is a proverb whose meaning is under- stood weU enough ; but it has never yet been applied in words to the human subject. As we say, 'Ware the dog ! so with ten times the reason should we write up at the entrance gate of our affections : " No admittance to our friend's Friend : all applications to be made in person.'' ( 45 ) MBS. b:8 alarms. ~\/f"RS. B. is my wife ; and her alariis are those produced •^'-*- by a delusion under which she labours, that there are assassins, gnomes, vampires, or what not in our house at night, and that it is my bounden duty to leave my bed at any hour or temperature, and to do battle with the same, in very inadequate apparel. The circumstances which attend Mrs. B.'s alarms are generally of the following kind. I am awakened by the mention of my baptismal name, in that peculiar species of whisper which has something uncanny in its very nature, besides the ^smal associations which belong to it, from the fact of its being used only in melodramas and sick-rooms. " Henrj, Henry, Heniy." How many times she had repeated this, I know not ; the sound falls on my ear like the lapping of a hundred waves, or as the " Eobin Crusoe, Kobin Crusoe '' of the parrot smote upon the ear of the terrified islander of Defoe ; but at last I wake, to view, by the dim fire-light, this vision : Mrs. B. is sitting up beside me, in a listening attitude of the very intensest kind ; her nightcap (one with cherry- coloured ribbons, such as it can be no harm to speak about) 46 Mrs. B.'s Alarms. is tucked back beliind either ear ; her hair — in paper — is rolled out of the way upon each side like a banner furled ; her eyes are rather wide open, and her mouth very much so ; her iingers would be held up to command attention, but that she is supporting herself in a somewhat absurd manner upon her hands. " Henrj, did you hear that ?" "What, my love 2" " That noise. There it is again ; there — there.'' The disturbance referred to is that caused by a mouse nibbling at the wainscot ; and I venture to say so much in a tone of the deepest conviction. " No, no, Henry ; it's not the least like that : it's a file working at the bars of the pantry-window. I will stake my existence, Henry, that it is a file." Whenever my wife makes use of this particular form of words, I know that opposition is useless. I rise, therefore, and put on my slippers and dressing-gown. Mrs. B. refuses to let me have the candle, because she wiU die of terror if she is left alone without a light. She puts the poker into my hand, and with a gentle violence is about to expel me from the chamber, when a sudden thought strikes her. " Stop a bit, Henry," she exclaims, " until I have looked into the cupboards and places ;'' which she proceeds to do most minutely, investigating even the short drawers of a foot and a half square. I am at length dismissed upon my perilous errand, and Mrs. B. locks and double-locks the door behind me with a celerity that almost catches my re- treating garment. My expedition therefore combines all the dangers of a sally, with the additional disadvantage of having my retreat into my own fortress cut off. Thus cumbrously Mrs. B.'s Alarms. but ineffectually caparisoned, I perambulate the lower stories of the house in darkness, in search of the disturber of Mrs. B.'s repose, which, I am well convinced, is behind the wain- scot of her own apartment, and nowhere ebe. The pantry, I need not say, is as silent as the grave, and about as cold. The great clock in the kitchen looks spectral enough by the light of the expiring embers, but there is nothing there with life except black beetles, which crawl in countless numbers over my naked ankles. There is a noise in the cellar such as Mrs. B. would at once identify with the suppressed converse of anticipative burglars, but which I recognize in a moment as the dripping of the small-beer cask, whose tap is troubled with it nervous disorganization of that kind. The dining- room is chUl and cheerless : a ghostly arm-chair is doing the grim honours of the table to three other vacant seats, and dispensing hospitahty in the shape of a mouldy orange and some biscuits, which I remember to have left in some disgust, about Hark ! the clicking of a revolver 1 Xo ; the wamiug of the great clock — one, two, three TVhat a frightful noise it makes in the startled ear of night ! Twelve o'clock. I left this dining-room, then, but three hours and a half ago ; it certainly does not look Kke the same room now. The drawing-room is also far from wearing its usual snug and comfortable appearance. Could we possibly have all been sitting in the relative positions to one another which these chairs assume ? Or since we were there, has some spiritual company, with no eye for order left among them, taken advantage of the remains of our fire to hold a reunion? They are here even at this moment perhaps, and their gentlemen have not yet come up from the dining- room. I shudder from head to foot, partly at the bare 48 Mrs. B.'s A larms. idea of such a thing, partly from the naked fact of my exceedingly unclothed condition. They do say that in the very passage which I have now to cross in order to get to Mrs. B. again, my greatgrandfather " walks ;" in compensation, I suppose, for having been prevented by gout from taking that species of exercise while he was alive. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, I think, as I approach this spot ; but I do not say so, for I am well-nigh speechless with the cold — yes, the cold : it is only my teeth that chatter. What a scream that was ! There it comes again, and there is no doubt this time as to who is the owner of that terrified voice. Mrs. B.'s alarms have evidently taken some other direction. " Henry, Henry," she cries in tones of a very tolerable pitch. A lady being in the case, I fly upon the wings of domestic love along the precincts sacred to the per- ambulations of my great-grandfather. I arrive at my wife's chamber ; the screams continue, but the door is locked. "Open, open!" shout I. "What on earth is the matter?" There is silence : then a man's voice — that is to say, my wife's voice in imitation of a man's — replies in tones of indignant ferocity, to convey the idea of a life-preserver being under the pQlow of the speaker, and ready to his hand : " Who are you — what do you want?" " You very siUy woman," I answer ; not from impolite- ness, but because I find that that sort of language recovers and assures her of my identity better than any other — " why, it's I." The door is then opened about six or seven inches, and I Mrs. B.'s Alarms. 49 am admitted with all the precaution which attends the entrance of an ally into a besieged garrison. Mrs. B., now leaning upon my shoulder, dissolves into copious tears, and points to the door communicating with my attiring-chamber. " There's sui — sur — somebody been snoring ia your dress- ing-room," she sobs, " all the time you were away." This statement is a little too much for my sense of humour, and although sympathizing very tenderly with poor Mrs. B., I cannot help bursting into a little roar of laughter. Laughter and fear are deadly enemies, and I can see at once that Mrs. B. is all the better for this explosion. " Consider, my love," I reason — '' consider the extreme improbability of a burglar or other nefarious person making such a use of the few precious hours of darkness as to go to sleep in them ! Why, too, should he take a bedstead without a mattress, which I believe is the case in this particular supposition of yours, when there were feather- beds unoccupied in other apartments ? Moreover, would not this be a stiU greater height of recklessness in such an individual, should he have a habit of snor " A slight noise in the dressing-room, occasioned by the Venetian blind tapping against the window, here causes Mrs. B. to bury her head with extreme swiftness, ostrich- like, beneath the piUow, so that the peroration of my argu- ment is lost upon her. I enter the suspected chamber — this time with a lighted candle — and find my trousers, with the boots in them, hanging over the bedside something after the manner of a drunken marauder, but nothing more. Neither is there anybody reposing under the shadow of my boot-tree upon the floor. All is peace there, and at sixes 50 Mrs. B.'s Alarms. and sevens as I left it upon retiring — as I had hoped — to rest. Once more I stretch my chilled and tired limbs upon the couch ; sweet sleep once more begins to woo my eyelids, when " Hem-y, Henry," again dissolves the dim and half- formed dream. " Are you certain, Henry, that you looked in the shower- bath ? I am ahnost sure that I heard somebody puUing the string.'' No grounds, indeed, are too insufficient, no supposition too incompatible with reason for Mrs. B. to build her alarms upon. Sometimes, although we lodge upon the second story, she imagines that the window is being attempted ; sometimes, although the register may be down, she is confident that the chimney is being used as the means of ingress. Once, when we happened to be in London — where she feels, however, a good deal safer than in the country — we had a real alarm, and Mrs. B., since I was suffering from a quinsy — contracted mainly by my being sent about the house o' nights in the usual scanty drapery — had to be sworn in as her own special constable. " Henry, Henry,'' she whispered upon this occasion, " there's a dreadful cat in the room.'' " Pooh, pooh ! " I gasped ; " it's only in the street ; I've heard the wretches. Perhaps they are on the tUes." " No, Henry. There, I don't want you to talk since it makes you cough ; only listen to me. What am I to do, Henry ? I'U stake my existence that there's a Ugh, what's that r' And, indeed, some heavy body did there and then jump Mrs. B.'s Alarms. 51 upon our bed, and off again, at my -mfe's interjection, with extreme agility. I thought Mrs. B. would have had a fit, but she didn't. She told me, dear soul, upon no account to venture into the cold with my bad throat. She would turn out the beast herself, single-handed. We arranged that she was to take hold of my fingers, and retain them, until she reached the fireplace, where she would find a shovel or other offensive weapon fit for the occasion. During the progress of this expedition, however, so terrible a caterwauling broke forth, as it seemed, from the immediate neighbourhood of the fender, that my disconcerted helpmate made a most precipitate retreat. She managed, after this mishap, to procure a light, and, by a circuitous route, constructed of tables and chairs, to avoid stepping upon the floor, Mrs. B. obtained the desired weapon. It was then much better than a play to behold that heroic woman defying grimalkin from her eminence, and to listen to the changeful dialogue which ensued between herself and that far from dumb, though inarticulately speaking animal. " Puss, puss, pussy — poor pussy.'' " Miau, miau, miau," was the linked shrillness, long drawn out, of the feline reply. " Poor old puss, then, was it ill ? Puss, puss. Henry, the horrid beast is going to fly at me ! Whist, whist, cat." "Ps-s-s-s, ps-s-s-s, miau ; ps-s-s-s-s-s-s-s," replied the other, in a voice like fat in the fire. " My dear love,'' cried I, almost suffocated with a com- bination of laughter and quinsy, " you have neirer opened the door ; where is the poor thing to run to ? " Mrs. B. had all this time been exciting the bewildered E 2 52 Mrs. B.'s Ah/rms. animal to frenzy by her conversation and shovel, ■without giving it the opportunity of escape, which, as soon as offered, it took advantage of with an expression of savage im- patience, partaking very closely indeed of the character of an oath. This is, however, the sole instance of Mrs. B.'s having ever taken it in hand to subdue her own alarms. It is I who, ever since her marriage, have done the duty, and more than the duty, of an efficient house-dog, which before that epoch, I understand, was wont to be discharged by one of her younger sisters. Not seldom, in these involuntary rounds of mine, I have become myself the cause of alarm or inconvenience to others. Our little foot-page, with a courage beyond his years, and a spirit worthy of a better cause, very nearly transfixed me with the kitchen-spit as I was trying, upon one occasion, the door of his own pantry. Upon another nocturnal expedition, I ran against a human body in the dark — that turned out to be my brother-in-law's, who was also in search of robbers — ^with a shock to both oui nervous systems such as they have not yet recovered from. It fell to my lot, upon a third, to discover one of the rural police up in our attics, where, in spite of the increased powers lately granted to the county constabulary, I could scarcely think he was entitled to be. I once presented myself, an uninvited guest, at a select morning entertain- ment — it was at 1.30 A.M. — given by our hired London cook to nearly a dozen of her male and female friends. No wonder that Mrs. B. had " staked her existence " that night that she hftd heard the area gate " go." When I consider the extremely free and unconstrained manner in which I was received, poker and all, by that assembly, my only Mrs. B.'s Alarms. 53 surprise is that they did not signify their arrivals by double knocks at the front door. On one memorable night, and on one only, have I found it necessary to use that formidable weapon which habit has rendered as familiar to my hand as its flower to that o^. the Queen of Clubs. The grey of morning had just begun to steal into our bedchamber, when Mrs. B. ejaculated with unusual vigour : " Henry, Henry, they're in the front drawing-room ; and they've just knocked down the parrot screen.'' "My love," I was about to observe, "your imaginative powers have now arrived at the pitch of clavrvoycmce," when a noise from the room beneath us, as if all the fire-irons had gone off together with a bang, compelled me to acknowledge to myself at least that there was something in Mrs. B.'s alarms at last. I trod down stairs as noiselessly as I could, and in almost utter darkness. The drawing-room door was ajar, and through the crevice I could distinguish, despite the gloom, as many as three muffled figures. They were all of them in black clothing, and each wore over his face a mask of crape, fitting quite closely to his features. I had never been confronted by anything so dreadful before. Mrs. B. had cried "Wolf!" so often that I had almost ceased to believe in wolves of this description at all. Unused to personal combat, and embarrassed by the novel circumstances under which I found myself, I was standing undecided on the landing, when I caught that well-known whisper of " Henry, Henry" from the upper story. The burglars caught it also. They desisted from their occupation of examining the articles of vcrtu upon the chimney-piece, while their fiendish countenances relaxed into a hideous 54 Mrs. B.'s Alarms. grin. One of them stole cautiously towards the door where I was standing. I heard his burglarious feet, I heard the " Henry, Henry ! " still going on from above stairs ; I heard my own heart pit-a-pat, pit-arpat within me. It was one rff those moments in which one Kves a hfe. The head of the craped marauder was projected cautiously round the door, as if to listen. I poised my weapon, and brought it down with unerring aim upon his skulL He fell like a buUock beneath the axe ; and I sped up to my bedchamber with aU the noiselessness and celerity of a bird. It was I who locked the door this time, and piled the wash-hand- stand, two band-boxes, and a chair against it with the speed of lightning. Was Mrs. B. out of her mind with terror that at such an hour as that she should indulge in a paroxysm of mirth ? " Good heavens !" I cried, '■' be calm, my love ; there are burglars in the house at last." " My dear Henry," she answered, laughing so that the tears quite stood in her eyes, "I am very sorry ; I tried to call you back. But when I sent you down stairs, I quite forgot that this was the morning upon which I had ordered the sweeps ! " One of those gentlemen was at that moment lying undeiv neath with his skull fractured, and it cost me fifteen pounds to get it mended, besides the expense of a new drawing- room carpet. It is but fair to state the primary cause to which all Mrs. B.'s alarms, and, by consequence, my own little personal inconveniences, are mainly owing. Mrs. B.'s mamma was one of the last admirers of the " Old Manor House" and " Mysteries of the Castle " school of literature, and her Mrs. Bh Alarms. 55 daughters were brought up in her own faith : that Mrs. Radcliffe was a painter of nature, as it appears on earth ; and that Mr. Matthew Lewis had been let into the great secret of what was going on — as they say at St. Stephen's — " in another place." So nervous, indeed, did my respected mother-in-law contrive to make herself throughout her life- time, by the perusal of these her favourite books, that it was rumoured that she married each of her four husbands at least as much from a disinclination to be without a protector during the long watches of the night, as from any other cause. Mrs. B. herself was haunted in her earlier years with the very unpleasant notion that she was what I believe the Germans caU a doppelgdnger : that there was a duplicate of her going about the world at the same time ; and that some day or other — or night — they would have a distressing meeting. And, moreover, at last they did so, and in the following manner : — Her mamma was residing for a few days at Keswick, supping full of horrors in the German division of the late Mr. Southey's library every evening, and enjoying herself, doubtless, after her own peculiar fashion, when she suddenly felt iU, or thought she was falling, and sent a postchaise, express, to fetch her daughter (Mrs. B.), who happened to be staying at that time with some friends at Penrith. The long mountain road was then by no means a good one ; and it may be easily imagined that nothing but filial duty would have induced my doppdgdnger to have started upon such a journey at dusk — although it was sure to be a fine moon- light night — and alone. Mrs. B., however, being warm and comfortable, went off to sleep very soon, like any boulder, nor did she wake until the chaise had skirted Ullswater, 56 Mrs. B.'s Alarms. and was within a few miles of home. She had looked carefully under both seats, and even into thfe side pockets of the carriage, before starting, to make sure that there was no other passenger : and yet there was now a form sitting upon the opposite cushions — a female form, muffled up in much clothing, but with a face pale in the moonlight, with eyes half shut, yet with a look of haggard meaning in them, steadily iixed upon her own. It was herself ! It was Mrs. B.'s double ! The dreadful hour was come. The poor girl closed her eyelids to keep off the horrid sight, and tried to reason with herself upon the impossibUity of the thing being really there, but in vain. She had been thoroughly awake, she was sure ; the vision was not the offspring of a dis- tempered brain, for she felt collected, and even almost calm. Venturing to steal another look at it, there it stUl sat, peering with haK-shut eyes into her face with the same curious anxiety as before. Not even when they rambled over Keswick stones, nor untU she felt herseK being lifted out in the post-bo/s arras, did she trust herself to look forth again. The carriage she had just quitted was empty. " There was something sitting there, man," said she solemnly, pointing to the vacant cushion. "Yes, Miss," replied he, pointing to a huge package on the ground beside them ; " I promised to bring it on for a poor man, a cabinet-maker at Pooley Bridge, and seeing you were asleep when we stopped there, I made bold to put it upon the opposite seat. I hope it did not inconvenience you. Miss. It was only a looking-glass ; and as I know pretty young ladies don't object to seeing themselves in looking-glasses, I turned its face towards j/ow." ( 57 ) AMALEK BAQON. "VTEXT to the inexpressible privilege of belonging to the -^ ' best circles .oneself, must be certainly ranked that of being connected -with those that do belong to it. If we are not the rose ourselves, at least let us get as near to that flower as possible, that, when we return to baser company, we may with truth have something to congratulate our- selves upon. My rose is Sir John Aighton, Baronet, or, as I feel myself sometimes justified in calling him. Cousin Jack. A man who has dined with no less a person than our Sovereign Lady the Queen. A man who is on the com- mittee of the Ehadamanthus Club, and the third best whist-player in Britain. I except, of course, Field-Marshal Bang, whose fame is more than European, and Lord Charles Five-to-two, who is known to have never missed a trump since he was of the age of thirteen. Sir John, sirs (I am addressing myself to the concentrated public), was at Cremome, you may take your oath, when the nobs alone had the run of those premises, and when you rang the bell and clamoured at the gate so loudly without the smallest attention being paid to you. He was in the dock of docks, the innermost sanctum of Cherbourg, when you and your 58 Amalek Dagon. House of Commons were tossing about, half smothered and wholly sick, outside the breakwater. He sits in the Duke's box at Goodwood, when you think yourselves happy in being in the grand-stand at all. He never had to wait — as the French king nearly had to do — in all his life save once (an occasion which he speaks of with a manly resignation), when he permitted the Prince Consort to have the pas of him. And no mortal eye has ever seen him run or hurry himself. I cannot positively affirm that Cousin Jack never saw a copper in his existence, but I am perfectly certain that he never took one into his elaborate hands, to the pruning and adorning of which, by the bye, he devotes several ingenious silver instruments. When he leaves PaU MaU, it is to hunt at Bister ; when he forsakes his native land, it is to start for Norway in his private schooner-yacht. I was extremely surprised to see him in town the other day, at a time when, according to his own confession, there was " not a single soul in all London ; " by which he meant, of course, no denizen of its upper circles. "Well, Harry," cried he, extending three lavender- coloured fingers, in lieu of the customary pair, " have you half an hour or so to spare in the service of a blood relation ? " I rephed, and very truly, that I always had half an hour, or half a day for that matter, at his complete disposal when- soever he desired my company. " Very well," answered he, with a frankness that became him charmingly, " I'm exceedingly glad of it, for I hate walking alone, and there's nobody else to walk with. We will go together and see Dagon.'' Amalek Dagon. 59 " And who is Dagon ? " inquired I, not without a sense of shameful ignorance. " Why, Amy Dagon, of course," retorted he, sharply ; " who else should it be ? " " Thank you," responded I, disengaging my arm from Ms with a certain virtuous violence, " my wife wouldn't like it if she heard of it. In short, you're a man about town, and I'm not, and I would rather not see her, whoever she is.'' I really did not believe that it was possible for anybody reared in the best circles to laugh as the baronet laughed at this reply. I don't think anybody ever saw him with tears in his eyes before. " It's a man," he cried, as soon as he found breath to speak ; " it's Amalek Dagon ; and do you really mean to teU me that you never heard of the great Dagon before ? " " Never," said I, " never, upon my word, except as a heathen god." Cousin Jack looked down upon me — he has a way of doing that, although I am taller than he — with an expression as if he was contemplating some rare and curious zoological specimen. " Come along," exclaimed he, " come along. I would not have missed this for a couple of ponies. Have you ever chanced to catch the name of Pahnerston, or of Betting Davis, or of the Tipton Slasher ? Indeed ! Well, I'm astonished to hear it. This is Trafalgar-square, and that is the National Cruet-stand, and now you shall see another British institution, who is quite as weR known in town as they." We turned into the Strand, and rang at the private door 60 Amaleh Dagon. of a house of genteel appearance. A tidy-looking servant- girl answered the summons, but requested us to give our names before informing us whether her master was at home. Having carried the baronet's card upstairs, she returned immediately, and ushered us into a room on the first floor, plainly but handsomely furnished. A short and rather vulgar-looking person, but perfectly well-dressed, rose from the sofa, at our entrance, and put aside a sporting paper that he had been reading. " How are you, Dagon ? " said my cousin, nodding care- lessly ; " I have brought a friend of mine to look at you, who has never heard of your existence before." The little man smiled in a somewhat siaister manner, but professed himself charmed at making the acquaintance of any friend of Sir John's. " "What is your last achievement. Amy ? " inquired my cousin, with the air of a man who asks for information for somebody else. " Anything about you in Bell ? " "An account of a neat little thing we did upon the Eastern Counties last week ; that's all ; a mere trifle, but rather laughable, too." " Go on ; tell it, Dagon,'' said my cousin, yawning un- politely, " it's sure to be news to him ! " " Well, sir," replied the little man, addressing himself to me, " there has been a good deal of picking up, you must know, on that line of railway lately.'' " Shares improving," interrupted I, innocently ; " ah ! so I've heard." Mr. Amalek Dagon looked interrogatively towards my cousin, as though he would say, " Can this ridiculous ignorance be actually bond fide, or is it affected ?" Amalek Bagon. 61 Sir John Aighton, Baronet, indulged in a roar of laughter ■which would have done honour to a coalheaver. " No, sir,'' replied the little man, softly, again addressing himseK to me, " I did not exactly allude to the shares ; I meant the sharpers. The card-sharpers and the thimble- riggers have been doing a great stroke of business upon that line, of late, particularly upon the Cambridge gentlemen. A young fellow-commoner, sen of General Blazes, — whom you know. Sir John, — came to me only the other day, about his famUy watch and other matters, which he had made over to them ; the money was gone, of course, beyond recovery, and we had a great deal of difficulty even about the ticker. You see, they're an exceedingly low set of practitioners, these thimble people ; quite pettifoggers, sir, with little or no connection among respectable persons." " I should imagine that was the case with most of that sort of gentry," observed I, " except, perhaps, an involuntary connection with the pohce." Here Mr. Dagon gave a sort of forbearing smile, which could scarcely be called appreciatoiy. " So," he continued, " I determined to put these public nuisances down. I took a place in company with three young gentlemen of my acquaiatance, from the Shoreditch Station to Cambridge, and two of the parties for whom I was in search, got into the same carriage. They had not much luggage beside a small carpet-bag, but within that there were three stout sticks, and a round piece of wood, out of which they ingeniously constructed a table to play at cards upon. When we four, who seemed to be all strangers to each other, declined to joia in the amusement, they showed themselves desirous of conforming to our fastidious 62 Amalelc Dagon. tastes by producing three thimbles and a pea. It's the simplest game to look at, as you may have observed, but I should recommend you not to play at it in a mixed com- pany. I warned my young friends not to do so upon this occasion, but they persisted, and they accordingly lost their money — one sovereign, two sovereigns, a five-pound note, went very rapidly into the pockets of the individuals who handled those simple domestic implements. Presently one of the losers got so excited that he offered to ]f,y twenty-five pounds upon the next event. " ' Now, hands off,' cried he, ' I'll bet that the pea is not under either of these two thimbles,' — and, lifting them, he verified his statement, ' therefore I need not say that it must of course be under the third.' " The two men protested that this was not a fair way of winning the wager, but my three young friends got so excited as to protest that they would throw the others out of the window unless the money was paid ; which at last it was, Por my part, I rather took the side of the sharpers in this dispute, although I observed that the words in which the bet was made, could be of no consequence with two gentlemen such as, it was easy to see, they were. 'I myself,' said I, ' if I ever did make a bet, would name the very thimble under which the pea was hidden, for fifty pounds ; the thing being to me as plain as daylight.' "The two proprietors of the table contradicted this so warmly, and derided my judgment so contemptuously, that I was actually induced to lay the money. " ' This,' said I, then, their hands being withdrawn from the board, ' is the thimble under which the pea is hidden.' " ' You bet fifty pounds on that,' cried they, excitedly. Amalelc Dagon. 63 " ' Done ! ' replied I, lifting the thimble. ' Here is the pea ; and there,' continued I, lifting the others very swiftly, ' there is no pea, as I told you.' " All that they had won, and all that they had had originally in their own possession, was scarcely enough to defray this second debt of honour which they had thus incurred. They got out, short of their stopping-place, at the very next station ; and they wiU not, I think, trouble the Eastern Counties passengers again for some considerable time." " And how in the world," inquired I, " did you manage to win that money ? " " Why, you see," replied Mr. Dagon, with an ingenuous air, " these gentlemen were accustomed to withdraw the pea altogether during their manipulation, so that nobody could possibly pitch upon the covering thimble. In order to evade which difficulty, I took the precaution of taking a pea of my own, with which, by a little sleight of hand, I supplied the deficiency." When my admiration at this device had been sufficiently expressed, my cousin Jack entered upon an explanation of the business which had brought him to the retreat of Mr. Amalek Dagon. " You see, Amy, I was obliged to come up to town about another matter ; but,' finding myself there, I could not go away without getting you to clear up a certain mystery which has puzzled us down in Warwickshire greatly. And this is it : Stuart and Eoss (both of the Rhadamanthus Club), and myself, have been staying together for a few weeks at Leamington, and were at one time sadly in want of a fourth man : neither the points nor the play of 64 Amalek Dagon. those we met with, suited us ; or rather, they did not suit Stuart, who will never sit down twice with any man who has lost him a trick. At last a stranger appeared at our hotel, who turned out to be just such a performer as we wanted. Only he won thirteen hundred pounds of us ia six days. Now, you know my play weU enough ; that of my two friends is scarcely inferior. I want to know, there- fore, who was the man who could so spoil us, and how he effected it." "You are quite sure it was a strange gentleman who really won the money ?" inquired Mr. Dagon, quietly. " Quite sure,'' replied my cousin, laughing, and without the least trace of annoyance, " you are right enough to be suspicious (for such things are not unknown even at the Ehadamanthus), but you are a little over sharp this time." " Then the fourth person," said Mr. Dagon, thoughtfully, "must have had hazel eyes, and a pair of very beautiful hands. He also had a trick of twitching his upper lip, which is a very foolish habit indeed for any gentleman who does not wish to be recognized." " That's the man, sir," cried my cousin, with evident satisfaction, "who did three of the best whist-players in England out of thirteen hundred pounds in a week." "Well, Sir John," repeated the other, cooUy, " and I know no man who deserves to have won it more than he — Charley Ledger, as hard-working, pains-taking a young fellow, mind you, at ever breathed. A lad who has im- proved his natural gifts (and what a touch that fellow was born with ! ) as I believe, to the very utmost. He allotted two of the best and pleasantest years of his life — when other young men are but too apt to give themselves up to Amalek Dagon. 65 vice and dissipation — entirely to the perfection of that art that has cost you so dear.'' " It must have heen very high art indeed that could have protected his fingers," observed my cousin, "from three such pairs of eyes as he had upon them." " It was," answered Mr. Dagon, enthusiastically ; " Charley Ledger, absolutely cannot himself discover, by vision, when he is in the act of transposition. The way in which he legged you was this. As soon as he got a pack of cards into his possession, he set a finger-nail mark in the left-hand comer of the back of each court-card, so minute as not to be seen by the naked eye, and only to be felt by his own miraculous sense of touch. Whenever he dealt, his practised thumb recognized unerringly these indentations, and at once by sleight of hand gave his adversary the next card but one, instead of the honour which belonged to him by right. He might have given him an honour also, it is true, but the odds, of course, were upon the whole immensely in Cha,rley's favour. It must have been he, for there is no other man in England, save himself, who can be certain of doing that trick." " Thank you," said my cousin, rising, " I thought you would be able to tell me aU about the gentleman. Have you any more questions, Harry, to put to the great Dagon, before you depart into the realms of Ignorance ?" "I want to know," said I, "what Mr. Dagon means by saying that his young friend could not even catch himself when he was cheating." " Oh,'* said the little man, good-naturedly, " that is very easily explained. You see, Mr. Ledger applied himself to this difficult study of his for at least two years : in the latter 66 Amalek Dagon. portion of his probationary time he was accustomed to sit opposite a looking-glass ; nor did he venture to practise his profession, and take in the public, until he was unable to perceive his own agile transpositions in the mirror — that is to say, until he could take in himseK." ( 67 ) JONES' 8 GREATNESS. "]% /TY friend Jones started in life with the intention of -'--*- achieving Greatness, adhered steadily to that deter- mination throughout, and at length, it is almost needless to say, was successful. Mankind, who flatter success even more than they hate it, are in the habit of assigning to the gainers of it a reputation for genius, talent, or shrewdness ; whereas what is far more requisite (except in rare instances) to its attainment, is self-denial — that is to say, the suborr dination, from the very beginning, of all other pursuits to the proposed end. This is easier with some than with others, of course ; but it can be done by almost all. Who can doubt but that any human male creature, coming naked into the world, and living seventy years in it with his mind fixed on the acquisition of money, will die with at least his plum! Getting as largely as possible, but despising no gain however small ; spending as sparely as he can ; with eyes ever alive to the gleam of gold ; with hands greedy to clutch, tenacious to hold — such a man may have had, indeed, to sacrifice all that is best in this life ; may have lived with- out love in the world, and died having made a friend of neither. God nor Man ; but he will have made (in compensa- F 2 68 Jones's Greatness. tion) his plum, or even Ms ten plums, his Million of Money. " And a very pretty sum, sir," as has been before observed, "to begin the next world with, too." Whether it is possible that such a one may have been a fool after all, is a question which, to some minds, would seem next kin to irreverent, considering the amount of money acquired ; but he needs not certainly to be considered a wise man. Similarly, although less easily, considerable distinction besides this one of mere wealth can be obtained in many walks, by dihgent application and concentration of all faculties to the one object. The inquiry to be made upon setting out, however, is but too apt to be delayed until it is too late — namely, " Will it, after all, be worth my while 1" I, for my part, have no experience of the matter to place at the disposal of the Public ; but I behold Jones's Greatness, and that is sufficient for me. Have you ever watched a persevering parrot climbing painfully up the outside of his gilded cage, never advancing one perpendicular inch but by a wearisome, tentative process of beak and claw ; and at last, having reached the ring at the summit, have you seen him swaying himself backwards and forwards in a self-congratulatory manner, and yet not looking altogether comfortable in his mind, even then ? Whether it is that, Alexander-like, he regrets that there is nothing more to conquer, that he can get no higher ; or whether he would really feel safer if he were at the bottom again, which, as he well knows, he can never more regain except by the headforward method, I do not know ; but the general expression of his features, in spite of his gorgeous attire and exalted position, is certainly not a happy one. And I cannot conceal from myself that his Jones's Greatness. 69 case finds something like a parallel in that of the Greatness of Jones. In the next edition of " The Boyhood of Great Men," that of my friend will, doubtless, be chronicled, and I do not intend to dull the edge of its interest by any anticipa- tion. I wiU merely state, that as, on the one hand, he did not distinguish himseK in athletic sports, on account of that early application to the pursuit of his greatness at which I have abeady hinted ; so, on the other hand, he was not a notorious " muff" or " spoon.'' Throughout his life, indeed, he has been a quiet, well-behaved person, ahnost necessarily debarred from the extravagances and foUies of his con- temporaries, and if remarkable at all, remarkable for his noiseless unobtrusiveness. What has been reported of him, therefore, since his distinguished elevation, is, as will be seen, the more extraordinary and unaccountable. He went to bed upon a certain night, a hard-working, deserving person in good repute ; he awoke in the morning, and found himself a public character, and infamous. Jones is a painter, and his last picture was announced by the Thunderer and aU its Echoes as being a credit to any age and any country. " It was Michael Angelesque," said some ; " It would have been so," said others, " but for its decidedly Claudian character.'' It was the picture of the year, and for all time ; and if only the colours were durable, he might be certain that mankind would not wfllingly let it die But, the very next day, poor Jones had tears in his eyes on account of what was the talk of the studios, concerning his atrocious conduct to the model of his Iphigenia ; and on the second morning it got into the newspapers, and came to the angry eyes of Mrs. Jones. 70 Jones's Gheatness. Moreover, it then appeared that he had not in reality- painted any of the pictures which were attributed to him, but had kept a colour-mixer, of very great talents, at half a crown a week, to do them for him, who was bound over to that service, by a legal document, for a very long series of years. He had picked the poor feUow up m the humblest circumstances ; observed, with a vulture eye, his extraordinary gifts ; and from that moment had battened upon his unlucky brains in the above unprecedented manner. Or my friend Jones, the subtle lawyer, but heretofore obscure, except among the profession, has just been ap- pointed Lord Chief-justice of the Common Pleas. " A fitting capital to a life-long pillar of legal devotion," say the judicial organs, becoming almost poetical in their enthu- siasm. " The right man in the right place," as is admitted by all who were not expectant of the high oflSce in question for themselves. " But how sad it is," says Rumour, gravely shaking its innumerable heads, " to think that, in early life, this man should have stolen a horse ! " It turns out also, that there are two clients of his, formerly in affluent circumstances, and to whom he introduced himself, it seems, without the medium of an attorney, who are now beggars, sir — beggars. His persuasive talents were indeed at aU times very remark- able. His clerk (who is poorly clad, and not well fed) is equally wicked, but not equally successful ; and if either of them chose to tell tales, it is said, they could hang one another. Moreover, it is probable that the truth wiU, some day, out, since everybody knows they both — motion as of turning a liqueur glass bottom upwards — to excess. Jones's Greatness. Or my friend Jones is a divine, and attains very wide celebrity for pulpit eloquence. His sermons, in their third extensive edition, combine the most fervid eloquence with the truest teaching ; possess a rare and genuine vein of the most liberal charity, and exhibit an array of learning, modestly indicated in their foot-notes, which is an honour to the Church which haUs hun as her son. " The greater the pity, therefore," sighs Universal Report, "that the reverend gentleman should be unable to write except under the direct influence of opium." Although that circumstance is, after all, of the less consequence, since it is alleged that he buys his discourses at an establish- ment in Cheapside, long famous for its possession of a certain theological writer, who, but that he prefers to sweep a crossing, and cannot be kept from drink, might be Arch- bishop of Canterbury, With such strict ultra-Anglican views, also, as Jones professes to have, so as to oppose himself even to the marriage of the priesthood, what a very queer story that seems to be about his niece ! Having been himself, too, an only child, and consequently without brother or sister, the relationship does look a little ill-chosen, certainly. The idea of his having had his gown taken away from him so lately as 1852, seems almost as strange as the reason for it — duelling. The report, however, that he killed his man, is inaccurate ; he only winged the gallant captain. Or my friend Jones is a physician of most meritorious character, who has done more towards the mitigation of pain, perhaps, than any man in his generation. A doer of numberless unknown acts of good, a beneficent apostle of healing, and an unadvertised Blessing to Mothers. Jones's Greatness. How unaooountable it is, then, that such a person should not appreciate the value of a moral character ! It is more than hinted that, when he has a mind. Dr. Jones will do almost as much harm as good, and is not always such a blessing to husbands as he is to mothers. He could not, clearly, have been thinking of his professional business when he (accidentally, of course) gave poor Sir Joseph Green Belladonna instead of Balm Tea. How such matters manage to get hushed up in the medical profession is very remark- able. He visits, however, good Lady Green as usual, who has forgiven him his little mistake in a truly Christian spirit. Being so generous, as some would have one believe, it seems inconsistent that the brown footman who shows you into his sanctum happens to be his father, who thereby prevents the bribes paid for early admission to the popular physician's presence from going out of the family. His grandfather, who is stiU alive (though in pitiably indigent circumstances), would doubtless have had an appointment of a similar nature, but that he is unfortunately a man of colour, and was formerly a slave in Carolina. Or my friend Jones is a comic actor of such intense humour, that he cannot appear upon the stage without one roar of laughter from boxes, pit, and gallery. Nor, indeed, for low broad farce is there a man to touch him , upon the British stage. And yet, do you know, the private peculiarity of poor Jones is melancholy ! Deep-seated, continuous, and funereal gloom ! He may die any moment with that disease of the heart he has, and is especially liable to such an accident when singing, which perilous performance he has (poor fellow) to go through every night of his life. Although a Jones's Greatness. player by profession, he is by conviction a strict Calvinist. It is said he learned his most telling laugh of a donkey looking over a village pond in Essex, and that he instantly killed the too talented quadruped with a pointed stick, lest it should ever give the idea to another person. It is also worthy of mention, that although we always see him as the grave-digger, his own impression is that he acts Hamlet, and solemn characters generally, better than any tragedian dead or alive. Or, lastly, my friend Jones is an author of acknowledged genius, whose books have the healthiest of circulations from the most natural causes. The delightful pathos of his writings, as you may read as you run in the daily press, " is enriched by the highest religious principles ;" while his touches of nature are such as to have brought tears, on more than one occasion, even into the eye of a publisher. But, alas, what hypocrisy is so great as that of the writer of Fiction ? It is but too well understood that Jones is at heart an atheist, and opposed to the celebration of the Sabbath. His private life, it is alleged, is of a character to make Nero blush, and Heliogabalus hide his imperial but less profligate head. With regard to his popularity, there is, some say, a sect in the City, who, despising all legitimate objects of veneration, have deified Jones, and worship him ; although others assert that this is but an exaggerated account of a convivial club of which he is the founder. His great original talents are acknowledged, but it is a curious, though perhaps an undesigned coincidence, that his productions are all buUt upon plots the property of an obscure French novelist of the last century ; while his dialogues present a marked similarity to those of Richard- 74 Jones's Greatness. son, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and several others. Al- though not much A propos to this subject, it may "be mentioned, as a noteworthy circumstance, that Jones is probably the only man now living in this country who is afflicted with the leprosy ; on account of which misfortune he is obUged to perpetually wear gloves, and a velvet mask with metal springs. My poor friend Jones's Greatness having, in a word, so many drawbacks, I have never much envied Jones. Whe- ther I ever possessed the talents, virtues, self-denial, or what you will, to achieve his eminence, had I desired it, is an open question, of which the world takes one side, and I the other. At all events, I am content with my lot. I prefer to paint portraits from ten shillings upwards : to pick up my guinea in the courts when opportunity and an attorney offer : to preach to a congregation which has never yet requested me to publish my sermons : to practise physic without a brougham : to consider the second comic country- man a good part, and one which exhibits my talents suffi- ciently ; or to write anonymously, as now, and never to wed my name with immortal title-pages. When I ride into the lists of Fame, like my friend Jones, with visor up, the good Time will have arrived, which has been so long in coming, when Greatness ceases to have its Libels as well as ^ts Privileges. ( 75 ) THE MABKEB. T AM a billiard-marker in the Quadrant. If a man can -■- say a bitterer thing than that of another, I shall be obliged to bim if he will mention it, as I shall then have a higher opinion of my profession than before. Everybody else seems to be making capital of their experiences, and why should not I ? I see a great deal of what is called life, up ia this second story, and why should I not describe it ? I am sure I have plenty of spare time. I have been here long enough to become unconscious of the roar of foot and wheel that rises from the street below ; neither is there anything in the apartment itself to distract my attention much ; no literature, save an illustrated edition of Allsopp's advertisements hung all round the walls, and a statement — which I know to be a lie — in seven colours, about the best cigars in London ; no pictures, besides a representation of Mr. Kentfield, which I hope for that gentleman's sake is not a correct one. He has one or both of his hips out, and is striking a ball in one direction while his eyes are steadily fixed in another. Of furniture, there is an immense oblong table with a white sheet upon it, one rickety chair, high- cushioned forms around the room, a rack for the public 76 The Marker. cues, two painted boards for marking at pool or billiards, a lucifer-matcli box over the mantel-piece, and spittoons. The atmosphere is at aU times chalky. In the evening, cigars and beer and gas make contitmally their fresh and fresh exhalations, but in the morning their combined aroma is stale. I feel when I first come in as if I were drinking the beer that has been left all night in the glasses, and endeavouring to smoke the scattered ends of the cigars. I sit upon the rickety chair witji the rest in my hand, and my head beneath the marking-board — sometimes for hours • — waiting for people to come. I arrive about twelve o'clock, and there is rarely any one to play before the afternoon. Yes, there is one person — Mr. Crimp. I call him, and every- body calls him, and he calls himself. Captain Crimp, but I now exhibit him in plain deal, without that varnish of his own applying. His step is not a careless one, but he whistles a jovial tune as he comes up-stairs, until he finds I am alone, when he leaves off at once, ungracefully ; first, however, he looks in the cupboard where the wash-hand- stand is kept, remarking, " ! " regularly every morning, as though he did it by mistake ; and, finding nobody there, he proceeds to business. Mr. Crimp assists me with his own scrupulously-clean hands in removing the white cloth, and immediately becomes my pupH. I have taught him several skiKul strokes at different times, which his admiration for the science of the game leads him to reward me for, quite munificently. Curiously enough, there is also an understood condition that I should say nothing about this. Later in the day, and when the company has arrived, it often happens that he will get a little money on, and accomplish those feats himself. The Marker. A certain winning hazard in a comer pocket, which appears particularly simple, I am now instructing him to miss — so that his baU may go round aU the cushions and perform its original mission at last. It seems a round-about method enough of accomplishing its object, but it wUl have its uses for the Captain, I have no doubt. His interest in the game extends even to the condition of the table itself. He knows how the elastic sides are affected by a change of weather, and he prefers the right-hand middle pocket, for choice, to play at — it draws. Our lesson commonly lasts about an hour, unless we are interrupted. I have another occasional pupil in young Mr. Tavish. He learns billiards as he would languages or dancing ; but he will never do much at it. His attitudes, however, are after the very best models ; and when he has made a fluke, he can look as if he intended it better than any man — a property in all situations of life not a little useful. Mr. Tavish is the pink of fashionable perfection ; and, with every garment which he takes ofl' for convenience of play, discloses some new wonder. Two buckles, Resides ribands and an Indiarrubber band, are ejnployed in fastening his waistcoat ; his worked suspenders have a hundred loops ; his miraculous collar has no visible means of entrance ; his tie appears to be a thin strip of sticking-plaster ; his new and patent leather boots are patched at the toes and , punctured in little holes most marvellously. I actually have observed him trying to look at himself in the pool-board. Between two and four come our chance customers, who are the most interesting to me, and of a very various sort. A couple of brothers who have not met for years, and who are about to part, perhaps for ever — one just returned 78 The Marker. from the Crimea and the other on the point of starting for India. They talk of their past adventures as they play — of their future prospects, of their respective sweethearts, of their home — for nobody miuds a billiard-marker — as though they were quite alone. A father with his grown-up son will knock the balls about for half an hour, to see if he retains his ancient skUl, dilating all the while on mortgages, on the necessity of a rich wife, and on the young man's allowance, and compressing the Chesterfield Letters into a fifty game. Now and then comes a parson, who looks into the cupboard, just as Mr. Crimp did, for fear that his diocesan should be in hiding there. Two University men, who are up in town for a week's lark, but are supposed (I hear) by sanguine friends to be at college, reading at that present ; their talk is of the boats, the proctors, the tripos, and of the man who went to the bad. Sometimes — for I was not bom into the world a bUKard- marker — these topics touch me nearly. What does it matter ? I am here ; and, whether through my own bad play, or an unlucky fluke, it is now all one ; my mission is to mark, not moralize. After four, drop in the pool-players : five or six habitues and a few strangers. Some of them gentlemen, but the majority, evident "legs" — quiet, resolute-looking fellows, with hard keen eyes ; abstemious moral persons, with iron nerves, and perfectly heartless, who live by this particular pastime. They would win the last half-crown of the player before them, although they knew the loss would insure his imme- diate suicide. They would remark, after he had drowned The Marler. 79 himself, that he had taken to the water. From the prose- cution of this game for eight hours daUy, their view of life has been formed ; it is one gigantic pool to them, wherein every man's hand is against the other's, and the misfortune of one makes all the rest happy. Each has a little sort of coflBn, locked, which holds his particular cue. He looks along this weapon carefully, to make certain of its straight- ness, rubs the thin end with scouring-paper, and chalks the top with his own private chalk, of which he carries a piece about with him, in his waistcoat pocket, everywhere. From the time when I have given out the balls to the last stroke which wins, or divides the pool, these men maintain an almost unbroken silence. No judge in delivery of a death- doom, no priest in the celebration of religious rites, could be graver or more solemn than they. My " Blue on yellow, brown your player," and " Red on white, yellow in hand," break forth amidst the hush, bke minute-guns during a burial at sea ; the click of the balls, the whiz when one is forced itito a pocket, are the only other sounds. Many of our visitors in the mid-day ask for lunch, which is invariably toasted cheese ; but, these night-birds, with the exception of a little beer and tobacco-smoke, suffer nothing to pass their lips. Sometimes, amidst those solemn scoundrels there appears a jovial face^a naval man on leave, perhaps, or somebody who is really a little screwed, and creates a disturbance : laughing and singing, putting the best off their play, and endangering the wariest by his mad strokes. Mr. Crimp looks on those occasions, as though, being hungry, some one had come between him and his dinner ; and I observe his lips to move silently — I do not think in prayer. There is a pretty constant attendant here, a Mr. 80 The Marker. Scurry, who is, I know, his special aversion. This gentleman conies for no earthly purpose but to amuse himself, and with his spirits always at high pressiu-e. He makes puns, and uses ready-made ones, about everything connected with the game. He is come, he states, on entrance, " To plunge in the quiet pool." " Consider yourself, Captain," said he, yesterday, while he held that instrument over Mr. Crimp, " under a rest." " No rest for the guilty," is his quotation whenever that is caUed for. He calls the cues that have lost their top-leathers, " ex-cues." You can imagine what a range such a man finds in " stars" and " hves ;" how the church and army are each laid imder contribution for his remarks on "canons;" how "misses" and "kisses" are remarked upon. If the red ball is kissed, he remarks, on each occasion, "No wonder she blushes." And all this waggishness of his is the more creditable, insomuch as he might just as well whisper it into one of the pockets, as impart it to his company with any hope whatever of appre- ciation. He does not want that ; it is merely that he has an exuberance of merriment, and must let it off somehow : which is to the others generally an awful crime, and beyond their experience. Mr. Scurry gives me a shilling now and then, as do many of the earlier visitors. I have also my rewards from Mr. Crimp ; and I am not, besides, ill-paid. It is not of the hardships of my profession that I have to complain (though I am up always until three La the morning, with the thermometer for the last six hours at about eighty), so much as of its unsocial character ; nobody trusts me ; nobody interests himself in me in the least, or considers me as anything beyond a peripatetic convenience for getting at yoior ball when it is out of reach. Nobody ever gets The Marker. 81 familiar with me, except Mr. Crimp, and I am the dumb witness, daUy, of innumerable frauds. I know the real skill of every player to a hair, and how much he conceals of it. I think I may say, from long habit of observation, that I know the characters of nine-tenths of the men who enter this room ; and if I do, some of them are exceedingly bad characters. The calm dead hand at a hazard, whom nothing disturbs from his aim ; the man who plays for a stroke 'only when it is a ce'rtainty, preferring his own safety to his enemy's danger ; the hard hitter, from whom no player is secure ; the man who is always calling his own strokes flukes ; the man who is always oaUing other people's by that derogatory name ; and the poor fellow who is for ever under the cushion. My world, which is not a small one, is mapped out for me, with all its different species of men, upon this table ; for I stand apart and mark many things beside the score. ( 82 ) HOW JONES GOT THE ENGLISH VERSE MEDAL. 1\/rY name is Herbert Brown, and my calling and pro- -^'-'- fession is that of a maker of poems ; however incredible it may appear to mere money-spinners and prosaic persons of all sorts, I am perfectly, convinced that I was bom for that express end and object, and any attempt at persuading me to the contrary wiU be thrown away. I don't flatter myself that I am A bit of a poet ; I don't consider that I have A very .pretty talent for mating verses ; I don't amuse myself in my leisure hours with Culling a chaplet for my brows from Olympus' top, and wooing the bashful muse ; I cannot find words to express my contempt for any such practices ; of all idiots the sentimental idiot being to me the most abhorrent. I am accustomed to drink vast quantities of bitter beer during composition, and my favourite supper is toasted cheese with onions. I think Shakespeare was the greatest stunner who ever breathed, and I am happy to believe that when he met the late Mr. Bowdler in Hades, he punched the head of him for presuming to meddle vsdth his original text ; that he gave him one for his nob for each im- How Jones got the English Verse Medal. 83 pertinent and unnecessary elimination. I think it would have done Mr. Wordsworth all the good in the world to have got what Burns calls fou at least once in every three weeks Of his poetic career. I go in for Nature and high spirits. The thoughts which I think I am used to express as well as I am able, instead of employing every artifice to conceal them, and of playing a sort of graceful hide-and-seek with the unhappy reader. Do not suppose, when I say that I despise the metaphysical and spasmodic poets, that I admire Byron ; because I don't at all. But for his frightful vice, he seems to me as whine-and-xvatery, and complainingly egotistic, as any of them, and if he had chanced to have been bom an actor instead of a lord, we should never have heard the last of that smeU of the footlights which pervades him. I go in for sunshine and fresh air. However, in spite of his bad grammar, one discovers easily enough what Byron means. This is also the case with the poetry of Herbert Brown, or I am much mistaken. I go in for Saxon and sense, and clearness of thought, and that is why I lost the Chan- cellor's Medal for English Verse at the University ; or rather, Jones, with all his gUttering verbiage, is obscure and afflicts the reader with vertigo, and that — as you shall hear — is why he gained it. There is always a great competition for the English verse-prize. The classical men write for it, after the same style in which they do their Greek and Latin verses, with pretty good metre, but with a great insufficiency of ideas. The mathematical men, too, are excited, in no small numbers, by the unnatural ambition ; but most of them are stopped by the first couplet, and subside into G 2 84 How Jones got blank verse, whioli is looked upon by the examiners witb great disfavour. AU the idle literary and fast intellectual men are also candidates for the laurel, and they gain it, as may be expected, at least as often as any other class. It is almost the only university distinction which can be attained, as the classic phrase runs, without '' sweating " for" it, and your gin-punch-and-Shelley under-graduate is, to say truth, not much inclined to laborious application. Though there are, perhaps, in reaUty more competitors for this prize than any other, in appearance there are very few ; scarcely any, where aU must faU save one, will own to writing for it ; and many are downright ashamed of the imputation of making poems (although they secretly pride themselves upon the fancied gift beyond measure), and so deny the soft impeachment, as being too soft to be con- fessed. I never denied it. As soon as the subject — The Aurora Borealis — was given out, I immediately announced my intention of becoming a candidate ; and my friends (I say it to their credit), who believed in me almost as much as I believed in myself, disseminated the informa- tion. Jones, too, to do him justice, was not wanting in self-confidence, although he pusillanimously declined to take my five dozen of bottled porter to two, which I had offered upon my chance against his. It was curious to remark how the Aurora BoreaUs per- vaded university talk during that term ; how the north pole thrust itself into general conversation, and the Esqui- maux obtained a social footing in undergraduate circles. Tangent of John's, a man who was spoken as embryo Smith's prizeman, but who was not a good hand at rhyming, went about complaining to his friends that he could the English Verse Medal 85 not get anything to chime with walrus ; his poem, he said, was perfect, except in this one particular, which was, however, of the greatest importance, because he had caused his hero to be attacked by that Arctic monster. I supplied him with this couplet : " Storm and iceberg, bear and walrus, Combined to make his prospects dol'rous ; " for which he thanked me heartily, and stuck it amongst his heroic verses, just as it was. Now, the examiners for the English verse prize were three. , One. The Vice-Chancellor for that year, who was not thought very highly of as an intellectual person, but who made up in obstinacy for what he wanted in wits, and was, therefore, highly respected and seldom opposed. Two. A mathematical professor, who was accustomed to amuse himself in leisure moments with making artificial suns, aa good, and almost as large, as the real one ; and whose modesty was such as to have once caused him to observe, that he was not a conceited man by any means, but still that he knew everything (if he were not mis- taken) except how to play on the violin. Three. A classical professor, who had passed five-and- thirty years of his life in the study of the Greek particles, and who maiiitained with pride that he had not mastered their astonishing subtlety of meaning even yet. The Vice was not only incompetent to write what was worth reading (although he had written a good deal in his time), but also what could be read at aU. His handwriting was the wanderings of a centipede who had just escaped How Jones got from the ink-pot, and had crawled and sprawled over the paper. It was, therefore, arranged that he, who had the privilege of reading the poems first, should signify his approbation or disapproval by one simple letter g for good, or h for bad, and not venture upon giving a written opinion. He then impressed upon his two coadjutors the necessity of their being impartial, and quite independent of his opinion, in such a manner, that they both retired from the presence secretly determined to agree with his High Mightiness at all hazards. This may seem a little hard upon the two professors ; but, if I spoke of them as strictly honest, it must be at the expense of their wisdom, — and where are the professors who would not rather be accounted wise than held im- maculate 1 It is also impossible for me to forget that it was these two misguided men who did in fact award the Chancellor's medal to Jones. All the manuscripts arrived at the appointed time at the Vioe-ChanceUor's, neatly folded up and sealed, each with its motto, as though it were a pastrycook's kiss : three-and-forty Pabnam-qui-meruit-ferats, and thirteen quo- tations culled from the Latin grammar, besides aU the beautifully appropriate superscriptions of the classical men, whose poetic merits upon these occasions are a good deal concentrated in the mottoes. The Vice-Chancellor must have had a very fearful time of 4t for the next three nights, if he really did read those various effusions ; they do say he got his butler to help him ; but the thing occurred long since, and it is well to let bygones be bygones. If he really did read them, I repeat, it is a wonder he did not die of Aurora Borealis. However, he the English Verse Medal. 87 finished his work at last somehow or other, and sent the terrible epics on (by cart) to No. Two. Now, the mathematical professor was a mistaken man in being so convinced that he knew everything except how to play on the violin. He knew nothing whatever of poetry. To him, as to a certain brother professor before him, it was all assertion without one word of proof. When he came to the manuscript marked g he opened it, with his mind half made up already. Although the dazzling no-meaningness of the author greatly puzzled him, — and how that Aurora Borealis did flash about Jones's poem ! — yet, seeing within as without, the g g g occurring where the verses were, to him, even more incompre- hensible than elsewhere, he quietly put Ms g g g opposite to the same places, deeming that the things, perhaps, were what people called poetie iijeas, although Avith scorn in his mind. There were no g's, I am truly happy to say, about Herbert Brown's manuscript. No. Three, on getting the cartfiil of epics in his turn, divorced his mind with pain from the Grreek particles to give them his best attention, which, under the circum- stances, was very good ; and, coming upon the Vice- Chancellor's gr's, endorsed with the g's of No. Two, he at once concluded that Jones must needs be the man for the Chancellor's medal ; while his own inability to under- stand him he set down to the same cause which rendered himself incapable of grappling with anything else — the particles : his g was accordingly inscribed opposite to the others, making an array of approbation triply strong for the fortunate Jones. That spasmodic and slightly incoherent 88 How Jones got the English Verse Medal. young man, therefore, obtained the medal, and recited in the senate-house to a brilliant audience of wondering, but fashionably attired ladies, his panegyric upon the Northern Lights ; and Herbert Brown was nowhere. When, however, the three examiners met at some social entertainment shortly afterwards, and the bonds of official reserve had got relaxed, the following conversation arose : — " Why," said the Vioe-Chanoellor to No. Three, " did you and your brother professor there put a g opposite to that insane epic of Mr. Jones's ?" No. Three, who was as usual among the particles, had to disentangle himself before he could reply ; so No. Two anticipated him. "Why, you put a g yourself, Mr. Vice-chancellor, you know you did." "A g, sir? Pooh, sir,'' responded that dignitary, in a contemptuous tone, "I thought it sheer madness. I put a g, sir — a g for query ; meaning that I could not for the life of me understand what the young man meant." And that was how Jones got the English verse-medal. PLACES. 91 ) DOUBLE GLO'STEB. TTTHO is it that stands godfather to the streets of Lon- don ? Who is it that, in so many oases, in answer to the solemn question, " Name this street 1 " pronounces " Glo'ster, Glo'ster ! " I suppose it is some assemblage, whose heads being laid together, are said to constitute a Board. A Board of Works, is it ? Good. Then aU I have to say with respect to that august body is this : that it is not a Board of Works of the Imagiuation. Its total want of origiuality in nomenclature is most remarkable. Albert, Victoria, Glo'ster, Stanley, but above all Glo'ster, form its round of ideas. Not less signal is its perfect indifference to the suitableness of the second word or noun — Street and Place are with it convertible terms. A short cross-street gets the name of Road equally with a great outlet from town. Most of its Terraces are double-rowed streets running up-hiU. After all, I am not sure if I should not retract the charge of want of imagination ; for in some of these misapplications there is a comic character, which, if designed, would argue considerable powers in that special line. The great mystery, however, is as to the prevalence of 92 Double Glo'ster. Glo'ster. We have Glo'ster Everything and everywhere. "Why must there be in every province of London a full suit of Glo'sters — Street, Place, Crescent, Terrace, Road — when a variation of Cheshire or even Stilton, would be so refresh- ing ? Now, who is this Imbecile who is thus permitted to confer street immortality 1 Is his ow;n name Glo'ster ? Is he a native of Gloucester or Glo'ster, eager to honour the place of his birth ? Or does the repetition of the word spring from some special devotion of his for a defunct member of the royal family 1 If the first, may her Gracious Majesty the Queen be pleased to listen to the prayer of a thousand householders, and grant him permission to assume, by letters patent, the names and arms (all the pubKc-houses are called Glo'ster Arms) of Montmorenci, or anything else. If the second, let Gloucester do her duty, and fetch her devoted son from London, creating him town-counciUor, mayor, beadle, or what she wUl ; he has made himself ridiculous enough, I am sure, to have merited the very highest civic honours that any town can bestow. If the third, let him temper his loyalty with discretion, for he loves not wisely but too well : the Duke of Gloucester, while he lived, was a most iunocent prince ; why, being dead, should he be made thus offensive 1 The writer of this brief but fervid paper is one of his many victims. I live in one of- his double Glo'sters, and suffer accordingly. Tired and exhausted, I leave the House of Lords, or Commons, after a prolonged debate ; or the Gity, after a financial meeting of partnera ; or the law courts, after a wearisome lunacy case ; or Messrs. Gimp and Sar- cenet's, after eleven hours' work as "manager" — for what matters my social status, since there is no position in life Doiihk^ Gh>\-Yliat's your number T' asks tlio im- patient cliarioteer. I lift tlie little trap-door, Mid enter into coiitro>'ei-sy. " My good man, what I'.s- this place i I want to go to (very distinctly^) tiloucester Orescent." " Well, and ain't this liere one on 'cm ?" It is the story of the cliamcleon over aguin ; I am right, but so also tlie cabman. Nothing, therefore, remains but to tiy imother " on 'cm." Py keeping my eyes about me, and my iinger on the trap-door, I may now possibly arrive, as it were by telegraph, at my right destination ; but should I once relapse into fancied security, I get into another region of double Glo'sters, and all the work has to be done over aguin. The Imbecile therefore vto whom I do not wish to apply any severer epithet^ defrauds uie of a piU't of twenty pounds a ycM of unnecessary cab-hire. He does not actually get tlie money, it is true, but it is so mucli tribute paid to his inordinate egotism. I have not a very high opinion of his sag-aeity, and even think it quite probable that he may be returned to Hanwell exery afternoon as soon as the business of the Board is finished ; but I do not believe he is so idiotic as to live in Glo'ster anything himself. One's own messages, and visitoi-s, and pii reels, and tradespeople are generally numerous enough ill London, but they only form one-half of the bell-pullers 94 Doubk Oldster. of a double Glo'ster estabKsliment. " Oh, I thought you was N. W.," is considered to be an ample excuse for bringing our Alphonso from his pantry to the front door to take in a penny newspaper with politics which are abhorrent to my feelings, but which delight some rabid democrat who resides under the shadow of the Coliseum. " We're W., stoopid," returns our Buttons gloomily, for these continual mistakes have affected even his once exuberant spirits. " Is this here Glo'ster Terriss ? " inquires another mis- guided wanderer in a minute or two. Our page does not deign to answer in words ; but making a circular movement with his arm to represent a Crescent, and pointing to the comer of the opposite house, on which Gloucester Crescent is displayed in enormous characters, he sardonically dismisses the inquirer. Butter, intended for I know not whom, grows rancid in this establishment, while waiting for the legitimate owners to send for it ; game becomes uncommonly high ; the moth even gets into new but unclaimed clothes, which have been left at the door without remark by whistling tailor-boys. There is a certain cupboard into which all this double Glo'ster property is thrust, and waits till called for. A less rigidly scrupulous man than I might clothe and feed himself and family quite gratuitously out of the hetero- geneous stock. Alas for our fallen nature, this is the true reason, perhaps, that the Imbecile has been so long pei> mitted to call all things Glo'ster without remonstrance. One-fourth of the human race (or nearly so) are concerned in the matter, and a large proportion of these are probably rogues. And yet the dishonest must themselves suffer something in their turn. It is very nice to get other Double Glo'ster. 95 people's turbot and lobster sauce ; but when other people get ours, and we happen to have friends to dine that day, the mistake is robbed of half its charm. To have one's little bills sent in to one's neighbour instead of one's self, is a very soothing circumstance ; but when the cheque for our quarter's salary goes astray, it depresses one's spirits. I have borne these things long and patiently, in common with a quarter of a million (or so) of my fellow-creatures ; but there is a limit to all endurance. The trodden worm, if you tread upon him with hobnaUs, wiU turn ; and hobnails have been employed with a vengeance in the case of the present writer. Not content with their double and treble Glo'sters, the Board of "Works has christened, or permitted to be christened, a street in our immediate neighbourhood by the name of Gloucester Crescent North. The original ImbeoUe must have been egged on to this piece of egregious foUy by some new hand ; bis unassisted intellect could scarcely have devised so ingenious a method of confusion. Some practical joker, I repeat, must have got admitted to the Board of late years, and perpetrated the Gloucester Crescent ■ North ; for, imprimis, it is not a crescent at all, but a straight street ; and, secondly, it does not happen to be north of us, but west. One-half of this anomalous erection does, I believe, refuse to be designated by so inappropriate a name, and calls itself a Square ; but with that piece of harmless eccen- tricity I have nothing to do, since it does not call itself Glo'ster. It is with the other half that my unappeasable quarrel lies. Its inhabitants absorb every description of alien property, from fire-guards to American galoshes. 96 DoiMe GMster. Nothing comes amiss to their felonious appetites, from Turkeys sent to us from the country, to Bonbons for our Christmas trees. On the other hand, we are most unfor- tunate in the things we get in exchange. For a whole fortnight, I partook regularly of a medicine, the only effect of which was to turn my complexion to a light blue, whereas the tonic which was applicable to my little derangement was imposed upon some one suffering some horrible com- plaint in Gloucester Crescent North ; the numbers of our respective houses being identical, and the chemist having confounded the Crescents. Again, in consequence of the great System of True Merit Rewarded being as yet unestablished in this sublnnary sphere, I do not happen to keep a carriage, but hire a Brougham upon those occasions when society demands that my wife should perform the great social paper-hunt — ^that is, drive about leaving cards. Now, with each new Broug- ham there is a new driver ; and each new driver, by some demoniacal instinct, drives to the house which corresponds to ours in Gloucester Crescent North. Opposite that door he sits for hours, nodding and blinking as only coachmen- can ; while up in her own drawing-room, in most magnificent apparel, |its my wife, waiting in vain for him to come. The individual who suffers for this sort of thing in the end is, as every Paterfamilias knows, the husband, who receives no inconsiderable portion of those remonstrances — ^let us call them — which are properly the due of the Board of Works and its Imbecile. On the other hand, persons of both sexes, and aU heights of fashion, are constantly being shown up to our first fioor, where, after being received with silent courtesy, they sit expectant for twenty minutes or so. Double Glo'ster. 07 and tlien inquire whether Mrs. X. (a totally unknown lady) will soon be down or no ? I win conclude with a fearful exanjple of this class of incident, wherein the mistake was gigantic iu its propor- tions, and the circumstances weird and unnatural in the highest degree. It was about half-past six on a very stormy day in January last ; my wife and I were alone in the drawing-room, wait- ing for our tete-d^tete dinner to be announced. I had my slippers on, and all things portended a domestic evening. I hugged myself, as the hail dashed against the windows, that there was no occasion for patent-leather boots and company-manners for that night, at aU events. But there came a double knock at the door. " Goodness gracious ! " cried my wife, rising and mechani- cally arranging her hair in the pier-glass, " who on earth can that be ? " " Gloucester Orescent North people, of course," said I, yawning : " that makes the seventh mistake since I came back from the City." " Hush ! " replied she ; " they are actually coming up- stairs.'' At the same moment that the cab drove rapidly away (it was a cab, for I heard its windows rattle), the door was opened, and a male and female entered in the fullest even- ing costume. They were good-humoured elderly people, very pleasant to look upon, but it was the first time that we had ever set eyes on them. " We thought that we never should have found you out," exclaimed the lady, beamingly ; " why, we're half an hour late for dinner, are we not? But we quite forgot the 98 Double Glo'ster. nmnber. and you. being new-comers, why, your address was not in the Red Book." They shook hands so heartily with us both, that we could not but return their •salutation with some warmth ; and as for any explanation, the old lady never gave us a chance of putting in a syllable edgeways. " I suppose, my love, you scarcely recollect me at all ? " pursued she, chucking my wife imder the chin ; " you were such a little thing when I saw you last — not that high ; and as for your husband — such a beard as he's got too ! — why, the very last time I met him, I dandled him on my lap, and gave him a Noah's Ark. He's got just the same eyes, however, as he used to have, the very image of his poor mother's ; but his hair has grown darker, and has lost a little bit of its curl. Law, Harry [my wife's name was Harriet], you should have seen him in his little black velvet frock and red ribbons, with his fat little arms and legs quite " At this point in the reminiscence, I fell into such a paroxysm of laughter that I did not catch the remainder of it. The old gentleman, who stood with his back to the fire, as if the house was his own, rattling the silver in his breeches pocket, laughed very heartily also, although it must have been at something diiferent. " I see," continued the old lady, " that he is just as lazy, however, as he used to be — naughty boy to wear slippers ; why do you let him do it, Harriet ? Not that we care, you know ; for, indeed, you said that you would be quite in the family way ; but, being London, why, we thought it better to dress. What a nice little drawing-room you've got!" Double Glo'ster. 99 " I am glad you like it, my dear madam," said I, bowing. " Madam ! " echoed she ; " well, I never heard of such a thing. Why, you used to call me Sukey — your own dear Avmtie Sukey — although, of course, I was not your auntie at all." " No," assented I ; "of course not." " Harriet will not mind your calling me Aunt Susan now, I daresay ; will you, my dear ? " " Certainly not," replied my wife (who has a sense of humour quite uncommon iu a female), and down whose cheeks the tears were rolling in hysterical merriment. " Now, I daresay we country people amuse you im- mensely," pursued the old lady, laughing ; " we seem so droU, don't we ? " [I nodded, for if I had attempted to have spoken, I should have perished of asphyxia.] " And yet, do you know, you seem to us almost as funny. I expected you to have kissed me. William expected Harriet would have kissed him. We were talking about it as we came along in the cab. Were we not, WiUiam ? " The old gentleman smiled more benignantly than ever, and rattled his money with increased enthusiasm. " Shall dinner be served, ma'am ? " inquired Alphonso, putting his face in at the door with a grin on it. There was a moment of painful indecision, which was luckily put an end to by the old lady herseE " Oh, I do hope you are expecting nobody else," said she ; " it is so much better to have you aU alone like this." " There's nobody else coming," returned I. " Alphonso, you knew that there were not more than four to-night. Let us have dinner at once." H 2 100 Double Glo'sUr. " And mind you put the cold roast-beef on the sideboard," added my wife, in a whisper. It would have been a most unchristian thing to have turned these good people out of doors dinnerless, and with- out a chance of discovering the young couple to whom they were evidently so tenderly attached ; so I took the cheery old lady's arm, and led her downstairs, while my wife brought up the rear with the sUent old gentleman. The fish consisted of a single sole, at the sight of which I trembled with dismay, but it only drew from our female guest an exclamation of delight. " It is such a pleasure," exclaimed she, " tp see that you have made no strangers of us." There was fortunately a quantity of pea-soup, to which my wife and I exclusively confined ourselves, aflBrming it to be our favourite food, and there afterwards appeared a fowl, whose appearance reminded me of an ancient song, which seemed as if it had been prophetically written with a view to our present circumstances — " Fowl 's small, as everybody knows — 'Twas never meant for more than two ; A brace of hungry folks pop in ; Why, Who'd Aa' thought of seeing you 1 " But here the cold roast-beef proved more than a piece de risistance ; it brought us off with flying colours. As for the sweets, we had a cook that we could trust for extemporizing those. " If this was a feast, I had been at many," as the Scotch proverb goes, but it really was not so skimpy an afiair as it looks in print. I heard my wife give a thankful rejoinder to my grace after meat, in the shape of a sigh that ' Double Glo'ster. 101 seemed to say—" Thank Heaven, there was enough then ;" but, upon the -whole, all was well. I was presently left alone with my unknown and speech- less guest. The door had hardly closed before he drew his chair near to mine, and observed in a solemn tone, " And now, George, how is our poor Elizabeth V It was evident that he had been reticent throughout the evening with the thought - of this unfortunate lady over- whelming his mind ; there was a tenderness, which before I should scarcely have given him credit for possessing, in his manner, that gave unmistakable proof of the hold this subject had upon his heart. I had almost risen up and said, " I am a humbug ; I am imposing upon your simplicity. Let me send out and fetch a cab ; " but my courage faded me. I said, " Thank you ; she is as well as can possibly be expected ; " which I thought would meet every emergency in which a, female could be placed ; and I added, very solemnly, "But let us talk of her to-morrow — not to- night." The old gentleman, whose eyes had fairly filled with tears, nodded his head several times, to express his content with this arrangement ; and having helped myself, and passed the claret, I drank to his very good health, and he drank to mine, after which he relapsed into silence, and we had a very pleasant evening. Upstairs, all went on quite as satisfactorily, for the old lady did all the talking, and if she did ask a question, answered it herself in the same breath. As she left the drawing-room for the cab which Alphonso had been sent for, her last words were these : — 102 Double Glo'ster. " You cannot think, George, how happy we are to have renewed our old friendship with yourself and your wife. We shall be here at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning with- out fail, for your uncle will be with us, so that we shaU have no difficulty in finding you. Come, you may kiss an old woman like me, for the sake of auld lang syne. William, you kiss Harriet." In a couple of minutes the cab had roUed away with its nameless occupants, and we two were once more left alone together, mystified, wonder-stricken, kissed. " Do you think that we have done right 1 " inquired my wife, with some little anxiety. " You have no idea what a confiding old lady that was. If we should have any children, she says she must certainly stand godmother to the first that comes. Only fancy if the twins upstairs had set up such a noise as they did last night ! " Again the absurdity of the whole transaction iiashed upon me, in one broad sheet of vivid humour, and I laughed till I could laugh no longer. " But do you think that we have been doing right ? " repeated my wife. " Perfectly right, my dear ; we have been acting a most Christian and hospitable part. To-morrow morning, the uncle will introduce them to the right people, and they will ,have a good laugh, and think us very pleasant folks. No inconvenience to either party can possibly What's this 1 " An open envelope was lying upon the mantel-piece before me, on which was hastOy written in pencil, " For Elizabeth ; " and within it was a twenty-poimd note. That note is stiU in my possession, awaiting and likely to Double Olo'ster. 103 await its legitimate owner. All endeavours to ascertain who tlie nice old couple were have failed most signally. We only know that they had friends, whom they did not know by sight, in one of the douhle Gloucesters. My suspicions rest upon Gloucester Crescent North, but only upon the general grounds that it gets us more into trouble, upon the whole, than all our other namesakes united. At aU events, the Imbecile who ornaments the Board of Works has robbed " Elizabeth " of twenty pounds. ( 104 ) OVB BACK GARDEN. TT7"B married, just six years ago, upon less than the ' ' minimum income allowed by the Times' corre- spondents to be sufficient for a frugal young couple, and we are still in the flesh — and in a good deal of it. The bitterest cup which we hare yet had to drain is that of Messrs. Bass and Company ; and I, for my part — and I think I may say the same, in a more mitigated sense, of Mrs. P. — ^have ever drained it cheerfully. Workhouse relief has not yet been applied for to meet any peculiar emergency in our domestic economy. The titled aristocracy of our native land do not, indeed, cultivate our personal friendship so much, perhaps, as we (especially Mrs. P.), at the time we were first united, anticipated ; but we are now content to believe that this is their loss rather than ours. Stm, it must be confessed, there are little unpleasantries inseparable from a little house and a little income which do not happen to my neighbour (in a very profane sense), the Duke of Bredlington. I allude more particularly to our back garden. It is probable that his grace is unacquainted with any such spot except through the medium of romance and poetry ; or, he may have heard the late Mr. Robson, of Our Back Garden. 105 Wych Street, London, inform an audience, with Ms aooustomed precision, that the garden wherein VUlikins met his Diaa,h was the back garden, and yet not have accurately realized what a back garden is. He may have imagined (I am speaking of his grace), as we did, a, dainty piece of verdant lawn, set with parterres of flowers, with an arbour, perhaps, hung with honeysuolde, or other sweet-smelling blossom of that nature ; with, maybe, a fishpond, or even an inex- pensive fountain in the middle of it. " Wherever we are," we thought, " no matter how humble the abode, let us have a dear little bit of garden at the back of the house." Well, we have got our little bit of garden in that position, and decidedly a dear one. It is not exactly the spot we had pictured to ourselves in the way of seclusion, because all the back windows in our terrace and all the front ones in the next street command it. It does not possess any erection that can well be called an arbour. It has no fish- pond ; nor fountains ; nor stalactite cave (which might just as well be expected as the other two) at the end or in any part of it. We attempted a great deal with it, at first, in floriculture ; but nothing ever came of that to speak of. Besides several daisies, quite a den of dandelions, and a handful of mustaid-and-cress (with J. and A. P. in a cipher) under the north waU, there are but three marigolds, a crown imperial, and a very limited extent of mignonette. Vegetables will not grow in our back garden. Fruits would be sure to be feloniously abstracted before they could attain maturity. Grass only flourishes here and there (from motives which I do not understand), in minute green patches, and is scant and mangy everywhere else. In some 106 Our Back Oa/rden. places it is so short that it looks as if it had been mown (with a saw) only yesterday ; in others, it is quite long enough to make very tolerable hay. The proprietors of other back gardens in our vicinity seem aware, either from experience or instinct, that nothing can be made of these retreats, and leave them just as they find them. They call them, with an honesty which we cannot yet quite bring ourselves to emulate, back- greens ; as gardens, they bear, almost exclusively, clothes- props and empty bottles. Upon our first coming into possession of our territory, we prided ourselves upon its having in it an elder-bush, — the only tree visible in the horizon ; but we now regret that circumstance. This shrub forms the natural staircase by which a thousand cats make, into our back garden, their exits and their entrances. It is the trysting-place of the young, the battle-field of the old, and the spot peculiarly devoted to their general refreshment ; for hither, as to a picnic, they each carry their peculiar delicacy, and never trouble themselves to clear away a single bone. Whether it is they who bring the spirit-bottles which we find there in the morning, broken, or whether those are chucked over the wall by our neighbours, I do not rightly know ; but the drunken choruses which are unquestionably indulged in by our feline visitors, incline me to the former opinion. At all events, that back garden, in which we had placed such tender hopes, is rendered, by these various influences, the home of desolation and riot. Our income being, as I have described, but limited, it behoves us much to practise economy, and my beloved wife is always striking out some new line of domestic con- Our Back O-arden. 107 duct by wMcli vast sums are to be saved. Many of these have appeared to me to be so unpromising that I have declined ever to give them a fair chance. It may have been cheaper — she said it was — to supply ourselves with pork without the intervention of a butcher (the hams we had bought, however, had all been failures, and not West- phalias either), but stiU. I could not bring myself to keep a pig in our back garden ; and whatever quantity our cMld, a very thriving one, might require, of new milk, I was not going to undertake, in that extremely limited space, the sole management of a cow. Even fowls, although the price of a trussed chicken sometimes staggered me, I was determined not to maintain alive at the back of my house, to keep me up aU night, — as they did some poultry proprietors in our neighbourhood, — watching over their personal safety with a blunderbuss. However, opposed as I am to change, my better half, assisted by her unscrupulous ally the cook, did persuade me once to deal no longer at the market, but with a peculiarly honest farmer, in a most picturesque part of the country, and where the air was especially adapted for the fattening of fowls. The birds were to come dead, but in their feathers, by a wonderfully cheap carrier's cart ; so that they would be delivered at ova own door for almost nothing. This scheme would, doubtless, have turned out admirably, but that the picturesque farm was such a long way off, and the wonderfully cheap carrier so slow in his move- ments, that the two couple of economical chickens would not stand the delay of transit, but made themselves offensive to the whole house. The cook persisted that they would still 108 Our Bach Garden. be very nice and tender in the eating, but it was with a faltering voice ; and she made no response to my challenge when I dared her to hang them up by their legs. They were very cheap at four-and-sixpence to eat (which was, indeed, at least eighteenpenoe lower than the trade price), but they were not cheap at any price (as I tried to explain to Mrs. P.) to bury in the back garden, which had to be done at once. I had nowhere else to put them, and therefore interred them in that spot by help of the dust- shovel, trusting never to see them more. Alas ! as in the case of Mr. Eugene Aram, my secret was one that earth refused to keep. Feline body-sna,tchers disinterred those four corpses during the night, and lo ! in the morning the ghastly fragments of bone and feather and skin and sinew were strewed over the whole of our back garden ! Nothing can be likened unto it, except the ravage which the vultures make in the Desert upon the victims of that wind which never blows anybody any good, the Simoom. Notwithstanding the utter failure of our cheap chickens, I discovered one Saturday, from some snatches of con- versation between my wife and the cook, as well as from a certain air of oppressive secrecy pervading the household, such as is apt to precede great events, that some culinary change was in contemplation. " My dear," observed I, at once, with unwonted firmness, " I do trust there is nothing more coming by that carrier." " Nothing," she replied, with an air of triumph ; " nothing that is of the nature which you imagine. Nothing that will spoU, my love ; but something that will be, on the contrary, a delightful treat ! " "It is not a fatted calf?" I inquired, satirically; "nor, Our Back Garden. 109 still more, a calf, alive and kicking, which I am expected to fatten, is it?" " No,'' she said, changing colour a Kttle, " it is not that. It is only a beautiful Michaelmas goose, fourteenpence cheaper than we can get it in the market, and an enormous " It will make the house unbearable, as the others did," I cried, ia a passion ; " we shall get indicted for a nuisance." " It's a live goose," quoth Mrs. P., severely, " and just ready for kiUing." " And where," inquired I, " in the name of common sense, are we to keep a live goose ?" " Why, of course, my dear," replied she, " it must be kept in the back garden." This animal — this beast with a bill — in due course arrived ; was uncarted in the passage, which is otherwise denominated the front-hall ; and, at once disengaging itself from the terrified domestic, took its way, with the most awful an- serine imprecations, upstairs into the drawing-room. Never shall I forget the scene which ensued for the next ten minutes ! that royal game of goose played out between us four and that dreadful bird : its malicious hisses ; the long shrill gurgle in its throat, half gobble and half quack, so convincing of its relationship to duck and turkey ; the agonized flapping of its short ungainly wings ; even the thud of its naked webbed feet, as they ran over the keys of the piano, extorting undreamt-of harmonies, — will never be erased from my mind. The carrier, incited by the reward of sixpence set upon the head of the fugitive, at last secured it, but not before 110 Our Back Garden. it had done considerable damage, and bore it under his arm, playing upon it as if it were an unsound bagpipe, into the place which had been assigned for its reception. I watched it that night for hours, roaming up and down the walled back garden, and complaining to the stars ; gazing up into the elder bush with an eye to its practicability as a means of egress, and shaking its goose's head with the melancholy of blank despair. When I saw it lie down to sleep under that tree, I also retired to my couch with a contented mind ; for I knew well the cats would come at their accustomed hour. They did come. Never shall I lose the recollection of that shriek which rang out on the startled ear of night about one o'clock, and wakened every sleeper in the terrace. Our goose had been dreaming pro- bably of home and peace and barley-meal, when _she was roused to the awful sense of her real position : four-and-twenty cats at the very least, Toms and Thomasinas, tabbies and tortoiseshells, were standing around her in solemn conclave, doubtful whether she was aKve or not, but certain that she was excellent eating ; in another instant they were up the elder bush and scattered over all the back gardens under the sky. The outcry which the geese made who saved the Capitol, was nothing to the outcry which our goose made to save herself. The memory of it abode with her enemies long after her spirit had fled ; for the cats did not return to their usual rendezvous for nearly a week. The next day being Sunday, the captive was spared from destruction, and well fed with her favourite food at the cost of sixpence ; twopence, therefore, setting aside the damage in the drawing-room, was, upon Monday morning, our total pecuniary saving through having purchased her alive. Our Bach Garden. Ill " Cook," said I, authoritatively, " you must kill that bird at once, or it will he a positive loss to us." "La, sir, me kill it?" answered she; "I should he terrified out of my life." " Who is to kill it, then 2" I inquired, in unfeigned astonishment. " Well, sir, missus thought (you see the poulterer charges eightpenoe for oomiug m and doing on it) as how you might be kind enough to kill it yourself." The poulterer came and performed his savage ofiioe. The cook took half the day to pluck the corpse, and even then left so many feathers upon it that the dish looked more like a singed sheep's head than a roast goose. The tenant of our back garden cost us exactly sixpence more than if we had purchased it at the poulterer's in the first instance, and finally turned out to be as tough as a goose could be. Since the decease of this leathery bird, our back garden has been left to its grass, its dandelions, its elder-bush, and its cats. ( 112 ) NO. 19, W. npHERE lias been a good deal of talk lately about model -*- lodgmg-houses for the lower classes ; but I tbiuk, for my part, charity should begin at home, and that we should first get model lodging-houses for ourselTes. Why are there no respectable furnished apartments in the whole of London where Mr. Poppet and I can afford to live upon our two or three hundred a year? One first-floor sitting-room, and two tolerably large bed-rooms (on account of the nurse and baby), with cooking and attendance, is what we wish we may get for about £7 a month in vain. Advertise ? Well, we home advertised, and with great success, numerically speaking, indeed. " All the comforts of a home,'' " clean- liness and attention,'' " no other lodgers in the house," " no extras," " a cab-stand opposite," " the gratuitous use of a piano," '' draught beer over the way " — every allurement, in short, that fancy could suggest to the designing mind, has been .offered to us for the above price, and lower ; but with what result? We have spent the money, and more than the money, I do believe, in removals and compensa- tions for removal. Once we thought we had obtained a certain status in No. 19, W. 113 society by taking apartments where there were "two members of parliament on the second floor ; " but these turned out to be Irish members, who occupied a double- bedded room immediately over our own chamber, and we had no rest for their Maynooth and similarly patriotic speeches for hours. " Sir-r-r-r,'' one would begin, " I came down to this House to-night with no intention of addressing it ; but the tants that have been levelled at my beloved country, the first gem of the urth and first flower in the say," &c. ; after which the other honourable member would "follow," as he expressed it, "upon the same soide, in reply." One little boy was retained all day in their sitting- room to take down their eloquence in shorthand ; and "hear, hear," "chair, chair," "order, order," and "Mister Spaker" resounded over us continuously until the two senators went down in an omnibus together to serve up their rkhauffis to " the House." The dining-room had been seized upon by two clerks in the City, under pretence of its not being wanted— although they paid only five shfllings a week apiece for sleeping accommodation — and the third floor was the residence of three, and the habitual resort of four other medical students. These never came in tiU two o'clock in the morning, when they would usually insist upon having some hot supper, and come to the door of our apart- ment to borrow forks and glasses. Moreover, the domestic being fast asleep ■ in some unknown region, Mr. Poppet had not seldom to go down and let them in, because they had a habit of dropping their latch-keys into the letter-box in their endeavours to open the door. Lastly, in the attic of this house was a clergyman, who had resided there for 114 No. 19, W. fifteen months without offering any remuneration whatever to the landlady : he, however, gave but little trouble, she said, made his own bed, and lived exclusively upon roUs and Bologna sausages — stUl it was very annoying. The place, notwithstanding, was not, I believe, more unsatis- factory than others ; certaialy not so bad as our apartments in Porchester Oblong, for instance, where the landlord and his wife played cards all day Sunday, being Jews, and their two female servants came up to me in a fainting condition, protesting that we did not leave enough pro- visions for their sustenance — they being made entirely dependent on the lodgers for support. It was upon this occasion that Mr. Poppet raised the standard of, revolt. " You have had the choosing of our place of abode for the last two years, my love," he said, " and I think I may say without contradiction, that you have chosen them exces- sively ni. No ; I don't regard your going into hysterics in the least ; all I have to observe is, that in future J choose the lodgings." And he took his hat up and went out upon that errand at once. It is unnecessary to relate here how he pitched upon an entresol in the Eegent's Quadrant, and paid two guineas deposit money for the same, and never took me even to look at it after all, in consequence of com- munications he received from bachelor friends ; or how he got a most excellent bargain of three sitting-rooms and as many bed-rooms in Allsop Paragon, where the landlord wore a peacock's feather behind each of his ears, and went about the house crowing and flapping his arms : suffice it to say, that the residence Mr. Poppet chose at last was No. 19, W. It was situated in a pretty fashionable street, runniag No. 19, W. 115 directly into Hyde Park, where first-floor apartments were, upon the average, three guineas a week. The drawing-room and back drawing-room of No. 19 were elegantly and ex- pensively furnished ; the sleeping-rooms, though bare, were sufiiciently large ; and the rent was only two guineas. Evei'ything, however, was excessively dirty, including Mrs. A., the landlady. Her complexion was cream-colour, sprinkled with yellow spots ; her hair, which should have been gray, was whity-brown ; and the hue of her gown quite indescribable : it neither reached Ingh enough nor low enough, nor was it ever changed for another during our protracted residence in her apartments. My husband informed her that I was excessively particular about cleanliness, for which she expressed herself truly thankful ; " for, sir, I do assure you, with me it comes next to godliness ; '' and it may have done that, perhaps, in Mrs. A.'s case, without inciting her to become of alabaster purity. She promised Mr. Poppet to have a good wash out ; each article of furni- ture should be accurately dusted, and everything made spick and span for our arrival. We called a week after- wards, and found seven days' extra dirt upon No. 19 and its inhabitants, and were assured that the work of reforma- tion was to be begun that afternoon. We called again next day, when Mrs. A. immediately set to work to dust the knocker, as though that were the sole appurtenance to No. 19 still left unmirrorlike and spotless. When, after many injunctions on the one side, and promises on the other, we arrived at last with baggage and baby, as tenants, we found all things in primal chaos, with the kitchen-fire out, and no mUk in the house for our beloved infant. Eetreat, alas, had become impossible ; and indeed we had cut it off' I 2 116 No. 19, W. ourselves by a remonstrance, ending with a policeman, with the cormorants in Porohester Oblong. The domestic of No. 19 at that epoch — the first of eleven Marys who trusted for a greater or less time to the empty promises to pay of Mrs. A. — was rather a pretty ypuug person, and a good deal cleaner than her mistress, but so hopelessly stupid, that upon being desired to fetch a cab for Mr. Poppet precisely at 2 p.m., she brought up at that hour a pair of lighted candles, as though he were about to conjure, read Shakspeare publicly, or perform high-mass. It was her custom also to put letters intrusted to her for the post iuto any chink or box which offered itself out of doors, especially any that had Letters on it, in the simple faith that that was all Mr. Eowland Hill required of her. There was also a Miss A., of ten years old or so, residing at No. 19 with her mamma ; but she was a lily of the field, and toUed for nobody ; nay, the one domestic was principally occupied in waiting upon her, iu curling her hair, and getting her up generally, in order that she might apply herseK, in correct drawing costume, to the piano. Yes, Miss Euphemia had a voice, as we well knew — ^was intended, as Mrs. A. confided tome, for the Opera; "my only objection being, ma'am, that I am told it is not a good profession for the soul." Extreme simplicity, indeed, would seem to come next to cleanliness in the scale of this lady's virtues, and next to that, perhaps, truth. She would appeal to Heaven upon the very slightest provocation, to excuse her omission to make a pudding, or to account for the absence of sippets from a hash. All day long, we could hear her solemnly protesting to tradespeople and others at the door of No. 19, that she had not got one penny in the house, but that next No. 19, W. 117 ■week, as sure as there was a sun in the sky, their demands should be satisfied in full. She made no sort of difference in this formula, whether we had just settled with her for her week's account or not ; and it is my firm belief that she never paid any one of them for anything. I had to go out for the barest necessaries of life myself, not even the mUk- man consenting to send round to No. 19 without the express understanding that the provisiorf was for the lodgers, and not for Mrs. A. " Why, ma'am," said he, " that 'ooman might have bathed in the milk I've sent her these last six months, without my seeing the colour of her money ; " and certainly he could scarcely have selected a more awful image by which to have expressed his feelings. . When, indeed, the claims of her landlord and her daughter's singing-master had been satisfied, I don't suppose that poor Mrs. A. had really much money to spare, and, of course, under these circumstances, she could do no less than live upon us. She had taken No. 19 upon spec, of a gentleman (Mr. B.), who rented it upon spec, of a certain lady (Mrs. C), who had furnished it upon spec, and never paid a shilling to the original proprietor (Mr. D.), wh6 had buHt the house upon spec, and was now at Boulogne. Neither A. nor B., nor C. nor D., had any money at all, I think, but were entirely dependent upon P. (the Poppets) for existence. Mrs. C. (who once called upon Mrs. A. in company with a gentleman in a Hansom cab, with the hopeless intention of getting a five-pound note out of her), by whose elegant, and somewhat expensive taste the furniture had been chosen, had herself resided at No. 19 as long as she could get pro- visions upon credit, and had been succeeded by Mr. D., who had done the same ; so that not only was the bell of 118 No. 19, W. No. 19 a good deal pulled, and the knocker considerably worked — they came with a rap, but went away without one — but also, in the course of the four-and-twenty hours, ex- postulation, and even direct menace, floated up to the draw- ing-room floor in ceaseless waves. It may seem strange that we should have put up with inconvenience of this kind for a single week ; but the fact was, that Mr. Poppet, and my- self and the baby, had suffered such incredible things at the hands of lodging-house keepers, that we had fallen into a sort of torpor of despair. Therefore, although a good deal alarmed and frightened, I did not rush out of the house at once, on the occasion when Mrs. A. enticed me into her bedroom in the attics, and there exhibited a ohestful of the most extraordinary and suspicious splendours — beautiful laces, heaps of cashmere shawls, necklaces of diamonds, jewels of every sort and kind, to be offered to me, as a valued friend, at what were certainly exceedingly low prices. • She told me a strange story of her having once been lady's- maid to a person of fashion, and that confidence having been reposed in her by many fernaJes of high rank, they now intrusted her with these valuables to sell for them, they being more in want of money than of the goods, which, how- ever, looked quite unworn and new. It was not a satis- factory account of the things, certainly ; but a peril which befell our own goods and chattels about tlys time, drove Mrs. A.'s secret treasure quite out of my recollection. This was no less than a menace on the part of Mr. D. to put _ an execution into No. 19, unless his rent was paid. Mr. B., it seems, had been trying the screw upon our spotted land- lady for a considerable period, with as little effect as Mrs. C.'s mechanical endeavours had had upon him; and the poor No. 19, fF. 119 gentleman at Boulogne could make nothing out of his house whatever. We received this information from one of the many domestics whom Mrs. A. had cajoled out of their gra- tuitous services ; and it being further corroborated by the good lady's most solemn denial, I sent off Mr. Poppet to see Mr. D.'s lawyer in Bedford Row. My beloved husband is not very much used to business transactions, and he re- turned home, after some hours, in a most miserable condition. He had entirely failed in persuading the legal gentleman^ who appears to have been rather deaf and excessively obsti- nate — that he was not B. or some other defaulter connected with No. 19. He said we could expect no mercy after such conduct as ours had been, and that nothing would be secured to us except our wearing apparel. I packed up what little plate we had, at once, and took that and my dressing-case, with a moderator-lamp and a bran-new silk umbrella, to a friend's, for safety. When I had done that, and not before, I began to listen to Mrs. A.'s expostulations upon the folly of apprehending such a thing as a distress-warrant in her house, when she had .£500 worth of property upder the bed in her room, let alone as much again behind the wainscot in the back dining-parlour. I am not sure, indeed, whether her riches or her poverty made us the most unconifortable. In the daytime, the house was besieged by importunate creditors, and in the evening and late into the night, haunted by mustached gentlemen of foreign appearance, and very much shawled, who had, I suppose, jewellery business to trans- act with Mrs. A. A magnificently attired lady of some fifty years of age having called upon one occasion, and had a most stormy interview, I animadverted, after her departure, upon the disturbance so respectable-looking a person had created. 120 No. 19, W. " Lor, ma'am,'' explained her opponent, " how deceived you be, to be sure! Now, have you never heard, about twelve or one o'clock, a party a singing and a hoUering up our street ? " " Yes," said I, " I have, and it's very disagreeable." " WeU, ma'am, now, that party is the same party — the very same ; " which information was accompanied by a tele- graphic si^ial indicating that the party drank a little. I began to feel very uncomfortable in No. 19 by this time ; was convinced that people were about the house at night, and sent Mr. Poppet out to look with a revolver, more than once, locking the bedroom door after him very carefully. He, however, manlike, having chosen the lodg- ings, determined upon the whole to Kke them : and I don't know but that we should have been there now, except for this. One day we went out, baby and all, to dinner in the neighbourhood ; and while we were enjoying that repast in the parlour, our nursery-maid received a rather startling piece of information in. the kitchen. " A pretty house your master and mistress have got into at last ! " observed the footman. " Well, I don't know," replied Sarah, who is quite imper- vious to satire. " I call it excessively dirty, at all events." " That ain't the worst," said Thomas : " its the West End receiving-house for stolen goods ! " Whether it really was so or not, or how Thomas got to know it, I can't tell ; but by the next afternoon we had everything packed and in a cab for instant departure. No- body had certainly entered the house that morning ; but as I raised my eyes, .by no means regretfully, to the first floor No. 19, W. 121 windows, without doubt I saw a gentleman standing there, in our own drawing-room, with mustaches, of foreign ap- pearance, and very much shawled. Mr. Poppet wanted to run in again and demand an explanation ; but " no,'' said I, " certainly not. You're sure to see it all some day in the police reports ; and nobody belonging to me shall ever cross the threshold of No. 19, W. again." 122 ) THE BLANK8HIEE THICKET. rriHICKETS in Blankshire are not now the dense masses -*- of underwood wMoh they are still popularly believed to he, and which, perhaps, once they were. The ram of the patriarch Isaac would scarcely he caught in any one of these by his horns ; vast quantities of sheep, indeed, make their pasture-land of our thicket without paying further tribute to the briars and prickly gorse than a few handfuls of wool, and a man may walk miles and miles upon it without meet- ing with greater inconveniences than an occasional thorn in his flesh. The lordly stag (not seldom uncarted on our thicket) finds scarce an obstacle which his easy canter cannot surmount without a bound ; the large-limbed hounds, whose mistress is the Queen herself, dash through it at full speed, unheedful of the gorse which reddens their tail tip's ; and the scarlet- coated hunters take their way by fifties and by hundreds across the densest part of it almost as swiftly as along its open turf roads. A lonely spot it is at all seasons, bleak enough in winter, but beautiful and brUliant with colour in the summer time ; then, except the little round bald patches which mark the The'Blanlcshire Thicket. 123 halting-places of the numerous companies of gipsies who at that period haunt our Blankshire thicket, all is green or golden. The soft south wind is never weary of blowing there, although always somewhat faint with the odour of the gorse blossoms ; the lark is never tired of singing in the blue above, the grasshopper of chirping in the green beneath, nor the butterfly of roaming over the dangerous blooms whose sharp spears threaten in vain its delicate fairy wings. There are few thickets Kke it, and those few are growing fewer day by day. It is not impossible that the Enclosure Act may lay its claws, or one of its clauses, before long even upon Brierly Thicket ; indeed, I have missed a corner here, and a good strip there, and what I have known to be a capital rabbit bank, has become a corn-field patch abeady, so that the sooner I say what I have got to say about our thicket — Brierly Thicket — whUe it is a, thicket — the better. In the good old times, which were five-and-thirty years ago exactly, Brierly, which is now a stagnant country town, was a place of importance. The great western road to Lon- don, the king's highway (which is now, alas ! the railroad), ran through it, and upon that road seventy-three coaches passed and repassed daUy. Forty-five of these changed horses at the Calderton Arms, which was the best hotel in our town, and patronized by Lord Calderton, of Brierly Park, who in those days saved us the trouble of choosing a repre- sentative in Parliament by nominating one himself, and bidding us vote for him. In those good old times it must be confessed that our thicket was not so safe as it is now. No coach ever crossed it after dusk without the guard having his loaded blunder- buss ready to his hand, lest he should meet with any gentle- 124 The BlanhsUre Thicket. men of the road, and many were the robberies to which, despite that precaution, passengers were obliged to submit. Brierly farmers driving home from market in the evenings used to go armed, and with at least one companion. Pedlars who were foolish enough to expose the contents of a valu- able pack at any place upon one side of our thicket, rarely got scot-free to the other ; nay, if they made resistance, they sometimes never crossed it at all, for highway robbery being then a hanging matter, murder was no worse, and it was as well, said the thieves with the proverb, to be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. There was a patrol upon our thicket, it is true, but he did not very much deter the marauders, and sim.ple nervous passengers, always mistaking him for a robber, suffered three parts of the wretchedness of being robbed in the fright. Nevertheless there were honest men, then as now, who cared for never a thief living ; and one of these was Farmer Johnson, of Stoat Farm, near Brierly, and another was my Uncle Jack. • Farmer Johnson was accustomed to cross our thicket at all seasons and at any hour, as often alone as in company, and unless he walked (which, as he was fourteen stone, he was generally loth to do), without even an ash-plant where- with to defend himself. He ran such risks indeed without ever coming to harm, that it was popularly imderstood, in fun, that he was himself in league with the highwaymen, which in those times it was not such a very unoonmion thing for men of some substance to be. Nevertheless, even Farmer Johnson was stopped at last upon our thicket. He was returning late at night from Fussworth market in his gig alone, and with a pretty heavy purse in his pocket, the proceeds of a successful sale in barley ; his good fortune The, Blanlshm Thicket. 125 made him wMstle as he drove, and his good mare Salt-fish, who was ahnost a thoroughbred, spanked along merrily with- out touch of whip, as if she sympathized with her master. When they had reached about the middle of our thicket, a man sprang up on either side the road from amid the gorse and stood in the way, while at the same instant a third fellow laid his hand upon the gig behind. Farmer Johnson understood the state of aflairs at a glance, and knowing that he could rely upon the mare, took his measures accordingly : by a sharp puU at the bit he caused the docile Salt-fish (who had come to a full stop upon two legs and presented the unusual sign in heraldry of a horse rampant in a gig passant) to run backwards with surprising agility, knocking down the gentleman behind, and playfully trampling upon him in her retreat ; thus Farmer Johnson extricated himself from the dilemma, and, had he been wise, would have trotted back to Fussworth well satisfied enough : but he had just come from thence, and was bound for his own residence, Stoat Farm, nor was he a man very easily induced to change his determination. Gathering up the reins, therefore, and holding the mare well together, he rushed her at the two men who stiU stopped the way, and scattered them like chaflf. " Good night, gentlemen ! " he cried, satirically, as he bowled along at some fifteen miles an hour ; but the words had scarcely left his lips when Salt-fish and gig and all heeled completely over, and Farmer Johnson's triumph was ended. The three thieves, it seems, regardless of omens, were the proprietors of a long stout rope, which was stretched across the road on pegs, and had thus caused his misfortilne. In another minute, and before he could rise, his enemies 126 The Blanlcshire Thicket. were upon him ; resistance from an unarmed man was use- less, for thougli they had no pistols they could have beaten out his brains with their bludgeons in a few minutes ; so Farmer Johnson submitted as patiently as he could, and confined himself to making a particular study of their countenances, with a view to recognizing them under more auspicious circumstances. They took his purse, and gave him a good drubbing, in return for the trouble which he had given them, and they would have doubtless taken his mare also, but that she had in the mean time gone off towards Stoat Farm, of her own accord, with the resuscitated gig behind her. Farmer Johnson, as he started homewards on foot amid the laughter of his despoUers, was sensible neither of his loss nor of his bruises ; an overwhelming desire for revenge swallowed up, like a Moses' rod, all other feelings ; he had scarce patience to get a prudent distance away from his late companions before he gave the long shrill whistle, which Salt-fish knew so well as her master's summons ; back came the high-blooded mare at a hand-gaUop, instantly, and the farmer climbed up into the gig : he put his hand under the driving seat and brought out exultingly a new sharp sickle. " Fool that I was," cried he, " to have forgotten this, which I bought only this very day." It was a present which he had promised to one of his men, and ten minutes before would perhaps have been worth two hundred pounds to him. " What's done, however, can be undone," according to the perseveriog farmer, and giving the mare a flick with the. whiplash, he turned her into a turf-road which runs through our thicket from the place where he was, and j oins the The Blankshire Thiclcet. 127 highway again by a circumbendibus ; by this means he could come, from the same direction as before, over the very same ground, and if the thieves should be stiU there, he was pre- pared for them. His only fear was that they would have decamped with their booty. They, however, thinking that "old twenty-stun" (as they had irreverently called him) would be a long time in going afoot to Brierly, had set their trap anew for more game from Fussworth market, and hear- ing the sound of wheels, pricked up their ears and grasped their bludgeons. No sooner, however, did the running footman, the third man of the party, lay his hand upon the gig behind, than Farmer Johnson, who was waiting for him, struck him over the head with the sickle, to such good purpose that the man dropped in the road. " I forgot," cried the stout yeoman, as he came up with the other two, " I forgoti, when I met you before, sirs, to give you this," holding up the weapon, and leaping out upon the left-hand man : this feUow, astounded by such an address, and really bewildered at seeing again the same individual who he had such excellent means for knowing was elsewhere and in sad plight, made but a feeble resistance, and after his fall, his comrade took to his heels across the trackless- thicket. The farmer was at no time very well calculated to catch a runner, and pursuit was of course, under the circum- stances, not to be thought of. The stolen purse was luckily in the pocket of the first man, and with that and his two captives — most grievously mauled by the sickle — the plucky old yeoman came into Brierly about daybreak, and covered himself, as may well be believed, with provincial glory. The other adventure, which I remember to have happened upon our thicket, occurred to my Uncle Jack. He was what 128 The Blanhshire Thicket. was called, in those good old times which I have referred to, a red-hot Radical, or as we should now say, a moderate Whig, and in the electioneering practices of that date he was a somewhat unscrupulous proficient. His hatred of the noble house of Calderton, which arrogated to itself the right of appointing the member for the borough, was of a nature of which we modems, unacquainted as we are with what political animosity reaUy means, can have no conception : " all's fair at election time," was a favourite moral precept with my uncle, and one up to which, whenever Brierly was contested, he most conscientiously acted. The struggle between the nominee of his lordship, and a certain yellow candidate from the metropolis, was, upon one occasion — the first in which the Calderton rule was rebelled against with any hope of success — excessively keen, and the screw was put very sharply upon the Brierly tenants. Uncle Jack, the better to observe the enemy, was stopping at the Calderton Arms itself, from which he secretly sent forth his ukases, and regulated liberal affairs. He saw that these were going badly, that more money was wanted, and that, for certain reasons, neither in Brierly notes, nor even in those of the Bank of England, but in good, untestifying, unrecognisable gold sovereigns from the Mint. There was very little time to procure it in, and the getting it from town was a highly important and most confidential task ; so Uncle Jack, after some consultation with those he considered could be trusted, determined to undertake it himself. Nobody, reasoned he, would surely suspect him, an inmate of the Calderton Arms, of being the purse-bearer of the Friends of Liberty. Robert Supple, the landlord, who was, of course, Caldertonian to the backbone, and had a con- The BlanhaUrc Thicket. 129 siderable following, was a dull man, who thought himself shrewd, and of the easiest possible sort to hoodwink ; while his son was a scamp, if not something even worse, whose feelings were not likely to be interested in any electioneering matter whatever. Uncle Jack was neither a dull man nor a scamp, ergo (so he proved it) he was more than a match for them. He ordered out his gig and his big brown horse in order to go to Fussworth ; there was certainly no mistake about that ; he mentioned Fussworth twice, distinctly, to Mr. Supple, who was smoking his pipe at the inn-door, with an expres- sion of countenance as though he were personifying human wisdom at the request of some eminent sculptor. He spoke of Fussworth, casually, to Supple the younger, as he hung about the inn-yard, as usual, with both his idle hands in his pockets ; and Fussworth, said he, nodding to the inquiring ostler, as he snatched the horsecloth cleverly off the Brown at the moment of departure ; and yet Uncle Jack was going farther than Fussworth that same day, never- theless. It was night — midnight, by the time my uncle got upon our thicket again upon his way home. He had nobody with him , and no weapon of any kind, and he had two thousand pounds in gold under the gig-seat. It was upon this last account that he kept his eyes so sharply round him, and listened so painfully with his ears, and not through any fear upon his own account, for Uncle Jack was bold as a lion. He was anxious lest the cause of liberty should suffer a dire loss ; lest the Oalderton clique should triumph on this as on all other occasions, through any misadventure of his ; and it was for this alone that he feared the chances of the dark 130 TheBlanlshhY Thldd. and the liighwaymen. Blindfold, he had almost known even- inch of the Tvay, and he drove through the gloom as softly as he possibly could, with his wheels low on the sajid, and dumb on the turf, and grating on the hard road but rarely ; sometimes he would even pull up to listen, and he did not press the big Brown to speed at any time, but kept him as fresh as his long journey would permit him to be, in case it should come to a stern chase. Presently, in the centre of the way, there loomed n horse- man, and the fatal " Stand ! " ran hoarsely out over the heath. My uncle would have made a rush, and trusted to the fellow's pistol missing fire, but he saw that the muzzle covered liim, and that the risk was too tremendous for that. The robber, who was masked, rode up to his side with the weapon still levelled, and demanded the money. ]\[y uncle offered him his watch and some loose sovereigns, but the other shook his head. " I want the money under the seat," cried he, hoarsely ; '' I know you have it there." " If you know that," said my imcle, quietly, " you must also know that not a penny of it belongs to me : I will not voluntarily give it up to any man, — I wiU die first, — but since you have a pistol, I cannot help your taking it if you have a mind ; and may I live to see you hung, you rascal ! " Uncle Jack used some rather excited language besides, which would better bear repetition in those good old times than in these, and then sullenly shifted his legs, so that the bags of gold under the seat coidd be got at. The highway- man leaned forward to reach them with one hand, still keeping the pistol levelled in the other, as though he knew The BlanJcshire ThicTcet. 131 the man he had to deal with ; but in doing this he bent his head for a second, and before he could raise it again Uncle Jack was upon him like a lion. By striking spurs into his horse the robber managed to extricate himself, but in the brief struggle the pistol went off harmlessly, and remained with my uncle, and before the wretch could draw another, the big Brown was laying his four feet to the ground to some purpose ; they were nearly at the end of our thicket, before the enraged highwayman could come within range of them. " Chuck out the gold," he cried, in a terrible voice, " or I'U shoot ye ! " " Shoot and ," halloed Uncle Jack, whose flying wheels, no longer particular about making a noise, drowned the rest of the . sentence. " I'll lay a pound that I hve to see you hung ! " He knew it was not an easy matter for a man on horseback to shoot a man in a gig — both flying. After they had gone on in this fashion for some time — " Patrol ! " cried my uncle, joyfully, and at the full pitch of his voice. " Death and thunder ! " or something of that kind, ex- claimed the highwayman, as he pulled up his mare upon her haunches. By which device Uncle Jack gained fifty yards, and got quite clear of our thicket. In five minutes more he had reached the toU-gate, and was out of Eobber- land. Not a word said he of his adventure to the ostler, roused up at one in the morning to attend upon him ; only, " What has become of the Grey ? " asked he, carelessly, as his eyes rested upon an empty stall in the huge stable wherein his own Brown was housed. K 2 132 The Blankshm Thicket " Master WiUiun has took him out to Wutton until tite day after to-morrow," was the simple reply. Uncle Jack retired to rest with the serenest of smiles, and deposited the gold in safety under the mattress. On the next morning his landlord waited upon him after hreakfast, by particular desire. " How many votes, my good friend," said my uncle, " can you really command now, independently of his lordship ? " " Why, you surely aia't a-commg that game 1 " said the innkeeper, grimly. " I should have thought you had known me by this time better than that : I am a/-goLag to bring seventeen voters up to poU next week to vote for the True Blue, however, and I don't care who knows it." " Seventeen," said my uncle, smiling, " that will do capi- tally : I should not have thought, Mr. Supple, you could have brought so many. This will be equivalent to giving us thirty-four,'' added he, soliloquizing, " and we only wanted thirty to win." " To giving you thirty-four ? " cried the indignant host ; " why, I'd see you hanged first ; leastways, not you, sir, but the whole yellow lot '| "Do you know this pistol ? " exclaimed my uncle, suddenly, and with a great deal of sternness, " and are you aware to whom it belongs ? " " Yes, I do," said the innkeeper, a little uncomfortable, but not in the least suspecting what was to come, " it be- longs to my son William." " It does ! " said Uncle Jack. " I took it from him last night upon Brierly thicket, where he tried to commit a highway robbery with a, badly fitting mask on his face — which is a hanging matter, Mr. Supple." The Blankshire TMclcd. 133 The agony of the father (who was only too convinced of the truth of what was said, as he had himself mentioned to his son his suspicions of what my uncle was reaUy gone to Pussworth about) was terrible to witness, and moved the accuser greatly. " Spare him ; spare my son ! " exclaimed the poor fellow. " Do I look like the sort of man to hang the son of any- body who promises to do me a favour ? " said Uncle Jack, placidly ; " but," added he, with meaning, " you had better not forget those seventeen voters, Mr. Supple." And so it turned out, that through Uncle Jack's adventure in the Blankshire Thicket, the yellow candidate came in for Brierly for two thousand pounds less than what he had calculated it would cost him. ( 134 ) PABGATE-8UPEB-MABE. ~\/f"RS. HARRIS and myself have too small an income -^-*- and too large a family to dream of keeping a carriage all tlie year round ; but for six weeks in tke summer months we almost attain to that dignity. We hire for that period a four-wheeled vehicle of considerable size, and, although it has no horses, we pay a woman solely to look after it. It holds my better-half and the two girls, and the nurse and baby, quite comfortably ; but although it has a commodious box, with a hood to it, I am not permitted even to ride outside at the same time ; the boys and myself go. out at a diflFerent time of day : in short, and to confess the whole secret at once, the machine is a bathing-machine. About the end of July, when town begins to be too hot to hold her, Mrs. Harris discovers that our dear Jemima's back is " giving," and requires to be strengthened by salt water ; or that Master Tommy is dyspeptic ; or her dear self failing as to appetite. If I dispute these matters, she wOl detect lumbago in myself, and get a couple of doctors to agree with her ; so I need not say (having been married twenty years) that I give in at once ; she descends upon Par- gate on the east coast without resistance, and there we take Pargate-super-Mare. 135 our bathing-machine. Pargate, as I say of the baby, is very charming when it's asleep : when the narrow winding streets are deserted of their roaring throng, and when I can set foot on its beach without becoming the prey of savage boatmen and the sport of donkey-boys. It is not quite so pleasant at other times. It must have been built, I think, by a succession of daring speculators, each of whom ran up his line of houses to his last sixpence, and then failed ; for the terraces are generally unfinished at either end, and from each starts an entirely fresh style of building, often at right angles, but always with a quite new direction, as though it would distinctly state : " We are Inkerman Villas — a totally different affair from Alma Cottages ; and quite in another sphere, we flatter ourselves, from that of Balaclava Build- ings.'' A gigantic dwelling-house, like " three single gentle- men rolled into one," forms the centre of these rows, as a double number stands out in a game of dominoes ; and dotted about, even in the heart of the High Street, are " Prospect Mansions," with a little blister on one side for a green-house, set in a garden-ground of the size of a street- tumbler's carpet, with a fishpond sunk in it of the dimensions of a foot-pan. In order to get sufficient " view of the sea '' for the con- scientious Pargateers to print it under their "Furnished Apartments," a wooden chamber is built upon the roof, or a gallery run out from the second story, or even a flagstaff stuck up, which an enthusiastic lodger may climb, and sit cross-legged upon with a telescope ; so that if the Picturesque is born of the Irregular, Pargate from the sea should rival the Bay of Naples. When the visitors are sleeping in all the parlours, and 13G PargaU-svpfT-MaTC. packed together in cases like herrings in the great Assemblv- rooms, there is still always " One Bed to Let " in everr house : your taking it for a week or so doesn't in the least affect that annovmcement suspended orer the area railings ; for your landlady will assure you that two gentlemen — ^who at pre- sent are taking it in tttms to lean against a post all night, perhaps — are only awaiting your departure ; or that the notice refers to accommodation she has yet to offer in the lum tier- garret. If you only rent a bedroom, you must put np with coining through the whole of the ba:k-yards from the end of the row, because the front door opens immediately into the chief sitting-room, where a famil y of distinction hoMs its state. I don't think there is any shop in Pargate — except, may be, the watchmakers' — ^where they don't sell prawns. The whole cry of the place, from mom to ere — ^like the "' ^oe, woe I " of Jerusalem — is, " Prawns, prawns — fresh prawns ' " Parcels of from twenty to two htmdred are left all day at your lod^Tiiirs by mistake, and newspapers full of them poked in your pocket as you walk about, and sold to you whether you will or no. Another trouble of the town is its warm bathing-establishments ; its rapour douche — whatever that is — and medicated baths ; into these you are liable to be dragged, stripped to the skin, and then to hare your skin taken off and bones broken, unless you are very sharp in- deed : the opposition bathers will tear you asunder in the High .Street, rather than not accomplish their horrid purpose. Also, if you are small and light, so strong is the rivalry of the fly-drivers, that you are liable to be snatched up bodily, and carried a great distance against your wilL Mrs. Harris, although, as I can well believe, she made a great resistance. Pargate-super-Mare. 137 was conveyed to the Tuileries Tea-garden, a mile and a half into the country, and back again in this manner, for nine- pence. It is cheap enough, certainly ; but then, when one doesn't want to go, where's the good 1 They say they don't care for money, but only custom, to have the appearance of driving a good business ; but ■ think of them driving Mrs. Harris — who is not business — and her infant for three miles as a living (and kicking) advertisement ! Finally, if you escape these different snares, it is not to be hoped for that you will evade raffling for an American clock ; there are three bazaars in Pargate, open day and night for this pur- pose, with emissaries in every quarter of the town. In one of these — the Boulevard Italien, by reason of the four aloes in green pots ; the Grecian Saloon, because of the naked Cupid who holds the umbrellas in the doorway ; or the Hall of Pyramids — imagination fails in accounting for this title — in one of these you must needs sooner or later be entrapped. By an outlay of sixpence, you reap the singular advantage of drawing out of a Wheel of Fortune the American clock, sixpence, or a blank. I never knew but one person who got his sixpence back again, and that he was obliged to spend in the bazaar ; while the clock has stood over the wheel, to my own knowledge, these five seasons, as though it were meant for eternity rather than time. Each of our children has invested the required amount for every successive year, but still they live in hope ; and from the wheel and its devotees a moral might at least be drawn, if not an Ame- rican clock. The pier, which is not finished at the end — nothing is finished at Pargate — is crowded all day long by people in the lightest of raiments ; loose coats without waistcoats, and 138 Parijatt'-siqnr-irarc transparent gowns ; and everybody wears yellow slippers, as though a great fire had broken out while we were all un- dressing, and driven us out oi dcshaldUi: for safety. When a pleasure-boat is hired, all the children cheer ; and the adventurous lessee affects the manner of Mr. Jones of the Surrey, as " the Rover of the Bloody Hand," until the sail is set, and the bark begins to wabble, when he is sea-sick incontinently. Indeed, our Parg;ite visitors are for the most part Cockneys, unaccustomed to the briny deep, who prefer fishing in what they oaJl " the Arbour " to going out to sea. The beach is not so crowded as the pier, principally, as I believe, because there is no charge for going upon it, and it is indeed a very pleasant place. First, we thread a camp of bathing-machines, just now not in use, which, we are assured by the amphibious party in charge of them, " it is one body's work to keep clear of the parties who will read novels and flirt upon the steps, or smoke cigars inside.'' Some of these have white, and some spotted awnmgs, raising the idea of their being the habitations of some tremendous female, who is not able to get her skirts and the bend of her back inside. At distances varying from a yard to a mile from land, there are scores of these vehicles — the one with blue wheels, from which those screams are proceeding, is ours, for Tommy is now taking his antidyspefftio — and under and about them are dancing nymphs of a fawn-coknu-, and elderly dipiicrs in blue. It is a very favourite amusement to watch them taking hands and dancing on these yellnw sands, while the white waves list, as Shakspearc, with Par- gate doubtless in his eye, has before described. There is a strong tide here at certain seasons, with unexpected currents Pargate-super-Mare. 139 and shifting sands. On one occasion, as Mrs. Harris was disporting herself under the protection of the speckled awn- ing, a male voice addressed her from without. " Go away, you wicked wretch ! " she screamed ; " go away directly, bad man ! " " Madam," replied the voice — " madam, it is the tide ; the nip-tide or the spring-tide, or something, and I cannot help it ; it has carried away my bathing-machine, and all my things, and I must climb into this one, or be drowned." " If you only dare," said my wife — " if you only dare so much as to lift the awning, I wiU — yes, I wiU — I wiU cry, Police ! " and with that she ran up the steps as fast as her bathing-gown would permit, bolted the door of the machine, and (she says) fainted. But the man held on desperately to the outside of the awning, had his clothes taken to him in the water, dressed, and waded home. I was nearly driven away from Pargate last year by an affair of this kind that happened to myself I had ordered out our vehicle to a great distance, imder the impulse of my extreme modesty, and because there were ladies on the beach, and was swimming lazily about the pier-head, when I suddenly felt myself drifting shoreward. I struggled to regain the machine : but the current — the current I had heard so much of — was too much for me. I was not afraid of drowning, for I could keep myself afloat well enough ; but worse than death by drowning threatened me : I was being gradually borne, in spite of all my efforts, directly down upon the esplanade ! I felt myself blushing from head to foot — tingling, I may say, from top to toe — and the water getting shallower every moment. I dared not turn 140 Pargate-si(,per-Mare. my face to shore, but raised my voice as well as I could in warning. " Ladies ! " I cried — " ladies ! the current is carrying me to your feet. I cannot help it — upon my word, I can't — and I shall be on dry land in a couple of minutes. I shall have to run along the beach " — I thought it better to tell them the worst at once — " I shall have to run nearly a hundred yards, ladies, before I can jump in again with any hope of regaining my bathing-machine." When I had said this, I thought they would be off ; but from a hurried glance over my right shoulder, I saw they were still there, about four-and-twenty of them, and I heard a sound of suppressed laughter. " Ladies ! " I began again — and how I wished I might be a sand-eel to the end of my days rather than what I was — " ladies ! don't look in this direction ; but I call you to witness that it is only the cur — cui '' At this place I got my mouth fuU of shingle, and found myself not more than ankle-deep in water. Let the Pargate Star of the ensuing Saturday tell the rest ; I am not sure, indeed, but that it was on the Saturday that this dreadful thing occurred, and that there was a special edition of the Star devoted to me that very evening. At all events, here it is : " Dis- graceful Outrage ! — We regret to say that the esplanade of Pargate was made the scene, at mid-day, of a flagrant outrage, the perpetrator of which, we trust, the police will make every effort to secure. WhUe our fair promenaders were employing their minds upon the beach with thoughtful books, or knitting graceful articles for the adornment of their boudoirs, they were terriiied by the appearance of an elderly monster in human form swimming swiftly towards Pargate-super-Mare. 141 them, and uttering tlie most savage but unintelligible sounds." [This refers, I suppose, to my simple statement regarding the force of the current.] " Our fair friends, of course, rose on the instant, and made the best of their vay homeward " — [They did nothing of the kind, but sat as still and composedly as though I had been the commonest species of jelly-fish.] — " and the ruffian, having reached the shore, contented himself with pursuing them for a moderate distance with dreadful cries." This HbeUous paragraph affected my spirits for some time afterwards, but I have long got over it ; and I am happy to state that Mrs. Harris is quite unac- quainted with the circumstance. Next to bathing, the great business at Pargate is the coUeotion of shells and weeds, and creeping things. Since Mr. Gosse's natural history books, and Mr. Kingsley's Wonders of the Shore have come out, everybody has a glass tank of his own, which he calls a vivarium or an cbqiMrium. My dressing-room has been taken possession of by my daughters for these marine purposes, and my bath for a receptacle of decayed fungi and pieces of rock that are not sufficiently picturesque, or that are unfitted for forming retreats to the Mesembryanthema or Crassicomes. I pay about 10s. a week for sea-water, brought morning and even- ing for the accommodation of Actiniae. It would make Mr. Hume turn in his grave to know what it cost me in shrimps alone for our gigantic polypus. The only creature amongst them, I confess, I have much regard for is a horribly ugly hermit-crab. I hfl,ve seen him glide out of a cranny aU unawares, and sideways, and kill and eat on all sides of him without Jemima being in the least aware of who did the 142 Pargate-super-Mare. mischief. She thinks the dust must have got in through the oil-skin cover, or the heat through the muslin blind, and slain her pet ziziphinus ; whereas the last-named gentleman, incautiously venturing out of his red house, has been seized upon by my talented friend, partially swallowed, and par- tially thrust back again into his own doorway, to save appearances. Julia gave me quite a turn the other day by running in suddenly as I was calculatiag our expenses for the last week, with — " dear papa ! there's another come ; such a charming little feUow ! " " Grood heavens ! " said I, stiU thinking of the bUls and what the baby cost — " impossible ! " " yes," said she, " there is, papa ; another little yellow sea-anemone ! " which was a great relief to me and matter of real congratulation. I have been also compelled to purchase a set of — as seems to me — glass surgical instruments, for the extraction of all unpleasant marine deposits, and a large earthenware jar, with iron clamps, for the final conveyance of all this rubbish into the City ! I rather flatter myself, however, as I know I shall have to carry it, that this last may be dropped by accident between Pargate-super-Mare and London Bridge. All the flirtations that used to be conducted over the crochet and Berlin wool are now transferred to the vivarium ; poti- chomanie itself, after a short struggle, has succumbed to the tank. One of the young doctors of the place, and otherwise a sensible person, is always hanging about my dressing-room ; he " dotes on zoophytes," he says ; and I expect to hear him say every day how he dotes on Jemima. I wish, for both their sakes, that he had a house to his back, like his fevourite Pargate-super-Mare. ' 143 Nerite, and didn't live in lodgings. I don't mean to say that Doctor Blank would Botanize upon his mother's grave ; but I do tMnk, if she was drowned, and covered with cockles, he would look to the cockles first, and to his mother afterwards. Besides the eternal splendours of the bazaars and the Tuileries Tea-gardens, there is a periodical gjory to Pargate, twice a year, in its regattas. On those great days, the pier is crowded Aore than ever, as well with natives as with aliens brought from any distance at fares fabulously low. There are sailing-matches and rowing-matches, and duck- hunting and fireworks, got up, as the bills say, " in a style of Eastern profusion," which I do not think, as regards the duck-hunting at least, can be quite the appropriate thing to say. Such fleets of vessels cover the harbour and offing on these occasions, that I could never make out the competitors until this very sunmier, when, under the guidance of an old boatman, I identified everything capitally. " The Blue,'' be said, " was Jack Spiers ; and the Green was Jim Ogle ; and the YeUer was ' the Old 'Un.' The Old 'Un was as good an oar as e'er a one in Pargate, let it be who it will, and had rowed this twenty year ; ay, and had won too, except the last time or so." " Getting too old, perhaps," I suggested. " Too old ! Why, he ain't a day older than I be," said my gray-headed friend, " if so much ; " which of course shut up that channel of discussion. Presently poor " Yeller" dropped behind, and was clearly to everybody — except my companion — giving himself up for last : to him,, he was only " puUin' I 144 Pargate-super-Mare. a good starn-race." Next he dropped his oar, and had to go back for it, which threw him out completely. " Ay, if it had not been for that now," said his ally ; and " even yet the Old 'Un wiU be somewheres.'' That vague position turned out to be some fifty yards behind at the finish ; and yet there was a balm remaining to my friend : " Well, anyways, the Old 'Un didn't show no white feather," he said. I confess my heart was fully with " Teller " throughout — as whose would not be 1 — ^but I could not^ help think- ing, as I stood on that same pier in the evening, alone and under the quiet stars, of how, in the far Crimea, and in a more deadly struggle,* we put our confidence, through feel- ings as honourable perhaps as mistaken, in the '' old 'uns " still ; and my thought carrying me away in that direction, I could not help contrasting Balackva Bay, and what was doing there, and on the terrible heights a few mUes away from it, with the repose and peace of that moonlit scene before me. The tide was out, and aU the haven steeped in darkness, save where some " stiU salt pool, locked in with bars of sand," glistened like a star ; a hundred masts and spars stood out against the sky ; and anchors, like huge beasts, and huUs, uncovered to their keels, loomed strangely. The sea stretched out in calm to northward without a coast, specked here and there with lights from passing vessels ; four steadfast fires, which yet I could but see at intervals, burned right in front — the four revolving lights that are set up on the shiftmg Pargate Sands. The town was not yet sleeping, but the streets had lost their stir, and from the * This paper was published in 1855. higher -wrndows flashed the gleaiOi ; the ikg-pniis and the wooden galleries look fair enotigh tinder tie mellow moon, and the qnaint dwellings climbing np the cUi^ and aH the range of terrace on the heights. Not one in all the popu- lons place need dream of war ; and yet if our ptsitions were bnt c"h;iTige'i. and Bnssian ships might sconr our sea5 as we the Enxine and the Baltic, one half an hotir of a frigaie's time would serve to lay all in mins. I felt myself forget- ting whose the fatal fanlt was. and who provoked the war. From thankfolne^ for oar own safety, I passed on to pity for onr foes. I shall hare a respect for that twopenny pier and pictures of " Pargaie by Moonlight," I am sure, for the time to come. I wonder whether people went about in yellow slippers at poor Kertch, and rafSed at bazaars, and kept vivariums ! ( 146 ) A DULL DAY ON EXMOOB. IVTE. ALBERT SMITH, in the course of his entertain- -'-'-'- ment at the Egyptian Hall, was accustomed to preface that admirable monologue of the Engineer of the Austrian Lloyd's, with this remark, " He told me the stupidest story that I ever heard iti aU my life, and now, ladies and gentle- men, I am going to tell it to you." Thus I, having passed through and mercifully got out of Thursday, the twenty- eighth day of August — the dullest day by far in the white annals of my summer life — am about to communicate that experience. The companions of my misfortune were two — Lieutenant Kidd Shinar, of her Majesty's Foot, and Olive Thompson, Esquire, of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, and, by practice, an amateur painter of landscapes. The place where we three were then and are now residing is eminently congenial to all delineators of scenery. Upon the red rocks by the sea, on little islands in the wooded streams, and upon the sides of our purple hUls, there are pitched countless tents, under the shelter of which the purveyors to the water-colour exhibitions are seen during this season at their pleasant toil. When they are not thus A Dull Day on Exmoor. 147 actively employed under canvas, they saunter loosely about the village in inteUeotual gin-punch-and-Shelley-looknig groups, with short pipes, flannel shirts, sketch-book, and moustachios. Our young ladies peep from under their slouch hats as they go by, upon the deathless vcorks of these distinguished youths with admiration, and " Oh ! I should dearly love to be a painter's wife ! " they confess at nightly toilettes to their bosom friends. The parents of these young people, however, entertain very different views upon this subject, and regard ova artists, as a general rule, as a less respectable order of painters and glaziers. Nothing but desperate ennui could have made brothers of Olive Thompson, Kidd Shinar, and me. We had each sat at our separate table in the hotel coffee-room for eleven days running — if I may apply that word to days that crawled — quite unconscious, as it seemed, of each other's existences. When the newspaper was laid down by Thomp- son, about four feet from where I was, I would ring the beU to inquire of the waiter whether anybody was using the Times. When I had done sending my fourth letter to people I did not care a penny stamp about, Kidd Shinar would summon him in like manner, and teU him to fetch a lighted candle, as though there were nothing of the kind close by. And each having heard each other's dinner orders, we would make precisely the same gastronomic inquiries upon our own account, as though we had no data to go upon. We behaved, indeed, we flattered ourselves (and without the flattery it would be impossible to keep this sort of thing up), as only English gentlemen can behave, for eleven wet days long. On the tweKth day, Kidd Shinar, of her Majesty's Foot, gave in, and commenced conversation. L 2 148 A Dull Day on Exm'oor. He made a remark wMch was brief, to the point, and not admissive of any obstructive argument. " What is to be done to-day ?" we inquired simultaneously of the waiter, after breakfast. " Well, gentlemen, I'm afraid it will be wet." " Afraid ! What do you mean by afraid 1 " said the lieutenant ; " you know it will be wet, you vagabond ! Is there anything going on besides the raiu ? " " To-day, sir— let me see, sir — the twenty-eighth ? There are races at the forest to-day, sir." " What forest ? " I inquired. " Exmoor, sir, — Exmoor Forest." " But I thought Exmoor uus a moor," I said ; " a place without a tree." " So it is," said Thompson, "that's why they call it a forest." " Yes, sir." "Well, let's go," said I. "Exmoor is very bsautiful, only a little exposed in bad weather,'' doubted Thompson. " Have you got a fly in ? " asked the Keutenant. " Not exactly a covered fly ; no, sir ; the covered flies are all out ; we've a dog-cart, sir." He looked through the back window where the vehicle in question was standing in the yard under a shed. The rain was falling upon it slowly and steadily, just as it had done at its commencement, two hundred and sixty-four hours before. " I don't see any signs of a break," said Shiuar, gloomily, "do you?" " No ; I only see a dog-cart," replied Thompson, laughing. We all laughed ; it was very excusable in people who had not smiled for a week. A Dull Day on Exmoor. 149 " Let us go," I said once more, greatly refreshed. " Let's ! " echoed the other two. We got a biH of the entertainment, the very simplicity of which — a farmers' plate, a pony race, and a donkey race — seemed to promise well ; and Thompson, who knew the ten mUes that lay between us and the festive scene, agreed to drive. I insisted upon sitting behind, because I am of a modest and retiring nature by birth, and because I saw that my two friends would thus intervene between the raia and me. Kidd Shinar had a bran new green silk umbrella of exquisite proportions, but rather deKcate make, and his get up was effeminately gorgeous, such as encases youth upon the grassy slopes of Goodwood, or in the Stand on Ascot Heath. Olive Thomp- son was but little less resplendent as a member of the western circuit taking holiday ; and as for myself, my clothes were from Bond Street, quite sufficiently unpaid for, and I also had a rather fashionable silk umbrella. We were certainly none of us equipped for that twenty-eighth day of August upon Exmoor. We had railway rugs and summer overcoats, however ; and lighting our cigars, we started hope- fully. There were seven hUls or so to be ascended before we could reach the moorland, and throughout the whole of that distance did OUve Thompson descant upon the sublimity of a scene that was entirely hidden in fog ; it was like talking of some beloved relative to an unfortunate person who has never chanced to see the individual in question. " Here's where I took my sketch of the Thread Stream,'' said he, suddenly pulling up at a cataract ; " you may remember the picture perhaps, Mr. Shinar, in the exhibition of last year 1 " 150 A Bull Day on Exmoor. " No, I didn't see it," said the lieutenant, sharply, for he was getting bored and damp. " In water-colours, I conclude," said I, smiling, so that he should not miss the joke. " No, sir," said the artist, gravely, " in oils ; it was twenty feet from the door of the octagon room, and three inches from the floor ; it was considered rather fine." " Was it ?" I said, as drUy. There was then a sUenoe for about a mUe, except for the soft sough of the rain, and for the wind which caught us from time to time round the comers of the road, and threatened to overturn the whole concern into the ravine beneath. " Look out for your umbrellas at the turn here," cried Thompson, presently. " I can't hear a word you say," roared Kidd. " Look out for your ■" The reiterated warning was lost in a sudden gust ; there was a sharp whirring noise, as if a pheasant had started up at the back of me ; and, turning round, I perceived the lieutenant's umbrella upside down and in ribbons, looking like nothing so much as that parachute which came down upon Blackheath, so contrary to poor Mr. Cocker's calcula- tions. Kidd Shinar presented a spectacle so utterly wretched, and appeared so despairingly unconscious of the rain, which was just beginning to spoil his beautifully brushed hat, that I could scarcely hold on for laughing. Thompson, who had had nothing but the drippings of this green umbrella by way of shelter (which had already turned his blue cravat yeUow), was not displeased. " I vote we go back," exclaimed Kidd Shinar. A Dull Day on Exmoor. 151 " Oh no," said the barrister (who had a waterproof), " the weather is looking better ; and it's almost as far bact as forward." The lieutenant looked at his own exquisite boots in- quiringly, and then began to whistle. " That is Badgerley yonder, if you could see it," said Thompson, after a long pause ; " have you ever heard of the Doones of Badgerley ? " I thought I was in for some anecdotes of the aristocracy ; but I was dry, and tolerably good-humoured, and I returned for answer, that I had not, and that I felt much interest in the Doones of Badgerley. " I can tell you all about the Doones of Yorkshire," said the lieutenant, sulkily, " if that's anything to do with it ' Doone was sheriff, and kept the hounds, and I've been at his place many times. He had a brother somewhere in the south." " Ah, but he didn't commit murder and eat human flesh habitually, as these Doones of Badgerley did — did he 1 " urged Thompson. " I dare say. They were a queer lot, I beheve," said Shinar, grimly. " Bless my soul ! " cried I, " it's raining very hard ; don't you think we had better go back 1 " "Don't be afraid, my dear fellow," said Thompson, laugh- ing ; " poor Doone was hung in chains on yon hillock, just seventy years ago. He had made an excursion with some members of his family to a desolate farm near Barnstaple, when nobody was at that time at home but an infant and a maid-servant in charge of it ; the latter seeing the Doones ride up, and being aware, although she did not know them. 152 A Dull Day on JExmoor. that she had nothing to offer people of their quality, left the chUd in the cradle, and got into the oven out of their way. The visitors then roamed over the establishment, selecting such things as they had occasion for, and afterwards sat down in the kitchen to the baby and onions. Mr. D., how- ever, vrith a poetic spirit that did him honour at the moment, but which afterwards caused him to be hung in chains, chose to deliver himself of the following distich, which he addressed extemporaneously to the food in question : " Child, if they asks thee who eat thee. Say thou 'twas Doones of Badgerley." " The girl in the oven, who had a talent for remembering verses, bore these words carefully in her mind, and after the departure of the Doones to their private residence yonder, she gave such information to the local constabulary that the result was the violent extinction of the whole family, with- out even an appeal to the Sir George Grey of the period." " How was it the girl was not done brown in the oven ? " asked the lieutenant, tenaciously. " It was on a Sunday,'' answered Thompson, with calm triumph, " and the farmer was very properly accustomed to confine the household to cold meat upon that day." We had now got upon the great waste of Exmoor, which is interspersed with dangerous peat bogs and morasses, and extends about ten miles every way, with scarcely a fence or a tree. The rain drove up between the low hUls in dense masses, but descended less thickly upon the higher parts of the road, from which we could see a good way round. On our left lay the little sluggish stream, not a yard across, which from this desolate birthplace flows down, through a A Dull Day on Exmoor. 153 land of plenty, of park and meadow, of orchard and corn- field, by tlie old cathedral city to the southern shore. Our attention was drawn to it on a sudden by Kidd Shinar. " My precious jingo ! " — that was the lieutenant's expres- sion — " if they ain't red deer ! " Ked deer they were, bounding one after the other over the infant Exe without any effort, and then pacing grandly on into the mist : the highest antlered of them, the stag of stags, leading by a few paces the royal herd. These red deer of Exmoor are among the few still left in England except in parks. They are hunted by a peculiar breed of dogs, fuller of tone and deeper of tongue than common, and, as some of the north coimtry sportsmen observe, by a pecu- liar breed of men. The truth is, several matters have to be observed in the pursuit of deer, which are unknown to men accustomed only to follow smaller game ; and those who don't regard such particulars must expect to be stigmatized sometimes as a pack of foolish fox-hunters, The fox-hunters we know, in their own country, take it out, in their turn, upon the hare-hunters, who are sometimes addressed as thistle-whippers. This finding the deer for ourselves, or at least going to look for it after it has been marked down, seems a far nobler method than that of turning the as- tonished animal out of the back door of an omnibus ; and the death he sometimes dies here, at bay in the dark Devon stream, or leaping in mad career down some red precipice sheer on to the sea-shore, seems fine and fitting. I happened to remark something like this to the lieutenant, whereupon he mounted his deer hobby, holding on principally by the antlers, upon the different stages and varieties of which he dUated, in the pouring rain, until I was almost ready to 154 A Dnll Day on Exmoor. drop. As a botanist is the last person whom I would ask to sympathize with me upon the delights of floriculture, so I am well purposed never again to put a sportsman upon the scent of his favourite game. We came continually upon great quantities of fine oxen, looking quite oily in the rain, and among large droves of Exmoor ponies, beautiful-eyed and eloquent featured, but unkempt and shaggy enough, and seeming piteously thin by reason of their long coats having got wet through, and cling- ing to their bodies ; one particularly pretty fellow, standing imder a little tower with no roof to it, biiilt into such a wall as the Picts and Scots might have erected, looked out upon us with an Irish complacency that made me laugh aloud. My companions, become by this time mere human sponges — Thompson's waterproof, by-the-bye, as wet on one side as the other, and looking like a great piece of blotting-paper — were quite incapable of seeing humour in anything ; nor did they take any interest iu the cost of these little nags, from five pounds up to the fancy price of fifteen, with which, as well as with much other useful information, I attempted to favour them. Arriving at last at the village, where the people seemed to be going about much as usual, and the day not to be considered by any means a wet one, we asked a crowd of men who were standing about a cottage door, which was the way to the inn 1 " This is the inn," said they, " and nothing but it." It was a four-roomed dwelling, of which one apartment was a sleeping-room, and the other three were fiUed with sixty-eight copper-coloured natives from the neighbouring iron mines. Kidd Shinar, who had fed himself in the spirit A Dull Day on Exmoor. 155 for the last five miles upon imaginary beefsteaks and. cutlets at the very least, with tarts and clotted cream to follow ; who had been wanning his hands ajid drying himself, in idea, by a blazing fire in a private room ; who had almost gone to bed, I may say, by anticipation, in a magnificent chamber, attended by obsequious waiters with continuous brandy and water, hot — Kidd Shinar groaned. OHve Thompson and I took him by the hands in pity, and led him in, and these rude men, touched by our inex- pressibly pitiable condition, made room for us around the little fire. They themselves were wet, it is true, but it was their normal state to be so, for upon Exmoor it always rains. They crowded roimd Kidd Shinar's umbrella (that was) and around mine, which was entirely paralyzed on one side, as though they were unaware of the origiaal intention of umbrellas. " Ask for a private room," said Shinar, dolefully. " With turtle and devilled whitebait," added Thompson ; "do!" But, room was made for us at the table, presently, and we sat down to cold meat and capital beer. Wherever we sat, or moved, or hung our hats or coats, or stood still, there was a puddle. Whenever we shook our heads in the nega- tive, a halo of rain-water was oast from them as from a housemaid's mop. Shinar's moustaches hung down per- pendicularly from his lip, like those of a Chinese mandarin. After these two men had dined, however, their sentiments and feelings were so greatly changed that they proceeded to contemplate walking a mUe and a half up-MU to an open moor whereupon the race-course was, and thither at last they went. As, in the first place, I had not been so cast 156 A Dull Day on Exmoor. down by misfortmie as they, so I was not now so unduly excited by cold meat and partial dryness as to venture out again unnecessarily, but remained in company with about half of our copper-coloured friends. They were as fine and intelligent-looking a set of men as I ever saw, and the one or two women among them remark- ably bright-eyed and cleanly. There was no drunkenness, to be called so, and very little quarrelling ; but I was told that there were almost as many folks in that Exmoor beer- house every day as upon this particular occasion. The village, Simonsbath, which will soon be a town, and probably one day a very large one, is at present in its infancy ; but a handsome church is buUt there, and a parsonage — the clergy- man not yet appointed ;* we will hope for a mechanics' institute and lending library in due time. The mines in its neighbourhood have been taken on trial by three of the largest companies in England, and bid fair to make a popu- lous haunt and busy mart of this barren and unproductive moor. I confess that I like the miner, and think him a very civil fellow at bottom. He won't be domineered over, and he won't stand soft soap (nor any other soap, to look at him) ; but when you have drunk out of his own quart pot, and taken a spark from his own short pipe, he is an honest, kind-hearted, sensible person, and has as large a stock of good feeUngs about him as of bad words. I, for my part, got on capitally with my neighbours on either side ; and, if I did treat them to a glass or two, it was not until I had partaken of their own hospitality first. Their conversation ran, for the most part, upon the prospects of the pits : " if ' This paper was written in 1856. A Dull Day on Exmoor. 157 tlie lode goes wedge-like, ■with the smaller end down, why then it soon comes to an end ; but, if the small end is upper- most, there's no knowing where it mayn't spread below,'' they said ; and seemed to take an interest in the matter generally, apart from its relation to themselves. They did not complain much of anything, except of " Capel," who seemed to stand in the way of everybody dreadfully. He made their work harder ; he lowered their wages ; he doubled their toil-time ; and he defrauded, at the same moment, the whole of the three companies. I took him to be some wicked overlooker, or unjust steward, for a long while, mitU I learned that Capel broke their pickaxes and shovels. When I asked who he really was, in order to expose such a ruiBian in the British press, he turned out to be some unpleasant mineral substance, which the miners are constantly coming upon, hard as the iron they are in search of, but not nearly so valuable. There was a deal of singing going on aU this time, for the most part neither spirited, humorous, nor decent ; otherwise the hour passed pleasantly enough, until my two companions returned, if indeed these miserables were they ! If they went out sponges, what marine invective can express their appearance when they got back again ? They were sodden and dripping wet as well ; they were pulp in the third stage, and might have been made into a couple of sheets of foolscap by one process of a paper-machine. They had waded, it seeined, through a marsh and quagmire up to the festive scene, and, bivouacking under a grand stand of five planks which let in the rain, and where refreshments were selling solely in the shape of great sticks of peppermint, they had witnessed a crowd of ponies start out into the blinding mist, 158 A Dull Bay on Exmoor. and not come back again. They had waited a reasonable time, allowing for the length of the course, and then re- turned, concluding that the whole of the competitors were lost. They said that it rained far worse than ever; that they thought they had caught their deaths of cold ; and that they were both going to bed immediately. The landlord replied to this, that there was but one bed in the house, and that there was a sick person in it already (a sick person above all that harmony from forty voices !) ; but that he would lend them such clothes as he had, with pleasure. A little space was cleared in front of the fire, and then and there the man of the law and the man of the sword disrobed and re-arranged themselves ; never was metamorphosis more complete. I gave up from that moment every stitch of faith about " once a gentleman always a gentleman,'' and transformed it, at once, to clothes. I doubt whether even my own appearance — which is eminently aristocratic — could have survived the change. I shook hands with the more friendly of my copper- coloured companions, and mounted once more behind the dog-cart ; the pair in front were as wet as ever in five minutes, and much more ridiculous. I, myself, was little better off, for my already paralyzed umbrella got a stroke in its fifth rib, and Thompson drove too quickly to admit of my holding it up properly, and keeping myself on my perch at the same time ; he was very savage, and so was the lieutenant. The rain and the wind increased as we topped the moor again, and the mare did not like to face them ; an angry man makes but a bad driver ; and as she swerved from side to side, then jibbed, then reared, I saw that matters were getting serious. As we were nearing a little A Dull Day on Emnoor. 159 bridge upon our way, with a steep bank and a brook upon the right, the creature became quite unmanageable ; I jumped out to run to her head, but she was too quick for me ; she gave one mad plunge to the left, and, at a sharp cut of the whip in punishment, ran the wheels back to the very parapet, stood straight up on her hind legs, and fell over — down the height, backward — dog-cart and all. I never expected to see either of my companions alive again, but they fell clear of the vehicle, one on each side of the ditch, and sprang to their feet at once. " My precious jingo ! " exclaimed the lieutenant, not without a touch of gratitude in his tone. "It was my fault," said' Thompson. The mare was all this time committing the most deter- mined suicide with her head under water in a narrow ditch ; the shafts were broken, but she was sufficiently bound to the cart — poor thing — for it to prevent her rising. We cut her loose and got her up unhurt ; that was the sole thing, except our personal safety, to congratulate ourselves upon. The rain was getting a trifle worse, the wind was certainly more violent, we were five miles distant from any house — save that of Mr. Doone's of Badgerley — upon Exmoor, and it was getting dark. I have been present during the worst part — the longest half, that is — of a meeting at Exeter HaU. I have heard five Protectionist speakers — one down and the other come on — at an agricultural banquet. I have listened to a Latin declamation at the University, from the lips of a college prizeman. I have heard the same story, for the fourth time, at mess. I was once at a convocation of the Clergy of ; but no experience of dreariness and weariness that I can 160 A Dull Day on E:rmoor. call to mind, endures comparison with our walk home from Exmoor. The mare fell lame, and kept limping and slipping behind us, exciting our wrath and wounding our sympathies at the same time. The men fell lame — Thompson and Shinar — the landlord's shoes being much too big for them and full of bumps, and presently Shinar lost one of his altogether. Our all having to poke about for that shoe in the wind and the rain, and the mud, and the half-darkness, was a wretched incident ; and when he had found it, big as it was, he couldn't get it on again. None of us spoke, except once ; then Thompson, who was much the biggest of the three, inquired, in an awful kind of murdering voice, which of us had first proposed going to these Exmoor Races ? The ravine was on one side of me, with a sheer precipice of fifty feet, and I hastened to lay it all upon the waiter. " Then I'll kill that waiter," said Thompson, solemnly. " And so wUl I," added Lieutenant Shinar. But neither of them did it, and we wound up that dismal day with a jovial evening, throughout which the spared waiter waited wonderfully. THINGS. ( 163 ) OUB JERUSALEM PONY. IS TWO POETIO>-S. Portion I. — Sow the Promise was Extorted. T A!M a medical man, residing, as my -wife informs her -*- relatives in the South, "in the neighbourhood of" Edinburgh ; but iu poiat of fact we are in it, the nearest villa-residences beiug thirty streets off at the very least. Our back-green, however, is commodious, and boasts of various fancy animals (priucipally rabbits) and poultry ; the former of which I use for scientific experiments ; the latter for my table only, although it has been hiuted by the ma- licious that they are made to fulfil double duty. Looking out upon this pleasant expanse of wood and verdure, with its contented denizens, sleeping, or eating, or going through the various interesting processes which result from chemical or chinu'gical experiment, I was wont not only to feel the monarch to whom !Mr. A. Selkirk compares himself in his somewhat egotistical poem, but to envy no man his ancestral acres, however wide-spreading ; his deer-forests, however fully stocked. I had risen in my profession, not by stand- ing on my own dignity, as the manner of some is, but by 164 Our Jerusalem Pony. hard work, and, as I flattered myself, usefulness. I was not made dizzy by my elevation, since it had been gradual ; and I reflected with satisfaction, that even if I should be in danger of slipping backwards, I possessed enough of balance to keep me right in that best of makeweights — a balance ki my banker's books. When I add that, in addition to these various subjects of congratulation, on a certain evening in July last, I had a mild Havannah in my mouth, and a pair of slippers just at the extremity of my toes, it wiU be under- stood by the married portion of my male readers that I was in a disposition peculiarly adapted for subjugation by the female. Leonora, the wife of my bosom for several years, and therefore but too well aware of her opportunities in this respect, was standing behind me, running her fingers through what she considers to be my curls, and dilating pleasantly upon my professional talents and success. " Alfy," said she, coaxingly, after she had thus laid down the raUs, as she thought, for the idea to slip dreamily into my mind, " now you are getting on so well, my love, don't you think that you ought to buy a brougham ? " " Certainly, if you wish it, my dear," returned I, pretend- ing to misunderstand her, and the broad aegis of domestic economy at once placing itself between my pockets and this extravagant proposition ; " buy half-a-dozen brooms if they are necessary, by aU means, sweetest ; but I thought we stocked the house when I moved, at your request, from our flat into this main-door." This shell had such a quantity of rusty nails in it in the form of reminiscence and reminder, that I imagined it would have silenced the enemy's fire altogether ; but no ; that " still small voice " which is never stiU — the voice of one's Our JerusaUm Pony. 1 1)5 wife — again attacked me with the quiet persistence which is its most fatal attribute. " I meant a carriage, love — a brough-am : a one-horse brougham would be quite enough." " Why not say Mr. Axle's prize ' drag' at oncel" replied I, laughing, and lighting another cigar : " I'U send round Betsy in the morning, with my compliments, and I'll buy it of him at his own figure." " It would very much increase your practice," remarked Leonora, musingly ; " there's nothing like a carriage for a medical man, you may depend upon that; it takes him where skill and talent, even such as yours, Alfy, would never carry him." " Yes, love ; it sometimes takes him to prison," remarked I, assentmgly. A slight pause here took place, during which I only caught one word of my Leonora's, and even that was not intended for me ; it sounded exceedingly like " Fiddle- stick." When she recommenced, it was in a graver and less playful tone ; Marshal Gyulai superseded, and Marshal Hess in command, with a new set of tactics. " Do you know how much you spend in the course of the year in cabs, Alfred ? Nothing ! Oh, don't you tell me naughty fibs ; you men never can keep any account. What do you say, dear ? I can't quite catch what you are saying : You walk ! Oh, you wicked man, you don't walk from ten to five every day, I'm sure ! " " My love," returned I, kissing her, " my remark was that there is such a thing as a 'bus." " Very well, Alfred," observed Leonora with a sigh, and as though the discussion was closed ; " all I have to say is this, that the chdd's ankles are going." 166 Our Jerusalem Pony. " Going ! " ejaculated I, with unaffected surprise ; " and where are they going to ? " " If the child's being lame for life is a joke, Alfred — as everything seems, indeed, to be a joke to you — it's all well and good, and it doesn't signify." In that wonderful alembic with which married females are endowed by too bountiful Nature, Leonora distUled a couple of tears, and let them fall. " He's got the perambulator," observed I, with that cal- lousness to shame which is the husband's only and very inadequate defence, the unwarranted mackintosh in which he vainly wraps himself from the watery foe ; "he can keep his ankles from going in that, Leonora, surely." " Betsy won't push it," sobbed my wife ; " she said she'd see the Htde angel fur-fur-further first. Its only use now is to hold the umbrellas in the lobby." " Then we must turn over a new leaf, and get a page," returned I, pleasantly. "You've promised me him a long time," returned the unrelenting Leonora ; " but I wouldn't trust that child to be butted about by a page — no, not for miQions." " I don't think so large a temptation wUl ever be thrown in your way, my love," remai-ked I, drily ; " say ' thousands.' But I teD you what I wiU do, Lenny ; I'll get a Jerusalem pony for him." " A pony," cried she, clapping her hands and shutting up her lachrymal ducts, as if by magic ; " oh, that'll be de- licious." "A Jerusalem -poBj," observed I again, with emphasis, and unwilling that an expectation should be aroused of some Arab steed ; " it will only be a Jerusalem." Our Jerusalem Pony. 167 " I don't care whether it comes from Jerusalem or not," replied she, in evident ignorance that the expression was euphuistic for a donkey ; " I'd jiist as soon have it from there as from Wales or Shetland." " Ha," said I ; for I had nothing else to say, since I had not the heart, nor indeed the courage, to undeceive her. "And, Alfy, darhng," observed she, as she trippingly left the room to communicate this piece of news to her off- spring, " do please, if you possibly can, let it be a piebald." " Very well, my love ; I will, if I possibly can," returned I ; " but I confess I do not think it very likely." Portion II. — How the Promise was Kept. On a certain Saturday evening, some time after this con- versation, I chanced to be at a small village in the neigh- bourhood of Edinburgh, which forms a sort of watering- place to that metropolis — that is to say, which boasts of a pier, a wheel-of-fortune, a few bathing-machines, and a stud of Jerusalem ponies ; and on one of those animals I set my eye and my mind. I made inquiry concerning its merits of the proprietor, who, without giving himself an instant's breath for a comma, and far less for consideration of the facts, deposed — that it was middle-aged, steady, and well conducted, would carry a lady side-ways, didn't know how to startle. Lie down ? Bless you, never. A child might ride him arhunting ; while as for kicking It may have been that the philosophic beast was annoyed by so much flattery ; it may have been that Fate herself 168 Our Jenisalem Pony. interposed to save my precious infant ; or it may have been a gadfly ; but certain it is that at the word " kicking," that donkey began a pas de deux with its hind-legs, the duration and violence of which I never before saw equalled. " It's only his play " began the hypocritical proprietor. I con- gealed the remainder of his sentence by a glance of incredu- lous scorn, and requested to see some smaller specimens ; infant donkeys, who had left off Hulk-diet, but had not yet been taught vicious tricks. Had he any such that he could lay his hand upon his heart and recommend to the father of a young family 1 Had he any under a year old? The change that came over this garrulous person upon his discovering with whom he had to deal was most remarkable ; from spurious enthusiasm, he sank into downright obstinacy, while he wrangled and disputed with aU the tenacity of an ancient sophist. " Young donkeys ? Of course, he had young donkeys ; soores^hundreds. Under one year old ? Certainly not. How could he have ? Nothing was younger than one ? How could it be?" The low cunning which overspread the countenance of this dealer in Jerusalem ponies would have shed another halo round any member of the Old Bailey Bar. I turned away in disgust, and should have departed donkeyless, but that a Deus ex machina — a feUow belonging to the bathing-machines — who seemed to know this man and his humour, intervened, and solved the difiiculty. He ex- plained to him, with an elaborate patience, which should earn him the lately vacated place in the College of Pre- ceptors, that there was a smaller measure of time than a Our Jerusalem Pony. 169 year, and that a Jerusalem pony might lie any number of months old short of a twelvemonth. I accompanied these two to the donkey emporium, pur- chased my young ass for ten shillings, hired a boy to lead it home by a straw-halter, and imagined the affair to be con- cluded. I did not, at that time, estimate the duties of the proprietor of a Jerusalem pony so highly as the privileges. In the first place, in addition to the boy that was hired for money, there were about three-and-twenty others who accom- panied us out of the village, for the fun of the thing ; of these, two took their posts, like a guard of honour, on either side of the creature, and encouraged him with unintelligible cries ; a fourth established himself immediately in his rear, and took every opportunity of my eye being diverted from my property to twist its perfectly straight and rather attenu- ated taU. The rest followed in a disorderly manner at a little distance, addressing either myself or the animal — for, having the misfortune to be an Englishman, I am unac- quainted with the Scotch language in its native purity — as "the cuddy,'' and taunting me with social pride in not at once getting up on the quadruped's back and riding home. These myrmidons deserted us in the course of the journey, but only to be replaced, as we reached Edinburgh, by a much more formidable following. When myself and prize reached our residence in Paradise Kow, about eleven o'clock P.M., he had, in addition to his four personal attendants, who had remained faithful, a " tail " of about one hundred people ; including two policemen and three or four highly respectable persons who wanted to go the other way, but who were compelled to follow the stream and accompany us. 170 Our Jerusalem Pony. I had forgotten, when I made my purchase, that our hack- green was, so to speak, dowu-stjiirs, and only approachable by the area steps and through the kitchen passage ; but often during the course of my triumplial march this difficulty had presented itself to my procrastinating mind, and it had now to be solved : " How were we to get the Jerusalem pony into his imcomatable paddock ? " Dearest Leonora was gone to bed ; that was the only bright side the picture at present afforded me. If her reproaches upon the animal not being a piebald had been added to my other annoyances at that moment, I verUy believe that I should have given the Jerusalem pony away. " Come," cried the policeman, as we vainly urged the animal to descend into his future residence, " this won't do, you know ; you must move on, sir ; you mustn't be ob- structing the street." " Obstructing your grandmother," cried I, pale with passion at the idea of the law interfering to oppress what it was intended to protect ; " is there not room in Paradise Row for this poor young creature, as well as myself ? Move on, indeed ! that is the very thing I want to do ! A 1, take the Jerusalem pony's fore-legs ; A 2, take his hind-quarters, and be very careful ; and carry him down those steps." " Hooray ! " shouted the crowd, in a state of wild excite- ment, and delighted with my commanding air. I was never in my life in the position of a public and popular character before, but I can now well understand the feelings which prompt the demagogue. I saw the respectable inhabitants of Paradise Eow regarding me from their Saturday-niglit windows, it is true, and I knew that I was losing my prac- tice as a medical man ; but, on the other hand, the cheering Our Jerusalem Pony. 171 rang in my ears like a trumpet voice, and I felt that what- ever happened, I was the favourite of the People. " Take him down," cried I, in a voice of thunder ; " you had better take him down, when I tell you." " Hooray ! " shouted the crowd ; " take him down, or down with the Peelers." The policemen looked at me, looked at the assembled thousands — for the street was filled by this time from end to end, and surged into the adjoining squares — looked at one another, and then proceeded to obey me without a mur- mur. They took up— they had never taken up such a customer before — the astonished quadruped in the manner I had suggested, and carried him safe and sound down the area steps. While this apparently funereal procession was in progress, a gentleman stepped forward and addressed me with a very excited demeanour : " Excuse me, sir ; I have but just come, and am unacquainted with the circumstances. You are a medical man, I see ; I am connected with the press, sir. "What is the matter, sir 1 What has happened 1 Who is it, sir ? Is it a lady or a gentleman, and are they dead, or only insensible 2 " " He is a gentleman, and at present speechless," returned I, hurriedly, as I accompanied the sufferer in question into the house. Oh, the relief of mind and body when I saw that Jeru- salem pony deposited safely in our back-green ! the grati- tude with which I overwhelmed those guardians of public safety ! the recklessness of expense with which I opened bottle after bottle of superior beer for their refreshment ! I woke Leonora, to recount to her all that I had done, 172 Our Jerusalem Pony. and had some diifioulty to prevent her rushing to the window to look at the new arrival. " I don't even know what a Jerusalem pony is," urged she ; " I shall be lying awake, and trying to picture what unusual " At this juncture, her doubts were set at rest for ever by the most tremendous braying that ever issued from the mouth of jackass since the days of Balaam ; it was exactly beneath our bedroom window, and sounded like a brass band composed of ophicleides out of repair. " Why, it's only a dreadful donkey, Alfred," cried Leonora, with just indignation. " It's forty donkeys," cried I, penitently, and stopping my ears. Never, indeed, shall I forget that noise, which seems even now to be ringing through the chambers of memory. "We retired to rest, however — ^that is to say, we lay down and listened. Sometimes we would nourish a faint hope that all was over, that the Jerusalem pony would himself require the blessings of sleep, and become quiet ; and some- times the real horrors of our situation could not be dispelled by any such baseless fancy. I think the creature must have been composing a coronach or lament for his absent mother or other relatives ; for after very short pauses, such as might have been given by any donkey to composition, he would burst forth with a torrent of discordant wailing of about fourteen lines in length — as far as we could judge — and end- ing in an Alexandrine. It was horrible from the first, and rapidly grew to be unbearable. At 2.30 a.m. I put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and taking down the rope from one of the window-curtains, I sallied forth into the ( ■'»)■ Ji-nixalnn Pony. 173 liack-s'ivon. Sleep had of eonree been Ixuiisliod from oaoit other iiihabitjmt of Paradiso Row as well as from om-solves ; a score of Immaai heads reirarded me fixim far and near, from tii^it Hat to attie, with interest and satisfaction. Thoy be- lieved,, in tlieii- foolish and reveugefiil hearts, I knew, that 1 ■«•!« abont to Iuiiki the JerusjUem pony. I wtis not going to do am-tliing of the kind. I appiwvehed the animal, nttering sounds such as. in the mouths of his late attendants, I had oViserved to give him pleasure ; but I miglu just as well have read aloud tlie Act for Preveutiou of Ci-uelty to Animals. He turned away ; he fled ; he even lifted up his heels against me. Pisgiistid, but not dispirited by this conduct, I pursued the fl.TOg beast with persevering vigour, despite the tlvittering of my lengthy g-aruicnt, and the increasing coolness of my unpi-o- tectM legs. I e.iught him; I tied up his jaws — seeiu-ely, as I thought— with the curtain-rope ; and retired amid murmm:s of applause to my aixutnient, leaving him speech- less and discomfited. Bt'ttcv. fiir better would it have been had I never at- tempted this ! The great harmonies of Nature are not to be hushed by the rude hands of Man. Scavccly had my head touched the pillow, when the bray, hsilf-stifled, pitifid, more harassing beyond expression than before, recommenced with hideous pertinacity, and increivsed in vohmie with every note. Presently the ivpe gave way, and the full tide of song bm-st forth jigain from tliat Jerusalem pony as the peut-up waters from an inetiectuivl dam : while the cock, imagining, no duibt, that it -n-jis dawn, and accusing itself of ovei^slecping, and permitting another creature to be the first t-o salute the sim, added its shriU tribute to the din. 174 Our Jerusalem Pony. " I'll cut that donkey's throat," cried I, leaping out of bed, and fumbling for a razor ; " the organ is situated so low down his larynx, that nothing less will stop him." " Give him chloroform," cried Leonora, sarcastically ; " you're so fond of that." This remark, intended to wound my professional feelings, was, as sometimes happens, the very best advice that could be given to me. I snatched up an enormous phial of that divine essence, and again rushed down to the back-green to silence the domestic enemy. This time, I conquered ; in fifteen minutes — it must be confessed, after tremendous exertion — I was standing in my dressing-gown and slippers upon that prostrate Jerusalem pony like another Earey ; a victim to science, he reposed like a sleeping infant who has had enough of his bottle. Tills victory, achieved in the sight of respectable though sleepless myriads, has been quite an advertisement to me. My practice is increasing, and the child's ankles are being rapidly strengthened. A breach knocked through the wall of our back-green permits the immediate cause of this pros- perity to retire, after his daily labours, to a pasture at a considerable distance. Leonora is more than molhfied. She has withdrawn the hasty expression once made use of, about something being no more like another thing than a horse- chesnut is like a chesnut-horse, and confesses that a Jeru- salem pony is a very good pony after all. Her sole regret now is that he is not a piebald. 175 ) TO PERSONS ABOUT TO FUBNISR. rriHE above heading will be familiar to many readers as -^ having met their eye in the shops of ironmongers, up- holsterers, and carpet-warehousemen ; and they that are bachelors, or who live in furnished lodgings, have doubtless been struck by the apparent solemnity of the address. It is indeed calculated to arrest the attention, and give pause to the most careless and unreflecting. It has a strong family resemblance to the title-page of a tract. It awakens thoughts upon ways and means, and the desirableness of settling in life, in all those who will soon be going dovra that hill of wliich we read in the ballad of John Anderson — for " set^ tling," as on board ship, not uncommonly precedes but by a very little our " going down." But, with whatever serious images the expression " To Persons about to Furnish " sup- plies the fancy, they must fall far short of the seriousness of the Furnishing itsett The man who has had no practical experience of this matter is as yet imperfectly developed. He has not shared the common lot, he is not a man like his fellow^, if he dies unfurnished. The same, too, may be said, although in a less degree, of one who furnishes, being unmarried. 176 To Persons about to Furnish. " A bachelor employed in such an undertaking," as I was observing to one of my maiden aunts but yesterday, " is an " I have not a doubt of it," replied she, decisively. " Yes," added I, delighted to meet the views of the old lady (who is funded), " he is quite a liLsus '' " Ay," interrupted my aunt, " you may say that. I never knew any weU-oonducted man who set about Furnishrug without a wife to help bim ; you may depend upon it some female must have a hand in it." I had been misunderstood in what I was about to observe, but I had elicited a valuable expression of opinion. AU women believe that Furnishing is one of their peculiar mis- sions ; an occupation for which, as for poking the fire and writing letters, the feminine mind is particularly qualified ; and they go about it with a hideous joy. It is perhaps the only opportunity in their lives of spending money on a large scale ; of bestowing valuable patronage ; and of fuUy grati- fying their love of bargains. With men, on the other hand, Furnishing is often only another name for Confusion, Inter- ruption, Debt, Duns, Indigestion, and the Queen's Bench. Of course, the last synonym is a very unpleasant one, but there is this advantage about it : it does at least end the matter. An execution is put into the house, and all the things so laboriously accumulated are sold at their just value — about a third of what we owe for them. Otherwise, to Furnishing there is no end. There is always " a charming bookcase I saw in a shop-window in Oxford Street, wonder- fully cheap, my dear, and which will just fit into that empty corner in the boudoir.'' Mrs. Turtle Dove is always finding somethmg (and bringing it home with her) just to fit a To Persons about to Furnish. 177 corner. This takes place, however, when the great avalanche of ottomans and tahles, of consoles (though why they are called by that name, I can't imagine) and prie-dieux is over, . and when the dropping fire of nick-nacks — " such as every- body must have, my love, about a house " — has permanently set in. During the former period, not only has Mr. Turtle Dove to pay enormous prices for vast pieces of mahogany — • beds as big as ordinary ships, and wardrobes of the size of aviaries — but he is compelled to go about with his consort, and take an unwilling part in his own ruin. " Has my own pet," observes she at the breatfast-table, " got anything very particular to do this morning ? " " Nothing particular," replies Mr. Dove, with studied carelessness. " I have, of course, to go to the ofiice as usual. Why is it that you ask such questions, my dear ? " " Oh, then, we'H put it off till to-morrow," returns the lady. " Put what off ? " inquires the gentleman, tartly. '' I can do anything to-day as well as to-morrow. They are both equally inconvenient." " There's a darling," exclaims Mrs. Turtle Dove ; " Iknew he would. I want you to come and look at some stair-carpets, my own, that's all." " I have not the slightest desire to look at stair-carpets : pray, please yourself, Mrs. Dove." " Well, you see, it's such a responsibility, my dear. I hardly think you would like me to get the seven-and-six- penny one — which is, moreover, certainly the prettiest." " Yes, my dear, you may get that, and have done with it. Now, please to give me my other cup of tea, for the 'bus will be passing directly. I do not consider seven and sixpence 178 To Persons about to Furnish. dear for a stair-carpet — although, indeed, it is quite enough money.'' " It is seven and sixpence a yard, my love," exclaims Mrs. Turtle Dove ; " and thirty-two yards at seven and six , Where are my tables ? " " Twelve pounds for a stair-carpet, Mrs. Dove — why, you must be a lunatic ! Where do you suppose I am to get the money from ? " " Well, my dear, I am sure I don't know. I never did understand money matters ; but the carpet man is so civil that I am sure he would never want to be paid unless it was quite convenient. Besides, you know, we owe him already for the drawing-room and the li " " There now, you've spilt the tea, Charles ; that's what comes of using bad language ; and the washing of a table- cloth comes to something in London, let me tell you ; and yet to grudge me a single morning to come and help me choose a car — car — car " " There, my dear, J'U come with you ; only, for Heaven's sake, don't begin to cry. I suppose you won't mind coming down in the 'bus ? " " The 'bus, my love ? Well, really, I don't much like a 'bus. And when one is going out Fiirnishing, in particular, it does not look very well, does it, to go in a 'bus ? The shopmen wiU very naturally say ; ' Oh, those people can't have very much money to spare ; we must look sharp after them.' Now, I think, on the contrary, if we had a brougham There, don't get in a passion, Mr. Dove ; a cab, if you hke, then — anything to oblige you. Let us go in a cab together — it is always a pleasure to drive about with you, my dear." To Persons about to Furnish. 179 Mr. and Mrs. Turtle Dove arrive at the carpet vrare- house. Mrs. D. spends two hours and a half in seeing every bale in the establishment rolled out before her, and in , employing every description of shopmen. Mr. Dove is dazed with the colours, and finally sits down, collapsed, on a heap of carpet. "Now, which have you set your affections npon, Mr. Dove, eh ? " observes the lady sharply, and as if to reprove him for his lassitude. Mr. Dove has no definite recollection of any pattern ex- cept the one which he saw first, and he therefore feebly proclaims his preference for that above aU others. " Now, that is just because it's cheap, Mt. Dove. That is so Uke you. Do you know that that is made by steam- power, and not by hand-loom, and wouldn't last a week ? Am I not right, Mr. Kidderminster ? " The obsequious Kidderminster hastens to corroborate this statement. " The cheapest carpet," observes he to Mr. Turtle Dove, pityingly, as though that gentleman were an idiot, " is not always the best, sir." " There, do you hear that, Mr. Dove ? Now, to my mind, this red and white, and this green one, are the two best suited for our purpose." " You will find them admirable wear, madam, and will never repent your choice," remarks Mr. Kidderminster me- chanically, and as though he were repeating the responses in church. " And now, Mr. Dove, which of the two shall it be ? What say you?" " Oh, the red and white," cries he despairingly, and crush- ing his hat on for departure. N 2 180 To Persons about to Furnish " Didn't I think so ? " exclaims Ms better half trium- phantly. "Ah, what would you do without me, my dear? You never thought of the cover ! " " Cover ! " returns Mr. D., stung to life hy the contemptu- ous expression upon the shopman's countenance — " what cover ? " " Why, the holland cover which every stair-carpet must have on when people are not expected, my love. Don't you see that the white hoUand would not contrast with the edg- ing of the carpet you have chosen ? It must, therefore, be the green carpet. And now, Mr. Kidderminster, please to show us your patterns of hoUands." This is only one example of the duplicate system that prevails in Furnishing, but I could have brought forward hundreds. You must get the very best things — for " depend upon it that the best things are always the cheapest in the end, my love " — and then you must get cases to cover them up with. Damask chairs, and chintz to hide the damask ; mahogany tables, and covers to preserve the mahogany ; Turkey carpets, and druggets to save the carpets. Nay, even then, Mr. Turtle Dove is not always permitted to make use of his furniture. " Goodness gracious, my dear Charles, do, pray, put a newspaper under your feet, before you lie down upon that chintz sofa ; " and when Charles has done so with infinite trouble, or, at aU events, to the loss of all luxurious sensa- tion of immediate repose, she comes and lays a horrible net imder his head, called an antimacassar, which prints its pattern off upon whichever cheek has the misfortune to rest upon it. It would be treason to divulge how often Mr. Turtle Dove, To Persons about to Furnish. 181 in secret, sighs, I do not say for the turn-up bedstead of Baohelordom, but for the less gorgeous sofa of early married life, when he hved in lodgings, and might do as he liked with the hired furniture. While the two Turtle Doves are thus engaged in lining their nest, it is hard upon the male bird that he never obtains the shghtest credit for his share of the performance. He is compelled to accompany Mrs. D., in order that she may commit her extravagances under his extorted sanction, but she acts in reality independently of him. She carries him about with her rather as a subjugated prince than as a sovereign with the right of Veto. As in the carpet business, so in every other transaction, she allies herself with the shopmen against her liege lord and master. Mahogany, say they, and she agrees with them, is, on the whole, cheaper than plain deal, even for the nursery. "Deal lasts no time, you hear, my love. Now, you wouldn't wish me to be buying all these things again, Charles, in a couple of years, would you ? " To which, with a ghastly smile, Mr. Dove replies he certainly should not. At the same time, Mrs. Dove takes much credit to herself in that she does not furnish the attic chambers with ward- robes in carved oak, " as some wives would, and think nothing of it ; " and if she rejects a set of drawing-room curtains that would suit a duchess, for some becoming the reception-room of a banker's wife, she prides herself upon hitting the Golden Mean. Mr. Turtle Dove is not permitted to go Furnishing by himself, for the lady says he is sure to be imposed upon ; but at the same time she taunts him upon his inactivity. " Mr. Turtle Dove has bought nothing but the hall table 182 To Persons about to Furnish. and chairs," says she, " and the table has no drawer in it. Fancy a hall table without any drawer ! Poor dear Charles, he means well, bless him : but as to Furnishing — why the very table doesn't stand straight, and one of the chairs is quite rickety." Furnishing, as I have already observed, can never be said to end, but its oppression is most seriously felt during the first six months of the process. Sleep during that period is cut short at untimely hours by people who want to measure the double wash-handstand for an article to put between it and the wall " to save the paper ; " or who are desirous to " match " the soap-dish. Dinner, in any high sense, is not to be got, because one has to jump up half-a-dozen times during its performance to witness in tradesmen's books that such and such things have been delivered, of the very nature and existence of which Mr. Turtle Dove has never heard. Upon one occasion, an implement, carried with difficulty by two persons, and resembling the pendulum of a gigantic clock, arrived at his house, in connection with which he signed a memorandum that the Salamander had been re- ceived. He naturally thought they had mistaken his resi- dence for the Zoological Gardens. But even when the more indispensable articles have arrived, Mrs. Turtle Dove and her olive-branches are con- tinually coming home with " something towards the drawing- room," which " she could not resist," and which our little Harriet Frances, with an intelligence beyond her years — and the same disregard to cost which distinguishes her beloved mother — has espied in a shop window. Mrs. Turtle Dove's actual Furnishing excursions — I mean those visits which she makes with the express purpose and malice prepense, of To Persons about to Furnish. 183 " getting things " — will sometimes extend over a twelve- month, but after that period she does think it necessary* to make some kind of apology. " I should not have gone, my dear — for nothing I hate so much as to run you into unnecessary expenses — I should not have gone furnishiug any more, had it not been for that gap on the drawing-room mantelpiece, between the lustre and the clock on the left-hand side ; the one on the right my uncle Henry filled up with that pretty Undine ; and I thought that it would be only common civility — don't you think so, love ? — after his great kindness, to get a companion for it." " And do you mean to say, Mrs. Turtle Dove, that you have been from here to Kegent Street after a superfluous china ornament ? " " Yes, indeed, my dear ; and I think you will say I have been very successful. Here it is — a sea-nymph vrith her sheU. Isn't it lovely ? " " What did you give for it, Mrs. Turtle Dove 1 " " Well, now, you guess ? — it was quite a bargain. Look at the shell alone — why, you can scarcely tell it from a real one." " You could have got a real one of that kind for three- pence or fourpence, so I hope that the imitation one was cheaper." " Threepence or fourpence ! I am astonished at you, Charles. But consider the sea-nymph. Is it not beautifully chaste?" " I da,resay she has her virtues ; but I want to know how much you gave for her, Mrs. Turtle Dove ? " " Well, I gave thirty shillings, my love. Think of that ! 184 To Persons about to Furnish. The man wanted thirty shillings and sixpence ; only I beat hiln down." " And what did you give for cabs 1 " " Well, dearest, I wanted to be economical, so I took the cab by the hour, and — being so anxious to please my Charley — I was some time choosing it, so that it took two hours altogether.'' " Humph ! then it cost you foirr shillings, did it ? " " Yes, darling, only these cabmen are such cheats. You know, I was anxious to get home, love, so I said, ' You won't be long, will you 1 ' when I got in ; and just because of that he charged me two shiUings extra, saying that I had told him to drive fast." " Very good, Mrs. Turtle Dove. Then you gave him six shiUings, did you ? " " Well, love, I was obliged to do so, you see. But isn't it chaste ? " " Thirty shillings for the superfluous china ornament, and six shillings for fetching it ! That is to say, twenty per cent, upon your unnecessary purchase, Mrs. Turtle Dove. You certainly are a pattern of economy. Now, how do you think that would look upon a mantelpiece in the Queen's Bench ? No, it's no use kissing me, Mrs. Turtle Dove ; and I am not ' a dear darling old fidget about money-matters,' nor anything of the sort." " WeU, I was almost afraid you would be angry about it, Mr. Turtle Dove. But you must allow it's beautifully chaste." Finally, when the Furnishing is reaUy done, Mr. Turtle Dove wiU. find that he is by no means " out of the wood " even then. The windows must not be opened, because the To Persons about to Furnish. 165 dnst mil get in upon the carpet ; the shutters must be closed, lest the sun should have a deleterious effect upon the curtains ; so that not only is the atmosphere of his residence a little close, but he partakes of breakfast and luncheon in total obscurity. Moreover, but too often ilrs. Turtle Dove becomes a prey to the designing. Upon one occasion, when Mr. D. returns from his office, he finds that lady in a state of uncommon exhilaration. She leads him up to a sculptured leaf upon the new dining sideboard, and exclaims triumphantly : " And now, my dear, what do you think of that i " " It's a leaf," says he ; '" but I am sure I don't know what lea£" •' But the polish — ^look at the polish, love. Do you think that either oil or varnish could have given that ? " "Perhaps not, my dear; but neither would they have left such a very unpleasant smelL" " It is rather strong," she admits, " but the professor assured me that it will go oil after a day or two." '■ The professor ! What professor ? " " Professor Shinee, of St. Petersburg. He speaks English like a native. He is the sole inventor of the — I forget the name — but this is one of his cases of bottles. You save so much by buying a quantity at a time. He can't afford, poor fellow, to take out a patent or set up a shop. He goes about with nothing in the world but a case of bottles, a handkerchief on his left arm, and a little bit of flanneL'.' " '^Vhat ! nothing else on?'" asks ilr. Turtle Dove. " He was dressed, of course, my dear, but even that inadequately. I particularly observed an absence of shirt- 186 To Persons about to Furnish. collar. But only think of that case of bottles for eight shillings ! " "Good Heavens," exclaims Mr. Turtle Dore, "eight shillings — eight ! " " Ah ! I thought you would he astonished. Didn't I say so, Harriet Frances ? Isn't it cheap 1 " " I tell you what," returns Mr. Turtle Dove, gravely, " it is not only not cheap, and very dear, but it is also excessively dangerous. No, I don't mean explosive, madam — although it may be that, for all I know — but burglarious. That man came for the spoons, and for the forks, and for the silk umbrellas. Is there nothing missing? Very likely not, but there will be. He has taken away the plan of the house in his head. All the other houses in the Crescent are the fac-similes of our own. By indiscreetly admitting that vagabond, you have not only exposed yourself and family to robbery and murder, but imperilled the safety of seven-and- fifty respectable householders." Whether the evil prophecy of Mr. Turtle Dove ever comes to pass or not, its fulfilment is always being anti- cipated ; and in the meantime the smell of the patent indestructible polish continues unabated. To pursue its application under such circumstances is out of the question. Therefore the leaf to which it was applied glitters in solitary splendour, causing every incautious beholder to inquire why the rest of the sideboaid looks so duU. There are many incidental unpleasantries connected with this painful subject, but I confine myself to those which mv^t happen, more or less, to all " persons about to furnish." For every ten persons, for instance, before whom a trades- man bows in silent gratitude as they leave his establishment. To Persons about to Furnish. 187 after giving a furnishing order, there are ninety who have to submit to the following mdignity : — "I beg your pardon, sir," — for he always addresses the male Dove upon the question of finance, — " but in the case of strangers, we generally require a reference.'' Nay, happy may that stranger consider himself, to whom, when he has replied, with offended dignity, " Mr. Jones, of Belgravia," a second and still more inquisitive observation shall not be presented. " Thank you, sir, but we do not know Mr. Jones. Could you be so kind as to favour us with the address of your solicitor ? " Have I exaggerated or set down aught in malice upon this dread subject? I appeal to the Paterfamiliases of England ; they will bear me out in all things, I'm sure, and even add that I have understated the case. Oh ! ye that are yet bachelors, look before you leap into the gulf of matrimony, look narrowly for a woman that has got a furnished house — it is better than much fine gold. And you, ye married men, who live in lodgings, and are inclined to find fault because the furniture is a little dirty or rickety, beware — beware, and rather suffer those small ills ye have, than fly to others that ye know not of. Better is a horse- hair sofa and a full-length attitude, than much damask and anti-macassars therewith. Your curtains may be indifferent, but then they will stand tobacco-smoke. What has been viciously observed by Mr. Punch in reference to matrimony, that I repeat, in all benevolence, with respect to this matter, " To persons about to furnish — Don't'' ( 188 ) PIGNI08. f 1 1HIS is not a pretty word Toy any means, nor, so far as -*- I know, a very expressive one ; and yet, what pleasant memories it awakens ! As I never can see a hearse, with red-nosed driver, and all the paraphernalia of simulated sorrow — sadder to think upon than even that heavy vacant burden within — without my mind reverting at once to the thoughtless merry time when I was a school-boy, and managed to be present at a certain Derby, by paying half-a-orown for the privilege of clinging to a funeral plume ; as I never smell a herring, fresh or otherwise, but the waving woods of In- verary, and the long blue waters of Loch Fyne, pass before me like a dissolving view, with all their summer prime of youth and pleasure ; so, at this word picnic, formed of two ill-assorted monosyllables, I hear the distant murmur of the seas, and the hurry of shadowy rivers, and the trumpets of the bees upon moorlands, and the whisper of autumn woods, with the voices and the laughter of those I love, ringing, year behind year, through all. There are but few touchstones of our poor human hearts which can elicit any past remem- brance wholly without pain ; but I think this simple word, that is born of pleasure, and nicknamed in drollery, is one : Picnics. 189 poverty, iU-humour, illness, all things that defonn or embitter our existences, are forgotten in. the sound. Care, it is said, killed a cat ; but I never heard of its having hurt a picnic ; otherwise, the salt would not be left behind so often. Mirth — if he travels even in the hamper with the bottles — is sure to be there ; love, who is very light and portable, is carried by the ladies ; appetite, like charity, never faileth ; and digestion — well, digestion sometimes comes to a picnic a little late, in consequence of having been obliged to go back for the dinner pUIs. I have sat at rich men's feasts, which were partaken of in the open air, whereat powdered footmen have waited upon us decorously, and a bishop said grace ; where every one had a cushion to sit upon, and a napkin folded upon his plate ; but I scarcely call that picnicking. And I have taken my repast — brown bread, and eggs and onions, with a flask of the most ordinary wine — outside Disentis, in the valley of the Grisons, and ate it upon the hillside by myself, because the town, and the inn, and the people all smelt so execrably ; but I don't consider that a picnic either. I have been one of a party of three hundred, whose various con- tributions to the common stock have been decided upon three weeks before the day of meeting, at a lottery, wherein mustard, and bread, and pepper were the prizes ; where there were two military bands to dance to, under a thousand Chinese lanterns ; where champagne corks went ofl' like platoon-firing ; and where it took half an American lake to ice the wine. And I have joined mighty pleasure companies of the people, where everybody kept his food in his pocket handkerchief ; and having cut it up with clasp knives, and devoured it, seized everybody else's hands, and ran down 190 Picnics. grassy hills at speed ; but these things, too, I consider foreign to the picnic, which seems, somehow, to signify something snug and well selected, and quite at variance with monster meetings of any sort. A picnic should be composed principally of young men and young women ; but two or three old male folks may be admitted, if very good-humoured ; a few pleasant children ; and one — only one, dear old lady : to her let the whole commissariat department be entrusted by the entire assembly beforehand ; and give her the utmost powers of a dictatress, for so shall nothing we want be left at home. It is not "fun" to find one's self without mint-sauce to his cold lamb ; nobody, who is properly constituted, enjoys lobster without fresh butter ; and when you are fond of salad, it is not cheerful to find the bottle of dressing, which was en- trusted to young Master Brown, has broken in his filthy pocket : these things all occur, unless we have our (one) dear old lady. Wbo else would have seen to that hamper of glass being packed with such consummate judgment? Who else would have brought the plate — I confess I dislike steel forks — in her own private bag ? Who else could have so piled tart upon tart without a crack or a cranny for the rich red juice to well through ? Who else has the art of preserving Devonshire cream in a can ? Observe her little bottle of cayenne-pepper ! Mark each individual cruet as it gleams forth from its separate receptacle ! Look at the salt-box ! — look at the corkscrew ! Bless her dear old heart ! she has forgotten nothing. However- humble the meal, let it be complete ; and it can't be complete without its (one) dear old lady. The girl with the prettiest hands wiU be generally found Picnics. 191 — in accordance with the eternal fitness of things — concoct- ing the claret cup ; the young man — the one young man, who should have the sole charge of the bottle department, and who must not be her lover — assisting her. Lemonade and claret is the best mixture for ladies, if you have no " cup ; " and beer, remember, in stone bottles is almost always flat. Let there be plenty of railway wrappers to sit and loU upon ; for in most of nature's salles h manger, and by the sea-coast especially, the seats and couches are hard, and at times damp. I had the mark of a plum-pudding stone — which I was not bom with, but which I thought I should carry to my grave — most firmly impressed upon me, until quite lately, the consequence of an open-air entertain- ment in the beginning of last autumn. If there is the slightest chance of people being duU, take the last new poem (I have heard better criticism again and again, sub Jove, than that of the weekly dispensers of immortality), take a flute — a comet, if there is an echo — take a sketch-book or two, for they often suggest, and never interrupt conversar tion ; and, if the company be very larkey, and rather unin- teUectual, take the Racing Game, or a pack of cards. Don't be too polite, for drawing-room manners are out of place at a picnic ; but do your very best, either in carving the chicken, or in saying good things, according to your gifts. And, by the bye, if there is anything forgotten, after all, don't send the most amusing person you've got back for it, because he is the youngest or the poorest ; for that, as the mathematicians say, is^a great waste of power ; but let the stout, rich party go instead, who is as much out of his ele- ment among you as an aide-de-camp at church. If you are by the sea-side, be very careful not to break the bottles ; 192 Picnics. for when they are empty and well-corked, they swim in the water capitally, and afford excellent objects for pebble- throwing to both sexes. If there be any servants, drivers, or boatmen, don't forget that they appreciate having the things left for them unbacked and tolerably neat ; and if they take your places, don't put everything of value out of sight, as though you were afraid of their stealing them. Let the gentlemen withdraw themselves, after dinner, from the weaker vessels who can't stand smoke, and enjoy their cigars ; the (one) dear old lady, aided by her obedient and neat-handed Phillises, wiU, during that period, be putting the crockery back again, and the plate into her private bag ; and that will be the time, also, you wiU be remarked upon if you have monopolised the most comfortable place during the meal, or have spoiled a dress through clumsiness, or have been eating rapidly in order to secure two helps of cream. It is now, when the glory of landscape or of ocean stretches before you, and your every sense is satisfied, that you must feel, if ever, benevolence towards the whole human race, friendship for those present, and love for one (at least) of them ; it is the period for affectionate thought and conver- sation ; the time " To glance from theme to theme, Discuss the books to love or hate, To touch ttie changes of the state. Or thread some deep Socratic dream." t How well the poet, from whom these words are borrowed, has understood this matter, he and his beloved friend, who found the shadows of the wych-elms and the towering syca- Picnics. 193 more so fair after the dust, and din, and steam of town ; who, bearing atl that weight of learning lightly, like a flower, brought an eye for all he saw, and mixed in aU the simple outdoor gambols ; who fed both heart and ear of the charmed circle, as they lay and listened to his reading, on the lawn ; who loved himself to listen while the maiden flung her ballad to the brightening moon, the while the stream ran on, the wine-flask lying couched in moss, or cooled within its glooming wave ; and last, returning from afar, before the crimson-circled star had fallen into her father's grave, and brushing ankle-deep in flowers, they heard behind the wood- bine veil the milk that bubbled in the pail, and bu^izings of the honeyed hours ; they went home — that is to say, to tea, wherein they showed their wisdom. My own first recollections of a course of picnics are derived from those, in my boyhood, held at Cliefden Spring, upon the river Thames, near Maidenhead. I was then an Eton boy, and my family living in that vicinity, some half-a-dozen of my schoolfellows, or so, good oars, and most of them good voices, would often row up and spend the day with us at home. Saints' days were blessed days in those times. Up the fair broad river in a six-oar, with nothing on to speak of, was fine travelling upon an early summer morning ; the right Eoyal castle looking down upon us from afar ; the flat green meadows upon this side, and the osier banks on that, and the little wooded islands in the midst, so gallantly stem- ming the tide. Here we delayed to bathe, and there to beer ; here, where the tow-rope took off our straw-hats, to chaff and counter-chaff the bargemen, and there to put ova flannel shirts on decently before the kdies met us at the old gray bridge ; then, on with our fair burden, through the 194 Picnics. locks, wherein, as the boat sank with the sinking waters, we sang our glees ; and again delayed by the w'et clinging lilies, which were woven into chaplets — bless the weavers' innocent hearts ! — for our young brows ; and by the swans delayed, which, as we neared their nests among the reeds, flapped out on mighty wings, and hissed their fiercest. So we reached CUefden Spring, beneath the hanging woods of Cliefden, and by the river's side. What appetites we brought then to those feasts ! what merriment ! ah me, what youth ! I remember one young after-dinner boaster of us, who, speaking of the great walks thereabouts, observed that they were nothing compared to the extent of those about his place at home. " There's one, a gravel one," he said, " that you may walk ten miles upon and never leave it." The ladies blushed and smiled. We boys, with swollen cheeks, remarked : " yes," and " We should rather like to see it ; " but one, who was the wisest of us, winked and said : " Ah, Longbow major means ten miles hackwanls and forwards ; " at which we laughed the laugh of those blithe days. I have picnicked for almost a summer long among the Cliannel Islands ; and there are no better places for this pleasantry than those. There is a certain ivy-mantled, wood-surrounded tower in Jersey, from which almost the entire island, the whole great state — which coins, its own halfpennies — can be surveyed. The tiny roads tfaSiirthread it in and out, shut in by honeysuckle hedges ; the avenues that lead to the old seigneuries ; the small green valleys, where the beautiful cattle feed ; the mighty ruined castle by the sea ; you may sit and see it aU from the tower, smoldng your great penny cigar, after your good bottle of Picnics. 195 claret at Is. 9d., after your peerless Jersey lobsters, your unexcelled green figs, your peach unrivalled, and your sans- pareil pear. Or will you prefer Grfeve au I'Anohon (of sand eels), where the white sand sparkles for such a distance eastward, and the forsaken pools are like mirrors ; where the mighty caverns will shelter you from the sun, and the spring water leaps from the rock to mix with that brandy which is so cheap, and not British ? Or, again, vnll you choose the tremendous headland, Grosnez, that juts out nose-like into the ocean, almost close under which the low coast of France seems to smUe invitingly, whither those exiles yonder are straining their eager eyes ? We have dined in these fair spots as merrily as anywhere, and amongst pleasant Jersey faces, as kindly as any in broad Britain. Ah ! happy island days ! our canopy, the sky without a cloud ; our banquet-hall, the cliffs above the sunlit sea ! Lastly, omitting many a forest meal, and many a spread upon the ruined ramparts of the Dane and Roman, in shells of ancient castles and upon decks of yachts at sea, let me recall one picnic more. From where I sit and write — be- tween the oaks and across the little harbour with its angry bar — I see the very place where we, we thirteen, dined ; upon the beach yonder in the fifth cove of the red cliff-bound bay. You cannot pass to it by land save at mid-tide and after, because of these four headlands which reach so far into the sea. Starting at half ebb, therefore, we took boat and sailed thither, determining to walk home round the points. The sandy bay we had chosen for debarkation was so flat that the boat could not come in, and we chivalrous men had to get out and drag it — with the ladies in it — high and dry. There was a mighty archway, cut by that laborious handicraftsman, o 2 196 Picnics. Ocean, througli wMcli the beautiful village we had lately left, the wooded oUiFs beyond it, and the channel-stream with white sailed ships, were seen as in a picture ; in the fore- ground, too, was a mighty fallen fragment, resembhng, almost minutely, that statue, brave and pitiful, of the Dying Gladiator — Nature, as it really seemed, playing the painter and the sculptor, and putting both arts to shame. The sketch-books were produced of course, at once, and it was decided here to dine. There was a doubt amongst the superstitious whether we should not ask the old boatman to make us up fourteen ; but finally, he was paid and sent away. " Be sure, gents," were his last words, " not to start later than four o'clock ; and even then you'll get your feet wet round the last point, perhaps." And the " gents," thinking he only wanted to frighten them, and get another job, replied : " yes, bother the time ! " as though ten minutes' unpunctuaKty in the matter would not have been our death-doom, with the spring-tide rising tliirty feet, and we shut out from hfe by a sheer wall of cliff which rose five hundred. We laughed and talked, drew and painted, climbed rocks, explored caverns, and dined ; the time flying on at average picnic speed, and even quicker. There wanted but a quarter to the fatal hour, and there was not a thing packed up ; the most phUosophio of our party, too, had only just lighted his second cigar, over which he was accustomed to form his judgment upon all things, and we did not dare disturb him. It was five minutes past the hour when we all started, slow and hamper laden, for home. By skipping round the first point from stone to stone, we managed to Picnics. 197 clear it dryshod ; but the tide was coming in apace, we saw, and I heard somebody say, in a hollow voice, that something would come of our having been thirteen at dinner. Round the next headland we had to wade knee-deep, and carry the ladies pick-a-back. We ran on over the inter- vening sand at quickest speed, for we knew our case was getting very hazardous, and found at the third point the water was up to our waists. There was but one promontory more, and that once rounded, we knew that wo should be in safety. We must effect that passage, for, as we were well aware, we were cut off by the remorseless waves from all retreat — even to that strip of beach where we had dined, and where, indeed, the surrounding rooks were just as pre- cipitous as elsewhere. We found the tide at the last point six feet in, at least, and quite unfordable. A look of un- utterable horror stole over every face ; the philosopher dropped his hamper of crockery with a tremendous crash upon the shingle. " It's no use my bothering myself with that any further, at all events.'' No statement, however solemn, not even " this all comes of our having been thirteen at dinner," which here again toUed forth, could have had a more awful effect upon us than this, for we knew that he had had his second cigar, and that his judgment was perfected. There was a little rook some twelve feet in the sea, which would not be covered over for an hour perhaps, and thither, with mournful hearts, we waded, to eke our lives out by that scanty space. I, too, had a good mind to let that heavy young person whom I had hitherto supported on my shoulders get there unassisted, as she was only going to 198 Picnics. be kept dry for so short a time : it was very lucky that my good nature prevailed, for behind the rock lay our good old boatman in his wherry, concealed and laughing to himself. " Ah, I thought you'd get your feet wet round the point, gents ; so I just waited here, in case you might want me." The heavy young person threw her arms about him there and then, and kissed him ; and for my part, I shall not for- get him either, nor that spring-tide autumn picnic, although the mark of the plum-pudding stone has, as I have said, by this time paled away. ( 199 ) COMMON HEN8E. " npHE Popkiiisos have a good doal of talent about them, -*- but (boy liaA'o no coumion sense," is the verdict uni- versally jiassed upon ouv family ; and it is a just one : even'body says so ; and what e\'erybody says — it staiulij to common souse— must be true. The vu-tue expired with a eovlaiu elerieal aueostor of ours, a sort of vioar of Bray, who under the Houses of t^i'oniwell, Stuart, and Hauoi'er, was never out of favour with the reiouing powei-s, and who at last, like a jolly fat eauon as he was, Avent otf peaceably in his stall. He eould "seek the Lord" with armour on, per- form the lighted caudle and genuflection business, or vox the soul of tlio liahitaiis in sii'vo of the period with Protestant oratory, all equally well. He was a man of the strongest common sense, and died worth ,i'3(),(HH) ; and "Where would you be without him ? " is a remark I have frequently made to members of my family, whou they have been in- clined to question his principles. It is cjuito certain that none of his deseeiulants would have ever made that money : liis second sou was put into a madhouse, and ended there, because he was always experiment^vliaingwilh fire and water, and persisted in asserting that carriages eonld be moved 200 Common Simnc. ■without horses ; another member of his race proposed to keep oif smallpox by means of the intervention of a cow ; and a third spent a good deal of his time in building a room to sit in under water. There was a good deal of a certain sort of talent in all these persons ; but wliat is so much to be regretted is, that what they did was contrary to common sense : the world never forgave them for it to their dying day. My fether, who might have stepped into a fiimily living of ;£800 a year as soon as he left college, chose instead to join a marching regiment, and live in that, upon £90 per annum besides his pay, because he had religious scruples. Now, in the first place, all scruples are foolish ; and religious scruples are woi-se than foolish — they're wicked ; and m the next place, the living actually went out of the family ! "\Yliat harm would my governor have done to it ? He was not an infidel — he was not a Radical — he was not a grossly immoral person ; he would have hunted, I suppose, and shot, and fished — occupations which he delighted in, very naturally, more than in anytliing else in the world ; and as for visiting the poor people, which, it seems, he considered himself unfitted for, why, he might have got a curate to do all that, pairing him very handsomely, and still receiving £740 out of the living. He could have bought most excel- lent sermons — and it stands to common sense that these must be much better than what one makes for himself ; he could But, in fine, he lost everything and did notliing, aU through having scruples, or, which is the same tiling, from the want of a little common sense. With aU my regard for the govornov, it jiositively makes me mad to think of what he threw away ; not only the actual advantages, but the chances. ^Miy, with our connection — I've got two Common Fense. 201 first cousins in the House of Peers, and our arms are the same as the Premier's — he might have been made a bishop, or even an archbishop — who knows ? — the spiritual shepherd of the Church of England, with six-and-twenty thousand pounds a year ! But then, he never could have said " Nolo Episcopari," for he had not the common sense for it. Then my mother, she was my father's cousin, and a regular Popkins. At twenty-one years of age, and one of six, she refused Sir Tattenham Leger, a man who owned haK a county, and was indirectly connected with the Eoyal family. Are you and I, my Public, going to believe that any reasons, any possible circumstances, could have justified such conduct as that ? I put aside the direct injustice done to myself ; but was it the right thing for any woman to do, who con- templated the possibility of ever having children ? What had she to urge against the man ? His age ? His some- what convivial language ? The absurd story of his having broken the hearts of his two former wives ? The haughti- ness which rather became a person of Ms rank and influence than otherwise ? Nothing of the sort. " I love dear cousin Henry, and he loves me ; " that was her sole objection ; and my uncle — Percival Popkins — positively let her have her way. Now, only mark the consequences : the baronet was seventy-five, and died the very next winter. Why, in the name of common sense, didn't she marry him first, and my father afterwards ? She would then have had a title, a park, and a towli house. As it was, my beloved parents lived in barracks, and in barracks was the writer of this paper bom. I positively believe that sometimes in the course of their wandering, and while my father was a subaltern, a curtain drawn across the apartment formed the sole partition be- 202 Common Sense. tween their sitting-room and bed-room. Now, is there a human being endowed with common sense who believes that love, or indeed any other mere sentiment whatever, could have compensated for such a position as that ? When my grandfather died — who had changed his name for that of Walker, and vrho was, I am thankful to say, the director of a joint-stock bank — we came into a property, and my father sold his commission. And how did Captain Popkins do that ? By giving out that he was quite unde- cided about leaving the regiment, but was ready to go if the juniors made it worth his while ? By getting an extra three hundred or so out of the first purchasing lieutenant, two hundred out of the next, and so on, with nice little pickings from the first purchasing ensign, in the usual way ? Quite the reverse ! he sold his captain's commission — if you can believe such madness — for regulation price ! Why ? Oh, don't ask me, or I shall lose my temper : the high-flown considerations upon which my father acts, are, I am happy to say, quite out of my range of vision. I am no genius, thank goodness, but I do think I have a little common sense ; I think I know the world ; I believe I know the value of money. The idea of a man sinking £30,000, as my father did, in the Funds and an estate in Westmoreland ! " Why, sir," said I, in remonstrance — for I know, I hope, how to be respectful to a parent, whatever may be his follies — "in these railway days, you might double, or at least make ever so much more out of that money." " I don't want any more, Bob," answered my father. Now, think of a person, sane, or at least not in confine- ment, openly avowing that he did not want any more money Common Sense. £03 " Sir," replied I, with a Kttle of that tact which — perhaps partial — friends have generally allowed me to possess, " I was thinking of your responsibilities. Consider how much more good you might do with double your income ! " Sometimes — I never can quite account for it — ^when I am talking to the gOTemor, there comes over his fiace just such an expression as a very clever feUow might wear when a second-rate man is trying to do him, and he wore it j\ist then very decidedly. " Do you think that likely. Bob ? " said he, slily. " How much do you spend a year in the practice of benevolence i " " Sir,'' replied I — and I felt somehow hot all over — " I hold that indiscriminate charity " " Stop, Bob," said the governor, interrupting ; " we won't enter into that subject. K I were to double your allowance, do you think you would spend twice as much in doing good ? You seem to have a doubt about that ; so have I. If the reason you urge in favour of speculation be valid — though most speculators, I am afraid. Bob, are far from having such noble aims as yourself — ought not the recipients of our present bounty to be consulted before we risk their interests ? Por, if we fail, they fail ; and when we succeed, Bob, we may sometimes forget to pay them their f ull divi- dends. You know we read that if s very hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven," " Well, father," said I, " I am sorry I spoke to you." Nothing gives me such a tremor — ^for my disposition is naturally reverential — as to hear the Scriptures referred to in the affairs of this world- I always attend my parish church, I hope, every Sunday, wet or fine, and listen to aU. the clergyman has to say ; but if s not a layman's place. 204 Common Sense. that's my opinion, to go preaching and teaching to people out of the Bible upon weekdays. It has the very worst effects upon the lower classes, I'm confident ; for I knew a tinker once who held the abominable doctrine, that one man was as good as another, and who had the blasphemy to teU me that he learned that for himself out of the New Testar ment. Of course there are expressions in it, here and there, about rich men and so on, but it stands to common sense that one isn't to take them literally. The idea, for instance, of it being my duty to give a half-naked fellow on the road one of the great coats I'm sitting upon, is simply preposte- rous. What becomes of the rights of property ? What be- comes of political economy ? What becomes, I should like to know, of common sense itself? Why doesn't my governor — if it comes to that — give all he's got to the poor 1 Why doesn't he cast his last shilling into the treasury, like the poor widow in the parable — which was a pretty example of political economy, by-the-by — and let us aU come upon the parish at once ? That would be being consistent, that would ; and consistency I hold to be the very next best thing to common sense. I hope I am a better Christian than to call my brother John a fool ; but I can't help having my own opinion about him for all that. He and his wife are absolutely hving — no, existing — upon .£250 per annum in a cottage close to my father's house. I think I know _my duty to society, to the circle in which I move, better than to propose to any woman unless I have a thousand a year to offer her at the very least. I feel my responsibilities, I trust, sufficiently strongly not to dream of asking her to live in the country unless I could keep her a carriage and pair. Even on the excellent Common 8e7ise. 205 salary I am now receiving at the Bank, I calculate that I shall not he in a condition to fall in love until I am iifty, when I may be depended upon so to do with some person of property and connection ; by that time, John wiU have had six children, and have sunk in the social scale two degrees at least. It is of no use for him to say that he does not care a fourpenny-piece for the social scale, because that isn't common sense. A man may say that he likes beer better than wine (John does) ; but I am not going to believe him any the more for that : that's what I tell my brother John ; for it's hard if one can't say what one likes to a younger brother with £250 a year, and a family too — whenever he tries to humbug one. " Liberty and the beauties of nature," said he, upon one occasion, " make up to me for the absence of aU luxuries which I could procure only at their expense. You ^on't appreciate my pleasures — pleasures is a faint word for them — any more than I appreciate yours. Bob." I knew what he meant by all this ; he meant lakes, and simsets, and mountains, and birds, and books — in a word, what is called poetry. Now, I have read Lalla Rookh my- self — for I have always made it a point to be well informed — and I own that that sort of thing is pretty enough ; but the idea of poetry having anything to do with real life ! — • that's where John shows his utter disregard of common sense. "Now, poets'' — this is what I told him — "never possess any : your geniuses are for ever in gaol, John ; every sense but common sense, that's what all you fellows have." " We have common sense, too," replied he, as cool as a cucumber ; " and if we could derive a satisfaction from the results of a clever stroke of business, made piquant perhaps 206 Common Sense. by the least tinge of dishonesty, not only equal to that ex- perienced by — no offence — yourself, Bob, but with a con- siderable margin of pleasure in addition as recompense for what would be to us uncongenial and prosaic, not to say dirty work, you would, I think, find us rivals quite the reverse of despicable both at change and market. You know how the Greek tradespeople suffered, notwithstanding their well-established adulterations, when the philosopher of old set up his shop, to prove that he could be a man of business." " Oh, confound it," said I, for I am none of your argufiers, " if metaphysics is your game, I'm off ; only just answer me this : was there ever a poet yet who kept his own accounts, and left off in the world a better man — I mean, of course, a richer — than he began 1 " " The majority of them," answered he, lighting a pipe, " have most certainly done so ; a number of them, you will allow it, have even shown a common sense above the com- mon, in living all their lives at other people's expense ; many of them have been remarkable for their business habits — William Wordsworth, for instance, and Robert Southey, who both lived within ten miles of this cottage door — ^wlule Mr. Samuel Rogers was a banker : think of that. Bob ! Shakspeare, I believe, had much more common sense than Baron Rothschild." " Come, John," cried I, with a burst of laughter, "per- haps, after that, you'll have the kindness to teU me what common sense is ? " And this was his reply. " Common sense. Bob, is the sense, as its name implies, which is common to everybody, and its office in us, accord- ing to general opinion, is to watch over and provide for our own interests and happiness. Men of striking intellect, of Common (SVjisc. 207 all sorts, possess, I believe, this quality in greater proportion than ordinary people ; these latter, however, beint;' by far the most nunioroiis, agreeing among themselves upon what are the objoets to be desired in life, and perceiving the others to be striving after and delighting in quite different things, are inclined to deny them common sense ; thereby making themselves judges of the interests and happiness of natures confessedly higher. Moreover, the vulgar, having thus flattered themselves that tliis quality is peculiarly their own, and possessing for the most part little other sense besides, are wont to exalt common sense to a most ridiculous degree." " Oh," said I, " since you choose to get rude and personal" — which is a thing I particularly object to in all argument — " I shall certainly not prolong the conversation." ( 208 ) AN UXGEEDINGLY CHEAP TOUB. \ LTHOUGH I am tolerably weU off, for a curate, in -^^-*- having nothing to pay for vegetables and house-rent, money — as far as it can be said of any churchman — is a con- siderable object to me. I have to save in this matter, and to go without in that, and to accustom my stomach a good deal to home-made wine. My surplice — the idea of a curate haviug such a thing ! — is not of lawn, nor do I renew very often that miraculous sUk garment without fastening, the getting into which is one of the mysteries of the Church of England. I read the wicked Times, on its third day, without feeling any of those disagreeable qualms with which it affects my revered rector, " the cloth '' it sometimes attacks being of a material widely different from mine. I confess, however, that my own clerical character falls considerably short of the ideal standard set up by the conductors of that journal. I think it no sm in a bachelor curate, whose hard lines have fallen in a place five miles from the nearest educated being, to feel a little dull, to be desirous of a visit from an old friend from time to time, or to take his parson's holiday, of twenty days, once every summer. I take one myself yearly, with as much mental profit as pleasure, and return to my parish All E.ciri't! ingi ij Cheap Tour. 209 all the better fitted in health and spirit to renew my labours in that vineyard. In the front of a certain June, I walked over the English and Scotch lake districts with Tom Trevor, attorney-at-law, of Striketown. We were at dear old Trinity together in the old times, and understood one another per- fectly. " We have heard the chimes at midnight, have we not ? " quotes he. " Oh, the mad days we have spent, and to see how many of mine old acquaintance that are now clergymen ! " I have no antecedents, I am thankful to say, to be very deeply ashamed of ; and if I had, I should know that Tom could mean nothing but good-humour and plea- santry in reminding me of them. Ho is one of those rare ones who can say without oifence anything, that from another man would be absolutely intolerable. That perpe- tual pyrotechnic display of his, no matter how inflammable the material on which it descends, never seems to set any one on fire. I don't know where he keeps his law-books, his business airs, his ill-successes, his Christmas bills, and his indigestions, but none of his friends have over seen a symptom of them : this of course weakens the ^'ulgar belief in his solid virtues ; and we who are pillars shake our heads a little, though we cannot refuse to offer cordial hands ; whUe his defence is, that his principles, so far from not being high enough, are elevated clean ou.t of sight. " He gives his brothers of his best ; His worst he keeps, his best he gives," and I for one am not inclined to be hard upon him. He is, of course, one of the most charming " tourist's companions " possible, and full of the happiest illustrations, lending an interest to the dullest landscapes, and heightening tlie glory 210 An Exceedingly Chmp Tour. of the grandest, — " Unto sorrow giving smiles, and unto graces, graces." I remember him, while at coUege, disco- vering a pathos in a certain proposition, in statics — whose object and meaning I have entirely forgotten, and which I shall most probably misquote — and throwing a touching regretfulness into his tones as he described how "D E vanisheth, the weight is supported by the immovable fulcrum C, and the body is at rest ! " It is said to have drawn tears from an entire lecture-room. " Now, Trevor," said I, before we started upon our rambles, "you have a genius for finance, I know, so you shall carry the bag for both of us ; but remember I am but a poor curate, so don't be over-generous." " Reverend sir ! " answered he, " I am a lawyer, and such imputations I shake off me as dew-drops are shaken from the calf-skin. Leave everything pecuniary to me." After this arrangement, I, of course, never interfered in such matters, nor was I ever present at any settling transactions whatsoever ; and hence it was, as will be seen, that I came to make such an exceedingly cheap tour. The landscape which lies round my curacy has none of those monstrous objects about it, obstructing the light and air, which are called trees ; but their place is supplied in some measure by gigantic chimneys, from the mouths of which rises an artificial sky, so dense that one wonders it doesn't rain down ink. And yet we have a sense of coming summer even there — a rustle of the leafy woodlands, a murmur of the pleasant brooks, make themselves heard amidst our very furnace-roars ; we feel that somewhere is the sun unblurred, the snow-white cloud set in the stainless blue ; the green earth without touch of cinder^scar. We ( An Exceedingly Cheap Tour. 211 that have heard it, long then to hear the wind at its wild play among the hill-tops, as hungry men for food. The great town, whose iron clamoiir comes to us for ever across the level flats, in summer scarcely seems fit to breathe and move in. There are no fountains there, no parks, no gar- dens, no galleries of pictures, where a man may slake his thirst for freshness and for freedom ; the workman there knows not so much of Nature even as Art, her pretty waiting- maid, can tell him : that is what dulls our pleasure — Tom's and mine — as we start from the hot clanging Striketown Station for the purple hiUs. " The pastor sees the dewy meadows, and the water-springs, but the flock never sees," sighed I. " Yes," echoed Trevor ; " you the pastor, I the shearer, we alone." A Striketown magnate in the same carriage — he was a corrugated-iron merchant, and he looked like it — took umbrage at our remarks upon this subject ; but myseH engagiug him steadily hand to hand, while Tom dazzled him with his finest sheet-hghtning, we reduced him to silence : presently, however, while we two were speaking of the best poetical expressions for distance, and one was instancing poor Keats's , " There ste stood, About a young bird's flutter from the wood," he broke in again with, — " And, gentlemen, pray how many yards may that be ? " and so revenged himself. Stafi'ord, Preston, Lancaster, the abominable Crewe, were all left behind in due course, and we quitted the London and North-Western for Westmoreland and fairyland at last. I confess myself to have been bom a Cockney, and to enter- tain an admiration, not unmixed with awe, for the Surrey p 2 212 An, Exceedingly Cheap Tour. range. The great mountain mesh-work of the lake-country is to my eyes, therefore, quite as tremendous as the Himar layas ; and all the witty things that hare been said against it and the Lakes pass by me like the idle wind, that wakes a smile of pity upon the face of fair Windermere, but never stirs its depths. I know not how fax the dim recollection of a wearisome journey and the distinct remembrance of a most excellent dinner, may have contributed to bring it about, but as we lay in our boat beneath Belle Isle that evening, the careless splash of the oars alone breaking the silence which brooded over the serene hiUs and moonlit lake, I believe, with Trevor, that if you had put pen and ink within my grasp — and it were not for the rhymes — I could have gone nigh to have written a sonnet. I feel at this moment the fatal facility of the lake district for writing descriptions stealing over me at the mere reminiscence ; I long to honey my page with such names as Ambleside and Elterwater, or to make it like a leaf out of some mountain peerage, with such titles as Helvellyn and Glaramara, but I forbear. Enough to say, that we made forced marches over the bills and far away to our great content ; the knapsacks — which at first seemed to be endowed with life and a desire to go the other way — which lay between our astonished shoulders like two large live coals, and which rendered our conditions of equilibrium both novel and dangerous — at last becoming as natural to us as the hump to the camel. And ever, at the close of each day's toil, did the red wine flow from the totel's best bin ; nor at any time, when our four legs grew weary, did we hesitate to hire eight fresh ones to reheve them, till, for my part, I began to fear that we should scarcely reach the Land of Cakes at all, or if we did, that we should have An Exceedingly Cheap Tour. 213 no money left to buy any. That Tom did pay for things, and pay liberally, was evident enough, for I never saw land- lords more obsequious, landladies more gracious, or the plurality of boots more perfectly satisfied. One day, when we were earring it, the driver, who was new to the lake- country, and desired to make a cicerone of himself for the benefit of future visitors, entreated us to point out to him the local habitations and the names of the great celebrities, which Trevor did at once, most cheerfully and with a ven- geance. It seemed to our astonished Jehu that so many eminent persons were never before collected in so smaU a compass ; in particular, a certain sequestered clergyman, preferring the delights of solitude among the hiUs to that of his collegiate halls during the long vacation, had an un- dreamt-of greatness thrust upon him. Many a time has he since been startled by a string of cars, fiUed with excur- sionists, puUing short up before his cottage door, while our apt friend, whip in hand, dilates aloud upon the glory of " Mr. A , the Fellow of St. Boniface, the accomplished coach, who knows more about the Grecian tongue than any other man within the four seas : that's his bedroom, gentlemen and ladies, looking east." For aU which incense he is indebted to Tom Trevor. On account of this good turn being done him, the driver dechned to take more than a shilling for cha- rioteering us twelve miles ; but of course Tom couldn't get rid of aU our carmen for such a mere song as that ; and how the purse held out, grew a stOl greater wonder to me, day by day. In Caledonia, matters went on just as smoothly : we de- nied ourselves no dainty which loch or mountain aiforded, while the wine of the country, by reason of its smoky 214 An Exceedingly Cheap Tour. character, was pronounced not good enough for our palates, and rejected for burgundy and claret. Still, while I was set wondering whether or not a clergyman of the Church of England could be imprisoned in a Tolbooth for a hotel-bill, the adulation of us in no way decreased. Gillies ran bare- legged, as though with the fiery cross in hand, to do our behests ; musicians, with instruments resembling the inte- riors of quadrupeds, performed the most excruciating coro- nachs at our departures and what were meant for agreeable airs at our arrivals. The best bedrooms seemed to have been bespoken for us at every inn, and the seats that were most comfortable, or which commanded the most extensive views, to have been reserved for us in the coffee-rooms. I began to have a horrid suspicion that we were being talien for somebody else — ambassadors extraordinary, or the Brothers Rothschild in disguise. Trevor had some sketching-paper, and I a note-book, which I used pretty freely ; but neither authors nor artists — I can answer for Striketown, at least — were wont to be held in such consideration in the south, as to induce a belief that our genius and talents were only receiving their natural tributes. Sometimes Tom wrote the day before to secure accommodation for us, and sometimes had an interview with the landlord as soon as we arrived ; but in either case, our occupation of the premises seemed to be haiied as triumphant and honourable to an extreme degree. At one of the largest inns in the Western Highlands, I happened, in Trevor's absence, to receive the bill instead of him, and I remember thinking of sending it to the Times newspaper, to refute the calumnies that had been published about hotel-charges, only Tom persuaded me not. This is s. d. 1 6 3 3 1 6 .. 9 An Exceedingly Cheap Tour. 215 the bill, which, for two persons, I surely was justified in thinking very moderate : — " Double-'bedded room Soup and fish-dinner (for two) . . . Bottle of port (1834) Breakfast for two, with meat ... Total N.B, — It is particularly requested tJiat no gratuities muy he given to the servants." I was much astonished that none of our fellow-travellers by the coach that morning seemed to be satisfied with their bills, but accused the landlord most unmercifully of extor- tion and excess ; and I agreed with Tom that it was a very remarkable exemplification of the proverbial nearness of the Scotch character. We travelled so fast, that I had time enough to spare for a four days' run into Ireland, which I was over-persuaded to take by my companion. The sister-isle received us with extended arms ; if any- thing, the welcomes of the innkeepers appeared to be still warmer and more afiectionate than elsewhere, and the set- tlement of their accounts a mere form, that we were at liberty to go through or not, as we preferred. The landladies yent so far, on more than one occasion, as to kiss Trevor, and to entitle me their jewel ; the gossoons stood on their heads to do us honour ; and the very beggars about the inn- yards regarded us with a solicitude that was the more remarkable by reason of the difference of our countries and religions. Upon the nineteenth day, I returned like a punctual 216 An Exceedingly Cheap Tour. shepherd to my flock, and on our road, Tom Trevor, Esq., attorney-at-law, insisted upon my auditing the accounts of our expenses, which — particularly as he handed me a much larger balance than, under the circumstances, I should have thought possible — I was very unwilling to do. My share of the three weeks' tour, irrespective of coach, railway, and packet fares, was under a five-pound note. "Well, my dear fellow," said I, with that feeling of grateful admiration which a Briton rarely permits himself to entertain except towards a great financier, " all I can say is, I can't imagine how you did it. I never lived better or at less cost in all my life, and I shall certainly go over the same ground next summer, and, as I most sincerely hope, with the same companion." There was a curious expression about Trevor's eye which made me unaccountably uneasy, as he replied with some dryness : " WeE, I think your reverence had better not do that for a few seasons." " Why, why not, Trevor ? — for goodness' sake, teU me why not ?" said I, getting alarmed. " Oh, nothing ; don't be afraid, my dear sir ; trust me for keeping on the safe side of the law in these matters." " The law ! " gasped I, looking at the figures just trans- ferred to my note-book, and regretting, somehow, that they did not make up a larger sum ; " Why, you don't mean to say you " " No, I did nothing,'' interrupted Tom ; " it was all you, you and that note-book. The fact is, you made such copious remarks in it from the first hour we started, and at every place you came to, that I thought you were compiling a Chiide to the North ; and without asking you the question An Exceedingly Cheap Tour. 217 poinl/blank, which I considered would have been indelicate, I communicated my suspicions, sometimes in writing, some- times verbally, to the innkeepers. ' My friend,' I said to them, ' is desirous of every information about this spot, and particularly regarding your hotel-charges : you must not speak to him as if you were aware of this, for he is pledged by the Messrs. Gratesail, publishers, to secresy and inde- pendence ; but I am pleased with your house myself, and am willing, under the rose, to do you a good turn.' Every time you put pen to paper in the coffee-room saved us half- a-crown apiece at least ; there was quite a difficulty in some places in getting them to charge us anything at all ; and I must say that, all along, you acted your part to perfection." " Acted my part ! how dare you," said I, in a towering passion, " you base, horrid " " There now, you are going on to what is actionable," interrupted Tom. " You parsons never know when to stop, and you are, besides, the last people in the world to take a healthy and charitable view of things. This is how the matter stands : we have passed, by your own confession, a very sumptuous three weeks ; we have given opportunities to a much-maligned class of our fellow-countrymen to ex- hibit their reasonableness and civility ; we have threatened to inflict upon Society a new guide-book, which you have both the power and the wiU to withhold ; and, finally, we have had, I must say, an exceedingly cheap tour.'' ( 218 ) THE GENTLE EEADEB. "TTAVING written a good deal for the general public * -without receiving any acknowledgment from that particiilar member of it, the Gentle Reader, I, for one, am not going to flatter him any longer. It is my private belief that he never purchased a book in his Ufe. I doubt whether he ever even went so far as to subscribe to a Library. I believe him to be a sort of person who borrows volumes from the book-shelves of his friends, and writes in pencil his idiotic remarks upon the margins of them. It is exceedingly improbable, if he does buy books, that he ever bought any of mine, because, in plain truth, the Gentle Reader is imavoidably a fool. Otherwise, would authors, who are conscious of having been insufferably stupid and prosy, or of being about to become so in their next chapter, so unanimously appeal to his goodnature and foolish forbearance ? They take such liberties with him, and place him in such positions as would be resented by any person of proper sense and feeling. When a love-scene is about to be described at any intolerable length, the Gentle Reader is commonly lugged in as a third party, and made a confidant of, whether he will or no, by the two sUly young folks. The Gentle Reader. 219 It is, first of all, fawningly insinuated that lie, the Gentle Reader, knows all about it, being, as he is, so fascinating an individual, and having been the object of adoration of so many hearts ; and then the whole tedious matter is laid before him in all its turtle-dove monotony, while the mela,n- choly details are dwelt upon with a sentimental distinctness, to which impropriety itself would be almost preferable. In descriptions of scenery especially, this patron of the novelists has to go through a very great deal for their sweet sakes ; he has to accompany them, if he will be so good, to inaccessible heights, where the foot of man has never before trodden, and where the shriek of the goshawk, or other bird unknown except to ornithologists, alone is heard ; or he has to wander among hanging woodlands, hand in hand with the writer, until he is deposited upon a dampish bank, by the side of a stream, whose course is presently compared, at prodigious length, to the life of man. When the novelist, indeed, is inclined to moralise, the Gentle Header is apostrophised as though he were Lord Bacon, or Dr. Paley, and made accessory to the most uninteresting and illogical sentiments of the author's, respecting Being and human responsibility. If religion be the subject of the work, the Gentle Reader is made a party to the strangest " views," and that by no means in the pleasantest manner ; his opinions being taken to be identical with those of the writer, not as a matter of course, but as one about which, on the contrary, there existed no little suspicion : he is regarded with an eye not so much of respect as of a certain affectionate watchfulness, and his supposed scruples are combated with a sort of tender authority, as though the author were his father-in-law and 220 Tim Gentle Reader. an archbishop. In battle-scenes, again, and stirring inci- dents of that kind, this slave of literature is commonly carried to a slight acclivity, commanding not only a good general view of what is going forward, but — to judge by what he is made to see — a very particular one also ; and I have even known the Gentle Reader, upon one occasion, to have been shamefully inveigled into a tree, under promise of becoming spectator of a deadly combat, only to be com- pelled to listen to some heroic verses of the seducer, who, taking advantage of the poor fellow's stationary position, inflicted a good three dozen. Nobody but a very weak- minded person indeed would suifer himself to be treated in this manner more than once, whereas there is neither cessation nor limit to the persecution of the Gentle Reader. That he is put upon thus remorselessly, and attacked with this impunity, — that every scribbler hails hJTn as his friend, and leads him through all the stupidest scenes by the button-hole, — is, no doubt, because of his gentleness. The Gentle Reader is unable to say No, or Bo to a goose-quUl. No author dares to treat the Reader — pure and simple — in any such way. On the contrary, his connection with that gentleman is wholly of a business character, and no obliga- tion is supposed to be upon either side. The Courteous Reader, even, is not so great a ninny as the subject of this paper, and is addressed, with hat in hand, indeed, but yet as a reasonably iU-tempered individual with whom absurd liberties are not to be taken. Our Fair Readers — who are always in the plural, and, I think, supposed to be the sharers of an eternal friendship which has lasted thirteen weeks at a boarding-school, and who lean over the same pages with arms round each other's necks and in mutual tears — are The Gentle. Header. 221 trifled with somewhat, and not set at a very high intellectual estimate ; but still they have not that Catholicism of character which admits of their being so continuously ill- treated as the Gentle Reader. The Dear Reader is only apostrophised by female writers, who endeavour by that unjustifiable emollient to blind the judgment and enlist the affections on their side. The General Reader is at the head of a totally diflerent class. He is, in the author's eyes, the ringleader of the unappreciating and illiterate mob ; of that faction — and it is sometimes considerable — which is sure to decline to read, and far more to buy, his book. When a chapter is about to be devoted to a subject which the writer has not entirely mastered, or is about to be filled with got-up and unnecessary technical expressions, the General Reader is warned off in the opening sentences, as by a trespass-board. He is recommended, in a foot-note, to buy another work of the author's, written in a more populaj style, and not to read any more of that which he has in his hand, because he won't understand it. The Intelligent Reader and the like are, at the same time, flatteringly beckoned on, it is true ; but everybody knows pretty well what is coming, and skips the chapter. This notice to the General Reader is the flrst open declaration of that contempt which the author secretly entertains for many even of his own chents. A sneering reference to the Casual Reader speedily follows. The Casual Reader will not peruse, and will not understand if he does peruse ; will not be entertained, and if he is entertained where no entertainment is meant, ought to be ashamed of himself ; will fail to mark, or, having marked, will not be able to carry it in his mind to the place where it will be 222 The Gentle Reader. useful to him ; will skim too hastily — in fact, the Casual Eeader is periphrastically informed that he had better shut up the book, go home, and get to bed. Having thus lashed himself into fury, and the worst passions of his professional nature being fully aroused, the author throws aside the last rag of courtesy, and falls tooth-and-naU and steel-pen upon the Vapid and Irreflective Eeader himself. He has been waiting for him for some considerable time. The bonds of sympathy between the writer and the public have been long gradually loosening, and are now utterly dissolved. Scarcely anybody is ignorant that, under the name of the Vapid and Irreflective Reader, the author is, in reality, anathematising everybody. Upon that unfortunate subject he avenges himself, with a hideous malice, for the servile adulation which he has lavished, in other places, upon the Gentle Eeader, and others of that kidney. The slave, as generally happens, is now become the tyrant. Growing duUer and duller in the matter of the work he is composing — and what is more, being well aware of it himself — ^he waxes fierce and more intolerant against that increasing majority of the read- ing public who are unlikely to read him. The only person, indeed, who can be compared to the Vapid and Irreflective Eeader as a type of all that is base and foolish, is that equally denunciated individual, the Sinner, who is the target of the divines. In the latter case, by some fortunate arrangement of our ideas, we rarely associate the object of so much invec- tive with ourselves ; but, in the former, we cannot fail to recognise some of our own familiar lineaments. StUl, there is in this an honest outspeaking and an acknowledged mis- understanding between the author and his unappreciators, which is to me infinitely preferable to that hypocritical The Gentle Reader. 223 deference he pays to the Gentle Reader. Any allusion to him — and, indeed, to any Eeader — only helps to destroy what httle reality the writer may have had the good fortune to invest his scenes with, and to break that web of fancy which, ApoUo knows, it is hard enough for him to weave. Moreover, as I have said — and this consideration has much weight with me^ — there is little or nothing to be got out of the Gentle Eeader. The very mention of him, indeed, is a literary toadyism ; from the practice of which, as of aU other toadyisms, no true benefit can be ever possibly derived. Therefore, though my brethren of the pen may tremble at my audacity, and the "unaccustomed public knit its indignant brows, I hereby declare that I do not care three halfpence whether this paper of mine shall please the Gentle Reader or not. ( 224 TEE NEXT PRESENTATION. T ENGTH of days is said, upon the highest authority, to -^ be one of Man's chiefest blessings, and it is not the intention of this writer to contravene that authoritative statement. Still, what was an advantage to the patriarchs may not be equally convenient now-a-days ; and if a gen- tleman persists in holding property, in which he has only a life-interest, as if he were possessed of the fee-simple and might enjoy it in perpetuity, he must be prepared to meet with indignation. " Live and let live " should be every- body's motto ; and excess in everything — even in vitality^ is especially unbecoming in a, divine. Nobody, beyond his own immediate relatives and friends, has, of course, a right to object to a curate's living on to any length of time. But if a man with a good benefice, like myself, enjoy the same beyond the reasonable hopes of the purchaser of the next presentation — beyond the limit, that is, which compilers of annuity tables have set do\vn as his legitimate average — he cannot escape without a hint or two that he is standing in the way of other people. I trust that what I have to say may serve as a warning to persons of sensitive nature who may be thinking of entering A The Next Presentation. 225 the ministry of the Church of England, and of investing their money in her at the same time. If they do buy a Living for themselves, let it he the Advowson ; or if they be so rash as to secure a mere Ufe-interest in her (as I have done), let them be well convinced beforehand — would they avoid the inconveniences of which I have to tell — that they have not an immoderate share of vital stamina. They must by no means think that general debility wiU. be any guarantee for this, for I have known a man to be put into a very excellent living merely as a stop-gap, and actually chosen on account of his many admirable infirmities, who yet retained his post for half a century, and outlived the grandson of the man who first waited for his shoes. The circumstances of this most unjustifiable event occurred within my own knowledge, and in the following manner. The famUy living of the YeUowboys fell vacant while their second son, Euphranor (whom they had destined for that preferment), was still at college, and before he was legally qualified to take that responsible charge upon his shoulders. They therefore looked about them for a " warming-pan ; " that is to say, a gentleman in orders, who would be content to hold the place until the young man was of fit age, re- ceiving the fuU stipend in the meantime in return for the obligation. But not only is there an ecclesiastical canon which forbids this very convenient and not uncommon arrangement' — a fact which, I fear, would not of itself have deterred the head of the house of YeUowboys from adopt- ing it, — but examples are on record of " warming-pans " who have refused to remove from comfortable quarters at the appointed time, protesting that the bed was their 226 The Next Presentation. own, and that they meant to lie upon it. To obviate any risk of this kind, Yellowboys senior made a gift of the next presentation to a certain cousin of his, not so ancient, in- deed, as was desirable, but aflBicted with such a complication of disorders as promised, if there was any faith to be placed in doctors, to carry him off in two or three years at the very latest. The Eev. Joseph Yellowboys, on receiving this good tidings, pricked up his drooping ears, returned, with thanks, to his bishop, the " perpetual " curacy in the Fen coimtry (where nobody Uves any time to speak of, even if there is no inundation), and came up rejoicing (and, I think, on crutches) to the rectory of Butterton Magna. He read himself in in such a quavering voice, that Squire Yellow- boys doubted whether the powers of his relative would even last out the very moderate span that was expected of them ; and his cough throughout that evening — for I was a child staying at the Park with the young Yellowboys at the time, and came down to dessert, and met him — his cough, I say, would have been music to his heir, if he had happened to have had one, which at that time was not the case. He was lame with both legs ; he had only one eye, and even that had an involuntary rotatory movement like that of a dying firework ; he was thinner, and rather more dried-up looking than a red herring ; and he had several most serious mala^ dies (as was affirmed on excellent authority), besides the more ordinary ailments — such as asthma and bronchitis — which were patent to aU who set eyes upon him. Yet, poor Euphranor Yellowboys waited for Butterton Magna for ten years, and then, instead of getting his living, died ; and Euphranor's son died, expectant, after him ; and The Next Presentation. 227 now Euphranor's son's son (as I have just heard) is dead like- wise, and the Eer. Joseph Yellowboys is rector stilL Again, in the case of Sheepington, the fattest living in the gift of St. Clement's, Oxford, what a shocking miscalculation there was there ! The great tithes alone of that place, they tell me, are over three thousand a year. It has capital shooting in the very midst of his Grace of Muddleborough's preserves, who is therefore always on his best behaviour towards the incumbent ; and dissent is almost unknown in the parisL It is altogether much too good a thing to go by seniority, and therefore the struggle to secure Sheepington when it chances to fall vacant (which is somehow very sel- dom) is something unparalleled. It resembles, in one respect at least, the strife for good-service pensions given to deserving warriors. Each candidate exliibits his wounds and his de- crepitude as so much claim upon the sympathies of the electors. The applicants for Sheepington, however, do not pretend that they owe these to hard usage in the cause of the church militant ; they only say : " Behold our sad — oiir really hopeless condition, electors ! If you should but confer this boon upon us, the next presentation of it must needs fall to you within a very few years. Vote for Senex and Softening of the Brain ! Vote for Octogenarius and Paralysis ! " Two eminent divines, neither of whom was destitute of good physical demerits, contended on the last occasion for this great clerical prize, and the votes, after the closest scrutiny, were declared equaL To elect one, would have been to mortally affront the other, and might have driven either (for the heart and liver were the parts affected in the two cases) into the ^rave at once ; so the council determined Q 2 228 The Next Presentation. to procrastinate. They elected the vice-principal of the college, a gentleman of a fabulous age, who weighed seventeen stone, and had not seen his own knees for thirty years. " Let us try again," said they, " after a few months, and then, perhaps, we shall have less difficulty in coming to a final decision." The majority of these sanguiue individuals are now lying in St. Clement hys Chapelle, with neat mural tablets over them, which celebrate their virtues iu the Latin tongue. Both the eminent divines hare departed from this sublunary sphere ; but the Eev. Methuselah Heviside stiU occupies the rectory of Sheepington, although he has been for many years imable to squeeze himself into its pulpit. Now, in both these cases it has so happened that the long- lived rectors have been pecuUarly fitted to bear vrith calm- ness the indignation which their conduct has excited. The Eev. Joseph Yellowboys (who married, by the by, within six months of his promotion, and has now several grand- children) is quite unconscious, or at least appears to be so, of the disapproval of his relatives with respect to his absurd longevity. He openly expresses his belief that a man has a right to live as long as he can, without any regard to the pecuniary interests of others ; and when he is reminded that there is moderation in all things, and that enough is as good as a feast, he begins to argue in a vicious circle. He says we must come round to the starting-point, and define what moderation really is, which changes (he contends) according to each man's circumstances : he was once, he confesses, wont to consider eighty as a tolerable age, which he now looks back upon as the prime of life ; while that which he might reasonably have considered to be a feast while he was The Next Presentation. 229 ,a curate in the Fens, he would hold to be a very indifferent dinner indeed at Butterton Magna. As for the Rev. Methuselah Heviside — " our Met," as we call him iu the Clerical Club — whenever the wrong he has been guQty of towards his college is mentioned, he laughs to that degree that I look to see it avenged upon the spot. He rolls like the Oreat Eastern in a sea, he coughs, he turns purple and black, and when his terrified wife (the third since his appointment to Sheepington) does at last recover him by a method analogous to that recommended by Marshall Hall in the case of persons apparently drowned, he wheezes out : " I know they're vexed, but I mean to keep it for half a century yet." Which he most certainly wOl — if he can. But neither of these two gentlemen, as may well be ima- gined, are of that sensitive and chivalrous nature which is doubtless yours, my young friends — as it is also mine, alas ! My own simple, but truly touching story, reader, runs — if I can call that running which loiters so inexcusably — as follows : — It is many years ago — I confess it — since I bought my life-interest in the living which I stUl hold ; but, on the other hand, I had myself a considerable time to wait. TO BE SOLD, the Next Pebsbntation to the Living of Chaunoey Bassett ; tithe so much ; glebe so big ; rectory house in good repair; locality salubrious and picturesque. Age of present incumbent, 76. Such was the advertisement which met my eyes nearly half a century ago ; dazzling enough to a young divine like myself, who had a few thousand pounds in the Three per Cents., the interest whereof, even with a curate's salary 230 The Next Presentation. added, by no means made an income to many upon — whiok seemed to me in those days the only legitimate object of aU incomes. My intended, Angelina, was, I felt confident, most ad- mirably adapted for a clergyman's wife ; but then she had certain tastes in the pony carriage and moiri antique direc- tions which pointed out that her husband should be a bene- ficed clergyman. So I went to my guardian, and asked his opinion as to the purchase. This gentleman resided in Gray's Inn, where I used to think he must also have been born, with a wig on — must have sprung forth from the head of old Father Antic the Law armed cap-a-pied — so legal he was, so precise, so parchmenty, and with such very mercenary views regarding the most solemn subjects. "In these speculative investments in church-property, young gentleman " he began. " My dear sir," interrupted I, blushing, " I have not con- templated this affair, I hope, entirely from that point of view." " In these excessively speculative investments," continued he, speaking through me (as though I was not a substantial form at all) to Briggs on Conveyancing, who stood on the opposite bookshelf — " investments in which tioo lives are con- cerned, and the calculations are proportionally complicated, we cannot be too cautious. The circumstance of the incum- bent being seventy-six will doubtless render the patron anxious to come to terms, insomuch as if he was so unfor- tunate as to die before the transfer was completed, he would actually have to give the living away ! On the other hand, incumbents of seventy-six are often comparatively young people ; and you perceive that the advertisement admits — it The Next Presentation. 231 is most incautiously worded, and so far affords hope of an easy bargain — it admits that the situation is salubrious. However, I will make every inquiry, and you may come to me in a fortnight for my best advice." At the appointed time I revisited my astute guardian — whom it would be impertinent, because totally inadequate, to compare, in respect to his detective qualities, with a, ferret — and found him in possession of all the facts con- nected with my contemplated purchase. The actual patron of Chauncey Bassett was a gentleman of the Jewish per- suasion, whose father had had pecuniary transactions with the grandfather of the present squire of the parish, from which the Gentile had escaped with his estate, but had left the advowson of the living in the hands of the Hebrew. It seemed very odd, and indeed wrong, to me at that period, that a Jew should have a Christian living, even indirectly, in his gift ; but my guardian bade me take comfort, on the ground that I myself, at least, would be under no obligation to him, but would have to buy it with hard cash. " My only fear," added he with an air of reflection, " is lest Mr. Levi and the parson may be confederated in the business, and that the latter is in reality a younger man in stamina than he chooses to seem. His appearance (though I saw him on a Monddy, just after his chief day's work, to be sure) is most promising ; feeble, fragile, and with a certain quavering of the voice, from which one would argue the best, if one was certain that all was on the square. But if the patron should have made it worth the incumbent's while to look his very worst, in order that the bidding may rise — why, then — you see, young gentleman, what a very specula- tive investment this sort of church property is ! " Tlu Ne.d Presentation. " But, iny dear sir,'* ejaculated I, aghast and shuddering, " is it probable " " Nay, sir," returned the lawyer with irritation, " I have nothing to do with that. It is certainly possible ; and it is with possibilities that I, as your guardian, have to do." Eventually the Next Presentation became mine, or rather my guardian's, who, to humour a certain prejudice of the law agaiost the convenience called Simony, affected to buy it himself and then handed it over to me ; and after an interval of ten years, during which I hope I never wished the situation of Chaimcey Bassett less salubrious by one breath of summer air, the incumbent became at length re- cumbent, and I was installed rector in his stead. Since that welcome period, up to a very recent date, Angelina, and afterwards Caroline and myself, have lived a life of almost unruffled calm. Children were bom unto us every year — as is almost the universal custom among the clergy — and none, thaak Heaven, were taken from us. I have held in my arms at the baptismal-font weU-nigh half the parish, and there is not a man, woman, or child within it with whom I am not acquainted. The squire — he that was " the young squire " when I first arrived — is ailing, which at his years he cannot but expect to be, but nobly seconds with his purse any proposition of mine for the benefit of the Poor. The Vestry, although not exactly liberal, I have always found to be pliant if manipulated with tact and good humour. The meeting-house at Ranter's End has been happily out of repair for some time, and the funds, I am told, are not forthcoming, even to set the roof in order. Our new bishop — the fourth, by the by, that has had the The Xf.rt Presentation. 233 diocese in my time — is courteous, and thoughtful for others ; he complimented Angelina upon her apricot jam at luncheon after our last confirmation in a manner she will never for- get. Until within the last few months, in short, I was the happy rector of a model parish, with as few causes of annoy- ance as can be reasonably expected in a countr)' where church-rates have been but recently saved from abolition only by a majority of one. Too great content, it was held by the ancients, provokes the anger of the gods ; and per- haps I was too comfortable. My worst enemy, however, can certainly no longer lay this to my charge. The thin end of the wedge — to use a metaphor which has been made their own by the Great Conservative Party of my native land — was inserted in the heart of my domestic life in April last, and the mallet has been falling, and the breach widen- ing ever since. The first blow was struck in this manner : I was engaged in the peaceful occupation of gardening, a little before lim- cheon time, when there drove up to the door a fly and pair from the railway station, bringing a strange gentleman of about my own age, and apparently of the legal profession. I hurried in to pay those pious duties of hospitality which in the country have not as yet fallen into disuse, and learned from my visitor that his name was Filer, and that he had the misfortune to be an attorney. Some men might have been dissatisfied with this information, and have asked biTTi what was his business at Chauncey Bassett ; but, as the bell was just then ringing for the children's dinner, I only asked him in to lunch. The number of my ofispring seemed to astonish him, and he took in them an evident interest, which could not but be pleasing to Caroline 234 The Next Presentation. — for Angelina, poor dear, was taken from me many years back. " This is your youngest, I conclude, sir," observed he, taking Adolphus John's left ear between his fingers, who, considering himself to be a young man, and aspiring to " stick-ups," resented that familiarity with some dignity. " Yes," said I, rather tartly, '' it is ; " for why he should have taken upon himself to conclude anything of the sort, I was at a loss to understand. " Thank you ; I wiU have another help," responded the old gentleman presently, to an invitation of my wife, who was superintending the cold beef : " the air of your down- country is truly appetising. What health your husband seems to enjoy, madam ! He looks as robust as men in London who are only half his age." " Thank you, sir," responded the hostess ; "he is very well." " He is very gray, however," remarked the visitor with startling abruptness. " At our age," retorted my wife, with some asperity, " we must be fortunate indeed not to be gray." " True, madam — true. If I were not perfectly bald, as you perceive, I should doubtless be gray myself. You are looking for the salt, reverend sir ; permit me. I dare say, now, you find your sight begin to fail you a little ? " " Well," said I, good humouredly, " I do wear spectacles now and then, I confess." " You do wear spectacles now and then, do you ? Ah ! Now, do you wear strong spectacles ? " I began to think this man must be a person of extraordi- nary benevolence, notwithstanding his acknowledged pro- The Next Presentation. 235 fession, and I therefore detailed to him certain difficulties which I had lately met with in getting my sight suited. " Dear me," said he, after listening to me with an appear- ance of the greatest iuterest ; " your lungs and hearing are, however, I remark, in the most excellent order. May I ask — you seemed to hare a little difficulty with that crust just now — may I ask how you are off for teeth ? " I was about to explain, for I don't see why one should make a secret of such matters, how much more comfortable I felt with those that Mr. Wrencham procured for me last autumn, when I perceived my wife to be telegraphing to me, as plain as eyes could speak, to take the man away, because there was only pudding enough for the children : so I asked him to have a stroll with me in the garden. " There, at least," said I to myself, " he wiU disclose his business, and leave off asking questions about my bodily health." I opened the glass door that leads from my study on to our little lawn, and motioned that he should pass out first. " Thank you," returned he ; "I should much prefer your leading the way. How well you walk — how exceedingly well you walk ! you put your feet down with all the decision and firmness of a young man. I think, however, I detect a sHght relaxation in the muscles of the left leg. They must of course be shrinking '" " Sir," said I, turning sharply round upon him, as he stood making some memorandum in his note-book, " what busi- ness is it of yours, confound you, whether my muscles are shrinking or not ? " " My dear sir," returned the lawyer, laying his finger upon my shoulder soothingly, ■" it is no business of mine whatever. 236 The Next Presentation. I am employed by a young fellow who has just taken orders, and has confidence in my judgment. He sent me down on purpose to look at you ; and you look a great deal too well, my dear sir, a vast deal too well, for my client, I do assure you. Mr. Levi is putting far too high a price upon the concern, according to present appearances. You bought, you know, the next presentation of this living of his grand- father, yourself." " So I did," said I with an involuntary sigh— "years and years ago : I remember the very day I did so as though it was yesterday." " The dickens you do ! " ejaculated Mr. Filer with irrita- tion. " Why, your memory must be as good as ever, then ! That is a great point against Levi's offer, that is. Don't you ever find your head swim 1 " " It is advertised in the papers, I suppose," said I, with- out replying to the question, for I was looking sadly round upon the dear old place, which seemed as though it was about to pass out of my hands at once. " Yes," returned he, " of course it's advertised, and I must say that it's very well done. It leads one to expect better things— I am looking at it from a professional point of view, you will understand — it hints that almost immediate occu- pation may be looked for. There wiU be scores of people coming down here upon a fool's errand. I left a fellow at the railway station even now, who will arrive with the same object as myself this very afternoon. He wanted to share my fly with me, but I knew better than that. He might have telegraphed ' Buy ' to his man in the city, and taken the wind out of my sails at once. However, he may tele- graph what he likes now. I was particularly told to see The Next Presentation. 237 your chancel — for my young friend is Higli Church — but since I have seen you, sir, that is more than enough. I thank you, however, for your hospitality. Excuse what may have looked like rudeness in my conduct to your good lady : business is business, and must be attended to before all things — that's my motto. I wish you good day, sir, and a long life. Here is the gentleman I spoke of coming down the lane. Observe how he is turning up the soil with his umbrella, to see what sort of a glebe you have ! " Mr. FUer, attorney-at-law, spoke truly. Scores of people have come, and are stiU coming down to Chauncey Bassett, if not on a fool's errand, at least on an errand which does not seem to give them much satisfaction. Through no fault of my own, I feel that I am incurring the resentment of a great ifiany worthy persons. A gentleman of seventy-two is ex- pected to look a great deal less hearty and florid than the unfortunate strength of my constitution will permit me to do. One gentleman even hinted at being reimbursed in his travelling expenses, on the ground of having been enticed to this secluded spot upon false pretences. On the other hand, if I was to decease suddenly, and before the transaction was concluded with any of the parties, Mr. Levi would be re- duced to the desperate necessity of giving away (by proxy) the next presentation, since it would be Ulegal, under such circumstances, to sell it. Conceive the anxiety of my Hebrew friend in that emergency to discover the very oldest divine in the Church of England that could be got to hold it ; and how miserable would the last days of that venerable man be rendered by people coming to look at him ! The reflection that the older I grow the more tempting win be Mr. Levi's advertisement, and consequently the more 238 The Next Presentation. numerous my inquiring friends, is by no means a soothing one. I wish from my heart that he was of a less grasping disposition, or else that one of the candidates for my to-be- vacant pulpit would bid a little higher, so that this matter might be settled. I should not mind one man taking an antagonistic interest in the state of my health ; but, as it is, I feel as though I were the common enemy of the human race — both male and female. It is not uncommon for ladies to accompany their husbands "to see how they Kke the look of the place," and these always ask to be shown over the up-stair rooms, with an eye to improvements and alterations, when your humble servant, the present writer, shall have been taken out of his own bed-chamber feet foremost. One " engaged " young man confessed to me, with a charming frankness, that my drawing-room was just the sort of apart- ment in which he should like to see hSafiaincie — his Angelina — installed ; " but then," added he, with a reproachful look at the calves of my legs, " there is no knowing when one is to get it." I really begin to think that some mutual arrangement with Mr. Levi (such as I was so ready to reprobate in my younger days) would not be altogether unjustifiable. If I chose to sit for haK a day with my head tied up, and my legs in flannel, for instance — as I suppose I have a perfect right to do — these people would bite at once at Chauncey Bassett, I know. As it is, I am obliged to prociire aUevia,tion for myself by a pious fraud. On one occasion, an applicant called while I was exercising the colt ; and the servant who answered the front-door bell informed the gentleman her master was engaged. " Exercising the colt ! " cried he ; " then I have been The Next Presentation. 230 most grossly imposed upon. Coachman, drive me back to the station." Since then, I am afraid that " exercising the colt " has been rather a stereotyped reply at the door of the rectory of Chauncey Bassett, when any stranger comes to it and asks to look at the house, and whether the present writer is at home. ( 240 BOWLS AND BOWLING GREENS. TTOW meagre and unsatisfying to the human soul is the * ' food offered to it by Euoyolopcedias ! They may set at rest a doubt of the intellect ; they may satisfy the desires of the pocket by settling a disputed bet ; but beyond the bare mechanical statement of a fact, how rarely do they stray ! I look for my favourite game of Bowls in one of them, and I find the EeT. William Lisle Bowles, author of several ingenious poems, in its place. I consult one of the best of them, and am humiliated to behold this charming subject dismissed in three-and-forty lines. In a third I read this idiotic (if not intentionally insulting) statement : "Bowls, an English game, played with howls ; these are generally made of lignum vitce.'' I wonder out of what material the gentleman's head was constructed who imparted that inte- resting information : if it had been elderwood, he could scarcely have been more pithy. Of bowling greens, whereon he might surely have whiled away a pleasant five minutes, the man says absolutely nothing. „ A Bowling green is nature's billiard-table, and the game at bowls, compared to that pernicious pastime, is as gaslight unto sunlight, or as the sparkling water of the mountain- Bowls and Bowling Greens. 241 stream to tliat which is kept in tanks, and filtered by some patent process. The man that could object to Bowls as a carnal amusement, must be a Puritan indeed, and ought to be made to swaUow the Jack. It is so simple, that a chUd may learn its rules in a few minutes, and yet it requires such skill, that one may live to threescore-and-ten, and never understand one's own bowls — an aphorism, although we say it who should not say it, which may take rank with many of Solomon's. That sagacious monarch, it is more than probable, did not play Bowls ; and the more was the pity, since it is just such quahties as he is represented to have possessed which constitute a good player. Your inten- tion, it is true, is simply to approach and lie by the Jack as nearly as possible ; but the means to be taken for the insur- ance of that result require a judgment of the highest order. A number of players have been before you (suppose), and placed their missUes like a chevaux de frise all around the desired object. To the unpractised eye, there is absolutely no ingress — no " port," as it is called — for anything bigger than a marble. It is true that the half of those bowls belong to your own side ; but the unpractised eye does not conceal from itseK — if it is an honest eye, and not inclined to blink matters — that that circumstance rather makes mat- ters worse ; for it is worse to knock away a friend who is " in," or to knock in an enemy who is " out," than not to get in with one's own bowl. I have known a very tolerable player, nay, even a " skip '' or captain of the side, to alter an existing score in this man- ner. His friends, who, let us suppose, are represented by a, have five bowls " in," or nearest the Jack ; his enemies — the 6's — of course being " nowhere ; " and x — for the unhappy 242 Bowls and Bowling Greene. man is alive, and shall remain unknown — has to play the last howl. That it is a dangerous howl, there is no douht. His allies, from the other end of the green, gire warning-voice that they are willuig to take what they have got, and be thankful ; that he had better not attempt another shot. His foes, pretending to be his friends, invite him, on the contrary, to " put in another." They bring their G-reoian gifts of advice gratis to an only too eager market. The wretched x entertains an idea — " a conception," as he calls it — of vast but obscure character. This gentleman is ordi- narily a most trustworthy " skip ; " but when he proclaims, as he sometimes does, that a splendid thought has struck him — the odds against the execution of which are always about 99 to 1 — the knees of all his side are loosened with dismay. A mistake in prose-writing is excusable enough — humanum est errare, — but in poetry, in the divine art, a false rhythm, a discord, a bathos, and, far worse, the writing the exact opposite of that which you had intended to write, is not to be forgiven. X delivered his bowl with even more than his usual consideration, and watched it for some mo- ments with his arms calmly folded after the manner of the late Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ; but at length perceiving what was about to happen, he fled up the grassy bank that fringed the Green, and was seen no more amongst us for the remainder of the season. X had put " in '' a bowl of the b party — put it in first, good reader ; had altered the score that was standing -)-5 in his own favour to — 1. If such misfortunes, then, may happen to the best regu- lated " skips," you may conceive the dangers that beset a novice. His value as a player is, indeed, represented ma- thematically by the i/ — 1 ; he is just as likely to do harm Bo'.rh and Bowling G^rcdis. 243 to his friends as to do good. He is thrown in at the end, when the rest of his side has been chosen, like the piece of suet which is cast into the butcher's scale to make up the weight. The present writer (whose personal characteristic is modesty, is indebted for some of his best lessons of humility to the discipline of the Bowling green. As there were phi- losophers of the Porch, so, doubtless, there would have been of the Green — had the ancients cultivated greens ; and, in- deed, it is the belief of the more enthusiastic bowlers, that the philosopher Bias invented the pastime, and gave his illus- trious name to the means whereby the missiles are impelled to the left or right. Some persons, on the other hand, imagine this to be derived from the bias, or disposition of the mind to go to one side — ^namely, one's own side ; to consider one's own bowl " in," when to every disinterested eye it is certainly not in ; but this we must leave to the etymologist. Certain it is that, in Bowls, the wish is not only father to the thought, but to the assertion ; and the amount of contradictory evidence which I have heard deli- vered around a Jack concerning the proximity of this or that, would not disgrace the Court of the Old Bailey. I have even known a- case where a gentleman of exceeding, and indeed somewhat exceptional rectitude, incurred great unpo- pularity in a certain bowling club by introducing a spring measure which could not be tampered with, but always gave an accurate result. Before the introduction of that measure, the club had been used to estimate their distances by their respective pocket-handkerchiefs, which being of a, more or less elastic texture, had given various results, suited to every mind ; and they resented the intrusion of the spring measure as the imposition of a tyranhical Act of Uniformity. B 2 244 Bowls and Bowling Greens. Again — to return to the difficulties of this science — the bowl-player has to guard not only against existing dangers ; he has to calculate also upon those which are likely to happen after he has played. If the bowls of his own side are " in," he has to protect them, so that the next player may do them no evil ; he has to stifle in his breast the desire of self-display — a most healthful discipline, which it is difficult indeed for some to submit themselves to — and to lie modestly (not nearing the desired object at all) a guard- ship in the offing, a " block " against which the coming foe may dash himself in impotent rage. As this is one of the severest acts of self-denial and self-devotion of which the human soul is capable, so it is, physically, exceedingly diffi- cult to compass. It is all very well for a " skip " to exclaim " Guard," in an authoritative voice, and as if it were as easy as essay-writing ; but it is no light mandate for even the best and most obedient of players to obey. You are generally "narrow" or ''wide," or "short " or "strong,"' or something else you shouldn't be, and you are greeted accordingly, through- out the progress of the bowl, with some such remarks as these : " Where are you coming to t " " What is the good of you ? " or in a reflective whisper, that can, however, be heard over the whole Green, " The stupid idiot, why did I ever choose him on my side ? " To evade these observations, some persons — nay, I regret to write, some "skips" — will lay their bowl only a few feet before them, easily blocking the way of the following player, it is true, but that at a loss of self-respect, I should hope — and certainly of the respect of the next player — which it is needless and would be pain- ful for me to enlarge upon. Such feelings of indignation, however, are transient as the bowls themselves, and leave Boivk and Bowling Greens. 245 aa little trace behind them. At no time (not even when engaged in antagonistic measurement) does the genuine — that is to say, the reflective — Bowler become so outrageous in his sentiments as to preclude aU hope of reconciliation, for well he knows his mortal enemy of the moment may be his sworn aUy upon a reconstituted " side," within the hour, whose bowls he will then have to stand by as by his own. A Bowling green is indeed no place for bad humour, but for pleasant companionship and a sort of decorous mirth, bearing no nearer relation to the vulgar merriment of a skittle-alley, than does a minuet to a jig. The time at which the game is generally played is propitious for active and yet unfatiguing amusement — the long cool evenings of summer, when the labours of the day are over, and nothing intervenes between man and his rest-chamber less pleasant than his supper. The place seems especially set apart for quiet recreation. It is almost always a retired spot, cut off from the thoroughfares of Life, and is necessarily more or less agreeable to look at. The clean shaven, well rolled green, with its sloping banks of grass on the four sides, and the' seats or garden chairs with which they are usually furnished, are objects that please eveiy eye. The situation, too, of Bowling greens is generally charming, either in its seclusion, or, if it be open, in tlie views which can be seen from it. When belonging to a town, they are commonly placed, for obvious reasons, in the outskirts ; and if not, they are sur- rounded by high walls after the monastic fashion. The most beautiful Bowling greens in England are to be found at Cambridge and Oxford. Whether the monks diverted themselves with Bowls, I do not know ; but if so, they must 246 Bowls and Bmvling Greens. have tucked up their frocks pretty higli, just as a " skip " I have in my mind's eye tucks up his coat-tails — as though the sun were his fireplace, and he were warming himself thereby as in the reading-room of the Club. How odd it must have looked to have seen them playing in their horsehair shirt-sleeves ! How pleasant it must have been, when their game was over, to have refreshed themselves from the fruit- trees upon their grand old walls, or in the surrounding garden, or it may be with a flagon of good ale from the buttery hatch ! What pleasant pictures of my own bygone time the thought of those old Bowling greens calls up ! The restful evenings beneath the shadow of coUegiate elms, when nothing stirred the summer air save the sound of far-ofl' chapel tinldings, and the near thud of the huge bowls — far larger than in these degenerate days are made ; or at the river's side, to whose very brink we played, and watched, in pauses of the game, the fleets of shallops shooting by, and listened to the music of their oars : nor was the well-iced tankard lacking, I wot, nor eke the weed that maketh con- tent the soul of man. No matter : there be Bowling greens elsewhere. I see one with my outward and physical eye ; I sit, even now, upon its sloping sward, and jot these thoughts down in my note-book, while my indignant '' skip " upbraids me for my idle inattention. " You waste your time on nothing," cries my Skip, not knowing that I am writing of himself. He is a fine sight when in the act of delivering his bowl, which he performs with a supernatural solemnity ; but when it has left his hand, he becomes a wonderful spectacle. He twists his fingers as though he were making a cat's cradle, and turns his hands one over the other as though he were wash- Bowls and Boivling Greens. 247 ing them '' with invisible soap in imperceptible water." He wheels upon one heel for axis, and watches the progress of his bowl with an agonized expression of countenance ; he inclines his body as the bias inclines the bowl ; he becomes, indeed, so utterly one with that missile, that I am half surprised he does not revolve as it does, and lie on his back with his face to the sky when it has finished. If the bowl is good, he is careful to mention it, along with the informa- tion that he always sends good bowls ; if bad, he remarks that the company had better watch his second attentively, for it will be worth their while, since he has never been known to give two bad ones. My hono;iied " skip " has, however, only a just confidence in himself, and is the best player, perhaps, upon our Green ; that is to say, with the exception of one person, whom a constitutional modesty — ■ which has been already alluded to — prevents me from more particularly indicating. ( 248 ) BY LIMITED MAIL. "P THINK there is no expenditure upon which persons of -*- small means look back with such regret as on money spent in traveUing. " There is nothing," as prudent house- wives say, " to show for it." When you are once there, at the journey's end, you feel how very much better it would have been to have walked the distance. You have spent four pounds (suppose) in coming by first-class, and yet, behold there are a number of your fellow-creatures, very little more frou2y and wretched-looking than yourself, who have arrived simultaneously and with equal safety by the third-class, for thirty shillings ! How nice it would be, you think, to have got that differential two-pounds-ten in your pocket, instead of having dropped it into the maw of a railway company, to be spent in amalgamation bills upon parliamentary lawyers ! Very few people not in the Upper Ten Thousand can afford to despise two-pounds-ten ; but, on the other hand, a very large number afford, or think they can afford, to despise third-class passengers. We shrink, like the poet's too fastidious baronet, from " the raw mechanic's '' dirty thumb — with which he is accustomed to point otit objects of interest during a journey. I By Limited Mail. 249 We do not like to be offered the refreshment of gin out of a soda-water bottle, with a slice of that Bologna sausage which he has kept perhaps overlong in his hat, and wrapped round with his pocket-handkerchief. The angels doubtless weep to see vain man behaving in this manner to his fellow- mortal. Hospitality should never be rejected, however humble, nor a kind action despised. The mearmess lies not in the meagreness of the fare, but in the pride of the way- farer. StiU, though a dinner of herbs, where love is, is better than a Guildhall banquet, sandwiches flavoured with garlic, and spread upon the Daily Telegraph for a table- cloth, are not attractive to the palate, and least of all when anybody is looking on. I lunched once upon such a delicacy in the company of an intelligent and certainly a most hos- pitable journeyman stone-mason, and I shall never forget my foolish trepidation at the station we chanced to stop at during the repast. Suppose one's cousia in the Blues had happened to look in ! Shouldn't I have been the bluer of the two ? It is idle to affect to despise those social distinctions ; no gentleman — however philosophic — would relish leaving his friends on the platform to travel with their servants in the second-class. He may say he wouldn't mind, but he would mind ; and though he should He on his back (after the impressive Eastern manner), and take oath to the contrary, this writer would not believe him. Some feeble-minded persons endeavour to persuade them- selves, that the second-class is cooler and more pleasant in summer than the more expensive carriage ; but, at all events, they do not succeed in persuading others. Blinds, and curtains, and spring-cushions are far from being engines of discomfort ; nor can rattling windows, and a seat so shiny 250 By Limited Mail. that we can scarcely keep on it, be desirable for travel. For the above reasons, I have almost always been a first-class passenger, and have expended much unnecessary moneys upon railways without the slightest acknowledgment from director or committee. They have plenty of votes of thanks and pieces of plate for comparatively unworthy objects, but to the persistent first-class passenger who can't afford it, they offer nothing whatever. And yet it is upon us they thrive, and not upon the few whose circumstances entitle them to travel luxuriously. Besides this extravagance, conseq^uent upon my thus being a victim to " Mrs. Grundy " — besides the ordinary high fare which I pay without any sort of justification — I find I cannot journey so cheaply as other travellers. My expenses are always about fifteen per cent, above those of any other person who accomplishes the same distance. I find it somehow necessary to surround myself before starting with a little library of "light literature," which I soon discover to be very heavy reading, and with " readable books " that I am quite unable to get through. I entomb myself in newspapers of all shades of opinions, which I skim over in a quarter of an hour, and then don't know how to get rid of. The very sight of them, crumpled, and crumby, and mysteriously smeared as they soon get to be, becomes hateful to me, and — raven-like — I hide them carefully away between the cushions, whence they are some- times extracted by a too officious porter, and stufied into my cab, as I leave the station, poor and penitent. I used to derive some amusement from " flying " these out of window on the railway, but that relaxation is now denied me. An old lady in the next compartment to mine once delayed the Great Western Express at Taunton, and terrified all the By Limitid Mail. 251 passengers about " a baby in long clothes," which, she insisted upon it, had been thrown out of some carriage past her window : and nothing would satisfy her until the station-master acceded to her prayer, that he would " set the telegraph in motion," which operation she seemed to consider was a remedy for every iU. I asked her whethej she thought it was a girl or a boy, and she replied : " Oh, a girl ; a dear little innocent girl ! " But she was wrong there, for it happened to be the Evening Mail — with some half-dozen other newspapers wrapped up in it, of which I had vainly hoped never to hear again. My body, too, has as many cravings as my mind. I pur- chase food at all the stations where it can be got, and I don't like it when I get it. Railway-pastry is an abomina- tion, and where is one to put that to, I should like to know, without offence to anybody ? A gigantic oyster paid, with but one bite out of it, once presented itself to me for forty miles, stuck to the lamp outside my carriage, and main- tained there by the speed at which we flew. Everybody who put his head out of window on that side must have seen it likewise, and to watch the thing loose its hold — like an exhausted bivalve — and fail and drop as the train slackened, was a sickening sight. Of course, in a journey of any length, I take care to equip myself with extra cushions, hot tins, &c. ; and although the Company supplies these, I always reward the individual hand which ministers to my comfort. That touch of the hat from the guard is worth half-a-crown of anybody's money who is not a peer of the realm, which (by a singular freak of Nature, who has endowed me with aU the tastes and characteristics of that titled class) I do not happen to be ; while the pantomime, 252 By Limited Mail. as he picks up my shiUing from the seat with the air of recovery — of having previously dropped it there himself — and murmurs, " Thank 'ee, sir," with his head in the carpet- bag he places so carefully beneath me, is equally satisfactory in its degree. It is partly, perhaps, in consequence of these habits of mine, that I find aU guards and porters excessively affable. In the gamut of social courtesy I would place Government officials at the one end, and railway officials at the other, and it will be conceded by every one of experience, that I could not have paid the latter a neater compliment. Who ever heard of a public servant (as the former class is satirically termed) offering you even a chair to sit down upon, far less a piUow for the small of your back, and a stool to help make up a bed to sleep upon? Yet these accommodations are offered to me whenever I travel by night upon any railway, and I am farirom rejecting them. They were placed in my carriage ia January last, when I started for Z. in the Limited Mail from A. Ten hours of travel through impenetrable darkness and almost arctic frost lay before me, and I was certainly not to be blamed for making myself comfortable. I had half a mind to suffer some other people to come into the carriage, for the sake of their animal warmth, but upon the whole I decided to be alone : they might have objected to smoking, or made them- selves obnoxious in some other respect. It is a peculiarity of long railway journeys, that they are accomplished with much greater rapidity (comparatively speaking) than are short ones. Before I have fairly settled myself, and begun to draw pictures in my mind of the dis- comforts which second-class passengers must be suffering (which I always find very soothing and excusatory), we are By Limited Mail. 253 at B. jtmotion — a place whioli it quite wearies me to reach, when I chance not to be going any further, and by day. A glare of lights, a trampling of feet, a ringing of beUs, and we are away again ; tearing through the gloom with a threaten- ing, ominous rattle, as though we defied the powers of air to stop us, and anon with a screech of triumph because they do not. The oscUlation is considerable, but not unpleasant, and acts upon my system as the rocking of a cradle affects a well-principled infant. I like it. I like to lie, swayed from side to .side in a half-dream, with every now and then a bump, which is not quite a jerk, to suggest that I must not go to sleep too soon, or I shall lose half the charm of the sensation. I like the short, sharp report as we shoot the bridges, and the long groan in the tunnel, where we get so very serious, and the gradually lighter tone we take as we come out of it, like a gentleman who has been near death's door, and in a sad fright, but is now convalescent, and aU right again. Whir-r-r-r! What is that, if it isn't a cock-pheasant rising? It must have been C, but my eyes were shut, and before I could open them, there was not a lamp within sight to show that we have been near the dweUings of men. How fast we are going ! And yet, because of the frost, we are warned to be very careful, and allowed forty-five minutes' " law " upon the whole journey. Why did they not strike the axles with hammers at B., too, as they did at A, and should do, the paper tells us, at every station ? But, after all, what do the papers know about it ? " The railway people must know best, of coursh," I mutter to myseK ; and I say " of coursh,'' because I am getting drowsy. They are always particularly careful about these night trains ; the best wood. 254 By Limited Mail. the best iron, the best steam ■ Pshaw ! what nonsense am I talking to myself? Did I say the best steam ? How sleepy I must have been ! Ha, ha ! Eh ? Oh, I thought somebody spoke I wonder whether that sound is the sea, or no ! We must be near the sea now — the sea that I have always seen here (for I never travelled this way by night before), bright and sparkling, and specked with sails, but which now might be ink itself, for all that I can teU to the contrary. Suppose it was ink ; with the sand close by for drying purposes, what a capital place the sea- side woidd be for authors ! The mention of authors makes me even drowsier than before How lonely one feels, and yet how far from dissatisfied ! It is a world without a sun, but then there is nobody to dispute my supremacy in it. I seem to myseK to be the one represen- tative left of the great human family, and to be hurried about everywhere at iifty mUes an hour, that aU space may have the advantage of my presence Whir-r-r-r ! Another station, but which, I cannot telJ, for I have been asleep, and lost count. How cold it is ! I wish I had brought a third railway-wrapper. Why does not the guard bring me another hot- water tin 1 He might do it, if he had any real regard for me. Those guards can climb about, no matter at what pace we may be going. I gave him half-a- crown. The train is slackening speed. Heavens, what an ass I was to open that window ! What could I expect to see, except the reflection of my own face as I let it down ? The night wind poured in like a knife, though it was but for an instant, didn't it 1 It would have been more agree- able, after all, if I had somebody to speak to. I wish they had hammered those axles when we were at B. However, By Limited Mail. 255 it is a comfort to thini that the best iron, the best wood, and the best The train is slackening. The engine shrieks like a benighted demon, and endeavours to " shake " upon a note altogether too high for it. Never mind. I don't let that window down again for ten collisions ; at least, I will be shattered to atoms, warm. What a despairing, hopeless yell that last was ! Our engine has given in ; it is vanquished, though it spurts and curses still. We are at K. — two hun- dred and fifty miles of journey done — and there is a quarter of an hour allowed for refreshments. Another peculiarity of night trains is this, that there is somehow always more time to spare at the stopping stations than in the day ; this is perhaps because we expect to have less, and are therefore especially expeditious ; but, at all events, so it is. The train has disgorged a number of dishevelled, ill-looking persons from aU classes, who crowd into the refreshment room. Their attire is disordered, their neckerchiefs awry, their eyes half-closed, their expressions stupid, and yet not unconscious of disrespectability. They swallow boiling coffee, which they in vain endeavour to cool with boiling milk. They toss it off with grins of agony, and then scuttle off to the train again like rabbits to a warren. " There is no hurry,'' says the presiding priestess from behind her tea-urn (and how different looks she in her clean cap and cherry-coloured ribbons, from the rest of us !), but we believe her not. We have heard legends of persons who have been beguiled by that syren, and compelled to remain at K. for twenty-four hours. And yet the glorious creature, who has risen at 1 a.m. for our especial convenience, was no deceiver, though so fair ! We have nearly five minutes to spare, after all. But is there not the State carriage to look 256 By Limited Mail. at, brilliantly lighted up as for a feast, and doubtless inhabited by swells ? The general public therefore surges that way, flattens its nose against the windows, perceives unmistakable nobUity in the air and attitudes of the occupants — who are naturally disconcerted by the intrusion — and remarks that it is a fine thing to be lords and ladies. Upon this, " the suite " in the side carriage flattens its nose in turn from the inside, and denounces such conduct as reprehensible, and appeals to the authorities for redress. " yes, ah," returns the public ; " we suppose we may look where we like in a free country ; " and altercation would be imminent, but that the guard arrives, and reads the Riot Act with, " Take your seats ! " and so disperses the assembly. Roar, rattle, jump, whir, on again through the night, half the dark way devoured, and the other half invisibly dis- appearing. It takes some time to reduce the excitement supervening upon the hot coff'ee and cold platform ; but when we do sleep, we sleep all the heavier. Only once, in a half-dream, as the train stops at some place unknown, we hear, amid the ringing of axles, the words, " Not safe ! " and the reply, " It will last to Z., depend upon it ! " Did I really hear it ? Stufl' and nonsense ! By the Limited Mail is always the safest travelling ; the best wood, the best iron, the best steam — and I fall asleep again over my favourite formula. I wake to perfect consciousness with a jerk that dislocates every bone in my body, and just in time to see the lamp extinguished, and hear both the windows fall down into their sockets with a crash. A long-forgotten picture of a farmhouse where I once lived in distant Westmoreland, and By Limited Mail. 257 of the face of a friend that is dead, flashes unbidden across my mind, before it settles down upon the reality of my situation. The carriage is off the line, I know, for we seem to be going over a ploughed field of solid iron. It is awful travelling, for it may be the road that leads to Death. No. I hear the engine rattling its chains like a horrid ghost, as it breaks away from us. Thank Heaven, then at least it cannot take us over an embankment, to be dashed to pieces, or into a canal, to be drowned like cats in a bag. But awful shrieks from oppressed human beings turn my blood even colder than does the icy wind. Others, then, have not escaped as I have done, with fright and bruises. A lantern or two glimmer across my window, and I implore of the passers-by to open the door for me, which is jammed quite tight by the collision. I am informed, in a cold dry tone, that that is the business of the Company's servants, and that it is indecorous of me to discommode a passenger amateur — to wit, the unknown speaker — ^by any such superfluous request. So I squeeze myself out of window, and drop down upon a heterogeneous heap of something — an assem- blage of " the best wood and the best iron," which has splintered off a neighbouring carriage. That carriage, how- ever, stiU stands upon its wheels, in the counterfeit present- ment of a carriage ; but this which I am approaching, which has the lanterns round it, and the circle of dark forms, has no resemblance to a carriage whatever. It is a mere mass of ruin, without door, or window, or floor, or wheel, crushed and flattened together ; and from within it come forth the shrieks that have grown fainter since I first heard them, and are fading into groans and murmurs. What I dimly discern cumbering the earth here was, a minute ago, a first- 258 By Limited Mail. class carriage, filled with people sleeping, or eating, or getting their personal luggage ready for the terminus at Z., "which they wiU now arrive at, poor creatures, in quite another fashion. What is to be done 1 Nothing can be done, says the grave guard, without pickaxes and crow-bars, which have already been sent for. A light has gone north and a light has gone south for these things, and for doctors and brandy, and, above all things, to stop the trains up and down. In the meantime, we shiver in the cold and dark- ness (for one would as soon think of entering a carriage now for comfort, as a sepulchre), and the thirteen poor wretches under the ruin shiver, too, after a ghastlier manner. " How did it happen 1 " inquires a passenger. " Axle broke, sir," interposes an ofl&eial sharply. " They will break in these frosty nights.'' " We told you at X. it would break," exclaims a voice indignantly. " And they said it would last us to Z.," I chimed in on a sudden. " Yes," confirms the voice, " they did ; and it's man- slaughter, and nothing else." Whereupon the ofiicial moves away from us into the gloom, as from persons who are dangerous for a well-regu- lated mind even to listen to. We are stiU around the ruined carriage, comforting the unhaj)py folks as well as we can, when a great cry arises that the L. up-express is upon us, and there is a universal panic. The piteous wail of the wounded and imprisoned is unheeded (and, indeed, we are quite powerless to help them), and all who can do so leap into an enormous hedge which happens here to fringe the line. We see the fiery eyes at By Limited Mail. 259 the mouth of the tunnel, and expect immediate ruin upon ruin ; but the engine-driver has perceived the danger signals, and is only bringing his train up to the halt. So we descend with more or less of difficulty from our unpleasant elevation, and I find that the thorns have (among other damages) grievously injured my hat. Not until two hours are the victims liberated from their dreadful prison, for the axe and bar must be used tenderly, lest they hazard yet again the imperUled life. Many have broken bonSs and broken heads — they hold these latter with their hands as though they were indeed splitting, but there is, thank God, no burden (such as we had aU dreaded to behold) borne forth and carried away in silence, with a cloth over it, upon which, no matter what the shape it takes, is written Death. From that extremity of misfortune all are mercifully preserved, for the present at least ; but enough of woe has happened to make me sad and serious as I step into the special train that has been sent from Z. to convey us and the wounded. It is not so, however, with my fellow- passenger, a commercial traveller of elastic disposition, who, as he takes his seat, finds something consolatory in travelling first-class, after paying only second-class fare, even under such circumstances as ours. " Ah," observed I gravely, " but it was a first-class carriage that was so smashed, remember.'' "It was so, sir," he assented cheerfully — ''shivered to lucifer-matches, sir. I have been in half-a-dozen of these little accidents, and I know nothing can stand 'em ; no, not if you were in a cage of cast-iron." " Dear me," said I ; " but surely by the Limited Mail " s 2 260 By Limited Mail. " My dear sir," quoth he impatiently, and snapping his fingers, " the mail is limited, but not the liability of the passengers." An official person, of sympathizing aspect, and attired as though he were the chaplain to the Company, here opened the door, and took down our names and addresses, with many earnest inquiries as to how we felt ourselves. " That was very civil of him," observed I to the bagman, who had not made quite so light of his bruises to this kind inquirer as his high spirits had led me to expect he would have done : " it was certainly a most Christian attention." " AU humbug, sir," replied my friend, " I assure you. Actuated by the purest commercial motives, he came to see that we were alive and well, and not in a condition to make any claim, for compensation. He also wished to make a complete list of the passengers, lest more should pretend to be injured by the Limited Mail to-night than ever travelled by it." " What a world of treachery and deceit we live in ! " observed I, reflectively. " Very much so, sir," rejoined my philosophic companion ; " and let us be thankful we do live in it, and without broken bones." " I hope at least," said I, " that those persons who have been less fortunate will obtain redress. I have injured my hat — you observe — my new hat, and shall myself demand another." And then I went on to tell him of what I had haK-dreamed, half-heard about the axle lasting us to Z. " In cross-examination, sir, they would prove that you had dreamed the whole of it." By Limited Mail. 261 I then informed him how satisfactorily I had been cor- roborated by an unknown witneas. " Yes, sir, and he will remaia unknown, you may rely upon it, to all but the Company's solicitors. No human being wiU ever hear of that too intelligent traveller again." " Good Heavens ! " cried I, appalled by the pretematuraUy significant manner of the speaker, " you do not mean to say that they wiU make away with him 1 " " I do, though ; just that, and no less. I don't mean to say," added he, assuringly, " that they will Burke him ; but they wUl certainly make Viim safe. That was another of the reasons why that gentleman was so solicitous in his inquiries. And as for you, sir, you will be convicted of ' conspiracy ' and ' intent to defraud,' if you open your mouth.'' By this time we had arrived at Z. ; and I was glad enough to find myself in a Hansom, unassisted by " the best steam," and upon the queen's highway. I read in the second edition of that morning's paper, that the Limited Mail upon the A. and Z. Railway had met with " a slight delay " near the X. station, in consequence of the unavoidable breaking of the axle, and that some persons had sufiered " contusions." Nobody ever got compensation, although many wanted it, for, as the bagman had predicted, the too inteUigent witness was not forthcoming. As for me — my own applioation for a new head covering being treated ■with disdain — I was not going to be indicted for conspiracy for the sake of other people. Nevertheless, the thought does sometimes strike me that the commercial traveller may himseK have been interested in dissuading me from such a course. Do the railway companies keep bagmen as well as chaplains always in readiness to run down to the scene of a 262 By Limited Mail. calamity, I wonder ? However that maybe, ever since that " slight delay between X. and Z." I travelled by day-trains as long as the frost lasted ; nor was I tempted again, not- withstanding " the best iron and the best wood," of which it is always constructed, into a Limited MaiL ( 263 ) A REALLY GOOD DATS FISHING. T HAVE a most unfeigned admiration of good old Izaak -^ Walton, and all fishermen ; I Hke to think of them as contemplative men, who might have been anything they chose — statesmen, divines, poets — only that they preferred being fishermen — lovers of their kind, lovers of scenery, lovers of all living things, and possessing some good and unquestionable proof that the worm which they thread ahve upon their pitiless hook, and which, to the ordinary eye certainly seems not to like it, does not in reality suffer in the least. I con- fess I have been many times upon the verge of calling Pisoator, my uncle, from whom I have expectations which such an appellation would ruin, a cruel and cold-blooded old villain for the quiet way in which he wOl torture his live bait — never taking the poor creature oif untU it has wriggled its last, and then instantly impahng a fresh victim — or selecting a lively minnow out of his green water-box, and throwing him into the pleasant river, his wished-for home, with a hook that he does not know of at first, poor thing, in his under-jaw. When he has done his duty even ever so well, and given warning of the approach of prey in the most sagacious manner by pulling at the float, and has been 264 A Beally Good Dai/s Fishing. rescued alive, Jonah-like, from the interior of some enormous fish, Pisoator wUl not yet suffer him to depart, but, con- fessing that he is a very good bait — as if that compliment could atone for these many indignities and pains — drops him again delicately into the stream ; conduct only to be equalled by that of the widow lady in the legend, whose late husband's body is discovered by her lover in the garden fish-pond, a receptacle for eels ; upon which, " Poor dear Sir Thomas," says the lady, " put him in again, perhaps hill catch us some more." Worse than aU, to. my taste, looks my revered uncle, when he is running after a May-fly, in order to impale that : one can bear to see a boy iu pursuit of a butterfly, because it is not so much cruelty that actuates him as curiosity ; biit an old gentleman, bald, pursy — which epithet reminds me that I must not let Piscator peruse these remarks — and perspiring, striving to catch and put to death, under circumstances of peculiar atrocity, a happy and inof- fensive insect, is a shameful sight. No ; I confess I like to See fishermen use artificial flies ; the mere hooking of the fish — which, after aU, are meant to be eaten — through those horny, bloodless lips of theirs, I don't believe is very painful ; and I regard these baits with a clear conscience. A good fisherman's book is a museum of unnatural science, and I like to examine it gratis upon some river-bank, with a cigar in my mouth, while Piscator fishes. He sets about this new creation about October, and by April has finished quite a pocket-filll of these additions to nature. This scarlet fly, almost as big as a bird of paradise, must have taken him a good long time. " It is a military insect, and a most tremendous bait for the female," says my uncle, who, I am thankful to say, is a confirmed old bachelor; "there is A Really Good Day's Fishing. 265 nothing in tlmt fine creature whatever except a little wood and wire ; but he kills, Bob — he IdUs." Why, by the by, do pursy old fellows, after fifty, almost without exception, repeat their words ? " It -is a fine day," observes Piscator, when I salute him in the morning — " a very fine day— a very fine day, iadeed. Bob," as though there was somebody contradicting that assertion. " And your mother is well, is she, Bob 2 Your mother is well ? Good, Bob, good — very good." I think they have some idea that this makes an ordinary sentence remarkable, and they wish, perhaps, to give you an oppor- tunity or two of setting it down in your note-book. " What is this huge black and white fly, uncle," I inquire, " like an excellent imitation of a death's-head moth ? " " Death's-head fiddlestick ! " cries Piscator, in a fury, "it's nothing of the kind. Bob — nothing of the kind. I call it the Popular Preacher, and it also is a good bait for the female — the serious female, that is. I have killed a number of chub with that fly, sir — a number of stout chub.'' There is a sort of box, also, attached to Pisoator's book which contains even still more wonderfnl effigies ; spinning minnows, twice as large as any in real life, and furnished with Archimedean screws ; mice with machinery inside instead of intestines, and composite animals — half toad, half gergoyle — of which pike are supposed to become readily enamoured. What a glomus amusement must indeed be that of the fly-fisher, climbing up in his huge waterproof boots the bed of some rock-strewn stream, amid the music of a hundred falls, and under the branching shelter of the oak and mountain ash, through which the sunbeams weave such fairy 266 A Beally Good Day's Fishing. patterns upon his watery path ! I never could throw a fly myself by reason of those same branches ; I left my uncle's favourite killer — brown, with a yellow stripe — at the top of an inaccessible alder, on our very last expedition together, just after we had taken a great deal of trouble, too, in its extrication from the right calf of Piscator, where I had inadvertently hitched it. I am too clumsy and near-sighted, and indeed much too impatient for the higher flights of fishing. Piscator starts in the dusk, in order to be up at some mountain-tarn by daylight, and comes back in the evening with half-a-dozen fine trout, well satisfied ; now I would much rather have half-an-hour's fishing for bleak in a ditch with a landing-net. However, I do rise to gudgeon- fishing. I know no pleasanter and more dream-like enjoyment than that I have often experienced on the bank of some ait (which some ingenious persons still spell "eyot") in the bosom of old Father Thames ; or, better stUl, on an arm- chair in a punt pitched in one of his back-waters. Let a • little beer be in the boat and some tobacco, with perhaps a sympathizing friend ; then what a scene it is ! Before us, the great roomy eel-pots are hanging idle over the foamy lasher, in waiting for the night ; their withy bands seem dry and rotten enough in the sunshine, but they are good enough for many a summer yet ; beyond them lies the round island where the bending osiers dip their green heads into the flood till they be needed ; in its centre, is the laige leafless nest of her, " born to be the only graceful shape of scorn," the river swan ; and around it grow those " starry river buds," the lilies ; on the right hand, stately woods slope up from the very bank to the horizon ; on the left is A Bealhj Oood Dai/s Fishing. 267 the miller's garden, upon an island likewise, with the high broad mill-stream running swiftly on its eastern shore, almost upon a level with the flowers ; clack, clack, gOes the great clumsy wheel, whose shining paddles we see disappear, one after one, under the low dark archway ; and whir, whir, go half a score of little wheels within the bowels of the quaint old wooden house : along the main stream, beyond the miU-race, and separated from it by another island, ply tlie heavy-laden barges with half-a-dozen horses apiece, on one of which the lazy ibiver sits, like a lady, sideways, with his red woollen cap drooping upon one side, and his pipe scarcely kept alight ; market-people are returning along the towing-path, many with weighty baskets on their heads, but aU have a word or a smile for us of the River ; pleasure-boats pass in the distance, filled with ladies, with brass bands, with racing crews ; the locksman sees them from liis lofty post, and the huge gates slowly part to let them through ; all this we watch afar ofi^, and have no part with the gTeat stream of existence regarded from its calmest of back-waters. As for the fishing itself, that is very pleasant ; I idways look away when the man puts on the gentle ; and my friend and I have shilling bets upon which catches the next fish. We did bet at least at one time, until I detected him in tlie ingenious but fraudulent manoeuvre of pulling the same perch up again and again, by which he not only won haJf-a- sovereign of me, but gloried in his shame. I love the very dropping of the boat from " pitch '' to " pitch ; " the careful fixing of it between its two bare poles ; the measuring with the plmnmet for length of line ; the chucking the bread and me«l in for the gratuitous entertainment of the fish ; the grating of the iron rake in the pebbly bottom ; and all tlie 268 A Really Good Day's Fishing. machinery which is set in motion to persuade me that I am doing something and not nothing. Better than all, perhaps, is the after-entertaiament at the old-fashioned river inn, where jack is stuffed in some pecu- liarly fragrant manner, or there is an especial patent for frying trout ; where awful specimens of both those fish, with particularly protuberant eyes, are suspended in the low- roofed cosy dining-room, along with the portrait of some famous fisherman, and the rules of the local angling club. The heroes of these places are not insolent and puffed up with knowledge, as hunters and shooters for the most part are, but freely and graciously impart intelligence to the unlearned. I confess at once that I have caught but two perch all day ; my friend, three perch ; and Jones, the man, about eight dozen. " Ay, ay, and very well, too," observes the landlord ; " Jones is a good rod ; you should have tried Miller's Hole with the minnow ; " and so on. I have fished for bigger fish than perch. I once went out — went in, I should say— to spear barbel : that is a very splendid and* almost warlike amusement. You see the leviathan reposing upon the pebbles beneath ; silently, softly, you seize a long barbed spear, and measure the distance between you and your prey exactly ; you think it to be about four feet, whereas the real depth of water is sbc feet at the very least. Striking, under this impression, with all your force, you throw yourself into the river, arrive upon the very spot which the barbel recently occupied, and are lucky if you can swim as well as he. Whenever I attempt anything above my perch, indeed, I fail miserably ; " the party " who occu- pied my seat in the punt on the previous day had caught so many trout, he could not carry half of them away with him ; A Really Good Day's Fishing. 269 and " the party" who comes the day afterwards, again, is equally successful ; but, for me, I might just as well have baited my hook with a pack of cards. However, at the end of this last summer, I had one really good day's fishing, killing with my single rod carp and trout, of such magnitude and number as Piscator himself would have been proud to tell of ; and it came to pass in this way. The Marquis of B , whom I call " B." in conversation with strangers — is a good friend of mine, who has known me for many years. If he met me in the markei/place of our borough, his lordship would, I am sure, say : " How d'ye do ? " or, " How are you ? " and thank me, perhaps, for the pains I took about the return of his second son. I have dined more than once at the Hall, during election time, and his lordship has not failed to observe to me : "A glass of wine with you ? " or, " WiU you join us, my dear sir ? " quite confidentially upon each occasion ; the words may be -nothing indeed, but his lordship's maimer is such that I protest that when he speaks to me I feel as if J had had the wine. Well, only a month ago, he sent me a card, per- mitting me to have one day's fishing in his home preserves. Piscator tried to persuade me to give it up to him, but I said " No," because he can catch fish anywhere, and I do not possess that faculty ; so he gave me the most minute directions overnight, and lent me his famous book of files, and his best rod. How beautiful looked the grand old park upon that August morning ! The deer — " In copse and fern, Twinkled the innumerable ear and tail," — cropping with reverted glance the short rich herbage, or ^1 Bealhj Good Day's Fishing. bounding across the carriage-drives in herds ; the mighty oak-trees, shadowing half-an-acre each ; the sedgy pools, with ■water-fowl rising from their rims witli sudden cry ; and the winding brooks, where shot the frequent trout from side to side. Now from their right banks I fished — now from their left ; and now, regretful that I did not borrow Piseator's boots, I strode, with turned-up trousers, in the very bed of the stream ; still, I could not touch a iin. I l)ej;;in to tliink that myuncle had given me, out of envy, wrong directions, and provided me with impossible flies. At last I eame upon a large brown pool, with a tumbling fall ; and " Now," cried I aloud, " for a tremendous trout, or nei'cr ! " " Never," cried a hoarse voice, with provincial accent ; " I'm dang'd if thee isn't a cool hand, anyway." This was the keeper. I saw how the case stood at once, and determined to have a little sport of some kind, at aU events. " Hush, my good man," I whispered, " don't make a noise ; I have reason to believe that there are fish here." " Wootthee coom out of t' stream [it was up to my waist], or maun I cooni in and fetch thee ? " " No," said I blandly, " don't come in on any account, the least sjilash would be fatal ; stay just where you are, and I dare say you will see nio catch one in this very spot. It's beautiful weather." I got out upon one bank, as the giant, speechless with rage, slipped in from the other. When he had waded half- way aeross — " Do you think I am poaching, my good man ? " inquired I innocently. A Beally Good Day's Fishing. 271 " I knaws thee is't," quoth the keeper, adding a violent expletive. " Well, I have a card here from my friend B.," said I, " which I should have thought was quite sufficient." " Thy friend B. ! " roared the other sarcastically, " let me et at thee." " Yes," said I, '' old B. of the Hall ; don't you know him ? — the marquis." The dripping savage was obliged to confess that my ticket of permission was genuine. " But how do I knaw as thee beest the right man as is named here ? " urged he obstinately. A cold sweat began to bedew me, for I had not thought it necessary to bring out my visiting cards. " Right mian ! " cried I indignantly ; " of course I am, why not ? " " Of coorse, why of coorse," sneered the brutal ruffian, " thee must coom along with me." A bright thought suddenly flashed across me : " Look here, my good man ; look at my pocket handkerchief ; J. P. ; ain't those the right initials ? Confound you, would you like to see the tail of my shirt also ? I'U tell B. of you, as sure as you live." At which the giant, convinced against his will, left me in peace. I fished until dewy eve, and still caught nothing. At last, in the near neighbourhood of the HaU itself, I came upon a little pond environed by trees ; the fish were so numerous in it, that they absolutely darkened the water. I had only just lodged my fly upon the surface, and, behold ! I caught and easily landed a magnificent carp ; again, and a trout of at least six pounds rewarded me ; a third time, and I hooked 272 A Beally Good Day's Fishing. another carp ; and so on. I was intoxicated with my success. In the couple of hours of daylight which yet remained to me, I filled not only Piscator's largest fishing-basket, but my pockets also. " What will my uncle say to this ?" thought I. He did not know what to say. We dined, we supped, we breakfasted oflf the very finest ; we spent the next morning in despatching the next best in baskets to distant friends. I was the hero of the family for four-and-twenty hours, although Piscator tried to make out that it was all owing to the excellence of his flies. At four o'clock on the following afternoon, however, arrived my friend the keeper, taller than ever, pale with passion, more inimical-looking than on the day before. " Well, thee hast about been and done it, with thy ticket and thy friend B.,'' quoth he. " Yes," said I cheerfully, " you're light : I rather flatter myself I have. Sixty-seven pounds of fish, my man" (triumphantly). " Sixty-seven pounds ! " said he, with a ghastly grin. " Ay," said I, " not an ounce less : thirty pounds of carp, twenty pounds of trout, and seventeen pounds of — I'm hanged if I know what fish." " Thirty pounds of carp, twenty pounds of trout, and seventeen pounds of he's hanged if he knows what fish," repeated the keeper, as if he was going to cry. " Yes," added I ; " and all out of one little bit of a pond." " Pond ! " cried Piscator, entering the room at this juncture, " you never told me anything about a pond, Bob." "Well — no,'' said I, blushing a little. "I confess I thought it better to say stream. I did catch them in the pond close by the Hall." A Beally Good Day's Fishing. 273 " Why, you've been fishing in the marquis's private stew, Bob ! " cried my uncle, horror-struck. "Yes," cried the keeper, blowing into his fists, as if preparing for a murderous assault upon my countenance ; " he's been a fishing in the stew-pond, in his friend B.'s private stew." And this was the only really good day's fishing I ever had. cox AKD WTMAlf, PBINTEBS, GEEAT QUEEN STEEBT, W.C. I an* ,^