/3f 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 4525.D37A8 1870a 
 
 Annals of an eventful life. 
 
 3 1924 013 469 220 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013469220 
 
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ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEOKGE WEBBE DASENT, D.C.L. 
 
 Then take the Spring while it is Spring, 
 Live warm in Summer while it glows, 
 Nor wait till Winter comes as king 
 With crown of thorns that bear no rose . 
 
 JFiftfj (Efcttton, ttetM. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 13, GREAT MAELBOEOUGH STEEET. 
 
 Jv 
 
K-2.-X} IM-u^ 
 
 London : 
 bradbury, evan?, akd co., printers, whitefriars. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HOW I WAS BORN, AND WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARDS. 
 
 I was born in the year 181-. I am not going to tell you the 
 exact year ; and am not likely to bore any of my readers with 
 recollections of the Peace of Amiens or the Campaigns of the 
 Duke of Wellington. Yes, I was born, but before I was born 
 my existence was blighted. Not that I came into the world a 
 rickety thing, for I was a most healthy child ; morally blighted, 
 I mean. Every one had made up their minds that I was to be 
 one thing, and I came out another. In a word, it had been 
 settled that I was to be a girl, and I was born a boy. > 
 
 ' ' Amphora coepit 
 ' Institui ; curreute rota cur urceus exit?" 
 
 We were a boy family, and we had been a boy family time 
 out of mind. Every now and then, after a run of fifteen boys 
 or so, Nature, or whatever it is that settles these things, threw 
 us a girl by way of a sop ; but I am bound to say, they had far 
 better have been boys ; they were merely boys in girls' clothing, 
 but inwardly they were thorough males. One such sop had 
 been my father's sister. At first the terror, and afterwards the 
 delight, of my existence, I fancy I see her now, and hear her 
 say, " Oh, child, that you had been a girl ! " Well ! this strong- 
 minded woman had settled it with my parents that I was to be 
 a girl, that I was to be called after her, to be adopted by her, 
 and though last, not least, to have her money and her land. I 
 have heard it whispered that my father had doubts on the 
 matter, and that he was seen to wring his hands when baby's 
 sex was talked of as a foregone conclusion. But my father was 
 a wise man, and kept his doubts to himself, thinking, perhaps, 
 that time would show ; and accordingly, when time did show, 
 and our old nurse ran downstairs to tell him that baby was 
 
2 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 born ; and born a boy, my father was almost the only one in the 
 house who was not surprised. 
 
 My mother fortunately, under the circumstances, could say 
 very little ; but as for my Aunt, who was about as old as my 
 father, and rather bullied him, I have heard nurse say, " She 
 was neither to haud nor to bind, but went about the house just 
 like a rampaging cow." What " a rampaging cow " may be I 
 can scarce say, even out-of-doors ; but indoors, and " about the 
 house," it must be a most unpleasant phenomenon. If tossing 
 was any part of the performance, my Aunt could have done it 
 beautifully. No one ever tossed up her head higher, and no one 
 ever kept her head so long at tossing pitch. To see her do it 
 was as good a sight as a mountebank balancing a donkey on a 
 ladder — a spectacle now, alas ! very rare in London streets. But 
 even a rampaging cow, if left to herself, must wear herself out ; 
 and so it was on the day of my birth. The other children were 
 sent over to a neighbour ; my father drove over his estate, there 
 was no governess to rampage over or with, and the doctor, when 
 he took his leave of my Aunt, insisted that the house must be 
 kept as still as death ; not so much as a mouse should be heard 
 to stir, she could not be too cautious, and so on, with a bundle 
 of commonplaces which meant, " Dear Mrs. Mandeville, if I had 
 power to turn you out of this house I would ; but as I haven't, 
 I expect you to be quiet so long as you stay here." 
 
 No wonder, then, that after Dr. Mindererus had departed 
 Mrs. Mandeville took some sal volatile, sat down and had a good 
 cry, and went to sleep. 
 
 Now I daresay you will say, Then let her sleep for ever, for 
 what we care .; why do you raise her up thirty years dead, to 
 make the beginning of your story hideous ? Yes ! that is just 
 the reason why I raise her up. She did all she could to make 
 my life hideous, and she very nearly succeeded. First of all, 
 she was always snubbing me, and I have heard nurse say, " If 
 Mrs. Man-Devil had had her way, Master Teddy would have had 
 a humpback." Once or twice she was caught trying to drop 
 " the little innocent " — yes ! me, the little innocent — on the 
 floor, and several times she cut my nails to the quick ; once, in 
 cutting my hair, she snipped off a bit of my ear ; in fact, she 
 was always brandishing steel about, and scaring me out of my 
 wits. Then she persuaded my parents that pastry and fruit 
 were bad — not for all the children, but for me in particular. 
 Oh ! the agonies I have endured at seeing the whole family 
 circle devouring flaming mince-pies like so many devout fire- 
 worshippers, while I was condemned to eat tapioca or sago pud- 
 ding. Then she said she was sure that plays and pantomimes 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 3 
 
 ■were too exciting for me, that I should have water on the brain 
 if I went ; and the result was that I was packed off to bed while 
 all the rest went in a merry party to the theatre. You will ask, 
 of course, why this tyranny was borne ; but I can give you a 
 very good answer. Though I had not proved a girl — for which, 
 on the bended knib of my pen, I most devoutly' thank Heaven — 
 I was considered to be in some sort Mrs. Mandeville's property ; 
 and as it was supposed that she would add to that property all 
 she had, or, in other words, make me her heir, my father and 
 mother agreed that Auntie must be humoured, and that she 
 should have her way with the boy. 
 
 Now, I may as well confess that Aunt Mandeville's property, 
 — that is I, Edward Halfacre, — was very undutiful to her. 
 Whether it was that my digestion rose against her interference 
 with its sacred right to ruin itself with mince-pies — whether it 
 loathed tapioca and sago as much as that dear old man of Tobago 
 — who can tell 1 Certain it is that if, according to nurse, Aunt 
 Mandeville plotted against my baby life, 1, in my turn, put her 
 in some peril of hers. As a little boy I was of a very lively, 
 sprightly turn, much given to what a horse-dealer told me one 
 of his horses was also given to — "badinage." "Well !" I said, 
 "that 's a queer quality in a horse ; is it a virtue or a vice ? " 
 " I can't 'xacly say, sir, but that 'oss of mine as is given to 
 badinage 'ud pitch Fordham over his 'ead in five minutes." By 
 which I mean that I was a very wicked little boy to Auntie. 
 Sometimes I would roll myself up like a ball, and lie in her way, 
 that I might trip her up ; every day, as soon as I could reach 
 up to her collar, I put pigtails on her. Once — I confess it with 
 bitter shame, — I heated the handle of the poker, and put it close 
 to her, that she might bum her fingers ; and, though last, not 
 least, I remember, when she was standing up to carve a leg of 
 mutton at luncheon, slipping gently off my chair, and suddenly 
 drawing away hers just as she was in the act of sitting down. I 
 fancy I see my father and mother both lifting up ■ their hands 
 aloft, and hear their shrieks, as down went Aunt Mandeville, 
 knife and fork in air, flat on her back ; the result being that I 
 was sent off dinnerless to bed, while Auntie was picked up, 
 feeling herself all over to see if she had any bones broken. 
 
 But where all this time, you will ask, was Mr. Mandeville ? 
 That is soon answered. Dead and gone. Stretched comfortably 
 out among the rude forefathers of the hamlet ; and if conscious, 
 dreading lest the sound of the last trumpet should recall him to 
 the side°of Mrs. Mandeville. " Poor old fellow ! He had a good 
 heart, and a good constitution," nurse used to say; "but law! 
 child/what was that if one had to live alone with Auntie? No ! 
 
 B 2 
 
4 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 No ! he couldn't abide it. He made a good fight, though ! 
 Lived with her better than three years, and then, all at once, he 
 died. Dr. Mindererus do say it were apoplexy, or sunstroke, or 
 compression on the brain ; but I tell you it was Auntie on the 
 brain. She was fond of him, but for all that she killed him. 
 Women often do kill them as they love, and then they cry for 
 them, and build their tombs. Did you ever see Squire Mande- 
 ville's tomb at Mandeville Hall 1 . . . Well, well ! child ! 
 you '11 see it some day ; for if you're a good boy, they do say 
 Auntie means to leave it all to you, and then you'll remember 
 your old nurse, — won't you 1 there's a dear." 
 
 So much for old MandeVille, whose time could not have been 
 a jolly one. He left his wife Mandeville Hall ; and so, what 
 with his property and hers, Auntie was a person of consequence 
 in the neighbourhood. Before I go any further, let me say that 
 all these terrible accounts of Aunt Mandeville were mere 
 nursery gossip. Nursie hated Aunt Mandeville, and painted 
 her in hideous colours. It is perfectly true that she was bitterly 
 disappointed that I was not a girl ; that she took care of my 
 digestion, and that I was very ungrateful to her for her pains. 
 She was a woman of strong will, and as such much the better 
 horse when she was Squire Mandeville's yoke-fellow. My father 
 and mother, too, for the same reason, were terribly afraid of her. 
 But in after-years, when I really became her property, I found 
 her as good as gold — when she had her own way. 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 HOW MY FATHER BECAME A WEST INDIA PROPRIETOR. 
 
 Where did we live ? Why, reader, you are like a child at a 
 watering-place, so curious and inquisitive. Next you will ask 
 what we were ? what my father did ? had we a carriage ? how 
 many horses 1 how many servants ? I had better answer at 
 once. We had all these ; and my father was nothing. He was 
 well off, but that was no concern of mine, for did I not belong 
 to Aunt Mandeville ? As for our house, it was in the Midland 
 Counties. I will even go So far as to tell you it was in War- 
 wickshire, but further as to my father's abode in England I do 
 not mean to go. Besides his English estate, he had land beyond 
 the sea. An old uncle had been a planter in the West Indies 
 in the good old time, and when he died he made my father his 
 heir. Now to.what shall we liken a West Indian estate in this 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 5 
 
 bad new time 1 A millstone round your neck is not a pleasaut 
 thing even on land, nor is it nice to walk up a mountain when the 
 snow reaches mid-thigh. Water-lilies are lovely to look at from 
 the bank, or out of a boat, but they are death to the strongest 
 swimmer ; and so it is with a West Indian estate. Sweet is 
 sugar to those who eat it. Sweet to old women in their tea, 
 and to little boys in tarts ; but gall and wormwood to those 
 who have to make it dear, and sell it cheap. Well ! I belong to 
 Aunt Mandeville, and so I am not going to moralise on sugar- 
 candy, clayed muscovadoes, jaggery, date-sugar, beet-root, 
 maple, diabetes, or any other of the sugar-stuffs or processes. 
 All I say is, woe to the man now-a-days who has a West Indian 
 estate ! But it was not so bad then, fifteen years before the 
 emancipation ; and my father was thought to be a lucky man 
 when it was noised through the Forest of Arden that old 
 Colonel Ratoon had died in the West Indies, and made Squire 
 Halfacre his heir. Then in due course Messrs. Steel, Penn, and 
 Quill, old Ratoon's solicitors, wrote from Lincoln's-Inn-Fields to 
 inform my father that they were ready to prove the will ; and 
 Messrs. Short, Ready, and Stump, his bankers, advised him of 
 the balance standing at their bank in the late Colonel Ratoon's 
 name ; and though last, not least, Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail, of Vulture Yard, Great St. Helen's, the late Colonel 
 Ratoon's merchants, who sold his sugar and rum and molasses 
 for him at ten per cent, commission, and sent him out vacuum 
 pans and mill-wheels, and condensers and boilers, and cane- 
 crushers, also at ten per cent, commission, which ten per cent, 
 became twenty, if in their jargon " they came under advances," 
 — this most respectable firm, I say, " notified " my father that 
 they were ready to transact the business relating to the Two 
 Rivers Estates, in the Island of St. Saccharissa, on the same 
 . terms as those which had been agreed on between the late 
 lamented Colonel Ratoon and their firm. 
 
 Strange to say, all these letters reached my father on the 
 same day. He was a good, easy man, who lived happily on his 
 estates, and thought all months endurable except June and 
 July, when there was nothing to shoot. Norway was not then 
 discovered, or he would have rushed off to fish there ; but as it 
 was, he managed to exist through May with a little rook and 
 rabbit shooting ; and on the 12th of August he went as regu- 
 larly to Scotland to destroy grouse, as the pufiins depart on the 
 same day from their island off Anglesea. 
 
 As for business, he had an agent, who used to come oyer 
 once a-month or so, and have a dreary morning of accounts with 
 him at Halfacre Hall ; not that his estates were at all encum- 
 
6 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 bered, but my father bated, accounts, and, to tell the truth, he 
 would much sooner have gone to the dentist once a-month than 
 see his agent for half-an-hour. You may fancy then how he 
 felt when he had three business letters, each signed by a trine 
 of partners. 
 
 "Steel, Penn, and Quill," "Short, Eeady, and Stump," 
 " Claw, Tooth, and Nail," he murmured, " nine nieii of busi- 
 ness ; why, I shall have to go up to town." 
 
 And to town he went, and in town he stayed, to my mother's 
 amazement, a month before he returned. This was long before 
 railways, and people used not to rush backwards and forwards 
 by express. It was also before the penny post ; in the good 
 old times of which I spoke, when no general post-letter cost less 
 than eightpence, and when people, even men, were wicked 
 enough to cross their letters. In those days, too, when you had 
 written a letter you had to fold it — no such easy thing, let me 
 tell you, to do neatly ; and if I wished to show, in one sentence, 
 how much better off we of this generation are than our fore- 
 fathers, I would simply say — " Then there were no envelopes." 
 My father hated letter-writing, but he was good, and wrote 
 often to my mother ; but his letters were so full of " Short, 
 Eeady,' and Stump," " Claw, Tooth, and Nail," and " Steel, 
 Penn, and Quill," and entered so much into probates, and 
 balances, and consignments, and brokers, that my mother could 
 make neither head nor tail of them ; and even my Aunt Man- 
 deville, whose knowledge of business was supposed in the 
 family to be profound, confessed herself puzzled. 
 
 " Brother Halfaere has got into a new world," she said. "I 
 hope we shall have him back safe, and that he will not be torn 
 to pieces by Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and Nail." 
 
 " I do wish though," .added my mother, " that he would tell 
 us whether he has seen the king ; and what's the truth of this 
 story about poor Lord Castlereagh, and whether ladies' waists 
 are longer, and their bonnets smaller, this season than last." 
 
 At last he came back, but it was only to talk incessantly of 
 the mystic nine who made up the three firms. It was plain 
 though that the three that had the firmest hold on him were, 
 as might be expected, Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and Nail. As for 
 bankers, they are very obliging, but it is rather in deeds than 
 in words. I once spent a day in Switzerland with three 
 bankers, all of one house, and it was by far the dullest day I 
 ever passed in my life. No one can spend a day with a banker ; 
 it is a contradiction in terms. As for conversation, they have 
 none — " How will you take it ? " is their longest sentence. No ! 
 you may shoot, fish, and hunt with a banker, and you may 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 7 
 
 dine with him, and do all well ; but with bankers it is as with 
 your destiny in a future state, you must bring your happiness 
 with you, and trust to no one else. A lively banker is a dan- 
 gerous banker ; he ought to be gazetted out of the firm as soon 
 as possible. 
 
 Nor are solicitors, as a rule, lively. Besides, the more re- 
 spectable a firm is, the more likely are you to sneeze when 
 visiting them, and I hate sneezing. Inwardly, like old port, they 
 may be cheering and cheerful, but outwardly they are sawdust 
 and cobwebs. But a merchant may be very lively and pleasant. 
 In them there is more of th'at speculative nature so attractive 
 to generous minds. There is something spirited and genial even 
 ,in their ventures ; and as the finest bird often lives in the 
 dingiest nest, many a merchant, when he wings his way west 
 . from the sunless prison of Vulture Court, may shine in society 
 at night as brilliant as a firefly of the south. 
 
 So it was with my father's merchants. Claw, the senior 
 partner, lived in a street which opened on Park Lane. He had 
 a few fine pictures ; statues by Thorwaldsen and Canova ; a 
 choice library, and gave good dinners at which all the wits of 
 the town were welcome. 
 
 Tooth was not so grand. He lived in Bryanstone Square, a 
 spot then, as now, of infinite respectability. The Bryansto- 
 nians in their inner hearts, I believe, think it fashionable, and 
 mean next season to have chairs and a Bow of their own> even 
 more rotten and more frequented than that on the south side of 
 Hyde Park ; but let that pass. In the year 182- Tooth lived 
 there ; he was the oldest of the partners, and was one of those 
 mysterious persons who are said to have come to London with 
 half-a-crown in their pockets, and to have realised a splendid for- 
 tune all by their own exertions. The truth, I believe, was that 
 Tooth had been warehouseman to old Claw, the father of Claw 
 the Second. He was industrious, and more, he was handsome. 
 Old Claw and his son and daughter lived in Vulture Yard, that 
 was the cradle of their race, their Stammhaus, like the Roths- 
 childs' in the Frankfort Judengasse. Miss Claw never saw any 
 one but the warehouseman, fell in love with him, and had the 
 sense to tell her father. Old Claw, if this were a mere common 
 novel instead of a most truthful story, would have flown into a 
 fury, set his face against the match, wedded his daughter to an 
 attorney who had red hair, black teeth, limped like Vulcan and 
 squinted like John Wilkes; the warehouseman would have 
 become a highwayman, waylaid the attorney, who just then had 
 his pockets full of thousand-pound notes, robbed him, blown his 
 brains out, married his widow, who would never have discovered 
 
8 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 that he was her long-lost lover till she was on her death-bed of 
 consumption, brought on by pining for her first love. In which 
 supreme hour the ex-highwayman would have confessed that he 
 had gone over to the Church of Eome when he took to the 
 road, and that his spiritual director had laid this penance on 
 him to purge him of his sin in murdering the attorney. He 
 was to marry the widow, and never to tell her his history. 
 This confession would have been too much for the consumptive 
 ■widow, she would have died in the arms of her husband and 
 lover now happily united. The bereaved husband, then left to 
 his own reflections, would have founded a monastery, subsisted 
 on herring-bones and potato- parings, of which he partook on all 
 fours out of a trough, and died at last in the odour of sanctity, 
 a thoroughly holy man. 
 
 But this is not a sensational novel, but plain matter-of-fact, 
 and as plain truth is often much more astonishing than fic- 
 tion, old Claw simply gave his consent, let his daughter marry 
 the warehouseman, and made him his partner. And old 
 Claw was quite right. One of the clerks who had served the 
 firm for fifty years, and was allowed to be facetious, said, " Our 
 Mr. Tooth is the eye-tooth of the firm," and so it was. Old 
 Claw's business increased twenty-fold after the partnership ; and 
 when he died and left it to his son and Tooth, and the name of 
 the firm, which had been first Claw, then Claw and Son, then 
 Claw, Claw, and Tooth, became Claw and Tooth, the two surviv- 
 ing partners were wealthy enough to take another partner into 
 the. firm, on condition that he brought a hundred thousand 
 pounds into the concern. This partner they found in Mr. Nail, 
 whose father was, like Alexander in the Acts, a coppersmith, and 
 had dealt largely with Claw and Tooth in manufacturing sugar- 
 boilers and such gear for the West Indian estates on which they 
 had mortgages. 
 
 Mr. Nail was the youngest of the firm, which now became 
 Claw, Tooth, and Nail. He was a bachelor, and lived in lodgings 
 in St. James's Street. He often went to the theatre ; not like 
 Tooth, who was devoted to the Kembles, and took a prominent 
 part in the O.P. riots, if any one remembers what they were. If 
 Mr. Tooth had a pain in the face he called it an ache, not an ake, 
 because that was how Mr. John Kemble pronounced the passage 
 in the ' Tempest.' — " For this thou shalt have aches." If he ever 
 took a holiday it was to hurry away to the third row of the pit 
 at Drury Lane, where he took his seat comfortably before the 
 overture began. , But Nail was not so " legitimate." He was 
 not like Tooth, he cared little for the Kembles.. Farce and 
 comedy were his delight. He adored Liston, and still more 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 9 
 
 Vestris. Another of the clerks, one'of those people who hear 
 and see everything either with their own eyes and ears, or those of 
 their friends, had heard Mr. Tooth's greengrocer say that he 
 knew an oilman, who knew a scene shifter, who said that once 
 " Our Mr. Nail '' had been seen to slip a nosegay — now-a-days 
 we call it bouquet — into the hand of Madame Vestris as she 
 retired from the stage. 
 
 But this is not a histdry of Claw, Tooth, and Nail, they are 
 only of interest as being my father's merchants, though I cannot 
 help speaking a little of them. When he came back, as I said 
 before, he was full of the firm. On such a day he had dined 
 with Claw, and met Mr. Canning, Conversation Sharpe, and a 
 very pleasant and agreeable young man, though quite a revolu- 
 tionist, Mr. Thomas Duncombe. He had quite meant to write 
 down all the clever things he heard, but somehow he put it off 
 from day to day till it was too late. Then he told of Claw's 
 pictures, and statues, and books; and how he patronised a 
 Scotchman, David Wilkie, whose works were really of great 
 promise. Another day, too, Claw took him to dine with the 
 Goldsmiths' Company, of which Claw was that year Master, or 
 Warden, or whatever it is. Such a dinner, and such plate ! 
 There, too, he tasted turtle for the first time, and confessed that 
 Claw had made him have two helps. Then Tooth asked him to 
 dine at five o'clock at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden 
 Market; and they had marrow-bones, a delicacy undreamt of 
 before ; and after that they went to see John Kemble play 
 Hamlet, and Mrs. Siddons the Queen ; and another day they 
 went to see Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth ; and all through 
 both tragedies my father confessed he still thought of the 
 marrow-bones of the Bedford Hotel, and wondered how it was 
 that the Warwickshire marrow-bones, on which his own Devon 
 bullocks so often said their prayers to the Power who sends 
 sweet grass, never had any marrow in them, and how it always 
 seemed to run up to the innermost end of the bone out of the 
 reach of the marrow-spoon, like the quicksilver in a barometer, 
 when it sinks below zero. Even in the famous soliloquy over 
 poor Yorick's skull my father's fancy still wandered on, and he 
 wondered whether there was any marrow in Yorick's shanks, 
 and why a man shouldn't moralise over a marrow-bone as well 
 as over a skull. 
 
 Mr. Nail also belonged to a City Company. He was that 
 year Benter Warden of the Fishmongers', and' my father dined 
 with him too, and he used to say that he cduld not tell whether 
 the Goldsmiths' or the Fishmongers' gave the better dinner. 
 Perhaps the turtle was better at the Goldsmiths', and the fish 
 
10 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 at the Fishmongers', but then it must never be forgotten that 
 first turtle is, like first love, a thing altogether apart and exqui- 
 site, not to be compared with any love or turtle that_ may come 
 upon us afterwards. Another thing in which the Goldsmiths 
 excelled the Fishmongers was this. After dinner they gave 
 each guest a box of sweetmeats to carry away with him ; thus 
 suffering him, unlike the little boy in. the story, to fill his 
 pockets as well as his stomach. Besides, this box gave a kind 
 of reality to my father's trip to London, for it was brought 
 down to Warwickshire, and shared amongst the children — all 
 save me, for did I not belong to Aunt Mandeville, and did she 
 not exercise her right of property on this occasion too, and for- 
 bid my father and mother to ruin the child's digestion, with 
 sweetmeats ? 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 HOW MY FATHER MADE UP HIS MIND TO GO TO THE 
 WEST INDIES. 
 
 Nothing of any note happened with us in Warwickshire for 
 some time. My father wrote to his merchants, and his mer- 
 chants to him, but no one knew whether anything was going 
 on, till one morning he looked hard across the breakfast-table at 
 my mother and said, — 
 
 " I must go to the West Indies.' 7 
 
 I do not know, if he had said I must go to the moon, that 
 my mother would have been more astonished. Certainly it 
 would have been less trouble ; for if a man makes up his mind 
 to go to the moon to the moon he must go. It is not far, only 
 to the nearest lunatic asylum ; but the West Indies are a long 
 way off, the voyage costs money and breaks up a family circle. 
 Certainly it is worse to go to the West Indies than to the moon. 
 I do not know if my mother was at first aware of the full extent 
 of my father's perversity, but she saw perplexities of all kinds 
 ahead, and speedily entrenching herself behind a whole array of 
 woman's reasons, she resisted the enemy. 
 
 " Go to the West Indies, Halfacre ! Why should you go to 
 the West Indies ? " 
 
 "Why, you see, my dear, Claw, Tooth, and Nail say it is 
 usual for a new proprietor to show himself among his tenants — 
 I mean among his slaves, — they work more willingly when they 
 see the man to whom they belong ; the managers and overseers 
 need the master's eye ; there are numberless improvements to 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 11 
 
 be made in the manufacture of sugar ; by the new vacuum-pan 
 molasses will be annihilated, and the new centrifugal boiler crys- 
 tallizes the juice in half the time consumed under the old pro- 
 cess. I have just given Messrs. Claw and Nail, who always 
 made Colonel Ratoon's machinery, a large order for new vacuum- 
 pans, boilers, condensers, pumps, and crystallizers. One of their 
 patent cane-crushers, too, I must have. A Scotch engineer 
 must go out, with two skilled mechanics, to fix all this machi- 
 nery, and this, again, will be best done under the master's eye. 
 Added to this, they tell me the voyage is safe and pleasant. 
 I will go out in the Encliantress, one of Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail's ships. She is a fast sailer, and I shall be there in six 
 weeks." 
 
 Here my father paused to take breath, as well he might, for 
 it was by far the longest private speech he had ever been known 
 to make. It was a good deal longer, in fact, than the famous 
 speech which he made at Warwick, when proposing the judge's 
 health at the assizes. As for my mother, she was utterly be- 
 wildered with his vacuum-pans, and condensers, and crystal- 
 lizers, and cane-crushers, so she wisely disregarded them, and 
 clung to the fact of his voyage across the sea, and as soon as he 
 paused she struck in, — 
 
 " And, Halfacre, if it takes you six weeks to get there, how 
 long will you stay, and when will you comeback 1 " 
 
 My father had been so full of going that he had not consi- 
 dered these points ; his fancy had landed him in the region of 
 the molasses which he was prepared to annihilate ; but having, 
 in his mind's eye, set iris foot on the shore, seen his slaves, and 
 set up his machinery, he thought he had gone far enough. 
 
 " How long shall I stay ? and when will I come back ? I de- 
 clare I never thought of that. I suppose I shall stay till my 
 business is done ; till I have mastered the details requisite for 
 my new position; till the machinery is in thorough working 
 order ; till the vacuum-pans " 
 
 How much further he would have gone on no one can tell, 
 but just at that moment in glided my Aunt Mandeville, the 
 only person in the world of whom my father was afraid. 
 
 "Why, brother Halfacre, what's all this? — You are not High 
 Sheriff, or Knight of the Shire, and yet you are rehearsing a 
 public speech to your wife." 
 
 Then seeing the tears in my mother's eyes, she went on : — 
 " Sister-in-law, what is it all about 1 " 
 
 " Oh, sister Mandeville,'' sobbed my mother, '■' here's Halfacre 
 going to the West Indies. I know it's all the doings of that 
 odious Claw, Tooth, and Nail." 
 
12 ANNALS dF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " More fool he ! " said my aunt. "All this comes of a man 
 leaving his family for a month, and spending his time in guz- 
 zling and junketing up in London. Claw, Tooth, and Nail, in- 
 deed ! I'd claw, tooth, and nail them, if I could get hold of 
 them." 
 
 And so my aunt went on scolding my father up hill and down 
 dale, for ever so long. 
 
 Now I don't know whether my readers will agree with me 
 when I say that women are strange things. You walk along 
 the streets and see a man thrashing his wife ; just take the 
 wife's part and see what will happen ; ten to one she will tell 
 you it is all her own fault, and that she deserves all she gets. 
 Something of the same kind happened in our family circle on 
 that occasion. When my mother first heard of my father's in- 
 tention to go to the West Indies she felt as if some one had 
 beaten her black and blue ; nay, she felt as though my father 
 had beaten her ; but when Aunt Mandeville came to the rescue, 
 and gave my father this verbal thrashing, the wife triumphed 
 over the woman in my mother's heart ; and when Mrs. Mande- 
 ville ended her tirade by another " To the West Indies, indeed ! 
 more fool he," my mother resented the imputation on her hus- 
 band's sense, and said : 
 
 " Indeed, sister Mandeville, why shouldn't Halfacre go to the 
 West Indies if he chooses 1 " 
 
 " Of course he may, if he is silly enough," retorted my aunt ; 
 " and so may you too. Go with him, by all means, if you are 
 fool enough." 
 
 And so she slipped through the garden door, shutting it be- 
 hind her with something like a bang, ran down the walk, and 
 drove back to Mandeville Hall in her pony chaise. 
 
 Next morning it was noised through the village that Squire 
 Halfacre and Mrs. Halfacre and some of the children were going 
 to the West Indies to see old Colonel Ratoon's estates. 
 
 Some of the children. Yes, that was just the difficulty; 
 which of the children 1 From which of her children could a 
 mother bear to part? And yet she had to bear it. Doctor 
 Mindererus, I believe, had a sly nudge from my father, and he 
 it was who decided the matter. Run down a general practi- 
 tioner ! Live in the country and do it, and die, or deserve to 
 die. Not believe in the apothecary, thou atheist ! May you be 
 sleepless and have no narcotic near you ; break your leg in a 
 land where there is not wood enough to make a splint ; may you 
 be in Africa, at Timbuctoo, where every man who crawls 5n his 
 belly before the Emperor must be clean shaven ; and with a six 
 years' beard, may you have ten minutes given you to shave 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 13 
 
 without soap ! unbeliever in apothecaries, believe, lest worse 
 befall you ; at least, for a little while, through this chapter. 
 Believe in Dr. Mindererus, our surgeon and apothecary, who at 
 my father's wink or nudge altered his opinion, from which there 
 was no appeal, as to which children were to be left behind. My 
 eldest brother, John, my father's son and heir, on whom Halfacre 
 Hall was strictly entailed, was a big boy, already at a public school. 
 There could be no question as to the imprudence of interfering 
 with his studies, so he was left behind. Then there was Tom ; he 
 too would soon follow John's footsteps. Meantime he had better 
 be left where he was, at a private school ; and while Dr. Minde- 
 rerus was thinking of Tom he thought he might as well think of 
 William, only ten, no doubt, and young to. go to school. But 
 then Tom was doing so well with Dr. Cutbrush, why shouldn't 
 William go with him after the holidays 1 So those three were 
 provided for. What would have happened had not Walter died 
 I cannot tell. He would have been seven ; too young to leave, 
 and too old to take. God had provided. He had taken Walter 
 to Himself. My brother was far away from this land of lessons,, 
 on an endless holiday. I came next, and over my infantine 
 bones there was a battle fiercer than any fought in the dark 
 ages for jaw-bone, or thigh-bone, or back -bone of the greatest 
 saint. Did I not belong to Aunt Mandeville ? Who then 
 should dare to take me from her ? 
 
 "Take the child to the West Indies; take him to the very 
 land where sugar is grown, and you will bring him back with a 
 sallow face and swollen liver." 
 
 But my mother would not hear of parting with me yet ; I had 
 come to fill Walter's place. I was but five ; when I was older 
 Aunt Mandeville might have me ; when I was eight say, and as 
 my mother said this she laughed in her heart, for she madej sure 
 that long before I was eight, or anything like it, she would be 
 safe back with all of us in Old England, and there would be no 
 separation. Poor mother ! My father, I really believe, would 
 have given in. He had gained his point as to going, to the West 
 Indies, and he would have thrown me in as a peace-offering to 
 his sister. But men propose and women dispose, and it was now 
 my mother's turn to give Dr. Mindererus a nudge. I said I was 
 always a healthy child ; bu% all at once the doctor discovered 
 the germs and seeds of countless diseases in my constitution. 
 My lungs had not been so sound last winter as he could have 
 wished ; I had never quite got over the croup. If I could escape 
 the ungenial English winter, it would be well. A sea-voyage 
 was just what I wanted. Cane-juice was very fattening, and 
 perhaps a diet of yams, Gonvolvolus Battata, and bananas, Musa 
 
14 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Sapientum, would make me a new child. ■ My aunt, against 
 whom this battery was erected and aimed, was proof against 
 everything till the doctor began to talk of Convolvolxis Battata 
 and Musa Sapientum. The botanical name for yams and ban- 
 anas perplexed her as much as the vacuum-pans had puzzled 
 my mother. Again, as every one fears something or somebody, 
 as there is a skeleton in every family, let me say that the one 
 thing that Aunt Mandeville feared, except her servants, was her 
 medical attendant. She would argue and beat out of the field 
 any one save Dr. Mindererus and Brooks her butler; but when 
 the doctor declared that it was as much as my life was worth if 
 I stayed behind, and backed up his assertion by Convolvolus 
 Battata and Oleum Mcini, Aunt Mandeville was utterly routed, 
 and let me go on the condition that I was to return to England 
 and belong to her when I was eight years old. So, thanks to 
 Dr. Mindererus, I and two younger children were to go with 
 my father and mother to the West Indies in the good ship 
 Enchantress. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 HOW WE WENT TO THE WEST INDIES. 
 
 It was a sad break up at Halfacre Hall, in the year 1 82- ; 
 but at last we got away. It was just then that I began to recol- 
 lect, and I well remember how my Aunt Mandeville bade us 
 good-bye, and stood as upright as a dart, waving . her handker- 
 chief, as our huge creaking carriage rolled off. We were to post 
 from Warwickshire to town, and thence, after my father had had 
 a farewell meeting with Claw, Tooth, and Nail in Vulture Yard, 
 we were to post on to Portsmouth, where we were to find the 
 Enchantress lying at the Motherbank off Ryde. In one carriage 
 were my father, my mother, myself and a little brother. On 
 the rumble was my father's valet, who had persuaded his master 
 to let him go with him. In a chariot behind were our nurse 
 and the baby, and my mother's maid. We posted by day, and 
 slept by night at inns. On this journey I will not dwell. I only 
 wish that any man, woman, or child who abuses railways were con- 
 demned to post, first from Warwickshire to London, and thence 
 across England in search of the Enchantress. My father's visit 
 in London to the firm was " most satisfactory." The partners 
 were all smiles, and assured him that, with the new machinery 
 with which the Enchantress was half laden, " a new era of pros- 
 perity for the Two Rivers Estate was about to be inaugurated." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 15 
 
 I have reason to believe that those were the very words which 
 Claw used. He was great at big words, and if he had his way 
 there would not have been any names of places on the map 
 shorter than Mesopotamia or Constantinople, nor any ordinary 
 word shorter than "vicissitude.'' And so we started from 
 London and posted to Portsmouth, and at Portsmouth we stayed 
 at the George r Hotel for a week, waiting for the Enclwmtress, 
 which never came, but instead of her a letter, dated "Plymouth," 
 from Captain Spark, regretting that the Enchantress had been 
 blown by a fierce north-easterly gale through the Downs and 
 past Portsmouth ; having been only just able to get into Ply- 
 mouth Sound, where, under the shelter of the Breakwater, she 
 was then lying and only waiting for us. The letter ended with 
 a P. S. expressing Captain Spark's desire that we should post 
 day and night to Plymouth lest the wind should chop round to 
 S.W. or west and we should be wind bound. So we posted to 
 Plymouth, making long days and short nights. Posting day 
 and night with babies was out of the question. It was bitterly 
 cold, and I was very often hungry in spite of a box of Leman's 
 biscuits which we had with us ; but at last we reached Plymouth, 
 with no other accident than that in passing through South- 
 ampton, just after we left Portsmouth on the 5th of November, 
 some wicked boys threw a squib at my father's valet and set 
 him on fire ; at least, so I thought at the time. The carriage 
 came to a dead stop ; my father alighted, and so did the flaming 
 valet, and the offenders were soundly thrashed. In those days 
 there were no police, only " Charlies," and travellers had some- 
 times to take the law into their own hands, and very heavy 
 their hands often were. Then the valet being extinguished, 
 and our honour avenged, the carriage rolled on again, and I 
 fell asleep. 
 
 But here we were at Plymouth ; glad to get there, to eat, to 
 sleep, to rest ; but it was only for a night. Very early next 
 morning Captain Spark came. He was a stout, thickset man, 
 with a copper-coloured face, a hare-lip, and a nose veiy like the 
 North Foreland. If any of my readers have not seen that 
 headland, I can't help it. They have, most of them, never seen 
 Jerusalem, yet they believe in it. Let them show their faith, 
 and believe that Captain Spark's nose was like the North Fore- 
 land. His hare-lip somewhat checked his flow of speech; at 
 least, he spoke a good deal, and spluttered more, but most of 
 what he said was lost. Perhaps what he said went out sideways 
 by his ears, but at any rate very little of it came out of his 
 ■mouth. He felt he was not an orator, and hence his sentences 
 were few, sharp, and laconic. 
 
16 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Come on shore, sir, — ship ready to sail, — wind fair, — when 
 will you come on board V 
 
 " Oh, directly, Captain Spark," said my father ; " we will 
 get ready at once ; but won't you take something after your row 
 from the Enchantress ? " 
 
 " Thank you, sir," spluttered out the captain ; " glass of 
 sherry wine, — cold morning, — spray, — drenched to the skin." 
 
 The sherry wine, as the captain called it, came and vanished 
 with great rapidity, and then the captain went down to hire a 
 large shore-boat to take off the servants with our trunks. As 
 for ourselves, we were to go off in his gig. Into the gig, then, 
 we got, baby and all. In these days there were no steam-tugs ; 
 no, nor any macintoshes. There was some sea on, and a brisk 
 wind, making the spray fly. We, too, were drenched by the time 
 we reached the Enchantress, as she lay pitching at anchor just 
 inside the Breakwater. 
 
 But " never mind," I still seem to hear my father say, " here 
 we are alongside." Down came a chair without legs, let down 
 by a pulley, and into this first my mother, then nurse and baby, 
 and last my mother's maid and myself were placed, our feet 
 covered with bunting, and so we were whipped up to the deck, 
 pretty much as coals are whipped up from a collier's hold. I 
 remember seeing my father scramble up the side j ust like an old 
 tom-cat up a tree. I was we.t and cold enough as I stood on the 
 deck ; but for all that I remember my father, while the anchor 
 was being weighed, pointing out to me two old three-deckers, 
 the Princess Charlotte and the Britannia. 
 
 " There, my boy ! yonder are Old England's wooden walls ; 
 and so long as these last she need fear no Frenchman." 
 
 Poor man ! he spoke with his heart full of Trafalgar, and 
 Nelson, and Waterloo, and the Corsican Usurper, and St. Helena. 
 Little did he think that the time would come when we should 
 call the wooden walls of Old England mere " match-boxes." 
 But so it is, mutat terra vices — " the earth changes her shifts " — 
 and very queer shifts she sometimes has to make up her mind 
 to wear. 
 
 But this is no time to talk of shifts or match-boxes. The 
 anchor is weighed, and we are off. Now we are outside the 
 Breakwater, and the Enchantress makes such a bow to the sea 
 that she fairly dips her nose into the green waves. I was not 
 at all sick, and rather enjoying the strange sight, when nurse's 
 voice cried, " Come to your mamma, Master Teddy ! " and in a 
 trice her strong arms were round my body, and I was dragged 
 down below and put into a berth, whence I did not emerge for 
 several days. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 17 
 
 A voyage has its nasty points— sea-sickness being the nastiest 
 of them — but it is not all nasty. I remember trying to get out 
 of the dark cabin, and to crawl on deck,. and how nurse handed 
 me back. My father and nurse were both very ill, and continued 
 so till we had crossed the Bay of Biscay. Nurse was the first to 
 get her sea-legs and appetite, and then she took me on, deck. I 
 remember the green, rolling waves, and how we ran before the 
 breeze, under easy sail, across the dreaded bay. Then we passed 
 close to Madeira, whence, in the good old days before emanci- 
 pation and oidium, "West Indians got their wine — Tinta, Palhe- 
 tino, Buol, Sercial, and Malmsey — peace to your lees, you are 
 extinct before the grape disease, just as emancipation has 
 destroyed your best customers ! Teneriffe, too, we sighted, with 
 its Peak, in the shadow of which we sailed for hours. We ought 
 not to have seen it at all, Captain Spark said ; and then came 
 something out of his hare-lip, a string of strange words, not one 
 of which I could understand then, though I have heard some of 
 them since. 
 
 " What's that the captain's telling you 1 " asked nurse of the 
 second mate, to whom a string of these strange words had been 
 just addressed. 
 
 " Well, marm, you see that's the way the captain has of 
 saying his prayers, and pretty regularly he says them too." 
 
 " Why," said nurse, " I thought no one said their prayers 
 more than twice a-day, but the captain uses those words, or 
 something like them, at all hours of the day." 
 
 " Very true, marm," said the mate ; " but you see our captain 
 is very religious — leastways, he is almost always praying." 
 
 What made Captain Spark say his prayers so hard just then 
 •was, that he knew, on coming on deck in the morning, that 
 we were out of our course, and ought never to have seen the 
 Peak of Teneriffe at jail, and so he gave vent to his devo- 
 tions in a special service, intended for the eternal welfare 
 of the second mate's eyes and limbs, ultimately including 
 his whole body, and even his soul. The second mate had 
 the watch, and had suffered the helmsman to steer a wrong 
 course. 
 
 The course was soon set straight, for in spite of his prayers 
 and hare-lip, Captain Spark was a thorough seaman, and had 
 crossed the Atlantic so often that he knew every whale and 
 grampus in it. We got a good " slant," I think he called it, 
 au*d soon got into the Trades, which bore the good ship merrily 
 on. Then it was really a happy time on board ship ; the sun 
 was very hot over head, but we lay under the awning and 
 listened to the stories of the sailors who were busy mending 
 
 ID a o 
 
18 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 sails. I remember well their great needles, which they kept in 
 rams'-horns filled with grease. 
 
 The Captain now seldom or ever said his prayers, or if he said 
 them it was in his own cabin. My father and mother had long 
 since got over their sickness, and appeared on deck. The baby 
 crawled about, and we were all very hungry at dinner-time. I 
 forgot to say that we had the whole ship to ourselves, and alto- 
 gether, though our life was dull, it was npt unpleasant. Every 
 now and then something happened to stir us up. A thunder- 
 storm at night — that was before Snow's patent lightning con- 
 ductors — and I was not natural philosopher enough then to 
 know the danger which a ship runs of being struck by lightning 
 in mid-ocean. But I could see how grand and beautiful a 
 thunderstorm at sea is. We saw a water-spout, too, and Captain 
 Spark fired a gun at it and broke it, and then he spluttered out 
 an explanation of its danger. We caught a shark with a great 
 hook baited with a bit of salt pork. He was a big fellow who 
 had followed the ship for days, feeding on our offal. I believe 
 he knew as well as any one when we were going to kill a pig. 
 His love for salt pork proved fatal to him ; and there he flapped 
 his tail on deck, and grinned with his ugly mouth, till the 
 carpenter came with an axe and chopped his back in two ; and 
 even then he wriggled and grinned for a while. I beg leave to 
 say that this was not the shark that was found with a whole 
 soldier, musket and all, in his belly, but we did find in him some 
 of our dead fowls, which had come to an untimely end, and also 
 one of baby's pinafores which had blown overboard, and been 
 snapped up and swallowed. The fowls had died by the pip or 
 homesickness, and had been tossed overboard. The sailors ate 
 the shark, and we tasted him, and I remember being told that 
 it was like bad beef. And last, though not least, we killed a 
 pig once a-week. 
 
 That was an excitement which surpassed thunderstorms, 
 water-spouts, and sharks. In my juvenile arithmetic, one pig- 
 sticking was worth twenty water-spouts, ten thunderstorms, and 
 five sharks. It began so early in the morning, and it lasted so 
 long, quite up to supper-time, if we reckon the satisfaction 
 arising from eating the flesh of the slain. Then it was as good 
 as thirty alarums. What family would not be early risers if 
 they killed a pig every morning ? They couldn't help it. I am 
 sure if the shark knew that a pig was going to be killed, the 
 pigs themselves knew what was about to befall them. All 
 through the night a presentiment of coming evil hung over the 
 long-boat in which they lived. They grunted a Be profundis 
 porcorum, a low mass of the stye, about midnight. About 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL- LIFE. 19 
 
 dawn the minds of the piggies were made up as to the member 
 of the family about to be slain. I suppose they knew their 
 fattest, and could pick him out as well as the butcher. There 
 they stood all round him, grunting a bass while the victim 
 whined a treble. At last the butcher looked into the long-boat, 
 knife in mouth. He leant over, and with both hands felt them 
 all round, while the concert continued in louder and louder 
 strain. All at once he made a dash at the victim and caught 
 him by the leg, while piggy laid hold of the thwarts of the long- 
 boat with his teeth. Now the grunting, howling, groaning, and 
 whining are incessant. Pull, butcher ! pull, piggy ! and in the 
 first encounter piggy wins. The butcher falls head first into the 
 long-boat, adds oaths — strangely like Captain Spark's prayers — 
 to the tumult, and retires for a while, only to return with two 
 strong sailors. They all climb over into the boat ; they all 
 three seize piggy, who howls and squeals, and kicks and bites. 
 The other pigs crowd round, squealing, and biting the calves of 
 the assassins, who repay them with kicks and curses. They 
 drag their victim out of the boat, hold him down over the 
 guuwale, and the butcher does the dreadful deed, while piggy 
 protests in the name of all porkdom against this tyrannical 
 exercise of the right of the strongest. 
 
 Just so did poor Eobert Blum, Mitglied der Frankfurter 
 National Versammlung, protest to Field- Marshal Nugent, who 
 was leading him off to be shot on the glacis at Vienna, that he 
 was being shot in violation of all right and good feeling ; and 
 just so did Nugent, like our butcher, reply " Das ist nicht die 
 Frage, mein lieber Herr" — "My good sir, that is not the ques- 
 tion;" and so with much clamour on the part of Blum, and 
 great bonhomie on the part of the Field-Marshal, who went on 
 smoking his cigar, "the member of the Frankfort National 
 Assembly" passed out of this wicked world and was buried. 
 
 But to return to our pig. We did not bury him, we ate him. 
 Hardly had his last cries been hushed when we had his fry at 
 breakfast. Many people do not like what they call " inwards," 
 I do. Liver and bacon are my delight ; fagoto di vitello, as 
 they call it in Italy, where it is especially recommended for 
 invalids ; goose giblets, whether in soup or pie ; I can even 
 sympathise with that clergyman in the fens who had three small 
 livings in those marshes, and used to ride about and hold a full 
 service in each every Sunday, eating a bullock's heart and cur- 
 rant jelly between each. But what is liver and bacon or bullock's 
 heart to pig's-fry ? Go on board ship every one of you that 
 refuse to believe this ; be awake for hours listening to the fearful 
 din which sounds the knell of a pig ; pace the deck in the fresh 
 
 c 2 
 
20 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 breeze for three quarters of an hour, waiting for your breakfast 
 after the deed is done, and then dare to say that you do not like 
 pig's-fry when the steward's head emerges from the companion, 
 and utters the welcome word " Breakfast," and you rush down 
 to find a dish of that dainty smoking on the board. 
 
 On board the Enchantress we all liked pig's-fry, and I am sure 
 even baby would have eaten it if he had been weaned. 
 
 So we sped along, and as we neared the Antilles the sun grew 
 hotter and the sea bluer, and we met great beds of sea- weed, and 
 saw whales spouting, and grampuses blowing, and turtles basking 
 on the surface. Think of that, Claw, Tooth, and Nail ! Turtles 
 basking, green-fat, calipash and calipee, sunning itself into ma- 
 turity and flavour, all to grace your civic feasts ! Flying-fish 
 sprang on board with their strange flitting, something between 
 a fish's leap and a bat's flight, from one rolling wave to another. 
 Dolphins played alongside, and we rigged out the " grains,'' or 
 dolphin striker, and, with unerring aim, the boatswain launched 
 it at the unwary stranger, and there he was fast held by rope 
 and iron. , Him, too, we hauled on board, and there he lay with 
 all his brilliant hues flashing and changing in the sun, till at 
 last they faded away as a bright sunset dies away, and he grew 
 one dull uniform grey blue. Him, too, we ate, after duly ad- 
 miring him. 
 
 And now we fairly wished the voyage were over. We were all 
 very well, — so far, all the better for our travels, — but we longed 
 to be on land, and to stretch our legs. How glad, then, were we 
 to see land and to pass island after island, green cones of verdure 
 springing out of the blue sea, so refreshing by their contrast to 
 what the poets call " the azure main." So we ran on for a day 
 or two, till one morning Captain Spark, having taken an obser- 
 vation, said chat if nothing happened we should sight St. Sac- 
 charissa by that time to-morrow. 
 
 Now, reader, don't rush off to your map of the Caribbean Sea, 
 and try to find that island. You had better come along with 
 me and let me show it you, for to that island we are bound, and 
 no other. 
 
 It was called St. Saccharissa in the days of King Charles II. 
 of fast and loose memory, and it was so called, when settled, in 
 honour of Waller's Saccharissa. If you are a High Churchman 
 you will, perhaps, protest that there is no such saint as Saccharissa 
 in the Bollandist collection or that of Surius, and that you can- 
 not find her name with a red letter in any calendar, which pro- 
 test I duly note and meet by another. In no calendar that I 
 know of is our Charles I. a saint, and yet that Chapel at Tun- 
 bridge Wells, which lies in three parishes and two counties, and 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 21 
 
 which was built -when Charles II. -was king, was dedicated to 
 Saint Charles the Martyr. Well ! just in the same way was 
 Saecharissa sainted, and her worship still survives, while that of 
 Charles I. has faded. She is the patron saint of sugar, white 
 and brown, revered in all nurseries, remembered on all twelfth- 
 cakes, adored in Scotch sweeties, sugar-plums, barley-sugar, sugar- 
 candy, lemon-rock, and all lozenges. Eightly, then, was she 
 canonized, and well named was our sugar island after Saecharissa, 
 for its yield of saccharine matter was most abundant. 
 
 The captain was as good as his word — nay, better. At day- 
 break we sighted St. Saecharissa, and, running down from wind- 
 ward before a good trade-wind, about noon we doubled one horn 
 of a deep horseshoe bay, and there, right before us, lay Prince- 
 town, the capital of the island. We stood in, and cast anchor 
 about half a mile from land ; but even before we were fast to 
 the land we were surrounded by a small fleet of boats, manned 
 by negroes, and steered by whites and mulattos. 
 
 "All as- black as a coal, ma'am," I heard nurse say to my 
 mother, who was busy below. " And a-most naked.'' 
 
 My father was on deck, and soon made the acquaintance of his 
 island merchants, who sold him salt-fish and farine and ale-wives 
 to feed his slaves, and lumber and hogsheads and puncheons for 
 his estate, and sugar and rum. A canny Scot, who knew well, 
 not only how to make both ends meet, but to lap over ! His 
 manager, too, was there, who had been old Colonel Eatoon's 
 right hand, and who now came to see his new master. Two 
 Eivers was on the westward side of the island, and so he had 
 sighted the Enchantress almost as soon as we made the land ; 
 and, getting into his gig, had driven into town post-haste. 
 
 So here we were at St. Saecharissa, and the next thing was to 
 land. There was leave-taking of Captain Spark, who put us 
 ashore again in his gig ; and this time we were not drenched to 
 the skin. But my father had not nearly seen the last of him, 
 for the Enchantress was half-full of his machinery. All this 
 time — I beg the Scotch engineer's pardon, and the skilled me- 
 chanics' too — I had forgotten to speak of them. But this is in 
 their favour ; for had they made themselves very disagreeable, 
 they would have been on my mind. The fact was, we saw little 
 of them. They lived in the fore-cabin by themselves. At first 
 they were very miserable ; but afterwards they brightened up, 
 and on week-days sang songs, and on Sundays psalms ; but my 
 mother used to say the week-day tunes and the Sabbath tunes 
 were all so alike that she would not have known whether 
 it was a profane or a spiritual song that was being droned out, 
 had it not been for the day of the week. We left them behind 
 
22 ANNALS jOF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 in the ship to look after the landing of the machinery in open 
 boats. The sailors gave way, the captain steered, and in five 
 minutes he uttered the well-known word, " Bow ! " Up sprang 
 the bowman, and grasped his boat-hook. In another second, 
 " Oars ! " followed ; they were lifted aloft, and laid under the 
 gunwale ; the keel grated on the yellow sand of that tideless 
 bay. A gang of negroes dashed into the surf and laid hold of 
 the painter, and hauled us up nearly high and dry. Some of 
 us jumped and some of us were lifted out, and there at last 
 stood the heads of the family of Halfacre on the shore of St. 
 Saccharissa. 
 
 CHAPTEK V. 
 
 HOW WE LIVED IN THE WEST INDIES. 
 
 As this is a story written more of my manhood than my 
 childhood, I am not going to bore you with any of my perform- 
 ances as an infant prodigy. We must get on. There is much 
 to tell ; and this whole book is more my life in glimpses than a 
 biography chapter and verse. Where were we ? Yes ! landed 
 in St. Saccharissa on the beach. The town of Princetown ! 
 Such a Princetown ! Nature had made the bay lovely, and 
 man made it hideous. The town of Princetown was one long, 
 straggling, circular street, following. the horse-shoe of the bay. 
 On the side of this thoroughfare facing the sea, or rather turn- 
 ing their backs on the sea, which smiled at the insult out of its 
 blue dimples, were stores and wharves, piles of lumber — that is, 
 Canadian timber, hogsheads of salt fish, puncheons of rum, and 
 puncheons of oats ; jetties that had not the courage to run far 
 out into the sea, flagstaffs, cocoa-nut trees, mangoes. That side 
 of the street was given up to the merchants — to the Bourgeoisie, 
 as the planters would have called them — to shopkeepers, in 
 short — to owners of dry-goods' stores, who sold everything. On 
 the other side of the street were the town-houses of the planters 
 — of the aristocracy of the island, whose ancestors held town 
 " lots," and had built houses on them. And very good houses 
 too ! To the town lot of Colonel Eatoon we were now led. 
 Fancy Squire Halfacre, of Halfacre Hall, Warwickshire, being 
 led to a town-house at Princetown, in the island of St. Saccha- 
 rissa ! But no one could say it was not an excellent house. 
 Even nurse and the valet and Mrs. Earl, my mother's maid, 
 confessed it was big enough. True, nurse said it would be a 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 23 
 
 mercy if baby didn't catch 'his death of cold in a house which 
 had no windows on one side. This was nurse's ignorance. She 
 did not know that at St. Saccharissa the wind always blows one 
 way, except in a hurricane ; and so a house needs no glass, but 
 only shutters or blinds— jealousies we used to call them — on the 
 other. It was all of wood too ; and there were cockroaches and 
 mosquitoes ; but we did not find these out till night — or rather 
 it was they that found us out. We all ought to have let down 
 our mosquito. nets ; but no one told us to do so, and so the next 
 morning my father and mother looked as if they had the small- 
 pox ; the baby's eyes were bunged up ; my lips had been 
 gnawed by a cockroach ; and as for Mrs. Earl, she declared her 
 complexion would never recover the attacks of the invaders. 
 B — s and fleas she had heard of ; but " them nasty flying things, 
 she couldn't abide them." 
 
 But the house was a good one. There were galleries, and 
 verandahs, and splendid bath-rooms, and round it was a garden 
 planted with choice trees. A little way behind it the ground 
 rose rapidly, and ran, if I may so speak, up hill, as though it 
 were afraid, of the dancing surf, a hundred yards off. I am 
 afraid to say that I think Colonel Batoon's lot was unhealthy. 
 We were none of us well when we got up ; and, warned in time, 
 my father called in the Dr. Mindererus of Princetown, an old 
 army surgeon, who was fire-rum-and-fever-proof. He had a 
 queer mode of expressing himself, but he knew well what he 
 was about. After my mother had stated all our ailments, the 
 doctor said : 
 
 " It's my opeenion *' — here he snuffed the air audibly once or 
 twice, as if challenging the fever to do battle. "It's my 
 opeenion that there's just no spot in the king's domeenions 
 where a man might catch Yellow Fever more easily than this. 
 Just look, there's an open town-drain right in front, and between 
 the house and the hull there's a hpllow that catches the water 
 and makes a swamp, and across that swamp the land breeze blows 
 at night right into the house, and makes it a fever-trap. Many 
 a night I've spent here with Colonel Batoon, and many a jorum 
 of sangaree we drank, and many a game of picquet we have 
 played here together ; but we two were the only whites who 
 slept a week in the house without catching fever. I do not say 
 Yellow Fever at first, but all marsh-fevers in Princetown turn 
 to Yellow. Now I am left, and the colonel is gone, and I advise 
 you to go too." 
 
 " Go ! " said my mother, who thought the doctor wished to 
 frighten her out of the house ; " where should we go 1 " 
 
 " To Two Bivers, to be sure. There has never been Yellow 
 
24 ANNALJ-LOF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Fever, or any other fever, on that estate that I heard of. The 
 house stands on a cliff, a ridge between two streams which 
 thoroughly drain the land, and close to the house the ridge 
 breaks off into a bluff over the sea, sheer down three hundred 
 feet or more. Go at once to Two Eivers." 
 
 " But why should we go so soon ? " urged my mother, who 
 wished to get settled a little before she took another flight. 
 
 "Why, because women are slow and fevers quick in this 
 country. All women want spurring here, but no rein will hold 
 a fever. Cast your eyes over the way to neighbour M'Culloch's 
 store. One of the articles he keeps constantly on hand, and 
 advertises weekly in the " Princetown Gazette " are English elm 
 coffins. Coffins of all sizes, for all ages. Baby-coffins and men- 
 coffins. This is a country, Mrs. Halfacre, where a child is born 
 at dawn, and both mother and babe are buried at sunset. 
 Nothing is lazy in this land of the sun except new-comers, and 
 they sometimes lay their bones in Princetown while they are 
 making their plans for going up the country." 
 
 And with these words the doctor turned on his heel, went 
 down the gallery, mounted his American pacer, and ambled off 
 in the broiling noonday sun. 
 
 " I don't believe a word he says. He only wants to frighten 
 us,'' said my mother. But my father knew better. That first 
 morning, when mosquito-stung he could take no rest, he had 
 risen at cockcrow, and gone to see Colonel Eatoon's grave in 
 Princetown Churchyard. He found it, and read the slab in 
 memory of " Colonel Eatoon, late Commander of His Majesty's 
 2nd Eegiment of Foot. One of the survivors of the St. Do- 
 mingo and Walcheren Expeditions, who, after a glorious career 
 in the Peninsular War, retired to his estates in this island, 
 where he died at the good old age of seventy-seven, in the year 
 of our Lord 182-." "A good old age," thought my father; 
 " seventy-seven ! seven years more than the Psalmist allowed. 
 The colonel, I have heard, was a free liver. With care a man 
 might live to ninety in this island." 
 
 Then he turned to other graves, and read, " Sir Fretful Fire- 
 brand, late Governor of this island, greatly distinguished as a 
 naval commander during the late war, in which he fought the 
 famous action of the Daredevil against the Snapping Turtle, who 
 was prematurely cut off by fever in the second year of his go- 
 vernorship, and the fifty-second year of his age." 
 
 Then his eye fell on another ■ " Sir Anthony Quibble, late 
 Chief Justice of this island and the islands of Manakoo and 
 Agouti ; whose legal talents procured him this appointment, in 
 which, however, fate did not suffer him to develop them. Cut 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 25 
 
 off by fever within a year of his landing, in the forty-third year 
 of his age." 
 
 On the same stone was carved, " And to Lady Quibble, relict 
 of the above, who died of Fever, having survived her husband six 
 months." 
 
 A little further on was a stone in memory of the "wife and 
 six children of David McCrosky, Esq., Merchant in Princetown, 
 who died in one week during the recent outbreak of Yellow 
 Fever in this island.'' 
 
 By this time my father's curiosity was satisfied. It was time 
 for breakfast. The sun was hot, so he put up his umbrella, and 
 went home, thinking how odd it was that Colonel Ratoon should 
 have lived till seventy-seven. 
 
 This graveyard visit was still in his mind when the doctor 
 came ; and when the doctor went my father was quite ready to 
 go to Two Eivers. He had his way without frightening my 
 mother very much. The doctor's opinion, he assured her, was 
 not to be despised. The sooner we got up to Two Rivers the 
 better. It was but a drive. We would go that very afternoon, 
 when the sun was not so hot. 
 
 So we started. My father drove my mother in a gig, and the 
 manager drove my mother's maid and nurse and the. children in 
 a sort of American waggon, called a " Deerborne." As for the 
 valet, he was mounted on the doctor's pacer, who kindly lent 
 him for the occasion. Alongside of each carriage ran a stout 
 negro lad to show the way, whose language and gesticulations 
 were most amusing. 
 
 " Oh, Massa Halfacre ! New Massa Halfacre ! stop bit ! 
 Massa's buckra servant no sit right in him stirrup. Him toe 
 turn out like Jack Spaniard. Him nebber ride a race, and 
 nebber win one." 
 
 All this was addressed to my father by the sable pair of run- 
 ning footmen to induce him to wait for the unhappy valet, 
 whose knowledge of horsemanship was derived from seeing the 
 North Warwickshire hounds throw off at Halfacre Gorse. 
 
 At last the procession started at no great pace. The road 
 was not bad as a road ; but then it was never level. It was all 
 ups and downs, and very steep ones too, rising and falling one 
 in twenty, and taking all manner of curves round bluffs over- 
 hanging the sea. To creep round these bluffs, where the great 
 rolling spurs that ran down from the backbone of the mountain 
 which filled the centre of the island broke short off at the sea- 
 coast, was the great object of the road-maker. The face of the 
 ' bluff had been cut off into a groove or notch ; and along this, 
 with a cliff on one side sheer down into the sea, and a steep wall 
 
26 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 of earth on the other, our procession passed. My mother shut 
 her eyes, and so did nurse and her maid. The manager was 
 quite cool, and so was my father, whose theory was that a road 
 by which every one went every day must be safe on any given day 
 for any given person. As for the unhappy valet he had long 
 before the first bluff given over the guidance of his steed to one 
 of our sable footmen, who was delighted to show "massa's 
 serbant " the way to ,: Two Bibber." Sometimes he led him 
 quite close to the cliff, and kept him with one leg dangling over 
 the precipice. As for the horse it was used to the work — as sure- 
 footed as a goat and as quiet as a lamb. There was no danger, 
 therefore, except in the valet's imagination ; but that was quite 
 enough to make him shiver and shake in his saddle. 
 
 " Oh," said his tormentor, " massa serbant got de feber. 
 Him come on so wid a shake and a shibber. Stop bit ; next 
 works I gets massa's serbant a glass of new rum." And, true to 
 his word, at the next estate round the bluff he begged a bottle 
 of rum in myfather's name, out of which he gave the valet a 
 glass, which scorched his throat like liquid fire. The rest the 
 rogue put away in his capacious pocket. 
 
 So we wound slowly on round bluff after bluff ; till at last, 
 after some twelve miles or so, which seemed at least twenty to 
 the rest of the party, and a whole eternity to the unhappy 
 valet, the manager called out to my father, who was in front, to 
 stop, and then, pointing across a wide valley to the next ridge 
 and bluff, said : 
 
 " There you see Two Rivers." 
 
 Of course, as the second river was on the other side of the 
 ridge, we could not see it ; but the one on this was a fine 
 mountain stream, which came rushing down the hill at the top 
 of the valley, which gradually widened as it neared the sea, and 
 at last spread out into a broad savannah or pasture. All up 
 the hill, on each side of the valley, the soil was scored and 
 trenched for sugar-canes, and the young crop looked green and 
 lovely after the rains. 
 
 On the ridge, as I have already said, stood the house, — the 
 " Great House," as it was called, — of Two Rivers, and towards it 
 we slowly made our way down the ridge on this side, across the 
 river at a ford full of stones, which afforded new fun to Sambo 
 and new terror to the valet, then up the valley to the tail of the 
 ridge, and then along the crest of the ridge itself, through an 
 avenue of cocoa-nut trees, till we stood before the house in which 
 Colonel Ratoon had lived and died. 
 
 I am sure I cannot tell whether at that moment my father 
 thought it worth his while to have come so far. Whether it 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 27. 
 
 occurred to him that he would have been just as much owner of 
 •Two Rivers had he stayed quietly at home at Halfacre Hall and 
 been master of his West Indian estate by deputy. But what- 
 ever his thoughts and feelings, like a wise man he kept them to 
 himself, and merely handed my mother out of the gig, saying, 
 " Welcome, my dear, to Two Kivers." 
 
 At the doorways swarmed a host of negroes — house servants 
 busy doing nothing, and taking stock of their new owners. 
 First and foremost was an old grizzle-headed fellow named En- 
 deavour, who belied his name, seeing that he endeavoured to do 
 nothing except to stand and snigger at the new comers. 
 
 By this time the manager had come up in the deerborne, and 
 he broke the ice by calling out — " Here, you, Endeavour, Jack- 
 son, Peggy, and the rest of you, why don't you help your new 
 mistress out of the gig, and thpse children 1 " 
 
 This was the signal for Endeavour to speak. " Hi, Massa 
 Manager,'' he retorted, " sure we wait for Manager to help 
 Massa out. What we see Massa Manager do, we do too. . We 
 'fraid to do anyting widout Massa order. Den why hurry Massa 
 Halfacre 1 Massa Ratoon always say, ' Nebber hurry, Endea- 
 vour ; try not to hurry ; de day is long enough for de work.' 
 So we got into de way of nebber hurrying in the ole Massa's 
 time, and we hab no time to learn to hurry yet in new Massa's 
 time." 
 
 After delivering this splendid defence of idleness ore rotundo, 
 Endeavour went up to my father, and said : 
 
 " How you do, Sare 1 I hope you quite well after de v'yage, 
 and n'ung Missis and the piccaninnies." 
 
 My father thanked him in all our names, and bade him lead 
 the way into the house. 
 
 So into the house the whole train went. The whites or 
 buckras first, and then the blacks. Nurse holding up her hands 
 at their number, and wondering how much a-week it cost to 
 keep all them niggers on board wages. The vestibule was a 
 spacious hall of Bermuda cedar, paved with marble which Co- 
 lonel Eatooh had sent for from the Levant. In the midst was 
 a fountain which threw up a jet of water, and in and out of the 
 "jealousies" flitted humming-birds, while the green lizards 
 looked down in their sidelong, curious way, as if they quite 
 understood that a new owner was coming into possession. 
 
28 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 HOW WE LIVED AT TWO RIVERS. 
 
 Two Rivers was really a lovely spot, shaded by trees of all 
 kinds : for Colonel Ratoon had lived in the good old times when 
 brown sugar was eighteenpence a-pound. He was without chick 
 or child, and was free to follow his fancy. As we have seen, he 
 imported marble from the Levant, and so, too, he brought nut- 
 megs from the Moluccas, bread-fruit from Otaheite, betel-palms 
 from Madras — in fact, all kinds of rare shrubs and trees grew 
 thickly about that ridge. Then there were the trees of the 
 country : cocoanut, palm, tamarind, mango, huge plum-trees, 
 Indian figs, hard woods, greenheart,' locust, and mahogany. 
 Great creepers ; all the passion-flowers, from the huge grena- 
 dilla down to the tiniest passiflora. Over head, by day, soared 
 the man-of-war bird, a kind of albatross, and lower down flew 
 wild pigeons and ring-doves. The eaves of the house were lined 
 with humming-birds' nests, much in the same way as our 
 martin builds at home ; and here, too, was the perpetual swal- 
 low. If the scene was gay by day, it was more brilliant by 
 night. As soon as the sun fell — and in those islands he literally 
 falls ; he does not set or sink ; he rushes to his rest in the ocean 
 as though worn out with his hot day's work, and, as Coleridge 
 
 " At one step comes the night," 
 
 then the landscape was lit by countless fire-flies, chiefly of two 
 kinds : the lesser winking and twinkling in their light, starting 
 in fitful radiance from every branch ; the larger flying straight 
 through the air with a fixed glare — insect meteors — till they 
 rested amid the leaves and veiled their light. To a child who 
 had nothing to think of except objects of sense, Two Rivers was 
 an earthly paradise, and I for one am much obliged to Colonel 
 Ratoon for making my father his heir, and so bringing me to 
 St. Saccharissa. 
 
 The people, too, the slaves, were good people. Grown chil- 
 dren, black Irishmen, — call them anything you please that 
 expresses cleverness and carelessness. How should it be other- 
 wise 1 They were well fed, well clothed, and not over-worked. 
 There was a hospital on the estate, and a doctor who lived in it. 
 A church, too, which Colonel Ratoon had built, and in which 
 the headmen of the estate appeared every Sunday in far better 
 garb than my father. Black " pants,'' as the Americans call 
 them, and blue coats, and brass buttons, was the correct dress. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 29 
 
 Even at this distance of time it makes me laugh and melt away, 
 to think how hot our headmen looked sitting up prim in 
 church, as stiff as pokers ; while we were all thinly clad in 
 gingham and nankeen. All this came of their pig and their 
 provision grounds, out of their pork and their yams, and tanias 
 and cassava, which they grew at extra hours, and then sent off 
 by their wives to town to sell. Did they never buy their free- 
 dom ? Very seldom. Sometimes a Brutus would arise who 
 scorned broadcloth and brass buttons on Sunday, and cherry 
 brandy at Christmas. He would save up his money and buy 
 his freedom at a valuation. What became of him 1 First of 
 all, he was called a " Willyforce nigger " by his old friends. In 
 my days there was no worse term of reproach. It meant a 
 drone among hired workers ; a good-for-nothing fellow who 
 loafed about the wharves, and only worked for the shipping 
 when hunger drove him. If he had saved enough to do so, be- 
 sides buying himself he bought another slave. To set him free ? 
 By no means. To make him work, and get all he could out of 
 him. Such " Willyforce niggers " were always the worst masters. 
 
 The Dissenters 1 Oh ! I have forgotten them. Well, in our 
 time, they did no harm. It was before emancipation had made 
 them powerful and revolutionary. A Jamaica estate was still 
 worth having. Many of our people were Dissenters, and there 
 was a Baptist chapel down near the works, which was well 
 attended ; but it was considered by all the fashionable part of 
 the community the right thing to go to church with massa. 
 
 English ideas of slavery are unfortunately taken from Cuba 
 and the United States, where it was the interest of owners to 
 work their slaves to death in order to save the expense of sup- 
 porting them in old age. But this is to confound the slave- 
 trade with slavery. After the exertions of Clarkson and Wil- 
 berforce had been crowned with success, it was the interest of 
 no West Indian proprietor to over- work his slaves ; on the con- 
 trary, he had everything to gain by taking the greatest care of 
 them. To me, who went constantly among them, they seemed 
 as happy as birds. They were always singing, and their Crop 
 Over Festival was a far more heartfelt rejoicing than so many 
 of our mock Harvest Homes. On those occasions every man, 
 woman, and child that could crawl, walk, or creep, came up to 
 the " great house," clad in their best — the men in broadcloth 
 and brass buttons, — those who could afford it ; the rest in drill 
 or pilot cloth. The women in the gayest cotton prints, their 
 heads tastefully tied with Madras handkerchiefs. They marched 
 to an awful music, far exceeding anything that our marrow- 
 bones and cleavers could ever perform. It was a mingling of 
 
30 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 tom-toms and conches, huge shells which, when properly played 
 by Tritons, may be very melodious, but which, with a negro's 
 breath in them, utter a most unearthly sound. It beats, in 
 fact, any of those German bands which make the squares of the 
 metropolis hideous in the summer months. Those were the 
 male performers; the women had "shake-shakes," as they 
 called them, gourds or calabashes, filled with small round red 
 seeds with black eyes. Each of them, like a grain of powder, as 
 Coleridge says of Frenchmen, was contemptible, but five hun- 
 dred " shake-shakes " all shaken at once, let me tell you, pro- 
 duced a dry, hoarse sound, something like the crash which 
 Virgil describes as issuing from the Italian hills when the dry 
 boughs and leaves were stirred by the coming storm. 
 
 Strange to say that, with all this savage minstrelsy, this con- 
 fusion of sea, and land, and air, which they called music, they 
 had excellent ears. No one could sing better wild minor strains, 
 snatches of joy from the heart of Africa ; no one than a negro 
 could improvise a better Fescennine ballad on the peculiarities 
 of an owner, a manager, an overseer, or a governor. Let any 
 one do the wrong thing, and his false step was handed about 
 the island in biting verses, which were sung at their work in the 
 fields by the " great gang," the able-bodied part of the people, 
 or over the steaming cane-juice in the boilers, or at night in the 
 negro-houses around the savoury stew. 
 
 They had no great crimes. Murders and lesser enormities 
 were so rare as to be almost unknown. They would pilfer from 
 their master, steal his fruit, or the contents of his larder at 
 night, but robbery with violence was never heard of. No ! the 
 great crimes in St. Saccharissa were committed by whites, and 
 generally by soldiers. As when the adjutant of His Majesty's 
 
 Regiment was shot by a sentry, much in the same way 
 
 as soldiers shoot their officers in India now, and the sentry was 
 sentenced to be hanged. The execution created quite a sensa- 
 tion in the island. It was ever so long since a man had been 
 hanged, and the negroes said, " Hang a white buckra ? Stop a 
 bit ; we shall see ! " By which they meant that no white man 
 would ever be hanged, whatever he might do. But the sentry 
 was hanged, though not without difficulty. If there are no 
 executions in a community there can be no executioner. The 
 honourable profession of Jack Ketch becomes extinct, and dies 
 like a fire for want of fuel. In a word, the man was to be 
 hanged, and there was no one to hang him. Old McCrosky was 
 sheriff, and it seemed as though,he would have the task on his 
 own hands. So he set out on a tour of the island to find a 
 negro who would do the deed for a consideration. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 81 
 
 Now, at Two Eivers lived, I am sorry to say, the worst cha- 
 racter in the whole island. I see him now, tall, and lithe, and 
 strong as a betel-palm. His name was Mercury, and he was 
 well named after the God of Thieves. He had once set fire to 
 a megass-house, that is, a house full of dried canes, after they 
 had passed through the mill, and are then stored up for fuel. 
 Once, too, he had taken another man out to fish with him, and 
 upset the boat and swam on shore. True, when he reached the 
 land, he swam back again and saved the life of his enemy, who 
 was clinging to the boat. When asked why he did it, he only said : 
 
 " Massa, dat only a bit fun ; Sambo too plenty coward, so me 
 upset de boat just to make him tink de ground-shark bite him 
 toe off!" 
 
 That, therefore, might have been merely a " freak of graceful 
 folly ; " but, somehow or other, the general verdict of the estate 
 was against Mercury. If a fowl was lost, it was laid at Mer- 
 cury's door. If a heifer fell over the cliff and broke her neck, 
 the watchman, who ought to have looked after her, simply said: 
 
 ■ " Ah ! massa, dis all dat Mercury work." 
 
 If a pig were choked when tethered by its leg, it was Mercury. 
 In vain he pleaded that the Manakoo, or opossum, had run off 
 with the fowl ; or that it was the watchman's fault ; or that the 
 pig had throttled himself. It would not do. Public opinion 
 was against Mercury, and the blame was laid on him. 
 
 So as Mercury's fame had spread all through the island as a 
 dare-devil, old McCrosky's gig was seen climbing the ridge when 
 the execution was about a week off ; and in due time he made 
 his appearance in the marble portico, wiping his face and head, 
 for the sun was hot. 
 
 " Good-days " having been exchanged, and sangaree ordered 
 in, McCrosky's errand came out. 
 
 " I suppose you know, Mr. Halfacre, that your Mercury is the 
 worst character in the island. I have come to ask you to lend 
 him me for a day." 
 
 " Well ! " said my father, " I hear every one say so ; but I 
 have been here too short a time to find out his wickedness." 
 
 " You may be sure there's never a bit of roguery done ten 
 miles round that Mercury has not his hand in it. Who but he, 
 I should like to know, stole your lumber last week in the bay?" 
 
 " I should very much like to know," replied my father, " but 
 I can't see any proof that Mercury stole it. He said most likely 
 it was swept out of the bay by the current, and that it would 
 be found somewhere to leeward." 
 
 ' " Yes, he has always an excuse ; but will ypu lend him me 
 for a day?" 
 
32 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE; 
 
 " Yes, if he is willing to go ; and if you will tell me what 
 work you mean him to do." 
 
 " Well, the fact is ; I am Sheriff ; and Stook the sentry, who 
 shot the adjutant, must be hanged, and I am afraid, unless you 
 lend me Mercury to be executioner, I shall have to hang the 
 fellow myself." 
 
 " I don't like it at all," said my father ; " but as I have said 
 Mercury shall go if he is willing. We will send for him and 
 ask him. Meanwhile, send your horse and gig to the stable ; 
 finish your sangaree, and let's have a game of billiards." 
 
 So Mercury was sent for, and, strange to say, quickly found. 
 Of course it was said that he was only looking about the house 
 to see what he could lay hands on. In any one else such readi- 
 ness would have been praised as that of a man attending to his 
 work. So great a misfortune is it to have a bad name, that 
 one's very virtues are made out to be vices. 
 
 Well, in stalked Mercury into the portico, a perfect model. 
 He might have been done in ebony for a Pantheon where all the 
 gods were sable. One had only to glance at him to see that he 
 was born to be a poacher — to levy black mail. In Africa he 
 would have been a mighty chief ; here he was only a fisherman 
 by profession, and a thief by repute. 
 
 So there he stood, confronting my father and the Sheriff, 
 nothing doubting that Massa McCrosky was come to bring some 
 charge against him. 
 
 " Well, Mercury," said my father, "the Sheriff has come " 
 
 " Yes, massa," broke in Mercury. 
 
 " Hear me out, Mercury, the Sheriff has nothing against you. 
 He only wants me to lend you to him to do a day's work ; and 
 I have said he shall have you if you are willing to go. He will 
 pay you well 1 " added my father, interrogatively to the Sheriff. 
 
 " Oh, certainly, certainly," said Mr. McCrosky. " It Bhall be 
 worth a guinea to him." 
 
 In those days, I may say, hanging was so cheap in the mother- 
 country that a guinea was thought extra-pay for a West Indian 
 Calcraft. 
 
 " A guinea, massa ! " said Mercury. " Dat berry good pay ; 
 but what for Massa Crosky pay so high for borrowing dis nigger 
 to work, when last time I see Massa Crosky he say : " Get out o' 
 de way, you blackguard, who nebber do a day's work in him life ! ' " 
 , This blow rather staggered Mr. McCrosky, and so my father 
 went on : 
 
 " Why, you see, Mercury, Mr. McCrosky is Sheriff." 
 
 " I know dat too well, massa ; he often put me in de stocks,'' 
 said Mercury. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 33 
 
 " You see he is Sheriff, and Private Stook is to be hanged ; 
 and if the Sheriff can't get some one to hang him, he must hang 
 him with his own hands ; and so he has come to ask me to lend 
 you for the execution, and I have said you may go if you are 
 willing, and if you go you will get a guinea." 
 
 I was but a small boy then, only between six and seven, but 
 crossing the sea had opened my eyes wonderfully, and my mind 
 had grown a good deal on the food it had taken in at the eyes 
 and ears ; for the eyes and ears are the mouths of the mind, 
 and that is why the mind grows so fast, because it has four 
 mouths to feed it. I was but a small boy, but if I lived to be 
 a small boy again, and had any memory left, I should never 
 forget how god-like Mercury grew at this proposition. Not 
 Jove and Juno together could have been more indignant. His 
 chest heaved; he turned almost blue — lobster-blue — with anger; 
 he glared fiercely at the Sheriff, and said : 
 
 " Massa Halfacre, you good massa ; leastwise you not here 
 long enough for me to find out you bad. Me know Massa 
 Crosky ; some tink him good, some bad ; Mercury tink him 
 bad, 'cause he nebber kind to Mercury, and nebber gib him one 
 lilly stampee at Christmas. Me teef, berry true, me teef some- 
 time ; me take tongue out of massa' larder when me hungry. 
 When me catch, say dozen mullet, me sometime say me only 
 catch six. Me drink new rum when I see it. Ebery nigger 
 'xposed to de wedder drink new rum. It good 'gainst de caugh. 
 Dey say me burn down megass house, steal fowl, pig, eberyting. 
 Dey lie ; Mercury can't steal eberyting, — his hand not reach so 
 far. If he steal fowl, what he do wid de fedder ; if he steal 
 pig, what for pig make no noise. But me teef; berry well, me 
 teef ; but me no hangman. Massa Sheriff, hab your guinea you 
 self. Hang buckra soldier you self. One buckra hang anodder 
 buckra ; berry fine sight. Massa Halfacre gib us all half-holi- 
 day to go into Princetown to see de sight." 
 
 And so saying, he strode out of the portico, sat down under a 
 huge tamarind-tree, and began mending a net. 
 
 "You see, Sheriff," said my father, "it's no use. I could never 
 force one of my people to do such a thing against his will." 
 
 So the Sheriff rode round the island, and could find no one 
 bad enough to be hangman. Nor would he have escaped the 
 dirty work himself, had he not sent a schooner up to Barbadoes, 
 
 and brought down the greatest ruffian in His Majesty's 
 
 Regiment, who for ten shillings and a bottle of rum was willing 
 to lend a hand in hanging Private Stook. 
 
34 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 HOW WE STAYED IN THE WEST INDIES. 
 
 I wonder you have never asked how the vacuum-pans, and 
 cane-crushers, and crystallisers, and engineer, and skilled me- 
 chanics succeeded. You had better ask first what they cost. 
 Of course they cost something. Messrs. Nail and Screw were 
 not fond of doing their work for nothing, and I think I may say 
 that this expensive machinery swallowed up, what with first cost, 
 freight, and fitting, more than one year's income from the estate 
 of Two Rivers. The skilled mechanics departed to their own 
 place, perhaps hotter even than the island of Saccharissa, and 
 they went there very quickly under the influence of rum and 
 loose living. The Scotch engineer took his money, and saved 
 it, and went to the Spanish Main, where, I have no doubt, he is 
 Still saving money and setting up machinery, if he is alive. But 
 alas ! after he and the skilled mechanics had gone their ways, 
 there was no one who understood their handiwork. Of course 
 the old manager and overseers were dead against the new fangle. 
 Vacuum-pans, and condensers, and crystallisers succeed admi- 
 rably now-a-days no doubt, because every one understands them; 
 but it was my father's fate to be the first in the field with Nail 
 and Screw's patents, and the result was a dead failure. It is not 
 always the early bird that gets the worm, and still less the 
 worm of the still. So the vacuum-pans had soon holes burnt in 
 their bottoms, and were got out with infinite trouble and ex- 
 pense, and thrown on one side to rot and rust in the bay. The 
 condensers and steam centrifugal pumps blew up one fine morn- 
 ing, and nearly killed the overseer, and shattered the boiler- 
 house to atoms. And last of all, — ungrateful implement that it 
 was ! — the cane-crusher stopped all at once one night, with its 
 maw full of canes, which it refused to masticate. It had got 
 hopelessly jammed and clogged, and would crush nothing but 
 itself. Of course we only wanted a Scotch engineer or a skilled 
 mechanic to set matters right, but, as I have explained, we could 
 not have them. So bit by bit the whole of the new machinery 
 was condemned as worse than useless, and cast aside. I have 
 heard it said that the head boiler — a man, and not a vessel — 
 had climbed up and let a screwdriver fall do,wn among the cogs 
 of the cane-crusher, and so jammed and clogged it; and I believe 
 it of this benighted boiler, because I have heard of the same 
 thing among our intelligent skilled mechanics at home, who look 
 upon a new machine with just the same eye of aversion as their 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 35 
 
 uneducated black brother did forty years ago in the island of 
 St. Saccharissa. But this waste of money was only the begin- 
 ning of trouble. One year's income was thrown away on that 
 machinery, as well as all Colonel Eatoon's balance at Short, 
 Ready, and. Stump's bank. But after it came what were called 
 measures for the " Amelioration of the Condition of the Slaves 
 in His Majesty's West Indian Colonies." Measures which did 
 little to ameliorate the condition of the slave, but everything to 
 deteriorate the position of the planter. What with reduced 
 hours of labour, and the care of old, young, and sick ; what with 
 churches, and doctors, and protectors of slaves — a sort of moral 
 exciseman, always poking his nose in where he was not wanted, 
 and expecting sangaree at luncheon, and to be asked to stay to 
 dinner, and take a bed — I say, what with all this, the margin of 
 profit on producing sugar grew less and less. But worse re^ 
 mained. Other countries became sugar-growing and sugar-* 
 competing for the sweet tooth of the world ; Mauritius, Java, 
 and the East Indies. With unlimited labour in India, for 
 instance, West India sugar was undersold; and though the 
 planters of St. Saccharissa and the other islands swore that what 
 came from the East Indies as sugar was not sugar at all ; just 
 as a late lamented Master of Trinity laid it down that bitter 
 beer was not beer ; somehow or other, the world thought it 
 sugar, just as they are stupid enough to think bitter beer beer. 
 They sweetened their tea. with it, sugared Twelfth Cakes with it, 
 used the sham and the reality with equal impartiality, according 
 as one was cheaper than the other, and the result was that 
 clayed Muscovados fell about one-third in price. 
 
 But this fall had another result. You remember that notice 
 of Claw, Tooth, and Nail, that when they came " under ad- 
 vances " their commission rose to twenty per cent, each way. 
 Few incomes or estates can stand forty per cent, deduction. 
 Yet this was what happened to Two Rivers. Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail did "come under advances" in the second year of my 
 father's ownership, and they charged forty per cent. ; for, 
 though they would have repudiated the notion of being usurers, 
 and Mr. Claw would have scouted the notion, that was what 
 their commission came to at the end of the year. They re- 
 ceived all my father's sugar and rum and sold it at twenty per 
 cent, commission, and they sent him out all manner of things 
 which he wanted and did not want for working the estate. 
 They even gave Nail and Screw another large order for ma- 
 chinery, which arrived in due course, and which was sent up to 
 Two Eivers in a coasting vessel, at infinite expense, and landed 
 at the risk of many lives through a tumbling surf, and was 
 
 r 2 
 
36 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 never put up, but lay rotting and rusting because it was before 
 its age, and St. Saccharissa produced no skilled mechanics. 
 From advances they got to a mortgage, the interest and com- 
 pound interest on which soon swallowed up the little profit that 
 remained after the Orders in Council and the Equalisation of 
 the Sugar Duties ; and so there was my poor father in the West 
 Indies, with the Two Rivers Estate like a millstone round his 
 neck, still trying to work it, for he was loth to abandon it, and 
 each year getting deeper and deeper into the spider web of 
 Claw, Tooth, and Nail. 
 
 You will understand now how lucky it was that my father 
 did not tie himself to a day as to his return, and that my 
 mother went with him. You will remember, too, how time slips 
 away, even to the owner of a mortgaged estate ; and how it was 
 that one fine day Aunt Mandeville wrote a letter, spitting fire 
 and flame even after being cooled on its way across the Atlantic, 
 to remind my parents that I was now nine years old, and ask- 
 ing why the promise given that I should belong to her at eight 
 had not been fulfilled. 
 
 I do not mean you to think that was the only letter she 
 wrote. She often wrote, and we often wrote to her. Like a 
 sensible woman she was always urging my father to throw the 
 whole thing up, and return to Halfacre Hall, and end his days 
 under his Warwickshire oaks among the green rolling fields. 
 Sometimes she sent him the Meets of Hounds to make him long 
 for home, and he sighed, when we were broiling, to think that 
 the meets were — Monday, Halfacre Gorse ; Wednesday, Brink- 
 low Tumulus ; Friday, Stoneleigh Park. But, like many 
 others, my father did not know when to make a loss. Hard is 
 it to know when to take a gain, but harder still to make up 
 your mind not to continue any longer throwing good* money 
 after bad. 
 
 As for me, it was felt that the fatal day had arrived ; if I was 
 to belong to Aunt Mandeville home I must go. In fact, we 
 ought all to have gone home : my mother was willing, but my 
 father would not. My mother's heart yearned for her other 
 children ; but when she spoke of them my father would talk of 
 having my eldest brother out, before he went to Cambridge, 
 that he might see the world. How much of the world he was 
 likely to see on the Atlantic, or in St. Saccharissa, I decline to 
 say. 
 
 But as for me, home I must go ; there was no blinking the 
 question. It seemed to be now or never. Of course I was 
 sorry to part with them ; how can you ask such an unfeeling 
 question t Every well-behaved child is sorry to leave its father 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 37 
 
 and mother — most of all its mother. But the mind of man is 
 full of mixed motives ; there is dross in the purest gold of our 
 nature. Every child likes change ; and'' so, when the first 
 shock was over, I was soon reconciled to the separation. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HOW I WENT HOME IN THE " DELAFORD." 
 
 I well remember how my father drove me in from his estate 
 in a phaeton ; how my mother sobbed and sighed ; how we got 
 to the beautiful horseshoe bay, and how I stood there, a sallow 
 urchin in nankeens, under the burning sun, till the ship's boat 
 came for me ; how the good old captain took me by the hand ; 
 how I still clung to my dear kind father by the other ; how 
 he patted me on the head, and bade me behave like a man ; how 
 I thought I would rather be a boy, and stay there ; how I was 
 coaxed into the boat by the bait of a banana ; how they shoved 
 her off — the cheery, brawny sailors ; how her keel grated on the 
 yellow sand ; how she shot off into deep water ; how the 
 sailors rowed lustily; how she lifted to the swell; how the 
 sharks rose round us, and their greedy eyes looked as if they 
 would so like a little boy ; how we reached the black-sided 
 sugar-ship ; how I was handed and hauled up the ladder ; how 
 I turned on deck and saw my father still standing on the beach, 
 his black groom, so full of jokes and jests, holding the horses' 
 heads until he turned slowly, got into the phaeton, and drove 
 off. Then, for the first time in my life, I really felt alone. 
 Down the companion I went, to look at the box called a berth. 
 Below it was stuffy and sweltering ; the air was full of bilge- 
 water, sugar steam, and rum. Out of the cuddy grinned a 
 mulatto steward. There too was the first mate, and there too 
 was my luggage, boxes tenderly packed and filled by a mother's 
 hand. Alas ! it was Black Monday for seven long weeks. We 
 put to sea, we shot by isle after isle, flat,, like Barbadoes, and 
 tall, like Grenada, rising with her green mountain-coronet from 
 the blue sea. What cared I then for such things 1 I was a 
 boy. I got sweetmeats at Barbadoes and oranges at Grenada. 
 Then the wind rose, and the sea grew rough, and so it lasted 
 for a week or more. I kept my berth. Cockroaches crawled 
 over me ; by night they gnawed my lips ; the yellow steward 
 came to me with his loathsome dishes ; he brought me his tea, 
 which was no tea to me without milk. What had become of 
 
38 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 that pet cow which my father had put on board to give me 
 milk t Had it gone mad, like Io, and jumped into the sea, or 
 had it climbed into the maintop ? Wherever it was, it gave no 
 milk. It was sea-sick like myself, and pined for its calf as I did 
 for my mother. Time after time the good old captain came to 
 me and bade me take heart ; I should soon be better and able 
 to eat. They were going to kill one of our pigs. Did I not 
 know it ? Had I not from early dawn heard the victim be- 
 wailing his hard fate, that he, a pig of high degree — his father 
 was a Spanish boar, and his mother a Neapolitan sow, — should 
 perish ignobly on that stormy ocean, and find a tomb in sailors' 
 entrails ! As he shrieked and squealed all his fellow-pigs joined 
 in the concert, and the cocks crew, and the hens chuckled from 
 their coops, and the sheep baaed, and my cow, the milkless 
 one, lowed in harmony. At last the martyr met his death amid 
 awful squeals. All this I heard as I lay restless in bed, and 
 wondered what a bad thing school must be to make me so 
 miserable. Like a youthful Hezekiah, I turned my face to the 
 wall, and refused comfort. At last I rose and went on deck, and 
 fhen my appetite returned ; for about three weeks I devoured 
 greedily everything the cook, who I hope is now safe in Heckle- 
 birnie's House, served up. He slew sheep, and geese, and 
 turkeys, and chickens, and pigs, and served them up raw. 
 Once, when it was very rough, he wanted us to do without 
 cooking altogether, and took to his bed. He was ill, and could 
 not cook. This led to an interview with the boatswain, a man 
 of few words and many blows, whose cane brought the cook out 
 of bed. Amongst other things I had a turtle on board, quite a 
 lively one. The captain had one too, which was unlively. 
 Here I may remark that there are Fairies and Good People on 
 board ship as elsewhere, and this is a proof of it. This lively 
 turtle was meant as a present from my father to Aunt Mande- 
 ville. I have always liked turtles, they are so sympathising, 
 and they open their eyes so tenderly, and their lips smile so 
 spftly, as they rise in their tubs and gasp for more fat. They 
 have been my passion from infancy. I love them in season and 
 out of season, at all hours, in soup, in upper and under shell ; I 
 love calipash and calipee, turtle-steaks and turtle-fins. In short, 
 I adore the whole turtle, and every part of him. Every morn- 
 ing, then, as soon as I was up and washed, I walked off to see 
 the turtle, and the cook generally looked at him too. Fancy 
 my wonder one morning when I saw that my turtle had grown 
 much smaller and thinner in the night. He looked as much 
 like my turtle of the day before as a changeling elf resembles 
 the comely child whose place he fills. He seemed too as if he 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. §9 
 
 were near his last gasp, so close were his puffs and pants. Over 
 him stood the cook, knife in hand. What are you going to do 
 to my turtle ? " Kill him to save his life ; he'll die if I don't" 
 So killed he was, and we ate him ;■ and a very nasty mess the 
 cook made of him — all shell and skin, no fat. After we 
 had eaten him, I said to the mate, " That looked Very like the 
 captain's turtle, only he was in my turtle's tub ; do you think 
 they changed tubs in the night ? " " No ! no ! " said the mate. 
 " It was your turtle that was going to die, and it was your 
 turtle that we ate ; the captain's turtle never dies." 
 
 So the voyage went on, and as one voyage is very much like 
 another, I shall cut this short. Our voyage home was very like 
 our voyage out, except that I was older, and had no companions. 
 I remember we met a whale,— a true whale. Or rather, I am 
 wrong; he overtook us. We were going free, with a fine 
 breeze, and yet the huge monster passed us without the least 
 apparent effort. He must have been going twenty knots at 
 least through the water, and yet he seemed to be swimming 
 quite within himself. He passed close alongside, baring only a 
 part of his large body at a time. I recollect thinking it was 
 very lucky for us that he did not take it into his head to run his 
 nose against us, and send us to the bottom. 
 
 The weather was pretty good until we got to the chops of the 
 Channel. There we had baffling winds for a week. As the sea 
 is always rough in the Gulf of Lyons, so I am convineed the 
 wind is always foul in the chops of the Channel. It has been so 
 whenever I have been there. 
 
 At last we got into soundings. We could touch English 
 earth by the lead. Tha,t they call the deep sea or " dipsey " 
 lead. How many hundred fathoms our "dipsey" lead took 
 down with it before it reached the bottom, I am sure I forget ; 
 but it was a grand sight to see the lead cast. What a splash it 
 made as it went down beneath the waves, and what toil and 
 trouble it was to get it up ! 
 
 When it came up I was standing at the mate's elbow. "Here, 
 Teddy," he cried, "taste a bit of Old England ;" and as he said 
 so he rubbed the patch of tallow, with the sand and small shells 
 sticking to it at the end of the lead, against my nose. What 
 with the nasty tallow, the filthiest of all smells in my opinion, 
 and the rough sand and shells, my first taste and smell of Old 
 England were not at all nice. But we were in soundings some- 
 where between Scilly and the Land's End, and we should soon 
 sight the land and run up Channel. 
 
 Next day we sighted the land. I think it was the Lizard we 
 was. How unlike the dear green lizards at Two Rivers ! Next 
 
40 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 we got a fair wind and ran rapidly past Cornwall, Devon, and 
 Dorset. Then we stood out, keeping the lead .going constantly, 
 till we were off the Isle of Wight. Next day we were oiF Dover, 
 and the pilot came on board. 
 
 Though it is so long ago, I remember the face of that man as 
 though I had only seen him yesterday. I remember his hale, 
 ruddy face, his clear, grey eyes, his huge mottled hands, his 
 awkward gait, as he crawled up the side from his pilot-boat, 
 which had rounded to under our lee, and lay dancing up and 
 down below our chains. He seemed half man and half seal or 
 walrus. His air of command was astonishing. Our good old 
 captain became as nothing before Mr. Smart, Trinity Pilot, who 
 now took charge of the ship. I believe a captain can't interfere 
 until a pilot has delirium tremens. If he sees him running his 
 vessel on shore he can't stop him. He may mistake Dungeness 
 for the North Foreland^ that's only an error of judgment. Itis 
 no concern of the captain. Let the ship strike, and the under- 
 writers suffer ! That is the doctrine of pilotage carried out to 
 its "extremest consequences ; but our pilot was an old friend of 
 the captain's, and had been on the look-out for him. Have I 
 never told you the name of our ship 1 It was the-J)elaford, and 
 a very good ship she was, and the captain was a most delightful 
 specimen of the true British sailor. There are few such captains 
 now-a-days. He might have stood to old Fuller for his model of 
 " The Good Sea-Captain." Well, he is gone, and so is the good 
 ship gone, and, I dare say, most of the brave hearts in her — all 
 except myself. 
 
 Let us gulp down such thoughts, and get on. The captain 
 asked the pilot if there was any news, — if anything had hap- 
 pened lately. 
 
 .' " Nothing," said the pilot, " except that Lord Castlereagh has 
 been and cut his throat." 
 
 " Do you call that nothing?" said the captain. "I call it 
 great news." 
 
 " He warn't Master of the Trinity House, nor he warn't Lord 
 Warden of the Cinque -Ports, nor he warn't Fust Lord of the 
 Admiralty," said the pilot. " If one of them had died I should 
 have called it news. They're seafaring folk ; but this Lord was 
 a landlubber for what I know. Luff," he called out in a voice 
 like the north wind blowing round the Pole, to the man at the 
 wheel, " you'll be aboard of that Frenchman if you don't 
 look out." 
 
 Besides the news of which he thought so little, he brought us 
 " fresh bread and butter." " You don't think that' much i Ah ! 
 that's because. you've never been in the West Indies, where they 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 41 
 
 know next to nothing of bread, and as for butter, fresh butter, 
 it's a thing unknown." It was early morning, a morning in 
 May — quite at the end of May — but it was bitterly cold, and I 
 remember that butter was as hard as a stone, whereas all the 
 butter. I remembered to have seen before was in a liquid state, 
 as. near oil as butter can be without ceasing to be butter and 
 turning into oil. No ! bread and butter, in our English sense 
 of fresh bread and butter, was unknown in St. Saccharissa, and 
 I made the most of it when I made its acquaintance on board 
 the Delaford. 
 
 I forgot to say that the pilot's cutter went away a few minutes 
 after he had boarded us, but not before one of his " mates," as 
 he called him, had clambered on board and paid us a visit. 
 Never did I see — never shall I see pockets such as that "mate" 
 had in his coat. Into them he stowed away three quart bottles 
 of rum which the captain gave him — I suppose to keep him in 
 spirits till the pilot rejoined him. As soon as he had stowed 
 them safely away, he said, " Good-bye, Bill," to Mr. Smart, 
 crawled back again, cast off the cutter, in which there were "still 
 three hands besides himself, and was gone. 
 
 Under the~~guidance of the pilot we ran past Dover and 
 through the Downs. We passed quite close to the Goodwins, 
 and I saw them stretching for miles of hard, yellow sand. At 
 night we were off the Nore, and as the tide failed and the wind 
 was now contrary, we cast anchor. Why didn't we have a steam- 
 tug ? "" Bless your innocent hearts ! in those days there were no 
 steam-tugs. The homeward bound and the outward bound had to 
 make their way up and down the Thames by tide and wind alone. 
 
 We anchored, therefore, that night ; and next morning the 
 good old captain, whose authority over his ship was, as we have 
 seen, suspended, left her, and hailing one of the small Ramsgate 
 steamers, which were then quite a novelty, we got on board her, 
 and so went merrily up to town. There my father had begged 
 the captain to hand me over to the care of Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail, until I could go down to Mandeville HalL 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 HOW I WENT TO MY AUNT MANDEVILLE. 
 
 As soon as I landed, the good old captain announced the fact 
 to Claw, Tooth, and Nail, and it was settled that I should stay 
 with old Tooth, who still lived in Biyanston Square, till his firm 
 
&2 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 had notified the fact of my arrival to my Aunt, and she had 
 signified her pleasure to receive me. I was just ten years old, 
 and not more sallow than little boys who come from the West 
 Indies usually are. Old Tooth was always in the City; the 
 older he gotj Mrs. Tooth said, the closer he stuck to business. 
 She believed, indeed, he would end by going back to Vulture 
 Court and living there altogether. So 1 saw little of old Tooth, 
 but Mrs. Tooth was very kind to me. She bought me a bow 
 and arrow, and I shot the Square gardener in the calf. Mrs. 
 Tooth gave him half-a-crown and begged him to be sure and say 
 nothing about the arrow to her husband. She took me to see 
 the beasts in the Tower. It was just after Chuny's execution — 
 if any one now remembers Old Exeter Change and Chuny, the 
 elephant — but he was then the talk of the town. One night 
 Nail took me to' Vauxhall, and I had supper, and saw the fire- 
 works — at least, I ought to have done so, but I fell asleep before 
 they were let oif ; and much to his dismay, the exquisite Mr. 
 Nail had to drag me to a hackney coach, one of the old Jarveys, 
 and carry me back to Bryanston Square. Next morning came a 
 letter, in due course of post, from my Aunt to Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail, begging them to send me down by the Highflyer to 
 Warwick, and there she would meet me and take me over to 
 Mandeville Hall. Accordingly next morning, at seven o'clock, I 
 started from the Bath Hotel in Piccadilly on the Highflyer. I 
 was perched just behind the coachman, and for ten weary hours, 
 as it seemed to me, we went along the London and Holyhead 
 road towards Warwick. Not that I fancy that Telford's Road 
 went through Warwick, but the Highflyer followed the road to 
 Dunchurch, and then turned off towards Warwick. 
 
 I remember, when I first arrived in England, thinking that 
 the sun never shone, that the rain seemed to fall in mere driblets, 
 that the trees were very short and stumpy, and that the crops 
 were very poor. I was not, therefore, much struck with my 
 drive to Warwick, though now I think Warwickshire one of the 
 prettiest and richest counties in England. 
 
 Perhaps I might have enjoyed the journey more had it not 
 been for the meeting with my Aunt Mandeville, which was at ' 
 the other end of it. I cannot say that my spirits rose when 
 about 5 p.m. on that June day, the coachman turned round and 
 said, in a quarter of an hour we should be in Warwick I felt 
 very much as though I wished the journey were just beginning 
 instead of coming to its end. But hopes or fears, wishes oi- 
 l-egrets, all were vain, here we were in Warwick, and the High- 
 flyer rattled over the stones, the guard blowing his horn, the 
 children flying from the middle of the street, and the maid- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 43 
 
 servants running to the windows, just to see what they had seen 
 every day of their lives about the same hour. All at once we 
 halted. The leaders were pulled round and we drove under an 
 archway into the court of the " Dun Cow," at which famous 
 hostelry the coach stopped to tea, and I was to alight. 
 
 A waiter, then as now, in black with a white neckcloth — why 
 are waiters and undertakers the only specimens of humanity 
 that never change ? — came out, looked up at the coach whence 
 I was crawling down in fear and trembling, and before I reached 
 the ground, asked, was I the young gentleman for whom Mrs. 
 Mandeville was waiting. 
 
 " Yes," I answered, " I am Master Halfacre, and Mrs. Man- 
 deville is my Aunt." 
 
 " This way, sir, — yes, sir. Mrs. Mandeville is in the Blue 
 Eoom." 
 
 Into the Blue Room then I was ushered, and there rising, 
 from the inevitable black horsehair sofa was a stately lady^ 
 •whose remembrance, strange to say, had not entirely faded from 
 my mind. 
 
 She had been very handsome, and still showed it. The first 
 and last thing that you saw about Aunt Mandeville were her 
 large bright brown eyes. For the rest, she had regular features, 
 a slightly aquiline nose, chestnut hair, iu which there were no 
 grey hairs, and a tall, slight figure. Altogether she was grace- 
 ful, and dignified ; but when you had scanned her all over you 
 had to return to her eyes, and to feel, as they looked at you 
 and through you, that it would be hard to keep a secret from 
 her. 
 
 "Well, Edward," she said slowly, but gazing hard at -me ; 
 " they have sent you at last 1 I have waited a long time for 
 you, and thought you were never coming." 
 ■ It was necessary to say something, but what I scarce knew ; 
 so I answered at haphazard : 
 
 " I came, Aunt, as soon as they sent me ; and along with mej 
 papa sent you a turtle, but it died." 
 
 Whether Aunt Mandeville still remembered the fatal turtle 6$ 
 which my father partook when first snared by Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail, I cannot say, but she gave a little start, and said quietly : 
 
 " I hope I shall be fonder of you than of the turtle, Edward. 
 I hope to care a great deal for you, and I care very little for the 
 turtle." 
 
 "I hope you will, Aunt." 
 
 " But will you be a good boy to me 1 Your mother writes 
 you are a very good boy." 
 
 "I'll try, Aunt." 
 
44 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Try, then ; and now give me a kiss, and let us go away to 
 Mandeville Hall." 
 
 Saying this she rang the bell ; the musty waiter appeared ; 
 the carriage was ordered; and in a few minutes it stood in front 
 of the " Dun Cow." We got into it, and slowly rolled behind 
 two sleek, grey horses over the uneven Warwick stones. 
 
 Mandeville Hall was five miles from Warwick, and we took 
 some time to reach it. Meanwhile my Aunt said little, but 
 leant back in the open carriage, lost in thought, while I looked 
 at the green fields and haymakers as we rolled lazily along. In 
 about half an hour, or more, we turned off from the high road 
 at a lodge ; then through a park studded with clumps of tall 
 elms and free-standing oaks ; then up a slope, and through an 
 avenue of feathering limes, at the end of which we swept round 
 in front of an old Elizabethan house. Out came a bald-headed 
 butler and two footmen. We alighted from the carriage ; my 
 Aunt went first ; and as we passed up some steps and reached 
 the threshold of the hall she turned round, looked me full in the 
 face with her large, piercing eyes, and said in a low, soft voice : 
 
 " Welcome, Edward, to Mandeville Hall." 
 
 Mandeville Hall was rather a Tudor than an Elizabethan 
 house. It had a moat half round it. An Irishman would have 
 said that it had a moat all round it in front. I suppose it had 
 once gone round the house, but had been filled up at the back 
 and sides. There was a large hall in the centre, with a staircase 
 leading to each wing, and these wings extended to more than 
 the length of the hall on each side, so that they enclosed a 
 court at the back. Now I remember more exactly, the house 
 was built on the site of an older embattled house, which had 
 left it the moat as a legacy ; and there was an inscription over 
 the portal which told how " This hovse was bvilded by Sir 
 Geoffrey Mandeville, Verderer of the Forest of Arden, in the 
 time of King Henry the 7th." Inside the hall was hung with 
 escutcheons and banners, and decorated with family waifs and 
 strays. Here hung the banner which an older Sir Geoffrey had 
 borne at Cressy ; here the helmet of Sir Giles, who fought at 
 Agincourt : here the sword of Sir Hugh, with which he would 
 have cloven the Roundheads at Marston Moor, whither he had 
 led a whole troop of Woodmen of Arden, only, unfortunately, 
 one of Cromwell's Ironsides split his head instead, and his good 
 sword was all that was saved to the family out of the wreck of 
 that day. In a glass case was another great curiosity — a mere 
 antiquarian object now, but a perilous possession a century 
 before. It was one of those transparent cups which in certain 
 lights show the lively likeness of the old Pretender, so that the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 45 
 
 Jacobite owner, as he held it : up and drained it to the health of 
 the king, might pledge him whom he considered the lawful 
 sovereign, though he seemed to be drinking- the health of 
 George I. 
 
 Let me not forget to mention the prudence of the Mandeville 
 of that time. He was of a Jacobite stock, and got together 
 and secretly armed his retainers, meaning to join Charles 
 Edward on his march to London. This he did when he heard 
 the Scots were coming south ; and when the news came that 
 they were nearly at Derby the Squire Mandeville set off with 
 his men. Fortunately for him the Scots turned tail at Derby ; 
 but he was wise in his generation. Did he turn tail too 1 In 
 that case he might have been hanged, drawn, and quartered as 
 a rebel. No ! he marched on, and told the first colonel of one 
 of King George's regiments that he met, how he had got toger 
 ther this force to resist the rebels, and now placed it entirely at 
 His Majesty's disposal. So he saved his estates. 
 
 All these things I came to know afterwards bit by bit from 
 my Aunt, who was as good as any showman or showwpman. 
 But whenever she told me anything of the Mandevilles which 
 raised my wonder at their antiquity, she used to say : 
 
 " Child ! they are mere upstarts compared with the Halfacres, 
 who were Danes, settled at Halfacre long before Godiva rode 
 through the streets of Coventry ; and your father has, or ought 
 to have, a charter by which Alfred granted these lands in Mercia. 
 to one Harfager, a Norseman in Guthrum's following, free from 
 every due and tax except ' the triple necessity.' " 
 
 I very much doubt that my Aunt, like many a showman, did 
 not know what she was talking about ; I am sure I didn't, but 
 of course I now know, and you know, too, that this triple neces- 
 sity, — the trinoda necessitas of the charters, was, first, the build- 
 ing of bridges and castles ; second, the repairing of roads ; and 
 third, the following the king to war when an enemy invaded the 
 land. 
 
 If you care to know this, thank me ; if not, I care little for 
 your thanks. 
 
 One staircase, at one end of the hall, on the right, as you 
 entered it, led to the bed-rooms occupied by the family. There 
 were rooms of all colours and denominations, the Blue, Bed, 
 Green, and Chintz Booms, and their dressing-rooms, as there are 
 in every- decent house. Then there was the Long Boom, and 
 the Square Boom, and the Octagon Boom in a turret ; and the 
 Halfacre Boom, the bed-room of our family, and I don't know 
 how many other rooms besides. Underneath these bed-rooms 
 were the offices on the ground-floor, the whole length of that 
 
46 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE: 
 
 wing. On the other side of the Hall, on the ground-floor, were 
 the Dining-room, and my Aunt's room, and two Drawing-rooms, 
 and a Library, filled with rare old books. Beyond the Library, 
 at the very end of that wing, was the Chapel, a late Perpen- 
 dicular building. The staircase on the left, at that end of the 
 Hall, led to the State rooms, which, in furniture and fitting, 
 seemed very much as they had originally been. There was 
 King Henry the Seventh's room, in which he stayed one night, 
 and the morning after fined Sir Geoffrey a thousand marks for 
 sinning against the statute of retainers. From Mandeville Hall, 
 it is said, Cardinal Morton dated his celebrated "Fork," or 
 Dilemma, addressed to those who remonstrated against the 
 forced loans called "Benevolences." Those who lived expen- 
 sively, it was plain, could afford the "Benevolence," because 
 they had money to spend, and those who lived economically 
 could also afford to pay, because they must have saved money ; 
 the end being that all had to pay. Then there was King 
 Harry's room, with bed-furniture all embroidered with double- 
 seeded roses ; and there were presses, and chairs, and tables, 
 carved with true Tudor strap ornaments. Here Henry VIII. 
 had come with Catherine Howard, the guiltiest and prettiest of 
 his wives ; and the monograms H. R. and C. R. were perpetually 
 intertwined on the plaster ceiling. 
 
 Then there was Queen Elizabeth's room, in which she once 
 slept a week when she had taken it into her head to visit Mary 
 Queen of Scots at Fotheringay, and changed her mind here- 
 abouts, and stayed here trying to make it up, while the Mande- 
 ville of the day, — Sir Hugh, I fancy, was his name, — was ruining 
 himself in masks and interludes and gatherings of the Woodmen ; 
 he, too, was Verderer of the Forest. And there was shooting at 
 the Butts, it may be at Meriden, where the ghosts of the old 
 Woodmen meet once a-year ; and there was dancing on the 
 green, and shafts clapped in the clout at six hundred yards, 
 which few Woodmen can do in these degenerate days. In 
 return the Queen left behind her a sampler which she had 
 worked, with "Feare Godde and honour ye Queene " in the 
 centre, and a wreath of gilly-flowers round it ; all within a 
 border of E.R. E.R. There was a sort of commonplace book of 
 hers, too, very like a child's copy-book, only the writing was 
 much better and stronger than that of our children, crammed 
 with choice sentences culled from Colet's grammar, as " Sera 
 nunquam est ad bonos mores via ; " " Scire tuum nihil est nisi 
 te scire hoc sciat alter ; " " Deterior est quotidie posterior 
 dies." Here were her sampler and commonplace book, but where 
 were the Queen and the Mandeville of that day, and the Wood- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 47 
 
 men of Arden "J Off this Elizabeth room was a dressing-room, 
 and a very strange room it was. There was no door in it, 
 except that which led from the bed-room, and it had one long 
 window in it half walled up. There were also Prince Henry's 
 room and Queen Anne's room, and I don't know how many 
 more ; quite as many as there were on the opposite side of the 
 court, and I remember that, in wet weather, 1 used to run up 
 and down the gallery which led down one side of our wing, and 
 count the windows in the gallery across the court. 
 
 The Hall, as I have said, was surrounded by a fine park. 
 There were beautiful flower-gardens and trim yew : walks and 
 bowers, a kitchen-garden, and a plaisance with a terrace over- 
 hanging a continuation of the moat, which was fed by a spring 
 under the house, and all along the old wall grew wall-flowers, 
 and stone-crops, and rockets, and snap-dragons, and all the old 
 flowers which gardeners now look upon as so many weeds. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 AUNT MANDEVILLE AT HOME. 
 
 This must suffice for a description of Mandevijle Hall, in 
 which my Aunt lived all alone. If I could have reflected, I 
 might have thought that she had been living all that time wait- 
 ing for me. I recollect when I went to bed that night in the 
 Octagon Room, two rooms off my Aunt's, that I said to myself : 
 
 " Nurse was Very wrong to call Auntie ' a rampaging cow,' for 
 she seems kindness itself." 
 
 And she really had been kind. She let me dine with her, and 
 talked every now and then gently to me ; not too fast or too 
 often, for she saw that I was tired ; and yet, somehow, she had 
 got from me all she wished to know about my father and mother, 
 and St. Saccharissa, and the voyage, and the Delaford, and old 
 Tooth, and " young " Mr. Nail, as he was still called. 
 
 After dessert she said : " Now, child, I think you had better 
 go to bed ; if you have any tea, it will keep you awake." 
 
 To hear my Aunt Mandeville was to obey her, — at least, for 
 a child ; so I got up, and was going to shake hands with her, 
 being still shy. 
 
 " No hand-shaking, Edward," she said, " not till I cease to 
 love you. Till then give me a kiss." 
 
 So I kissed Auntie, and went off to bed. 
 
 If you are a woman who are reading this, you will be dying to 
 
48 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ask how old Aunt Mandeville was. Well, / then thought her 
 very old, like the nursemaid who, when asked her age at the 
 census, said : " I'm fifteen, sir ; but no one can tell how old cook 
 is ! " the said cook being described by another fellow-servant as 
 an " aged woman " of thirty-five. But what I thought, a child 
 of ten, was not much to the purpose. I never exactly knew how 
 old Aunt Mandeville was, but I fancy she was still under forty 
 when I came to her. Under forty, but not far from it. " Small 
 change out of forty," as one of the unearnest rising generation 
 would say. 
 
 Now, to very young ladies of eighteen, forty seems a fabulous 
 antiquity ; but, perhaps, the same young lady, when she has 
 been married — which is the surest of all female cosmetics, — and 
 Ithough it sometimes spoils the shape, often makes a face beauti- 
 ful for ever, — the same young_lady, I say, a widow of thirty-seven 
 may find that she has a beauty of her own ; that all ages have 
 their beauty, and that she may even be forty and still very at- 
 tractive. 
 
 But enough of my Aunt ; she lived very much alone, went 
 out little, read a good deal, and seemed very glad to have me 
 with her. I have already told you that she was afraid of Dr. 
 Mindererus ; but there was some one else who tyrannised over 
 her, though she scarcely knew it. Every one else saw it, and yet 
 she shut her eyes. This tyrant was that bald-headed butler, 
 Brooks, of whom I spoke before. I have often, as I grew in 
 wit, and of course in wisdom, lain awake o' nights and wondered 
 how it was that Brooks, who, besides being bald-headed, was a 
 pot-bellied, scrubby-bearded dolt, had my Aunt so completely in 
 his power as to her movements. If any one stayed in the house, 
 and talked Tory politics, this offensive fellow would not scruple 
 ■to say, leaning gently over their chair at dinner, and seeming to 
 help them to champagne, — " Mrs. Mandeville's politics are Whig, 
 sir ; you had better talk of the weather." Or if the Church were 
 started, or there was a question of Irish Emancipation — I mean 
 the emancipation of the Romanists in Ireland forty years ago ; 
 not the destruction of the Irish Protestant Church — and any one 
 praised the measure, this wretch would whisper in the same way : 
 " Mrs. Mandeville is a strict Orangewoman,'' by which he did not 
 mean that she was a Nell Gwyn of the nineteenth century, but 
 that she was against the Church policy of the late Sir Robert 
 Peel. The end of it was that there was no conversation, when 
 any one dined at Mandeville Hall, except about gardening, the 
 weather, the Dorcas Society, the village choir, and the cholera, 
 which was then rapidly approaching these shores for the first 
 time. None of these were very lively subjects, and the last was 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 49 
 
 a most dismal one. I recollect one dessert in particular, in the 
 August of 182-, when a most magnificent dish of peaches smiled 
 on the board. Before I made my appearance at dessert, the 
 scoundrel Brooks, the heartless hypocrite, had artfully led the 
 conversation to cholera by one of his whispers, and when I came 
 in I found a party of undertakers, so gloomy did they all appear. 
 
 " They say it is very painful," said my Aunt. 
 
 " Dreadfully so,'' said Dr. Mindererus. " Patients become quite 
 blue and pulseless, and die in six hours." 
 
 " I read to-day in The Times, just before I dressed for dinner," 
 said Colonel Stock, then in command-of the 10th Queen's, at 
 Coventry, " that it had reached Posen." 
 
 " Where's Posen, Edward ? " said my Aunt. 
 
 " In Poland, Aunt. But what's in Poland ? Mayn't I have 
 a peach 1 " 
 
 " No ! no ! my little friend," said the fiendish Mindererus. " At 
 these seasons of epidemic, malaria, and universal contagion, peaches 
 are absolutely forbidden, except to the faculty, who know and always 
 carry about with them antidotes against the malign influence." 
 
 Having uttered which oracular words, he bowed to my Aunt, 
 and helped himself to the finest peach in the dish. 
 
 " Mayn't I have some of Dr. Mindererus' antidote, Auntie 1 
 Ask him to carry some for me too, next time he comes, if he 
 .hasn't got enough for me now." 
 
 At this there was a laugh, even under the ribs of the under- 
 takers, and the colonel bowed to the doctor, and said : 
 
 " Had you there, I think, doctor." 
 
 As for me, I could not join in the laughter I had caused, for 
 Brooks seized the diversion to take me by the collar and nearly 
 choke me, saying in a soft voice, as I turned sharply round : 
 
 " Beg pardon, Master Edward, if I hurt you ; but your shirt- 
 collar is all awry, and I tried to put it straight." 
 
 " No, Edward, no peaches to-day. You hear what the doctor 
 says." And so that magnificent dish went off minus one, and 
 no doubt was duly discussed and devoured by Brooks and the 
 upper servants. 
 
 So, too, about going out in the carriage. Here Brooks and 
 Ribbons the coachman ran in double harness. If the day was 
 cloudy, rain was siire to fall. If it was fine, it might turn to 
 rain. If it was a rainy morning, it would certainly not clear in 
 the afternoon. Over the orders for the coachman, in short, there 
 was always a pitched battle. " Any orders for the coachman ? " 
 asked Brooks ; and then, in the same breath : 
 
 " Mr. Ribbons do say, ma'am, that the grey mare have strained 
 
 her back-sinew." 
 
 n 
 
50 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 "Very well, Brooks ; then I'll have the pony-chaise." 
 
 Brooks would then retire, but only to return in a moment. 
 
 " Mr. Ribbons says, ma'am, that the bay pony threw a shoe 
 yesterday, and the blacksmith hasn't shod her yet." 
 
 By these devices, added to the days when Mr. Bibbons felt 
 out of sorts, after a night with Mr. Brooks, it rarely happened 
 that my Aunt had her carriage out more than once a week. 
 And what proved that these deceivers were in league against her, 
 was the fact that the horses were always well when my Aunt 
 went out to dinner. Then the worthy couple knew that she 
 must go, as she had accepted an invitation, and so they were 
 foiled ; but in anything that depended on her own fancy or will 
 alone, they invariably tried to thwart her by some pretext. 
 
 Yes ! great is the power of man, even a dolt, over a woman 
 in domestic trifles ; greater still is the power of men-servants 
 over their mistresses in servants' matters. In all the real 
 business of life Aunt Mandeville was equal to any two men I 
 have ever known, but at home she was a slave to her servants. 
 Her maid would never allow her to wear the clothes she liked. 
 She used to say that she never knew what dress she would bring 
 her in the morning, or how she meant to dress her for dinner. So 
 there she was, when I first knew her, tyrannised over by butler, 
 coachman, and maid, a triple necessity, quite as severe and in- 
 exorable as any which bound the old Halfacres ; and though the 
 proverb which says that all good things are three, has its 
 converse in all bad things are three, these three bad things 
 under which my Aunt laboured were made worse by a fourth, 
 in the shape of an old housekeeper, who did next to nothing 
 but feed the parrot in her room on the basement. 
 
 However, all these things which I found out afterwards, did 
 not much concern a boy in his eleventh year. Of course I had to 
 go to school, but fortunately I arrived at the middle of June, 
 and towards the end of the half, at Dr. Cutbrush's school at 
 Potterbridge, where one of my brothers had been, and where it 
 was settled I was to go. So between June and the middle of 
 September I ran wild about Mandeville Park, and was as happy 
 as any boy could be. My Aunt was very good to me, and we 
 became great friends. I soon found out that she was of a jealous 
 nature, as though her natural feelings had been repressed, and 
 were now finding vent. With my Aunt Mandeville it was all or 
 nothing, and that was the reason why she had so few friends. 
 She was too exacting. But in the nineteenth century, the age of 
 jealous gods is past and gone. We worship many divinities, and 
 expect to find favour with all. This is idolatry, you say ; well, 
 so it is ; Pantheism, so it is ; Atheism, sq it is ; that is to say, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 51 
 
 if you think the adoration of many denies the worship of one. 
 But you are drawing me into a trap, reader ; I am telling you 
 my Aunt Mandeville's character, and you are trying to ferret 
 out my beliefs. I throw myself back, therefore, on the great 
 principle, thought is free, and carry it out by declining to let 
 you prove me socratically a freethinker. 
 
 When I was older I learnt better to know what my Aunt's 
 jealousy meant, but for a child it is an easy and a reasonable 
 service to worship a woman who is kind to you. There are so 
 many tender things that a woman can do for a child which no 
 man would ever think of doing however much he loved a child. 
 It is part of the brutality and stupidity of the stronger nature 
 of the lords of the creation — of that hard, rough will which has 
 trodden under foot so many flowers of feeling, and, therefore, 
 nipped even in the bud so much moral fruit, to stand before a 
 being which it loves, a child or a wife, meaning to love it and 
 be kind to it, and yet to be utterly helpless to express its feeling, 
 and even to seem heartless and repulsive. 
 
 But it was not so with me and my Aunt. She made herself 
 all in all to me, she sang to me and danced with me. If she 
 ever became like that rampaging animal to which nurse falsely 
 likened her, it was when she scampered across the grass after 
 my ball, or was fagging out for me at cricket, while Brooks, the 
 bald-headed tyrant, stood longstop. Who bowled? Why, 
 Ribbons, the coachman, of course ; and many a long run old 
 Brooks had after the bye's. Indeed, I don't think he ever 
 stopped a ball once, except by accident. 
 
 At that time I think there was nothing that Auntie would 
 not have done for me, even to climbing a tree to take a wood- 
 pigeon's nest. 
 
 No wonder then that my grief at parting from my parents 
 was soon assuaged. Oh ! blessed, glorious boyhood, that cries 
 its eyes out, and then wipes them in again brighter than ever. 
 
 But time will roll on, and so July passed, and August came 
 and stole away, though he seemed scarce able to stir a step for 
 heat, and then September came, and we had partridges, and I 
 wanted my Aunt to let me go out shooting, and to go with me 
 herself ; and I verily believe she would have done it, had not 
 Brooks again interfered, by saying he did not know what the 
 country would think if they heard that Mrs. Mandeville had 
 gone out shooting with Master Edward. 
 
 And September went away very fast. He could stir his feet 
 nimbly enough. The 10th, the 12th, the 15th, the 20th, till 
 it was only two days to the 23rd, the awful day on which the 
 "young friends" of Dr. Cutbrush were to re-assemble. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 HOW I WENT TO DR. CUTBBUSH. 
 
 The morning of the 22nd came. Now-a-days I should have 
 got into a train about mid-day at Warwick, have reached 
 Euston Square in two or three hours, have taken a cab to King's 
 Cross, and gone by the Great Northern to Potterbridge, which I 
 can only tell you was somewhere down the Great Northern, 
 line. I should thus have arrived between four and five at the 
 abode of the doctor. But in 182- it was quite otherwise. Up 
 at six at Mandeville Hall, drive to Warwick, catch the coach 
 Highflyer or Tallyho at the " Dun Cow " at eight ; ten hours to 
 London, reaching the Bath Hotel, Piccadilly, between six and 
 seven. It was therefore necessary that I should sleep a night 
 in town, as no one ever heard of a new boy coming to his school 
 at night. My Aunt hated Claw, Tooth, and Nail from the 
 bottom of her heart. She loved, her brother, though she 
 despised him because he was not "man enough," as she ex- 
 pressed it, for " the old Halfacre blood ; '' and she hated the 
 firm that had inveigled him out to the West Indies, and there 
 kept him fast bound in misery and iron. But she had to do 
 the hardest thing on earth,' — ask a favour from those whom you 
 detest and despise. She had to sit down and write to Mrs. 
 Tooth, and beg her to give me a bed. In her imperious way, if 
 my father had been free from entanglements, she would have 
 written • like Elizabeth : — " Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and Nail. 
 Take notice, failing at your peril, that it is my intention to 
 send my nephew, Edward Halfacre, to you, or one of you, for 
 one night. For whose safe keeping this shall be your warrant : 
 
 Teste meipsa 
 apud Mandevillam. 
 
 Eleanor." 
 
 All this time you have never known my Aunt's name. It 
 was Eleanor, a fine old family name. She was such an Eleanor 
 as would have sucked poison out of her husband's veins had he 
 been Edward I., but as he was only Thomas Mandeville, of 
 doubtful memory, why ! it is lucky that no one stabbed the 
 good easy man with a poisoned dagger, and so put her devotion 
 to the proof. 
 
 But instead of a queenly missive, she sat down and wrote, 
 " Dear Mrs. Tooth," &c, to the effect that I was coming to town 
 for one night on my way to school ; and as Mrs. Tooth had been 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 53 
 
 kind enough to take me before tinder her roof, perhaps she would 
 add to this obligation by once more giving me a bed. To all which 
 Mrs. Tooth, T must say, with great good nature had responded, 
 " that nothing would give her greater pleasure than to see her 
 young friend again/' How it was that she said nothing of the 
 arrow rankling in the Square gardener's calf I know not. 
 Perhaps the wound was healed by the half-crown. Perhaps old 
 Tooth had never found it out. At any rate she said nothing 
 about it, and as I took good care not to show my face in the 
 Square, I have heard nothing about it from that day to this. 
 
 On hearing from Mrs. Tooth, my Aunt wrote again to beg 
 that I might be met at the Bath Hotel ; and this important 
 point conceded, I went up to town as I have described by the 
 Highflyer, and was in Bryanston Square at seven o'clock. 
 
 Mrs. Tooth was good and motherly, but I can't say. that I 
 thought old Tooth very amiable. He said nothing when Mrs. 
 Tooth announced me as " Master Halfacre, just come for one 
 night on his way to school," but mumbled something out about 
 boys " making their way in the world as they used to do for- 
 merly." Then he turned to Mrs. " T," as he was wont to call 
 her even to her face, and said : 
 
 " Mrs. T., there's been bad work in the City to-day. Dreggs 
 and Lees, the great sugar-refiners, have failed for 200,000?., 
 and that has pulled down Holdfast and Lively, our sugar- 
 brokers, in whose hands, I am sorry to say, were the proceeds of 
 two hundred hogsheads of sugar just sold as part of the Two 
 Eivers' crop." 
 
 " Deary me," said Mrs. Tooth. " No loss to the firm, I 
 hope.'' 
 
 "I hope not, Mrs. T., I hope not;" and then he added, 
 " But we are already under heavy advances towards the estate, 
 which would only have been partly met by the sale of those 
 two hundred hogsheads. Then Kum, too, is a drug, and we are 
 large holders. Fact is, the West Indies are going to the dogs, 
 and to protect ourselves we shall have to foreclose on several of 
 our estates." 
 
 " Deary me," said Mrs. Tooth again ; " but we had better go 
 down to dinner, or it will get cold." 
 
 Though I couldn't understand the full meaning of what old 
 Tooth said, I was old enough and quick enough to see that 
 something unpleasant had happened to Claw, Tooth, and Nail 
 in general, and to the Two Rivers Estate in particular. So I 
 ate my dinner in a rather crestfallen mood, old Tooth saying 
 little or nothing, but showing that age had but little impaired 
 his appetite. Mrs. Tooth — good soul that she was ! — throwing 
 
54 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 every now and then a drop of oil on the waves of his surliness, 
 every drop of which no doubt' returned to her own bosom, as it 
 had plainly no effect in softening old Tooth. 
 
 The dessert, in September, consisted of dried figs of fossil 
 appearance — some of the same figs, in fact, which Noah took 
 with him into the Ark, and which were afterwards returned to 
 the shippers as condemned stores. Then there were Barcelona 
 nuts and a sponge-cake, both of immense antiquity ; and there 
 was a bottle of ginger wine. All these dainties old Tooth 
 despatched at such a rate that Mrs. Tooth and I were glad to 
 beat a retreat. I really thought if he went on as fast as he 
 began he would eat us up too. 
 
 " My dear," said Mrs. Tooth on the stairs, " when Mr. Tooth 
 is like that something dreadful has happened in the City, and 
 then it is always best to let him eat himself to sleep." 
 
 And surely in ten minutes such a sound of snoring followed us 
 upstairs, or up the chimney, that it was amazing to hear. 
 
 " Ah !" said Mrs. Tooth, " now it's all right. Mr. Tooth will 
 snore in that way till midnight, and then he'll get up and come 
 to bed like a lamb. And now let us go to bed as soon as 
 we can." 
 
 So to bed we went. Whether old Tooth slept in the arm- 
 chair all night, or not, I cannot tell. All I know is that I saw 
 nothing of him in the morning. After breakfast Mrs. Tooth 
 took me and my trunk — I mean my box, and not my carcass — 
 in a hackney-coach to the " Blue Posts," at the top of Tottenham 
 Court Road. From that famous inn, now, alas ! to be sought 
 for in vain, the Potterbridge go-cart — a nondescript vehicle, half 
 fly, half omnibus, and whole abomination — used to start, reach- 
 ing Potterbridge in two hours by way of Pinchley and Barnet. 
 To the care of the driver of this conveyance I was intrusted, 
 Mrs. Tooth giving him a shilling for himself beforehand, and 
 bidding him be sure to drop me at Dr. Cutbrush's door, which 
 he passed on the route. 
 
 Away the melancholy vehicle crawled along Tottenham Court 
 Boad, through the Highgate Archway, past Finchley, by Barnet 
 and Whetstone to Potterbridge. It was not a lively journey to 
 go to school for the first time in this way. My only companions 
 were a farmer who, to judge by his boots and general appear- 
 ance, had been up to town with a successful venture of dung, 
 and a maid-servant going home for a holiday from her place in 
 town. 
 
 Luckily it was not a long journey, and in about two hours, 
 going at the rate of five miles an hour, we entered Potterbridge, 
 drove past the church, with its fine old yew and its ponds> 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 55 
 
 dipped down a descent, rose a little again, and then" the driver 
 got. down, and pulled the bell at Dr. Cutbrush's door. ' The 
 bell gave what I thought a most mournful sound ; but in a 
 minute a well-fed servant opened the door, took down my 
 trunk, and showed me the way into the house. It was out of 
 school hours, and I was ushered at once into the awful presence 
 of Dr. Cutbrush. He was a fine, hale, florid-faced man, between 
 fifty and sixty. When he spoke he had a trick of blowing and 
 puffing out his cheeks, but he was not at all a bad master ; and, 
 except when he boxed my ears because I would not open my 
 mouth, and kicked both him and the dentist most unmercifully 
 on their shins, he was always very kind to me. Having examined 
 me he said he should place me at the bottom of the school, and 
 leave me to find my level ; and in a little while he took me to 
 Mrs. Cutbrush, who handed me over to the housekeeper in the 
 China Pantry, to wait till it was time for dinner. That meal 
 was not long in coming, and then I saw for the first time the 
 seventy boys who were to be my schoolfellows. I may mention 
 here that the school was a first-rate private school, preparatory 
 for the great public schools, and specially so for Westminster 
 and Harrow. 
 
 There were two long tables in the hall. Dr. Cutbrush sat at 
 the head of one, with an usher at the other end, and an usher at 
 each end of the second table. Grace was said, and we ate our 
 meals in silence. I remember our dinner — who would not re- 
 member his first school dinner 1 — was roast mutton and rice 
 pudding. After dinner the doctor called up a boy with curly 
 locks and a ruddy face. 
 
 " McArthur," he said, " this is Halfacre. You are to be his 
 substance for a week, and he is to be your shadow for the same 
 time. Take care that he gets into no scrapes, and that he pre- 
 pares his lessons. If he commits any faults in the next week, 
 they will be reckoned to you." 
 
 " Very well," said McArthur, who then turned to me with a 
 "Come along!" after which he pushed open a door, through 
 which all the rest had already vanished while the doctor was 
 talking to McArthur ; and at one step we stood in the play- 
 around, a large gravelled yard, surrounded on all sides by a high 
 wall, and shaded on one side by a row of horse-chestnuts. 
 
 Everybody knows what happens when a boy first goes to 
 school. The cry of "New boy!" is raised— a knot gathers 
 round him— " What's your name ?"— " Where do you live ?" 
 —"Edward!" "Edward what? not King Edward?" saya 
 another boy, who knows something of English history. 
 
 " Edward Halfacre !" 
 
56 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " What an odd name ! Has your father only half-an-acre 3" 
 
 " In what country is your father's half-acre?" 
 
 " In Warwickshire and the West Indies." 
 
 " What a long half-acre to stretch so far !" 
 
 " How many brothers have you got V 
 
 " Six." 
 
 " What a lot !" 
 
 " Any sisters?" 
 
 " No ! but I ought to have been one to please Aunt Mande- 
 ville." 
 
 " Who's your Aunt Mandeville?" 
 
 " I know her," says a Warwickshire boy, who ran up just in 
 time to hear the question. " She lives at Mandeville Hall, and 
 no one ever sees her. They say it's a ghost's house." 
 
 " No, it ain't," I summoned up courage to reply. 
 
 " Don't be impudent, or you'll get a smack in the face." 
 
 Now, I hadn't been baked, so long in the West Indies not to 
 have warm Southern blood ; so I gave the smack in the face to 
 the Warwickshire boy which he threatened to give me. He 
 returned it ; and we had a fight which lasted just long enough 
 to show that I could give blows as well as take them ; but just 
 as victory hung in the balance, Dr. Cutbrush appeared at a 
 window from a dormitory which overlooked the playground, 
 attended by a parent who thought of sending a boy to the 
 school, and had run down to look at the place. 
 
 " There you see them," said the doctor, as he led his visitor 
 to the window; "there you see them employing the hours 
 allotted to them for bodily recreation and relaxation in rational 
 amusements. We are a happy family at Potterbridge, and it is 
 very seldom that a quarrel occurs." 
 
 The visitor put his neck out, the doctor just having beaten 
 him by a head, and saw the Warwickshire boy, whose name was 
 Deepdale, bleeding profusely from the nose, while one of my 
 eyes was already quite bunged up. Yes, reader, " bung " is the 
 word ; my left eye was quite bunged up. 
 
 What did the doctor do or say ? As to what he said no boy 
 could tell ; but what he did was to withdraw his visitor as 
 rapidly as possible from the window, to bow. him out of the 
 house, to go to his study, and to a particular cupboard, where he 
 had a goodly stock of birch, to choose a fine swishing rod, to put 
 on his gown, to stride across the playground, puffing out his 
 cheeks like a grampus, to call the boys into school, though it 
 was a half-holiday, and there aud then to flog the unhappy 
 Deepdale for fighting me, and the still more unhappy McArthur 
 for letting me fight. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 57 
 
 Me he merely called the Game Chicken, Cribb, Mendoza, and 
 Scroggins, all names great in the " fancy " of those days, but 
 now, alas ! buried in the gloom of night. 
 
 " Halfacre," the doctor added, " if it had been a week off, I 
 should have flogged you instead of McArthur. You now see 
 what it is to be substance, and what shadow." 
 
 Eveiy boy, except very stupid or very good boys, has a nick- 
 name. Mine was " Mendoza," because I had fought a good 
 stand-up fight the first day. It was true the historical boy, who 
 knew about the Edwards, wanted to call me " Edward the Con- 
 fessor," or " Teddy the Confessor," because I had told them so 
 much about my family. 
 
 " He would have told us more too if Deepdale hadn't spoiled 
 it all," he said ; but the other boys, who did not care for history, 
 wouldn't hear of Edward the Confessor ; they said it was like 
 lessons ; and so the historical boy, — of whom I may say it 
 without breach of confidence that he is now head of the Civil 
 Service Commission in Timbuctoo, where he sets most head- 
 splitting questions to the sable candidates for place and power, 
 — had no followers. Edward the Confessor, as bearing on me, 
 was utterly forgotten at Potterbridge ; Mendoza I became, and 
 Mendoza I remained to the end of the chapter of my life at a 
 private school. 
 
 How aboi.it my lessons ? And this reminds me that I have 
 never told you a word of what I had been taught or knew. Now 
 if any anxious mother is reading these glimpses of my life, in 
 hope of finding a model on which to educate her darling Augustus 
 or Albert, she had better throw them away, and return to Mrs. 
 Trimmer. My mother had taught me Latin in the West Indies ; 
 and when I came to Potterbridge I knew Busby's Grammar, the 
 dear and old Westminster Grammar, by heart. Since then I 
 have learnt many Grammars, for have I not lived in the days of 
 transition from verse to prose Grammars 1 Did I not have to 
 learn a new Grammar every year at least ? Yes ! I have dealt 
 with all Grammars, from Busby up to Zumpt and Matthia; ; but 
 I never knew any Grammar so well as those darling doggerel 
 hexameters which I used to con by heart under the orange 
 trees of Two Piivers. Then I knew a little French, which my 
 mother also taught me ;' a good deal of geography, a little 
 history, ancient and modern, and a little music. But I shone 
 in none of them particularly. I always did my lessons, could 
 construe when I was put on, got tolerably well through nonsense 
 and into sense verses, could write a theme on " Sero nunquam 
 est ad bonos mores via," or " Deterior est quotidie posterior 
 dies." I beg leave to say, reader, that maxim comes from 
 
58 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Publius Syrus, an author of whom you had better not say you 
 have never heard, or I will confute you socraticallyj Thus." 
 You have read the " Edinburgh Eeview 1" Regularly, you' 
 answer. Well then what is the motto of the periodical in blue 
 and buff? — that periodical which wears the uniform of the 
 King of Sweden's 2nd Eegiment of Guards. You don't know 1 
 I'll tell you. " Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitor." That 
 too comes from Publius Syrus, and a very good rule it is if it is 
 carried out, and I wish it were carried out more often. You say 
 you never looked at the outside of the "Edinburgh Eeview?" 
 You are always deep in the inside. Well ! the outsides of some 
 things are better than the insides. The outside of a tomb, of a 
 crowd, of a prison. Even outsides go for something, especially 
 when there is nothing inside. So now you will look at the out- 
 side of the next number of the ' Edinburgh Review,' and find 
 what I tell you true. 
 
 But to return to my theme. I did my lessons regularly ; I 
 was never black-strapped on a cold morning, that is, beaten on 
 the palm of the hand with a cart-trace, a less disgraceful but far 
 more painful punishment than any flogging ; nay, I was never 
 flogged at all for anything, though I often deserved it for 
 other things besides lessons, as when I threw a stone over the 
 wall and hit the curate's wife on the head. Old Cutbrush 
 rushed in again, and was going to flog every tenth boy, but I 
 went up and confessed ; and when he said, "Fetch me a rod, 
 monitor,'' I appealed, and asked : 
 
 " What's the good of confessing, if one's to be flogged all the 
 same 1 " 
 
 And old Cutbrush was just, and forgave me the flogging, but 
 made me write a copy of verses, in which I made all sorts of 
 fun of Mrs. Blowsy, the curate's wife ; that was not her real 
 name, but we called her Blowsy and Blousibella because she 
 was so " baggy " and such a slattern. I remember one line in 
 which I said that she turned up her eyes after receiving the 
 blow of the stone, 
 
 " Qualiter in tonitni lumlna tollit anas." 
 
 Old Cutbrush was a good fellow at heart and a good scholar, 
 and said the verses were rather smart, but he said, " Halfacre, I 
 don't quite catch the sense of this line. I wish you would con- 
 strue it." 
 
 " It's quite a common simile," I replied ; " Mrs. Blowsy — 
 Mrs. Brownsmith, I beg her pardon — turned up her eyes so 
 queerly that I likened her to a dying duck in a thunder-storm, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 59 
 
 at which moment Buffon says dying ducks lift their eyes in a 
 very peculiar way ! " 
 
 " Indeed ! " said the doctor. " I daresay you and Buffon are 
 quite right, but I must say I never heard of this fact in natural 
 history before." 
 
 This, as you may suppose, was towards the end of my career 
 at Potterbridge, when I had quite established my character 
 with the doctor, and was getting to the top of the school. 
 
 I remember the first winter at Potterbridge was rather try- 
 ing. They tell you, or used to tell you, that West Indians 
 brought a store of caloric with them which enabled them to 
 stand the first winter better than born Britons, who have never 
 crossed the sea. I can't say I believe it. I think that warmth 
 of the body in winter, strange as some people may think the 
 theory, depends first on good food and lots of it. This we got 
 at Potterbridge, which was in no sense a Dotheboys Hall. Se- 
 condly, on warm clothing and lots of it. With this my Aunt 
 amply provided me. Thirdly, on good fires and being near 
 them. The first part of this need was well met by the doctor. 
 There were two great fires in the school-room, but then there 
 were seventy boys, and out of seventy boys some will necessarily 
 be bigger than the rest, and those in wet, cold weaiKer will 
 gather round the fires and keep the little ones off, just as they 
 make the little boys fag out at cricket and football, and so 
 serve an apprenticeship. I can safely say that for two winters 
 I never once saw the fire out of school-time, and in school-time 
 it was like what the Promised Land was to the Israelites in the 
 Wilderness, a thing that they had heard talked of so long for 
 forty years without seeing it, that they began to doubt whether 
 the Promised Land existed at all. So too with cricket, I de- 
 clare that I never once had an innings for two summers, which 
 were spent in an agreeable variety of fagging out ; extending all 
 round the wicket from Longstop to Point, but never once set- 
 tling at the wicket itself. They say it is bad for little children 
 to see the fire, but for my own part I would sooner be baked 
 than frozen to death. 
 
 The holidays, of course, I spent with Aunt Mandeville, and 
 great fun they always were. The doctor used to take me up to 
 town, and put me into the coach, and the Highflyer rattled 
 merrily along, the guard blowing his horn. That was in the 
 height of the coaching days, when the Duke of Beaufort drove 
 this coach and Sir St. Vincent "Cotton that, and when horses 
 drew coaches as no horses ever drew them before or since ; 
 when it was utterly effeminate to go inside, and when in my 
 particular case my legs used to dangle over the side of the 
 
60 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 coach as I sat just behind the coachman — I was too young jet 
 to aspire to the box seat — till by the time we reached Warwick 
 they were stiff and numbed. 
 
 But at the " Dun Cow " there was always Aunt Mandeville 
 waiting to meet me, and away we drove to Mandeville Hall as 
 fast as the ponies could scamper ; and there stood old Brooks 
 with his bald head and tyrannical ways, year after year just the 
 same, never getting greyer or thinner, but wearing quite as welL 
 as the portrait of Gevartius in the National Gallery, which it 
 provokes one to see never getting any older, while we who look 
 on it grow more and more grizzled. 
 
 The winter holidays were best, I think. There was shooting, 
 and I already looked forward to having a gun. Did not young 
 Wryneck, at Potterbridge, Lord Scatterbrains' son, already 
 shoot so well that he could kill a dozen swallows without miss- 
 ing one. Never frown, Mr. Sykes, this was long before your 
 Gull Bill, and still longer before your Pigeon and Swallow Bill 
 of next Session, just as the Irish Church Bill is before the 
 English Church Bill, which the whole Ecclesiastical body looks 
 forward to with fear and trembling. Yes ! young Wryneck, 
 whose tongue, I remember, reached further out of his mouth 
 than any boy's that I ever knew, and whose nickname was 
 venter, or glutton, because, when he was recovering from the 
 scarlet fever — of coui'se we had our scarlet fever periodically at 
 Potterbridge, just as our forefathers had their "small-pox," — 
 he wished for and got a basin of chicken-broth. Young Wry- 
 neck, I tell you, could shoot a dozen swallows without missing 
 one, and it was said that if two martens were clinging to the 
 eaves, as martens will do, he would shoot the right-hand bird 
 and leave the left, or the left-hand bird and leave the right, 
 which you chose. Young Wryneck had long carried a gun, and 
 therefore why shouldn't I carry one too 1 It is very true that 
 young Wryneck, who is now Lord Scatterbrains, and my very 
 good friend, never did anything else than shoot ; and, besides, 
 if he had not spent his time in shooting he might have been 
 doing something worse. There are worse things in the world 
 for young and old men to do than shooting. Take my word for 
 it, Mrs. Killjoy. 
 
 Then there was hunting, and, though I longed for a fire at 
 Potterbridge when it was wet, and they shut us up in the 
 schoolroom, I cared not for cold or wet on my pony after the 
 North Warwickshire hounds. What brooks did I not flounder 
 into ? What bullfinches did I not creep through 1 What 
 " croppers '' did I not get ? As Aunt Mandeville, but for Brooks 
 and the coachman, would have gone out shooting with me, so, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 62 
 
 but for the coachman and Brooks, she would certainly have 
 gone out hunting. She could ride well enough ; Mr. Ribbons 
 said, he had often seen her take a fence in Squire Mandeville's 
 time, when she was more lively-like ; it wasn't that. But in 
 Warwickshire it was not the thing for widows to hunt, any 
 more than for curates to shoot. Bectors, of course, might 
 shoot, and did shoot, just as deans could, and bishops couldn't ; 
 but with women, only wives — that is, women whose husbands 
 are alive, I say— might hunt. If a widow hunted she would 
 lose her character at once. 
 
 This was the coachman's notion as to shooting and hunting. 
 Whether my Aunt agreed with him I cannot say, but certainly 
 she never went out with the hounds, though I am quite sure 
 she would 'have given her eyes, as the saying is, to have done 
 so, merely to be with me. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 HOW I WENT TO WESTMINSTEE. 
 
 Three years had now rolled by, and I was nearly fourteen. 
 " That boy," old Mindererus used to say, "has never anything 
 the matter with him ; " and so it was. I defied the Doctor and 
 all his draughts. Aunt Mandeville was no coddle, though she 
 dreaded the Doctor, because the day had been when he attended 
 her husband, and shook his head ; and she knew the day would 
 come when Dr. Mindererus, or some other doctor, would shake 
 his head over her, and say : 
 
 " Poor lady, I am afraid she is not long for this world." 
 
 Was she afraid to die ? No. But you may not be afraid of 
 a thing, and yet not like it ; and so it was with my Aunt. 
 
 Where were we 1 Oh ! The Doctor said I never had anything 
 the matter with me ; and . he was right. Thanks to the West 
 Indies, I never had a cough in my life ; and thanks to Aunt 
 -Mandeville, who still kept up her aversion to sugar, and, in spite 
 of the West Indies, my digestion was as that of the ostrich. I 
 mention this to show that I was fit to go to a public school, 
 where, in my days at least, the weakest went to the wall. With- 
 out being a Hercules, a hero of Muscular Christianity, I was 
 quite able to hold my own at any game, and I still did my lessons 
 fairly. My brothers were at Harrow ; but I saw little of them. 
 We were very good friends, only we scarcely ever met. I have 
 told you that Aunt Mandeville was jealous, and she always seemed 
 
62 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 afraid that my father and mother or brothers would come and 
 take me away from her. Once she had my brothers down to 
 Mandeville Hall for a week, but she did not ask them to prolong 
 their stay. Mr. Brooks said they were very rude, and quite unfit 
 to keep company with Master Edward. The fact was that my 
 brothers had persuaded old Brooks to get into a punt on the 
 lake, under pretence of giving him a little fishing. They had 
 then pushed him off without pole or oar, when the wind was 
 strong off shore, and, I grieve to say, pelted him with'stones — an 
 outrage at which, I am ashamed to add, I greatly rejoiced. But 
 it was fatal to my brothers' reputation. That was the first and 
 last visit they ever paid, in my time, to Mandeville Hall. 
 
 My Aunt declared she would never send me to a school where 
 boys were so ill-mannered. Unlike most women, she was a Whig. 
 "Women take to Toryism naturally as ducklings to the water. 
 But my Aunt was a Whig from family and principle. As the 
 Mandevilles had been Jacobites and Tories, the Halfacres had been 
 pure Whigs. Pure Whigs — think of that ! — a thing which you 
 must be born, and cannot become. Parodying the Articles, one 
 might say, " Pure Whiggery lieth not in the following of Charles 
 Fox, as the men at Brooks's do vainly fable, but is the beauty 
 and perfection of the nature of every man and woman who is 
 naturally engendered of pure Whig parents ; so that such chil- 
 dren are, as it were, predestinated to place and office by peculiar 
 fitness of their nature, and for no special merit of their own." 
 Yes ! Auntie was a born Halfacre and a pure Whig. My father 
 was a pure Whig, and had been sent to Westminster, the great 
 Whig school. In a weak moment my mother, who was a Tory, 
 had persuaded him to send my brothers to Harrow ; and see 
 what came of it. They learnt little, and when they were on a 
 holiday they pelted old Brooks the butler in a punt. 
 
 So my Aunt resolved to send me to Westminster, for which, 
 as I have said, Dr. Cutbrush's was a special preparation ; and 
 two years before 1 went there I remember going with Dr. Cut- 
 brush to Westminster, and seeing a play which turns on the 
 history of a man who was similarly situated to the high official 
 at Queen Candace's court, whom St. Philip met before he was 
 found at Azotus. Now, if that is not a delicate periphrasis for 
 the name of Terence's play, and for the convert of St. Philip, 
 may I be in the same position at the Court of the Waag Shum 
 Gobazie, who was of such infinite use to our army in the Abys- 
 sinian Campaign ! 
 
 So I went to Westminster. I remember the very first day I 
 went there being taken down to the barges in Abingdon-street, 
 and there seeing an unhappy coalheaver, named " Wrynecked 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 63 
 
 George " — who is there who now recollects such a coalheaver 1 — 
 slip off one of the barges and perish. 
 
 " Why doesn't he come up ? " I asked of one of his companions, 
 who was vacantly gazing at the river just after the accident. 
 
 " He has come up," was the sad answer, " and has knocked his 
 head against the bottom of the barge, and been stunned, and 
 gone down again. The drags will find him ; but we shall never 
 see ' Wrynecked George ' alive again." 
 
 I had paddled about a little on the lake at Mandeville Hall, 
 but besides knew little of rowing ; and I also remember being 
 put on the water by a sixth-form boy, with another new boy no 
 wiser in rowing than myself, and being told to row over to 
 Roberts's, the boat-builder. So we set to work, back to back, 
 to the intense delight of the boys on the stairs and barges, the 
 result being that we pulled the boat round and round ; and in 
 that rotary fashion a strong ebb tide carried us fast through one 
 of the arches of old Westminster-bridge, so that in due time we 
 should have made the acquaintance of old London-bridge as well, 
 but feeling that we were all wrong, I got up, and hailed a water- 
 man in a wherry— there were wherries and watermen on the 
 Thames in those days — who, for a shilling, took us in tow, and 
 sculled us back to Lambeth Walk. 
 
 Much to the doctor's dismay, I was placed in the under school, 
 and was therefore a fag for a while. I soon got out of the under 
 school, but I am sure the fagging I underwent did me a world of 
 good, and were I to go to school again, I would sooner begin as 
 a fag. It is all stuff to call it degrading. At Westminster, too, 
 the fags were protected by their masters, and at night almost 
 fed by them. Many a night and oft I should have gone from 
 one till nine p.m. with nothing to eat, had it not been for my 
 master's " Tuck," as it was called, in the winter time, at six 
 o'clock. 
 
 Westminster boys have always been a manly, self-reliant race. 
 It was of Eitzroy Somerset, afterwards Lord Raglan, an old 
 Westminster, that the Duke of Wellington said that, when he 
 intrusted any order to an old Westminster, he was sure it would 
 be carried out.- The story has been appropriated by Eton and 
 other schools, but it was said of Old Westminsters. They are 
 fond of their school, too ; at least they say they are. Let them 
 prove their fondness by sending their children to it, and not 
 listen to mothers who overcrowd Eton till it is so unwieldy that 
 no education is possible, or to the doctors who say that a London 
 school is unhealthy. 
 
 But this has little to do with my life. When I went to West- 
 minster the school was full, and full of boys of good family. 
 
64 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 There were Byngs, Grosvenors, Pagets, Lennoxes, Pettys — all the 
 old Whig families. There was the grand old Abbey, with its 
 fighting-green, in which there were still fights. Then, too, there 
 was hockey round the Cloisters — very bad for the monuments 
 of the dead, but very good for the bones of the living. What 
 recks, I should be glad to know, Sir Edmundsberry Godfrey in 
 his grave close by the gate of the Chapter-house, of the doings 
 of men or boys now 1 Or " Jane Lister, dear child," in the 
 Cloisters, would racket-balls disturb her rest 1 Or even Edward 
 the Confessor — after whom I so narrowly escaped being nick- 
 named — after the eight hundred years which have passed since 
 he died on Childermass-day, does he care whether balls are 
 tossed by children over his bones ? or Vincentius and Gervasius 
 Abbas, those apocryphal abbots, over the last of whom, if he lies 
 under that slippery blue slab, I got one of the worst falls I ever 
 had in my life, slipping up backwards on a greasy November 
 morning. 
 
 Then, too, the Green in Dean's Yard was open to us summer 
 as well as winter. Many a hot summer day I have lain as happy 
 as twenty kings, in the shade of the great elm which stood at 
 the corner near the gateway, and fell, some time after I left, nearly 
 carrying away Queen Anne's Bounty Office. I should not have 
 cared if it had carried it away altogether. I have heard it said 
 the grass of the Green is more valuable to the Chapter than the 
 pastimes of the boys. If so, the sooner the boys are reinstated, 
 and the Chapter disendowed, the better. Then the pump in 
 Dean's Yard, sung in so many epigrams, the spring at which so 
 many thirsty souls slaked their thirst — on Sunday especially, 
 when the poor held their great feast of pitchers. The pump, 
 alas ! is dry — cut off by the Metropolitan District Bailway, they 
 say, which has pumped all the moisture out of Westminster. 
 Alas ! poor pump ! St. David's Day and Sir Watkin still survive, 
 but where is the ditch-leaping that followed 1 where are those 
 delightful three-quarter-holidays called Early Plays, on one of 
 which this ditoh-leaping took plape ? where are Big Ben, 1 Spank- 
 ing Sam, and the Black Joke ?■ — ditches that no leap could clear, 
 and into which we all fell, and floundered through ? Gone, gone, 
 filled up. Battersea Park now covers their remains, though I 
 think I can still detect " Spanking Sam " in one of the drains 
 left in that flourishing plantation. 
 
 Nor let me forget the Peregrines that built on the Abbey 
 Towers, the terror of the pigeons which nestled among the but- 
 tresses lower down. How we used to watch the noble birds, who, 
 in defiance of London smoke and noise — far above it, in fact — 
 had chosen this favourite haunt of pigeons for their eerie ! 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 65 
 
 There they lasted all through my time. Often have I seen the 
 feathers fly as they struck a pigeon, and bore it down ; and there 
 they or their descendants might still be, had not some wretch 
 lost to all feeling, some carrion crow or buzzard in human shape, 
 lain in wait upon the leads with a gun and shot one of the birds 
 for fun. May hawks harry him in a future state, and may his 
 eyes be pecked out for fun ! 
 
 There was Shrove-Tuesday, and its pancake, and its cook, who 
 sometimes failed to toss it over the bar, and, when he did fail, 
 was " booked ; " that is to say, every boy threw a book at him, 
 much to Ginger the bookseller's benefit, and he fled as fast as he 
 could lay legs to the ground down school, with all but the sixth 
 form and. seniors at his heels. The sixth form were like the 10th 
 Lancers : as the tenth never danced, the sixth never ran ; they 
 were like the gods, they had a motion of their own ; they walked 
 down school. Every one in any other form had to run up and 
 down school. The pancake-tossing still exists, but sometimes, 
 when the cook fails, and is booked, he gets in a rage, and throws 
 his frying-pan at some boy's head with considerable effect. I 
 think I may say had the cook in our time attempted such a 
 thing, there would not have been left a bit of him to boil or 
 roast. He would have been torn to pieces, and an inquest of 
 Old Westminsters would have sat on the bits, and brought in a. 
 unanimous verdict of Justifiable Coquicide. 
 
 ■ Then there was College — that mysterious school within a. 
 school, against which we " Town-boys," who would have thought 
 it beneath us to go into College, had so many grudges and 
 heart-burnings ; and there were the challenges for getting into- 
 College — the most trying and exhaustive mode of election 
 known ; and when boys got into College before entering'it, they 
 were tossed in a blanket to the following Latin rhyme, which 
 may be as old as Laurentius Abbas, or the Confessor himself.- I. 
 am inclined to think, if there were any blankets in the Confes- 
 sor's time, that boys were tossed in them. But this was the* 
 rhyme : — 
 
 " Ibis ab exousso 
 Missus ad astra sago." ,_**«< 
 
 And as it is not every one that knows the right way to toss 
 boys in a blanket, I may pause to tell you how it is done. 
 Eight or ten strong fellows take several blankets, — one or two 
 would be too thin. They lay hold of them at the corners and 
 sides, and pull against each other at the pauses of the rhyme. 
 Thus', "Ibis ab," one pull; " excusso," another, stronger; 
 " missus ad," another ; " astra sago," the strongest of all. By 
 
66 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 which time the wight in the blanket who has been from the 
 first as lively as a parched pea on a drumhead, flies up to the 
 sky a wondrous height, and is caught and tossed again in the 
 same way, to the same rhythm, as he descends. It is said to be 
 very great fun for all concerned, but most of all to those who 
 toss. 
 
 Then there was the water, and the funnies, cutters, wherries, 
 punchbowls, and half-deckers that thronged the river daily. As 
 I have said that in those times there were no envelopes, I may 
 add that in those days there were no penny steamers to inter- 
 fere with rowing. Sailing barges were our great enemies, and 
 often I have been in fear of my life from them ; but how we 
 used to go on the water ! What races and sculling matches 
 we used to have ! Very soon after I went to Westminster I got 
 a " stick-licking," a very nasty thing let me tell you, that made 
 you black and blue all over, for leaving the boat-hook of a four- 
 oared, which I steered, hanging on Putney Bridge, when we 
 started against four other four-oars to race to ! Westminster. 
 We got a good start by leaving the boat-hook behind, but I 
 smarted for it in a way which makes me remember it right well. 
 And the Eight, what pulls they used to have on an " early 
 play," when tide served, rowing down to Greenwich, shooting 
 that headlong old London Bridge by the way, and back again 
 by one o'clock ; then to Richmond on the last of the flood-tide, 
 and back with the ebb in the afternoon — a pretty good spell of 
 rowing for one day. 
 
 But now, where is the Westminster water 1 where are her 
 Eights 1 and where is her annual match with Eton 1 It will 
 soon be one of those events which no fellow can remember. 
 
 Well, one half got me out of fagging, and I then took so well to 
 my books that I got two bye-removes running, that is to say, I 
 got up four forms in the year instead of two, and this com- 
 forted good Dr. Cutbrush, because I had not only recovered my 
 lost ground, but had beaten many of my contemporaries ; but 
 I warn you from fancying that I was at all a prodigy of learn- 
 ings, Now I think of it, I never got a single prize at Westmin- 
 ster, except a few silver pennies for epigrams. It was a custom 
 of the school that between Christmas and Easter subjects were 
 given out each week on which any boy, who chose, might write 
 an epigram, and if he thought it good enough he might run up 
 with it to the headmaster's desk, and read it out aloud. If it were 
 bad he was treated with derision ; if it were good the head master 
 •dipped his hand in a bag and gave him some silver pennies. I 
 got some more than once, and, I have them still. They were all 
 the prizes I ever got at Westminster. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 67 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 HOW THINGS WENT IN ST. SACCHAEISSA. 
 
 While I was flourishing in England what became of my 
 father and mother, who were left behind in the West Indies six 
 years ago 1 There things went from bad to worse, the worst of 
 all being that my father had taken some of his English money 
 from the Warwickshire Estates and thrown it into the Great 
 Dismal Swamp of St. Saccharissa. Now his own. balance was gone 
 as well as Colonel Ratoon's, Claw, Tooth, and Nail had both come 
 under advances, and held mortgages on Two Rivers, which in 
 the good old time could have been rapidly cleared off by good 
 crops and high prices ; but as evils never come single, bad crops 
 had run neck and neck with low prices. One year there was a 
 drought, and the canes were good for walking-sticks, dry and 
 tough, but would yield no juice, — no, not even to Nail and 
 Screw's crusher. The next year was too wet, and the canes 
 gave plenty of juice, only it had no saccharine matter. "Too 
 plenty rain," the negroes said, "jist de same for make sugar, 
 wid no rain at all" 
 
 Then strange insects appeared, a great army like the palmer- 
 worm of the prophets, grasshoppers, and locusts, which ate up 
 every green thing, and mole-crickets, a sort of insect mole which 
 burrowed in the ground, and destroyed the roots of the cane. 
 Claw, Tooth, and Nail were equal to the occasion. They con- 
 signed, — of course, "under advances," — to my father, fifty 
 hogsheads of salt and one hundred puncheons of lime at Heaven 
 knows what price per puncheon and hogshead, and one hundred 
 carboys of sulphuric acid ; with a letter of instruction and ad- 
 vice, in which they told my father that, having consulted Dr. 
 Smellfungus, the great analytical chemist, whose days were 
 chiefly spent in examining the entrails of men and women, sup- 
 posed to have been poisoned, he had recommended that the 
 female locust should be sprinkled with salt, and the male with 
 lime, when he knew, I suppose, out of his " inner consciousness," 
 that' they would both shrivel up and vanish. The sulphuric 
 acid was a " prophylactic "—yes, that is the word in old Claw's 
 letter ! — against the mole-cricket. " You must watch for the 
 creature till it emerges from its burrow, and pour a drop of the 
 ateid on his occiput." Why he couldn't say head I cannot tell. 
 There it stands in the letter now before me " occiput." The 
 only objection to this treatment ol the " creature " was that 
 
 F 2 
 
68 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 mole-crickets never came out of their holes any more than the 
 talpa or common mole. 
 
 That, at any rate, was how some of the money went. These 
 remedies were first consin to the nursery one of sprinkling salt 
 on a bird's tail : they might have succeeded, only it was quite 
 impossible to apply them. Here was another case in which my 
 father was the martyr of science. Claw, Tooth, and .Nail were 
 indefatigable patrons of science with other men's money ; they 
 paid Smellfungus high for his opinion. If he lived now he 
 would read a Paper on the Extirpation of " Mole-Crickets " at 
 the Entomological Society, and the penny-a-liners would call 
 him " the eminent chemist ; " but, alas ! he lived before the era 
 of learned societies, and great travellers, and the Brothers Fres- 
 sensheitz, who subsisted, as Umbra tells us, for two whole years 
 on camels' dung in Central Asia, and then coming home recited 
 their feelings before one of the most crowded meetings ever 
 held of the Stercological Society. The salt, the lime, and the 
 sulphuric acid, too, came to a pretty penny; and as to get them 
 — Claw, Tooth, and Nail had " come under advances " — they 
 only cost double what they need have done ; and then there 
 was the forty per cent, commission, and freight and landing. 
 The salt and sulphuric acid were worse than thrown away ; we 
 had lots of salt of our own ; and the sulphuric acid was stowed 
 away in an outhouse till one of the carboys was tapped by a 
 night-walking nigger — Mercury, perhaps. 
 
 " Jest, massa, for ouwee see what inside him. Suppose he 
 rum. When jest me got bung out, Sambo give me one push 
 behind ; me tink a jackass kick me. Ober go de jar ; out come 
 de rum. Sambo jest toop down to taste him with his lilly 
 finger, when, phiz ! few ! something 'xplode and catch fire, and 
 we both run out to sabe our life. Dat, massa, how de outhouse 
 catch fire before massa say Jack Eobinson ; and dat how de out- 
 house burn down." 
 
 " But how did it catch light t " asked my father. 
 
 " Why you see, massa," said Mercury, " Sambo berry bad 
 nigger. He smoke pipe. Ebery night I say, Sambo ! Sambo ! 
 where you 'spect to go to after dis world ober 1 I Churchman, 
 massa. I go wid massa whereber massa go. Massa safe to go 
 to Hebben ; such a good massa ! But Sambo Baptist ; he be- 
 leeb what Metodist say. They say ebery nigger bear his own 
 load in dis world, and de same in de next ; dat why me no like 
 Metodist. Me bear load in dis world, but massa bear de load 
 for me in the next. Dat why I stick to massa. But Sambo 
 lazy nigger ; smoke pipe ; sleep in sun; nebber bear any load in 
 dis world ; him hab to carry ten men load in de next. So, just 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 69 
 
 for frighten Sambo, I say, 1 ' Sambo, Sambo ! watchman come ! ' 
 and he so 'fraid he gib me great push behind, and say, Get 
 out of de way, and jest den ober go de jar, and out fall a spark 
 from Sambo pipe ; and so, massa, come de comphlagratium ! " 
 
 As for the lime, it was used up in time ; but it was really no 
 use, because the sea threw up quantities of coral, which was 
 gathered into heaps and burnt]at stated times into .thebest of lime. 
 
 But these were trifles : only the last grain that breaks the 
 camel's back. Eeal ruin came with Emancipation. I know it 
 is the fashion to talk of the generosity of England to the West 
 Indian proprietors. Generosity ! A highwayman is generous 
 when, after robbing a traveller of a hundred sovereigns, he 
 throws him two or three pieces to take him on to the next 
 town. Very generous, no doubt, to put your hands into the 
 pocket of a man and take out a pound, and then to put half-a- 
 crown into it ! That was about what the twenty millions came 
 to. Slavery was, no doubt, a great evil — greater to the pro- 
 prietors than to any one else ; but the way in which it was 
 done away was the first step to that great march of sentimental 
 humbug which has been going on in England ever since. Solid 
 and old-established interests are sacrificed to the sentiment and 
 clamour of a clique, who gratify their sentiment very often at 
 the expense of the class against which the outcry is raised, and 
 fill their own pockets into the bargain. 
 
 But, fair or unfair, there could be no doubt of the f conse- 
 quences to the proprietors. Claw, Tooth,^nd Nail-first got all 
 the compensation— some thirty thousand pounds in our case ; 
 and that having stopped their maw for a while, my father, if he 
 had taken my Aunt's advice, would have thrown up Two Eivers 
 and returned to England ; but, by a strange infatuation, both 
 he and my mother had grown quite fond of the spot which 
 had caused them so much misery. It was a lovely island ; they 
 liked the house, the sea, the sky, the slaves— or, as they were 
 now to be called, "apprentices." Blind as the mole-cricket, 
 they resolved to stay on, and they even had my eldest brother 
 out from Cambridge to stay with them for a year. 
 
 "My dear child," said my Aunt in her soft way, "they will 
 be giving Claw, Tooth, and Nail a mortgage on Halfacre Hall 
 next ; see if the firm don't try to persuade your father and our 
 John to cut off the entail." 
 
 My mother wrote constantly to me, and my father sometimes. 
 He was always a magnificent background to me— something to 
 look forwardyto— and let me tell you that in painting this is no 
 bull, you must look forward to the background and distance ot 
 a picture ; but mothers are a sunny, smiling foreground on 
 
70 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 which all one's best feelings come out and warm themselves in 
 the genial light. The father's day is to-morrow, that day that 
 never comes. The mother's is to-day, the day that is here 
 next to you, which takes up all your time ; it will be time 
 enough to think of your father when to-morrow comes. And 
 yet I did often think of my father. I was far enough off to 
 feel for him, and to grieve to have to agree with Aunt Mande- 
 ville that he was wasting his life on a dream, and the most un- 
 real of dreams, that of making both ends meet round a West 
 India estate after emancipation day, when instead of bringing 
 the ends closer together, every day drew them farther apart. 
 
 I have told you my Aunt was jealous, and how she treated 
 my brothers at the instigation of Brooks. She showed it in 
 everything. I belonged to her, and I should belong to no one 
 else. If I was ill, she nursed me. No maid should give me 
 Dr. Mindererus' medicines. No woman bent on poisoning her 
 husband could have watched over him more tenderly to see 
 that he took his death-bane properly. That was when I had 
 the measles ; and old Brooks — idiot that he was ! — had 
 allowed me to get up with the rash on me, while my Aunt 
 went down for half-an-hour to see her agent. When Dr. Min- 
 dererus came he said I was much worse, and mumbled some- 
 thing of a chill and water on the brain, and that dolt Brooks. 
 I can't remember much about it, for I had a strange sort of 
 humming in the head, and I recollect I thought a queen bee 
 had flown in at my ear and been followed by a whole hive. 
 But, instead of a rush of bees, I had a rush ' of blood to the 
 head, all owing to that Brooks. But it was worth being ill to 
 see how my Aunt watched over me when I was getting better. 
 
 Then, it was that she gave a fresh proof of her jealousy. A 
 letter came from my mother in which she very innocently said 
 how glad she was to have John with her, and how some day she 
 hoped I would follow his example and come to see them at St. 
 Saccharissa " if your Aunt Mandeville will let you. We shall 
 never come home," she went on in a melancholy strain, " we shall 
 lay our bones here, and I should like you to see us, and the old 
 place, before we die." 
 
 I was very weak, and I threw the half-read letter over to my 
 Aunt to see what it contained. As she read I watched her. 
 After she had read it through, she flushed red, she grew ashy 
 pale— grey, almost like a dead leaf, the hue of a fallow field, 
 when nature is dead in winter time. 
 
 " Child," she said, " I see it all. They want to take you 
 away from me. If they once get you out there in that horrible 
 new place. How dare they call it ' old,' when here in England, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 71 
 
 at Halfaore Hall is the old place, which has come down from 
 Halfacre to Halfacre, from father to son, since the battle of 
 Ashdown, where Alfred smote the Danes! How dare she call 
 that ' Two Rivers,' that upstart estate, that beggar on horse- 
 back, that Sugar-loaf, that Twelfth Cake Ornament, ' old 1 ' It 
 will melt away from them some morning. No ! you shall 
 never go to them. If your mother wants to see you she must 
 come home, as my brother ought to have done long ago. Re- 
 member you belong to me, you are mine ! " And then, remem- 
 bering how ill I had been, and her passion fading from her as 
 quickly as heat from iron, she added in her usual soft winning 
 way, as she leant over and kissed my wan face : 
 
 " You are mine ! dear to me as my own child ; are you not, 
 Edward 1 But I am a wilful woman, and from first to last I 
 must have my own way." 
 
 Soft as a silken string when things went smooth, but savage 
 as a fury when thwarted, was my Aunt Mandeville. 
 
 Yet there was no doubt that she loved me now more than 
 anything on earth. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 HOW I WENT TO OXFORD. 
 
 That illness, and the scene I have related, happened when I 
 was about eighteen, just before I left Westminster, and when it 
 was not settled whether I should go to Oxford or Cambridge, 
 My brother John was at Trinity— Trinity, Cambridge,. I mean ; 
 for though I am an Oxford man, I believe that there is only one 
 Trinity. I rather think this was the real reason why my Aunt 
 sent me to Christ Church. Let Cambridge men be just and 
 acknowledge that, as there is only one Trinity, so there is only 
 one Christ Church. Let both Cambridge and Oxford confess 
 that there is but one Trinity and but one Christ Church, and 
 our articles of faith will be full. We have no need of thirty- 
 nine. Those were for the sixteenth century, when the clergy 
 read homilies and never wrote their own sermons. How I wish 
 they never wrote them now ! This is the only article that 
 Oxford and Cambridge of the nineteenth century need. What 
 the undergraduates of the other Colleges and Halls will say to 
 this Confession of Faith I cannot say, and do not much care. 
 I look upon them as the Archangel Michael did when he was 
 disputing with a certain dark person for the body of Moses, i 
 
72 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 do not abuse them, or bring against them any " railing accusa- 
 tion." I look upon them, in short, with supreme contempt. 
 Let them follow the example of the devils, and believe and 
 tremble at my angelic faith. 
 
 I need hardly say, then, that my Aunt settled that I should 
 go to Christ Church. Squire Mandeville had been there ; and 
 though he was a staid, sober man after he married my Aunt, 
 and for the short time they lived together, there were stories 
 about him current with the " scouts," when I went up to " The 
 House," that showed him to have been playful as a kitten. 
 
 " Bless you, Mr. Halfacre," old Filch would say, "the gentlemen 
 as come up now ain't half as light-hearted and gay as they used 
 to be in my time. Talk of pinks ; why, when I was first in the 
 House, you couldn't count them. And your uncle Mandeville, 
 — many's the supper-party I've served for him ; and the flip, 
 and the bishop, and the cardinal, and the songs ; all manner of 
 larks. Why, he it was that first painted the Dean's door red. 
 The same thing's done now, but there was some fun in being 
 the first to do it. All that comes after is mere imitation like. 
 Then, too, who first bribed the porter to toll Tom one hundred 
 and two instead of one hundred and one 1 — why, Mr. Mande- 
 ville. Who locked Dean Jackson and young Mr. Barnes into 
 the library, and kept them there the whole afternoon 1 — Mr. 
 Mandeville. I think I see him with his smiling face, as cool as a 
 cucumber, going in to see the Dean, who had inquired particu- 
 larly for him ; for Mr. Mandeville, when he heard there was to 
 be a row, went to his tutor and gave himself up. He were not 
 a sneak, weren't Mr. Mandeville. And what do you think he 
 told the Dean ? Why, when the Dean, with his wig on, — the 
 reason why the deans are not respected now is that they don't 
 wear wigs. Bless you, you would have as soon seen Dean Jack- 
 son out without his kneebreeches as without his wig, — what do 
 you think Mr. Mandeville said, when the Dean asked him how 
 he dared lock him up 1 Why, he made him a low bow, and 
 said, nothing could be further from his intention than to lock 
 him or young Mr. Barnes up ; but he knew there were some 
 valuable things in the library, and he was afraid some dishonest 
 persons might get in, and as he was coming across Peckwater, 
 going down to the boats, he saw the key in the door, and locked 
 it, and put the key in his pocket, and went on the water and 
 forgot it till he came back, and here it was ; and with that he 
 pulled out the key, and handed it to the Dean with another 
 low bow." 
 
 " And what did the Dean do V 
 
 " Do ! why, what could he do but make him another low bow 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 73 
 
 back, and thank him for the care he had taken of the key 1 
 Next day Mr. Mandeville dined with the Dean." 
 
 But that was nearly the end of my uncle's tether. The Dons 
 were too much for him at last, old Filch said, just for all the 
 world like a fox that often hunted, and often escaping, still 
 comes to the hounds at last. One fine night, Uncle Mandeville 
 with others met the junior Proctor in the walks, and tied him to 
 a tree, where he passed a good part of the night while they went 
 down to Sandford Feast, and only knocked in just before twelve. 
 Unfortunately for them the junior Proctor, Jerry Sneak — that 
 was not his name, but that was his nickname in the University 
 ► — had got loose and stood at the gate, hiding in the porter's 
 lodge at "Tom" to see who knocked in. After that he put on 
 beaver and crept up the staircase in Peckwater where my uncle's 
 rooms were, and listened at the door, while he had a supper- 
 party, to overhear what was said. Then it was, alas ! that my 
 uncle committed that atrocity which the Dean said was enough 
 to restore the hair of a bald man. Going out of his rooms for 
 something, he found the unhappy Jerry lurking on the stair- 
 case, and, pretending not to know him, incontinently kicked 
 him down stairs ; Jerry, all the while, exclaiming, " Don't you 
 know me, Mr. Mandeville 2 I am the junior Proctor." 
 
 " I don't believe a word you say," said my uncle, who pro- 
 bably thought that his cup was full, and that he might make it 
 overflow a little. " I don't believe a word you say. Where are 
 your academicals ? A junior Proctor in beaver at this hour of 
 night. Get away with you, you rank impostor !" So he chased 
 him into the quad with blows and jeers, and then returned to 
 tell his friends what he had done. 
 
 Next morning the Dean held a Chapter, at which Mr. Man- 
 deville and the junior Proctor appeared. My uncle was con- 
 demned, almost unheard ; a black eye which Mr. Sneak had 
 unfortunately contracted in his headlong descent speaking elo- 
 quently on his side, when my uncle coolly told the Dean that 
 they w«re going to condemn him on evidence which would be 
 quite insufficient in a court of justice. 
 
 " This is a Chapter of Christ Church, . and not a court of 
 justice," said the Dean. 
 
 " I am quite aware of it. There is no justice here," said my 
 uncle, and was about to retire with a bow, but they would not 
 let him go, in fact, they expelled him on the spot, and his place 
 in Christ Church knew him no more. " A very wild young man," 
 as the Dons said. Yet there was his memory as fresh as ever, 
 in old Filch's mind, when I went up to Christ Church forty 
 years after. Such is undergraduate fame. 
 
74 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 It was fortunate for me that the Don's memory was shorter. 
 Some of the young Dons of my uncle's time were very old Dons 
 when I went up, port-logged souls, but^the management of "the 
 House" was in younger and abler hands. Sometimes, however, 
 the old lotus-eaters used to appear at collections, and ask us 
 silly questions, and correct our Latin. I remember getting into 
 a sad scrape with one of them, because I began a theme, " Quis 
 negaverit." " ' Quis negaverit,' Mr. Halfacre," chirped out the 
 Canon, " what does this mean 1 " When I explained, he said, 
 " Oh ! I see, but it would be far easier to say, Quis rum dicit. 
 Dicit, Mr. Halfacre, an honest straightforward indicative, none 
 of your subjunctives." I thought of reminding him of one of 
 Paul de Kock's novels, where a lover is detected in disguise, by 
 saying, "Eh bien! que voulez-vous que fen fasse." "Voild, du 
 subjonctif" said his mistress, and turned him out-of-doors neck 
 and crop. But, on second thoughts, I knew that this story 
 would be thrown away on him. I have kept it till now, and 
 tell it to you, gentle reader, instead. I shan't tell you in 
 which of Paul de Kock's novels it occurs, and so you will have 
 to read them all through ; much good may they do you ! but 
 one thing I can tell you, whether you are man or woman, they 
 won't do you half as much harm — I admit their coarseness — as 
 " Gerfaut," or " L' Affaire Clemenceau," and yet, I dare say, you 
 have read both. 
 
 However, I went up to Oxford, and I always look back upon 
 those three years as the happiest of my life. I left Westmin- 
 ster scholar enough to pass Littlego and Greats with little 
 trouble. The Bible, — that great stumbling-block in the way of 
 " Greats," that book utterly impossible to be crammed up in six 
 weeks, — that had been made safe by my mother and my aunt. 
 Don't laugh, you enlightened people, who know how to do with- 
 out the Bible. Don't think me a fool for being taught the 
 Bible almost by heart by two weak women. I say the Bible 
 so learnt is a pearl beyond price, a book full of touching 
 memories, of recollections which sweep across the soul, sooth- 
 ing all the tempests of passion — oil, balm, manna, spices, 
 call it what you will. Let no one mock me for knowing the 
 Bible. 
 
 In those days there were but two examinations. Let those 
 who were undergraduates thank their stars for that. Now, I 
 do not even know how many there are. In those days, if a man 
 was a double first, you knew what he was ; now he may be double 
 first in insects and stuffed birds, big at beetles, and able to set 
 up a seagull. That they call natural science. Very natural, I 
 call it, that is, very idiotic. If a son of mine has the love of 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 75 
 
 insects or seagulls implanted in him, — nay, even if he should 
 aspire to the place held at court by Mr. Ribbins, who is or was 
 bug-destroyer to Her Majesty, — it will come out quite soon 
 enough in after life. But while he is an undergraduate, let 
 him study the classics and philosophers ; and if he is greedy for 
 more, let him take up mathematics, and if they don't satisfy 
 him, I can't tell what is to be done with him. 
 
 I was not sent up to read. Of course my Aunt did not 
 expect that I would be plucked in any examination. She 
 wished me to read if I chose ; but one of her favourite maxims 
 was that life wouldn't be worth having if everybody were as 
 wise as Solon. Once in a way a wise man may be welcome, 
 but a nation of wise men — " Child, it would be hell upon 
 earth !" 
 
 " Besides," she went on, " some people are born to be fools ; 
 why teach them what they can never master ? Just like teach- 
 ing girls without ear, or touch, or taste, or feeling, to play, 
 making music a terror to the world." 
 
 She often said that what she sent me to university for was to 
 learn men and manners ; to associate with what she called my 
 " equals." She gave me a good allowance ; but if Auntie hated 
 one thing with a deeper hatred than that which she bestowed on 
 Claw, Tooth, aud Nail, it was debt. " Never run in debt, Ed- 
 ward. Pay your way like a gentleman. Don't stint yourself, 
 but remember that it is possible — nay, easy, by play aud bet- 
 ting, and running to the Jews for a hundred, pounds now, and 
 another hundred then, — to empty the deepest purse and ruin 
 the finest estate." 
 
 I often think how unhappy I should now be if I had not kept 
 faith with Aunt Mandeville. She never had to pay a sixpence 
 of debt for me. Perhaps it was owing to her liberal allowance. 
 I knew an unhappy wretch whose father sent him up to Oxford, 
 and expected him to live like a gentleman on fifty pounds a-year. 
 He did live like a gentleman for one year, and then went down 
 for ever, owing three hundred pounds. Poor fellow ! he was 
 sent to India, and his bones now lie either on or under the 
 surface of the Khord Kabul Pass. Parents should remember 
 that there is nothing that goes such a little way as nothing, 
 especially at, the university. 
 
 Well, then, in October I went up. I remember I came from 
 Leamington to Rugby, and so to Oxford by the famous coach 
 called the Pig. Why it was so called I never could find out ; 
 perhaps from the obstinacy and porcine propensities of the first 
 driver. But that it was called Pig there can be no doubt Ask 
 any old Rugby man why it was so called, if you know one. I 
 
76 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 think we went by Southam and Banbury, and so along the valley 
 of the Cherwell to Oxford. 
 
 How glad I was to quit the Pig and hasten to Christ Church ! 
 My rooms were at first in Fell's Buildings, — the old Fell's 
 Buildings, I mean, not those new Fell's Buildings which are 
 enough to make William of Wykeham turn in his grave. How 
 proud I was of my rooms, and yet how miserable those garrets 
 were ! I could sit by my fire, open the door, shut the window 
 and poke the fire without rising from my seat. Then, too, the 
 prospect was so lively ; the floods were out almost all that term, 
 and Christ Church meadow was one huge lake. However, I 
 managed to get through that term, and the next my tutor made 
 interest with the Dean, and I changed into excellent rooms in 
 Canterbury. Dear me, when I was last in Oxford I looked up 
 at the windows, and thought of all that had rolled over my head 
 since, and of my first breakfast party in them, and how "jolly " 
 it was — we only said " jolly " in those days j not " awfully jolly," 
 as girls and boys now use the expression every other minute ; — 
 and of the old faces, some of them new then, and where the old 
 faces are now ; how many of them haggard and wizened ; how 
 many of them grinning skulls in India, in the Crimea, beneath 
 the sea deep down hundreds of fathoms in mid-ocean ooze, it 
 may be with electric cables lying close to them, flashing the 
 secrets of one hemisphere to another, and yet those poor empty 
 brain-pans never so much as knew that there were or would be 
 such things as telegraphs. Some lying in fat English church- 
 yards in tombs at which the village urchins throw stones, de- 
 facing the legend of their many virtues. Some with no tombs 
 at all. Many dead, some worse than dead. Well, well ! Time 
 will have his own, and death and the tax-gatherer no man can 
 cheat. 
 
 But, to come back to my rooms in Canterbury, which I am 
 trying as hard as I can to people with ghosts. Then it was 
 really flesh and blood ! though young flesh and blood would do 
 well to reflect sometimes that, after all, its flesh and blood are 
 but a mantle and mask for so much phosphate of lime — I beg 
 pardon of the osteologists if that is not what bones are made of. 
 I have often thought how oddly we pick up our friends ; how 
 sympathy lies in one's cold, stony heart, as fire in a flint, till 
 something strikes us, and brings out the spark which burns 
 speedily into friendship. One of my best friends I made by 
 fighting with him. Not that Deepdale of the private school, 
 but one with whom I fought at Westminster. Strange that 
 blows should lead to love ! but they did in that case. His 
 name was Mainwaring — no relation, I beg leave to say, of the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 77 
 
 Cheshire Mainwarings ; but of quite another stock. While it 
 lasted — and it lasted long — I don't think I ever loved any man 
 so much. He grew up a bigger, stouter fellow than I was ; and 
 when we went up to Christ Church he could have thrashed me 
 easily. Very handsome, too, he was : fair of face, with rich 
 brown hair ; — so handsome that women used to turn round in 
 the streets and bless his "sweet, pretty face." At first, "as 
 freshmen," we used to be for ever on the water in skin's. This, 
 again, was before the days of outriggers and canoes. In our 
 second year they coaxed Mainwaring away from me into the 
 eight. He went into training, and used to eat raw beefsteaks, 
 never touch pastry, and run six miles round the Walks before 
 breakfast. Mainwaring was an enthusiast, and threw himself 
 heartily into everything that he did. He said it was "jolly 
 work — training." But I think the athletic spirit was not so 
 strong in our generation at Oxford as it is now ; for then it was 
 that Cambridge used to beat us so fearfully on the water, while 
 we stood by, wondering how it was that they could ever beat us ; 
 but, for all that, they did. The fact was, our eights were too 
 exclusive. I remember a University eight, which had six Christ 
 Church men in it, just as I remember a Christ Church eight, in 
 which every oar was a Westminster man, pulling that fine Lon- 
 don stroke which still characterises Oxford from Cambridge 
 pulling. If we had all been Mainwarings we should have beaten 
 Cambridge then as we beat her now ; but we were not Main- 
 warings ; we would not take the trouble to train ; we would eat 
 pastry after our raw beefsteaks, and cream ices at Jubber's 
 Temple after we came off the water at night, to say nothing of 
 egg-flip and other nightcaps well known in Oxford butteries, 
 right pleasant to the palate, but very noxious to the stomach 
 and lungs. 
 
 Then there was Scatterbrains ; but as I shall have something 
 to tell of him afterwards, I shan't say anything about him now, 
 except that he was one of my greatest friends. 
 
 Theh there was Martingale. He was not an old friend. He 
 was the younger son of an Irish peer ; but he has since suc- 
 ceeded to the family estates and honours, his elder brother 
 having broken his neck in " lepping a dyke," as the local journal 
 put it. He was mounted on " a grate horse entirely, and an 
 excellent lepper ; " but the brute tripped in clearing the dyke, 
 and the unhappy horseman broke his neck. I made his brother's 
 acquaintance coming home from hunting one raw November 
 afternoon; and we should have been good friends if hunting had 
 lasted all the year round, as an Oxford tutor thought in my time 
 when he said, enraged at what he called my sinful idleness, when 
 
78 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 in a Chorus of the Agamemnon I could only translate the inter- 
 jections " Alas ! alas ! " and " Ah me ! ah me ! " After -which 
 he broke out with : 
 
 " It is well known, Mr. Halfacre, that you are for ever hunt- 
 ing that disgoosting animal, the fox — the fox, which animal was 
 sown up in a sack with parricides, when they were drowned along 
 with an ape and a cook. God knows why they put the cock 
 there ; but the ape, it is well known, is another most disgoosting 
 animal. You mount your horse, and put on your scarlet coat, 
 in this month of June, and hunt the fox over the fields ': that is 
 why you make yourself so ridiculous in lecture." 
 
 I forbore to make him ridiculous by exposing his ignorance of 
 hunting before the lecture-room; but the titter that went round, 
 even from the pale-faced reading men, showed that every one in 
 the room saw that, however much our worthy tutor might know 
 of the punishment of parricides among the ancients, he was pro- 
 foundly ignorant of the times and seasons for following the fox 
 in modern England. 
 
 CHAPTEE XV. 
 
 HOW SOMETHING HAPPENED AT MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 Now, what I am going to tell you is true, though you may 
 think it a lie. So if you don't like strange truths you had better 
 .skip it. 
 
 There was a Muniment room at Mandeville Hall, filled with 
 what, to you, would seem musty old papers, but which would 
 make the mouth of the Master of the Eolls water. There were 
 no Anglo-Saxon charters as we had at Halfacre Hall, but there 
 were numberless old Norman deeds which had belonged to 
 Mandeville Abbey, of which you may still see the ruins about a 
 mile and a half from Mandeville Hall. So when you find Man- 
 deville Hall, in Warwickshire, you will not be long in stumbling 
 on the Abbey. I regret to say that the Mandeville who built 
 the hall was a time-server. He was Catholic and Protestant 
 by turns, just as bluff Harry willed it. The wits of those days 
 called him " the Warwickshire weathercock.'' The result was 
 that he got a grant of the Abbey lands, and pulled the Abbey 
 itself down for the sake of the lead. He was very nearly coming 
 to a bad end in Bloody Mary's time, for he was silly enough to 
 turn out his men for the Lady Jane, and had to pay a heavy fine 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 79 
 
 to the Queen before he could get his pardon, which is still to be 
 seen among the Mapdeville manuscripts, under the Queen's great 
 seal. There were deeds signed by Sir Thomas Lucy, and who 
 knows if the deeds were properly searched, whether the very 
 inquisition before that shallow knight who drove Shakespeare to 
 London may not still be found. Besides papers and parchments 
 there were old pictures of ancestors, which after the usual course 
 of promotion and degradation which befalls family portraits, 
 after being hung in hall, library, gallery, and bedroom, at last 
 find their way into lumber rooms, their frames, alas ! being 
 wanted for a new generation. One day when I was a freshman 
 at Oxford, I went with my Aunt into the Muniment room to 
 hunt for some lease, and while she was busy looking for it, I 
 amused myself with the pictures. They were all rolled up, and 
 docketed at the back with the names of those whom they repre- 
 sented. This was Sir Giles, Sir Hugh, Sir John. Then as knights 
 banneret dropped out, and the family fortunately escaped the 
 disgrace of a baronetcy, it was Squire this and Squire that, or 
 Mistress Ursula, Eleanor, or Mary. After I had turned over a 
 good many, and raised dust enough to make us almost swallow 
 at one dose that peck of dirt which we are told we must all eat 
 before we die, I was just going to leave off, as my Aunt's search 
 was nearly over, when I saw a roll which had a larger docket 
 than the rest, and so I thought I would just look at that too. 
 The docket read rather strangely, " This is the portrait of the 
 ' White Lady,' cut from the frame by me, John Mandeville, 
 January 3rd, 1716." 
 
 "What White Lady ? " I asked of my Aunt. " Who was the 
 'White Lady?'" 
 
 " Never mind, child," said my Aunt, rather sharply for her, 
 " unroll her and let us look at her." 
 
 I did as she bade me, and unrolled the picture. It was a 
 portrait by Vandyck or one of his pupils, excellently painted not 
 merely in hands, but in head and face. A three-quarters length, 
 with a child clinging to her in the right-hand corner of the pic- 
 ture and seemingly cut in half. 
 
 " What an awkward picture, Aunt Mandeville ! The figures 
 look as if they were cut in half." 
 
 " Yes ! " said my Aunt, now in her quiet way ; " Yes ! but 
 see how beautiful she was ; what hair, what eyes, what a skin, 
 and what a sad, mournful, wild look she has ! Boll her up at 
 once. I do not wish to see her again." 
 
 Then I prayed for the picture. " If it is such a good picture, 
 Auntie, what a shame to cut it from the frame ! Why did John 
 Mandeville cut it from the frame, I wonder 1 " 
 
80 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Ah ! " almost sighed my Aunt, " why did he cut her from 
 her frame ? but as you seem taken with the picture we will 
 have her lined and reframed, and she shall be hung up in the 
 hall." 
 
 So we had her lined and framed, and hung her up in the hall, 
 opposite to the entrance. 
 
 I used to spend all my vacations with my Aunt, and very 
 happy we were together. I think there was scarce a watering- 
 place in England — she did not much care for foreign travel — 
 that I have not visited with her, either as boy or man. She 
 longed for the sea, and would even go to Cornwall in the winter, 
 and to Wales in the spring, taking a regiment of servants with 
 her, much to the indignation of Brooks, who complained that 
 " at them sea-side places '' he could never get his meals " com- 
 fortable or regular." 
 
 But these sea-side rushes were one of the things that my 
 Aunt insisted on. Once out of her park she had a will 
 of her own in domestic matters. She ceased to be a Man- 
 deville, and was again a Halfacre ; and well for her it was 
 so, or else she would have been worried to death by old 
 Brooks. 
 
 Well, the long vacation after we found the White Lady, my 
 Aunt did what she never had done before, and what she never 
 did again. When she went away to the sea she lent Mandeville 
 Hall to Sir Benjamin Bullion, her London banker. The Man- 
 devilles had banked with the Bullions ever since there was 
 banking in England. . The first Bullion was a rival of that Dun- 
 combe of whom Pope sung contemptuously ; but in spite of 
 Pope's satire I would sooner be a live lord at Helmsly and Eie- 
 vaux than a dead poet. The Bullions had not done so well as 
 the Duncombes. They rather messed matters in the South Sea 
 Bubble, but still they had done pretty well. When their wills 
 were proved they made half the millionaires in London die of 
 envy, and had they lived in the days of succession duty they 
 would have contributed thousands upon thousands to the reve- 
 nue. They never speculated and never allowed interest on 
 deposits, and that was why the Mandevilles banked on them. 
 One of the few things remembered as having been said by the 
 late Mr. Mandeville was, " Never bank with a banker who 
 allows you interest on your balance ; it always means specula- 
 tion and bad security." 
 
 I don't quite know how it happened, but the chief cashier of the 
 bank, in corresponding on business with my Aunt about some 
 investment of her savings, said, " Our Sir Benjamin is not so 
 well as we could wish. The constant efflux of gold to the Con- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 81 
 
 tinent worries him, and he is getting thin. I wish he would 
 take a holiday." 
 
 Strange to say, for a woman so cold to all the world, except to 
 me, Aunt Mandeville sympathised with the banker ; and when 
 the investment was made on the unerring advice of Sir Benja- 
 min, she wrote him a kind letter, and said that if he chose to 
 come down to Mandeville Hall with his establishment it was 
 quite at his service. A Postscript added, " We shall be away 
 all September and part of October at Scarborough, and you will 
 find excellent partridge-shooting at Mandeville Hall." 
 
 I believe that P.S. decided Sir Benjamin. He accepted the 
 invitation, and as soon as my Aunt was gone with her establish- 
 ment he succeeded her with his. I think I am right when I 
 say that there was not one servant left in the house. 
 
 Well! we went to Scarborough; and very happy we were 
 for those two months. My Aunt was not only fond of the sea, 
 but she loved to be on it. We hired a yacht, the only drawback 
 to which was that we could never get the master — whom we 
 hired, too, with his crew — to set the gaff topsail. That he was 
 quite right was proved by what we heard afterwards,' but what 
 no one told us, though every one in Scarborough knew it, that 
 whenever that yacht set her gaff topsail she capsized. How- 
 ever, we knew nothing of that ; our grievance was that we could 
 never get the gaff topsail up, and we were a living proof that it 
 is better to have a grievance than to surmount it and perish in 
 consequence. Then, too, we went to Whitby, and to Holy 
 Island ; passed Flamborough Head, then noisy with the gulls, 
 which the cockney sportsman had not yet shot off, and which I 
 sincerely hope Mr. Sykes' Bill may restore. Standing too close 
 in we ran on Filey Brigg, and very nearly went to the bottom, 
 but the master managed to get the Petrel — that was her name 
 — off, after bumping a little upon the rocks. 
 
 Just before we left Scarborough, my Aunt, who had been 
 wondering why she had not heard from Sir Benjamin, received 
 a very mysterious letter from him, informing her that he had 
 returned to town, and that when she came back to Mandeville 
 Hall he would be glad if she would allow him to come down 
 and see her for a day. 
 
 " I can't make' out what he means," said my Aunt, as she 
 threw the letter over to me ; " but I shall write and tell him to 
 come and stay as long as he likes." 
 
 We returned to Mandeville Hall, and as Claw, Tooth, and 
 Nail would have said, " duly notified " to Sir Benjamin that my 
 Aunt was at home again, and would be happy to see him. He 
 fixed the day, and came. 
 
 Q 
 
82 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 I recollect him well. He was a most prosaic man, far above 
 telling a story, and quite incapable of a joke. I remember he 
 told us that he had never dreamt in his life. Fancy a man who 
 has never dreamt ! why, even dogs dream. Look at a sleeping 
 dog. Let him lie ; let him sleep his sleep out, and then say 
 that he doesn't dream ! 
 
 Well, this truthful, dreamless man sat down to dinner with 
 us, clothed and in his right mind. 1 remember we dined in the 
 Hall, with the banners fluttering, and the family portraits look- 
 ing down on our meal. After dinner, when even Brooks had 
 betaken himself to his pantry, or wherever else he abided, Sir 
 Benjamin, clearing his throat, said to my Aunt : 
 
 " Something happened during my visit here, Mrs. Mandeville, 
 with which I think it my duty to make you acquainted.'' 
 
 Here he paused, and my Aunt, rather fluttered, said : 
 
 " Indeed, Sir Benjamin ! what was it 1 Nothing about the 
 game, I hope. We always follow our own birds on Lord Lur- 
 dane's land, and his lordship does the same on ours. But I 
 daresay it was something about bushing the fields, which the 
 tenants are bound to do ; or was it the foxes, or the rabbits 1 " 
 
 She would have run over the whole litany of landlord and 
 tenant, and pursued the irrepressible rabbit even into his bur- 
 row, had not Sir Benjamin, in his slow, heavy way, checked her 
 by saying : 
 
 "I can assure you, Mrs. Mandeville, it was nothing that arose 
 out of game. The shooting, both partridge, pheasant, and rabbit, 
 was most excellent ; and as for hares, I never saw so many any- 
 where." 
 
 " What was it, then ? " said my Aunt, who began to grow 
 impatient. 
 
 " You shall hear,'' said Sir Benjamin, and then he went on : 
 "You are aware, Mrs. Mandeville, that you were good enough 
 to leave us the house entirely empty. I do not mean, of course, 
 empty of furniture, but of servants. It was an act of great con- 
 sideration, for the servants of two establishments seldom agree, 
 and ours were, so to speak, left carte blanche." 
 
 What he understood by carte blanche I am sure I can't tell, 
 but those were the very words he used. " There could there- 
 fore be no collusion or deception played by one set of servants on 
 the other, and, as utter strangers, of course our servants were 
 ignorant of the story of this house." 
 
 " Proceed," said my Aunt, who seemed quite at a loss to 
 understand the drift of Sir Benjamin's observations. 
 
 " As we are few in family," continued Sir Benjamin, "and 
 you had not fettered me by any prohibition, I thought I would 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 83 
 
 ask my friend Blogg, a Eussian merchant of great standing and 
 integrity, the best judge of bristles and tallow on change, and a 
 man whose word would pass for thousands even without a 
 crossed cheque drawn to order — = — " 
 
 My Aunt was so bewildered with tallow, bristles, and crossed 
 cheques, that she could only bow acquiescence — an act which 
 she mechanically performed. 
 
 " Mr. Blogg accepted my invitation ; — he is a first-rate shot, 
 besides his knowledge of his business,— put himself into the 
 Highflyer, and arrived here in time for dinner. As our side of 
 the house, up those stairs yonder, was full, we put Mr. Blogg 
 into one of the State rooms, — into Queen Elizabeth's room, in 
 fact, — and after a pleasant evening, Mr. Blogg confessed that he 
 was very tired, and went to bed. I went myself with him to 
 his room to see that it was comfortable ; and as it seemed not 
 to have been tenanted for some time, we had a fire lighted in 
 the large grate, and when it burned up, we left my friend. I 
 may mention here that Mr. Blogg is a man of undaunted 
 courage ; witness his buying ten thousand casks of yellow 
 candle at fifty-six and sixpence for delivery in the very height 
 of the tallow panic at the end of the old Russian War. That 
 bold step checked the disastrous fall in Eussian tallow, and 
 saved hundreds of families from ruin. I have heard him also 
 say that he has seen ten men flogged to death with the knout 
 in Russia without feeling faint. 
 
 " Well ! I left my friend and retired to rest with Lady 
 Bullion. Let me say it was at the full of the moon. When I 
 was shaving in the morning," — here Sir Benjamin felt his mas- 
 sive chin, which was firmly seated on a dewlap of which any cow 
 might have been proud, — " I was surprised, I may say amazed, to 
 see my friend Blogg walking in the garden in front of the Hall. 
 
 " As I felt sure that he could not have rested well, I sent 
 down my valet with an inquiry after my friend's health, and to 
 my surprise he came back and said that Mr. Blogg had sent for 
 a fly, saying that he would not re-enter the house. 
 
 " I reflected whether Mr. Blogg had been seized with sudden 
 mania, but there was nothing in the condition either of the 
 bristle or of the oil and tallow markets to warrant that con- 
 clusion ; I therefore sent back the valet with a request that Mr. 
 Blogg would at least enter the house to take his morning meal, 
 and that I would be down in a few minutes. To my great 
 satisfaction I saw that he had entered the house, and hastily 
 finishing my toilet I went downstairs ; but on my way down, on 
 looking through the window, I saw that he was again walking 
 in the garden, though his breakfast was smoking on the table. 
 
 o 2 
 
84 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " I ran — with some sacrifice of self respect I own — but I ran 
 into the garden, and seizing him by the arm, I said, ' Good 
 God, Blogg, are you mad ? Why will you not eat your break- 
 fast as a Christian and a merchant ought ? Be a man, Blogg,' 
 for I felt something dreadful had befallen him. To tell you the 
 truth, I thought that the Czar of all the Russias had issued a 
 Ukase forbidding for fourteen years the export of tallow, hemp, 
 hides, and bristles, a tyrannical exercise of authority which I 
 knew by the state of his balance, and the bills ' maturing,' as 
 we term it, could have caused my friend to suspend." 
 
 " Do you mean he would have hanged himself here at 
 Mandeville Hall?" asked my Aunt with an anxious jealousy for 
 the reputation of the Hall. 
 
 "No! no!" said Sir Benjamin, "not so bad as that. J5y 
 suspend, I mean stop payment ; in other words, become a bank- 
 rupt. But to proceed : Mr. Blogg turned sharply round on me 
 and said, ' Nothing will induce me to enter that house again. I 
 had hardly set my foot in the Hall, when I saw her again.' " 
 
 " Her, " said my Aunt, whose interest increased now that the 
 story had passed from the domain of Ukases on tallow and 
 bristles — " Her ! whom do you mean, Sir Benjamin ? " 
 
 " That lady yonder," said the baronet, pointing to " the Lady 
 in White," with the rueful countenance, whom we had only a 
 little while before restored to the light of day. 
 
 " That lady yonder, and if you will let me go on, I will tell 
 you all about it, for I would not leave Mr. Blogg, or suffer him 
 to go, till he had told me all that had happened. 
 
 " Mr. Blogg said that when we had left him in Queen Eliza- 
 beth's room, he had undressed himself as quickly as he could 
 and gone to bed. Though the fire was burning bright he was 
 soon asleep. How long he had been asleep he could not tell, 
 but he suddenly awoke, and saw by the low light of the embers 
 a female figure in white crossing the room, past the fireplace and 
 bedside. She moved slowly, and as she went she wrung her 
 hands, and he saw that the expression of her face was full of 
 grief and sorrow. She passed slowly on towards the dressing- 
 room, and opened the door into it. It closed after her, and she 
 was lost to view. I have said that Mr. Blogg is a man of gr.eat 
 nerve. He said that he was not at all alarmed at what he saw, 
 thinking it was some maid-servant walking in her sleep, or some 
 one trying to frighten him. But as he lay there, the father of 
 a family, he thought of Mrs. Blogg in Barnsbury Park, and the 
 seven little Bloggs, and he felt it behoved him not to permit a 
 strange female to stay any longer in his dressing-room. You 
 are aware, I conclude," continued Sir Benjamin, " that there is 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 85 
 
 no exit from that dressing-room, except the door at which the 
 figure entered. The window, too, is bricked up to more than 
 the stature of the human figure, so that it was plain that the 
 female must still be in the dressing-room. Mr. Blogg waited a 
 minute or two longer. He then rose, lighted a candle, and pro- 
 ceeded to the dressing-room. He entered it and saw — nothing. 
 He hunted and searched everywhere, and still found — nothing. 
 There were no cupboards, no hiding-places, no exit. Mr. Blogg 
 was more than ever amazed. Having satisfied himself on all 
 these points, he retired again to his bed, but not to sleep. He 
 had not been five minutes in bed ere" — here Sir Benjamin 
 grew slightly poetic — " ere the same female figure re-appeared 
 through the dressing-room door, and passed slowly out of the 
 bedroom, wringing her hands and seeming to weep as she went. 
 As she passed the bedside, she stood still for a moment and 
 looked hard at Mr. Blogg with such a woe-begone face that he 
 said it would melt a heart of stone into a heart of tallow. 
 
 " When this apparition — for such Mr. Blogg firmly believed it 
 to have been — departed, Mr. Blogg lay tossing about for two or 
 three hours ; he then fell into a fitful slumber, waking every 
 now and then with a start. As soon as day dawned — it was 
 about the equinox — he rose and dressed himself. He then 
 descended into the garden and ordered the fly to take him to 
 Warwick that he might catch the Highflyer. The strangest 
 thing of all, though, was what happened when he re-entered the 
 Hall to partake of his breakfast. The very first object that his 
 eyes fell on was that portrait yonder, which he is ready to swear 
 is the portrait of the woeful lady in white whom he saw in 
 Queen Elizabeth's room. 
 
 " This, Mrs. Mandeville, is my story. I have thought it 
 right, in justice to Mr. Blogg and myself, to put you in posses- 
 sion of these facts, to the truth of which Mr. Blogg is ready to de- 
 pose on oath before the Lord Mayor or any two justices of the 
 Peace; and, having said so much, I leave the matter in your hands." 
 
 " Very strange, Sir Benjamin, very strange !" said my Aunt, 
 as though musing and recalling in a dream something that had 
 happened long ago. Then awaking as it were, she said in a 
 lq^der tone, and in her best company manner : 
 
 " Thank you, Sir Benjamin. This story must be inquired 
 into, and when you go back to town pray tell Mr. Blogg that 
 no exertion shall be spared on my part to punish those who have 
 been guilty of playing such a hoax upon him." 
 
 " But," rejoined the banker, " Mr. Blogg is ready to aflinn 
 the truth of what he saw. He altogether denies that there was 
 any deception." 
 
86 .ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Well !" said my Aunt, "I can do no more than say what I 
 have said. Every exertion shall be made, and if anything is 
 discovered, it shall be communicated to Mr. Blogg ; and now, 
 Sir Benjamin, I think we had better go to bed. You will be on 
 our side of the house. You need not fear that we shall put you 
 into Queen Elizabeth's room. Good night ;" and with these 
 words she retired to rest, and we soon followed her example. 
 
 Now whether Sir Benjamin slept soundly that night, all I 
 know is, I did not. I lay tossing about a la Blogg, thinking 
 about the ghost, which, begging its pardon, seemed to go so 
 thoroughly on all fours. Nor was I altogether easy about my 
 Aunt's manner. I remember that her behaviour was rather odd 
 when we first found " the White Lady," and what she said, 
 when Sir Benjamin had ended his long-winded story, seemed to 
 show a determination on her part not to allow the question of a 
 ghost at Mandeville Hall to be so much as raised, and a fore- 
 gone conclusion against all the evidence adduced, or offered to 
 be adduced, by the unhappy Blogg. 
 
 Next day Sir Benjamin took his leave. He had come down 
 at great inconvenience to "tell us the story, which, as he justly 
 said, was far too long to write, and my Aunt ought to have been 
 much obliged to him. Still, though she was civility itself, I 
 could see she was heartily glad when we heard his carriage- 
 wheels rolling off. 
 
 When he was gone I thought Aunt Mandeville would have 
 returned to the ghost in Queen Elizabeth's room, but she made 
 no mention of the subject. She went, indeed, all alone into the 
 Muniment room where we had found the picture, one day when 
 I was out shooting, and had, as Brooks called it, " a great rum- 
 mage among them parchments," but still never a word of Mr. 
 Blogg's story. At last, after a week had passed, and it was 
 within a day of my return to Oxford, I summoned up courage 
 after dinner, and said : 
 
 " I wish so much, Auntie, you would tell me what you think 
 of Mr. Blogg's ghost." 
 
 " It will be quite time enough to talk of Mr. Blogg's ghost," 
 replied my Aunt, still fencing with me, " when Mr. Blogg is 
 dead and buried. At present any discussion as to his gho§J is 
 premature.'' 
 
 " No ! but, Auntie, you know very well I mean the ghost 
 that Mr. Blogg said he saw — ' the White Lady.' The picture, 
 too, and the likeness which he saw in it to the ghost, how do you 
 explain that away ; and John Maudeville's docket too, why did he 
 cut the White Lady's picture out of its frame, in 171 6 1 and why 
 did he roll her up, and stow her away in the Muniment room ? '' 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 87 
 
 "•Child," said my Aunt, very slowly and distinctly, " there is 
 a ghost that is said to haunt Queen Elizabeth's room, but it is 
 so long since any one saw it that no one in the house except me 
 knows of it — not even Brooks, who thinks he knows everything 
 about Mandeville Hall. When I was first married I remember 
 I wanted to change our sleeping-rooms from the side on which 
 they now are, and which, as you know, looks north to the State 
 rooms, which look south. I thought them lighter 'and warmer, 
 though the furniture and fittings are gloomy enough. My 
 husband refused, and would give no reason for a long time. 
 When I pressed him, he said he wasn't going to sleep in a 
 ghost's room, and to have the White Lady looking in upon him 
 at night. He would tell me no more, but said if I chose to look 
 into a drawer in a cabinet in the Muniment room, I would find 
 John Mandeville's diary — the same Mandeville, no doubt, who 
 cut the picture out which now hangs up there in the Hall. You 
 may think it odd, but from that day till the other day, I 
 never cared to look for John Mandeville's diary. I do not think 
 I even remembered where it was when we found the picture, 
 though one would have thought that fact would have recalled 
 it to my memory. I had always a vague apprehension of putting 
 any visitor into that room, and I do not think it has been occu- 
 pied ten times in the last forty years. I never put any one into 
 it during my widowhood, till this London banker comes and 
 piits the best judge of bristles on Change into the room, and lo ! 
 this prosaic man sees the ghost, and recognises her picture. It 
 is certainly very odd." 
 
 " But have you seen John Mandeville's diary now, Auntie 1 " 
 1 asked, for I felt sure that was what she had been "rummaging 
 for," to use Brooks's elegant phrase, while I was out pheasant- 
 shooting. 
 
 " Yes, I have, child," said my Aunt. " Here it is." As she 
 said this she took a few sheets of yellow-looking paper out of 
 her Davenport table, and began : 
 
 '"Sept. 20, 1715,— the full of the Moone. On this night ye 
 White Lady, my great great grandmother, Lucy Mandeville, 
 was seen by General Tryon in ye Queen's room. She came 
 weeping and wailing to his bed, and soe passed into the sjde- 
 roome and disappeared. N.B. There is no exit from the side- 
 roome, and it is wall'd up at ye windowe. 
 
 " ' The General was exceeding scared, and was for flying ye 
 hall. Hee was persuaded to remaine by ye promise of another 
 sleeping roome. 
 
 " ' This Lucy Mandeville was an Ogle, and lived very un- 
 happie with my great great grandfather temp. Jacobi l™ 1 . She 
 
88 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 killed her cliilde in the side-roome, and threw itt oute of the 
 windowe, which was since wall'd up. She then drown'd herselfe 
 inn ye moate.' 
 
 " That is one entry. Here is another which answers to the 
 docket on the portrait. 
 
 "'Jan. 3, 1715/16, N.S.— On this daye, 1" John Mandeville 
 did, with mine own hand, cut out off its frame, the portrait of 
 Lucy Mandeville, my great great grandmother, and did put itt 
 away oute of sighte in ye Muniment chamber, that itt might 
 not hange in ye halle with ye other portraits.' 
 
 " There you have it all chapter and verse in John Mandeville's 
 writing, and I must say," said my Aunt, " that I have now a 
 firmer belief in the reality of the White Lady, and in Mr. Blogg's 
 story than I ever had before." 
 
 " It was odd, too, Auntie, that old Blogg saw her at the full 
 of the moon in September, 183-, and that John Mandeville puts 
 an entry into this diary that she appeared in September, 1715, 
 at the full of the moon." 
 
 "Very odd," said my Aunt. "It all puts me in mind of 
 ■what Chief Justice Earwig said when he was past eighty — when 
 was it ? The last time I dined at Whitley when he was down 
 for the Warwick Assizes, that the evidence in some ghost stories 
 — the Airlie Drummer for instance, the Sherbrooke Ghost, and 
 the Brown Lady of Bainham, the Townshend Ghost,— was in 
 every case such as would be received in a Court of Law. 
 I think our Mandeville Ghost would match any of them; 
 and, as you say, Lucy Mandeville's apparitions go on all-fours. 
 Strange times these when a.n old family ghost takes it into her 
 head to appear to a stolid tallow and bristle merchant, and not 
 to one of her old stock." 
 
 " Yes ! but then, Auntie, you must remember that none of 
 the old stock sleep in Queen Elizabeth's room, but if I had been 
 sharp I might have known the hall was haunted, for when I first 
 went to school, Deepdale, one of the boys, taunted me with your 
 living alone with the Ghost in Mandeville Hall." 
 
 " The Deepdales were always unmannerly, and worse," said 
 my Aunt dryly. There is an entry in John Mandeville's Diary 
 very much to the point. Here it is : 
 
 "'July 30, A" 10 1720.— Mr. Deepdale, the antiquary, did 
 come over to look at ye manuscripts in ye Muniment roome. 
 On taking leave he did beg ye loane of ye Foundation Charter 
 of Mandeville Abbey, by ye Empresse Maude, which I willingly 
 granted. I trust hee will soone restore itt.' 
 
 "Then, '1722, April 2. — I did see Mr. Deepdale at ye 
 Warwick Sessions, and did prcsse him to restore ye Foundation 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 89 
 
 Deede of ye Empresse Maude, and hee made answer that he 
 had taken itt to London as a greate rarity to showe to his friende 
 Sir Eobert Cotton.' That deed, Edward, was never restored. 
 It is not among our muniments, and is no doubt still among the 
 MSS. in the Cottonian Collection at the British Museum." 
 
 So there were Auntie and I at Mandeville Hall, and Blogg 
 and Bullion in London, in possession of a ghost story ; what 
 Blogg and Bullion would do with it, remained to be seen ; but 
 my Aunt Mandeville's course was clear. She resolved to keep 
 Blogg's story a strict secret from Brooks and the other servants, 
 and trusted that the unhappy Kussian merchant would keep his 
 story to himself for fear of being thought ridiculous on Change. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 HOW THIM3S WENT AT MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 Time rolled on, and I was now twenty. I scarcely remember 
 •what happened to me between eighteen and twenty. Happy 
 the boyhood the annals of which are dull. In mine were few 
 events. Every now and then would come letters from my 
 mother, showing that my father was sinking deeper and deeper 
 into the Great Dismal Swamp. The slaves had passed from 
 apprenticeship to complete freedom, for which they were about as 
 fit as children to keep house. In any temperate clime they 
 would have been forced to work for existence, but in the West 
 Indies a man can sit down for a month and supply himself with 
 food by mere tickling the soil with a hoe for half-a-day. Then, 
 too, wife-working is a great institution, especially for a negro, 
 and very often the men did no work at all, but made their 
 ■wives put in their provisions. As for the children, negroes were 
 never very good fathers or mothers. They were as the hen 
 pheasants who are above hatching their own eggs, and must 
 have Dorking hens to take the labour off their hands. The fine 
 ladies of ornithology, they bring up their children by the help 
 of others. In the case of the negroes this was an evil inherited 
 from the old system. The slaves were so accustomed to see 
 their children taken care of from their birth at the pains and 
 expense of the proprietor, that they altogether neglected the 
 duties of parents. 
 
 ■ Of course, this dry-nursing by the owner ceased with slavery ; 
 but the habits of a century cannot be made to cease by Act of 
 Parliament. The owners were unable to take care of the chil- 
 dren, and the parents would not. The consequence was- the 
 
90 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 children died fast ; and mere pity, on our estate, fed children 
 who, like the pheasants to which I have compared them, flew 
 away to other woods when full fledged, and never did a day's 
 work ! When my father called a meeting of his people, and 
 explained to them that the proprietors, for a variety of reasons, 
 could not now undertake the expense of a do'ctor, and hospital, 
 and nursery for the children, the negroes were reasonable enough 
 in speech, and said : 
 
 " No, Massa, dat nebber do. Massa Halfacre can nebber 
 rear all dese piccaninny." 
 
 " Who, then, is to do it ? " 
 
 " Oh ! Massa, dey born gentlemen, dey support demselves." 
 
 As for John, my eldest brother, he was in London, eating his 
 terms, and the younger children had been sent home to a 
 private school. Not to Dr. Cutbrush ; he had been prematurely 
 cut off at seventy, as his tombstone said, " by the bursting of a 
 blood-vessel in the midst of a career of usefulness, thus affording 
 a melancholy example of the incertitude of existence, even when 
 its prolongation seems most desirable." 
 
 The fact was that across one of Dr. Cutbrush's fields ran a 
 footpath. Many a time have I seen the worthy Doctor in chase 
 of little boys who strayed from the footpath in spite of an elabo- 
 rate notice which said that "trespassers would be prosecuted 
 with the utmost rigour of the law." If he caught them, he 
 added the vigour of his birch-hardened arm to the rigour of the 
 law. He either caned or boxed the ears of the offenders ; and 
 if they pleaded that they could not read the notice, he boxed 
 their ears still more to encourage them to learn to read. In 
 .these days he would have been summoned for an assault by the 
 village attorney. But those were the days of universal ear- 
 boxing, and hair and ear-pulling, and what would be an aggra- 
 vated assault now would then have seemed to a passer-by the 
 most natural thing in the world. Boxing on the ears and caning 
 little boys were like hanging for sheep-stealing, bleeding, and 
 calomel, and flogging in the army, and bull-baiting, and cock- 
 shying, and a host of other brutal, drastic things, which were then 
 done every day, and at which no one was shocked, because they 
 were done every day, had been done every day, and, it was sup- 
 posed, would be done every day for all time. We now look back 
 at them in their true light, and see how shocking some of them 
 at least were. 
 
 But to return to Dr. Cutbrush, and the manner of his end. 
 On that fatal day he was eagerly chasing two little boys across 
 the field, they having trespassed in search of wild-flowers. Cane 
 in hand, he had all but reached them, and they were shrinking 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 91 
 
 away in fear of the dreaded stroke. The stroke came, but it 
 alighted on Dr. Cutbrush. He was smitten by apoplexy, and 
 fell forward, his outstretched cane just grazing the back of the 
 hindmost boy. They turned round as they heard the dull 
 thud of the fall, and saw the Doctor with distorted features 
 stretched before them. They cried for help, and help came. 
 They carried him home. The Doctor Mindererus of the village 
 was in attendance. They tried to breathe a vein, but it was no 
 use. The Doctor had passed to other fields, across which, let us 
 hope, there are no footpaths, but rights of way everywhere. 
 
 My Aunt and I were the best friends in the world. She was 
 as jealous as ever, and as devoted as ever. I had no will but 
 hers, nor did I wish for any other. Wbat did we do ? Oh ! we 
 restored the chapel, and made it more ecclesiastical. In doing 
 so we had to take up the pavement, and the workmen broke 
 into the Mandeville vault, and Auntie and I went down one 
 bright afternoon, and saw all the old Mandevilles since the Man- 
 deville who was fined one thousand marks by King Henry VII. 
 The earlier Mandeville monuments were in a sad state of dese- 
 cration amongst the Abbey ruins. But here was John Mande- 
 ville, the Trimmer and Turncoat, lying in a sadly crushed coffin 
 between his two wives, and a whole row of little coffins contain- 
 ing the Mandeville windfalls -of two or three generations, the 
 untimely fruit of the family, packed up upon him. Do you 
 fancy the dead lie still and quiet in then- coffins — that it is all one 
 dead level in the grave 1 Alas ! you had only to step down 
 into that Mandeville vault, to see that there are ups and downs 
 beyond the grave, just as there are in daily life. Here was a 
 father crushed by the weight of his children and grandchildren. 
 The stoutest elm and the toughest lead could not stand the 
 burden of three generations of babies. That Mandeville was 
 crushed as flat as a pancake, his poor old bones protruding from 
 the riven lead and rotten wood, one arm thrust out, as . though 
 warning his descendants against early marriages and hosts of 
 children. Too truly was typified in that coffin the fate of a 
 family estate ruined by the charges entailed on it by three 
 wives and twenty children. Another coffin stood on end, as 
 though, impatient of death, it had edged its way 'toward the 
 gate of the vault, and sidled itself off the coffin on which it had 
 been reverently laid, till it slipped down with a crash of grave 
 dust, and remained with its heels in the air. Idle ambition, 
 that of a corpse craving for the light of day ! — restless body 
 that longed to follow the spirit whithersoever the spirit had flown ! 
 
 Some were stripped of their -velvet and brass- mouldings 
 and handles, shorn of honour and distinction, even among 
 
92 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 their dead fellows. Horny-fisted undertakers and rude labourers 
 had so treated them to make a nice resting-place for the last 
 new comer. Others lay as it were quiet and comfortable, side 
 by side. Well-behaved coffins, keeping up appearances even in 
 that sad vault, where the spade and mattock were the sole 
 authority. 
 
 We read some of the plates — the earliest being, strange to 
 say, more legible than the later inscriptions. That Trimmer's 
 plate, which recited all his honours, was as plain as the first day 
 it had been nailed on. Among others that we read was this, in 
 which we both took a strange interest : 
 
 " Lucy Mandeville, deceased at the full of ye moone, Sept. 
 16th, Anno Dom. 1620, buryed at midnight Sept. 20th." 
 
 And above her lay a little coffin with this inscription : 
 
 "Arthur Mandeville, sonne of Lucy Mandeville, born 1616, 
 buryed at midnight Sept. 20th, 1620." 
 
 We felt a flutter at this fresh proof of the truth of John Man- 
 deville's diary. Here before us lay all that was left of Lucy 
 Mandeville, " the White Lady," and of her child, both buried 
 at midnight, four days after their death. 
 
 We had seen enough. My aunt had the vault carefully 
 repaired, and she never entered it again till she joined the rest 
 of the family in their last long sleep. 
 
 What else did we do ? We cut down some of the old trees 
 where they were too thick, and planted thousands of new ones. 
 We were, in truth, rather over-treed, but my Aunt used to 
 boast that time out of mind there had never been an oak felled 
 to pay a debt on the Mandeville estate. I am afraid our hedge • 
 rows showed very bad farming, our fields were too small, and 
 we had no leases — only yearly tenants ; but then the same 
 tenants went on from father to son, and hardly one of those was 
 ever ejected, except by death. The result was that we had a 
 set of tenants with very little capital, who could aflbrd to lay 
 very little out on the land, and several of them were childless 
 widows, who had persuaded my Uncle, and after him my Aunt, 
 to let them stay on at the old farm where their husbands had 
 lived and died. Some of them were very good farmers — equal to 
 any man, but some of them were very bad. Then the farms 
 were too small. Modern farming would have levelled their fences, 
 cut down the oaks and elms — whether free-standing or in the 
 hedge-rows — thrown several farms into one, and given twenty- 
 one years' leases. We should thus have raised our rents, and 
 our tenants would have been men of capital, not afraid to lay 
 out their money on the land. 
 
 But our farming was not modem farming. If there was any- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 93 
 
 thing that Aunt Mandeville hated more than another, it was an 
 improved agricultural implement. Eeaping and thrashing ma- 
 chines were to her as shepherds to the old Egyptians. She 
 could not away with them. I think the chief reason why she 
 so detested Claw, Tooth, and Nail, was because of their im- 
 proved sugar machinery. What she would have done had she 
 lived till now, and been forced to go to the Agricultural Show 
 at Birmingham, and seen steam-ploughs, scarifiers, clod-crushers, 
 and all their kind, I cannot telL She always said when advised 
 to pursue a different system with her tenants : "I prefer to 
 keep them as they are. I think it the duty of a landlord to 
 grow men as well as corn." She paid her labourers well, and 
 built them good but not architectural cottages ; but I am not 
 at all sure that with all her liberal ideas she would not have 
 much preferred them if they could not read and write. She 
 often said, Book-learning was like letting out water, you could 
 never tell where it would stop. Reading was not bad, a little 
 of it, and writing and arithmetic the same ; but when she heard 
 some philosopher say he hoped the day would come that the 
 man who broke stones by the roadside would be a good mathe- 
 matician, she dryly said : " But not a good stone-breaker, and 
 in this stiff soil we need stones on our roads more than Euclid 
 in our cottages." 
 
 Perhaps there are some still left who may think Aunt Man- 
 deville was right. But, right or wrong, she would have her 
 way, and she liked far more to see the boys and girls playing 
 on the village green, than to go to the school and hear them 
 droning out their lessons on Bell's system. 
 
 Then we restored the church. We thought we had done it 
 very nicely, and it was one of the first " restorations '' in the 
 district ; but I lately heard that " the Ecclesiological Society of 
 Mercia" had made an excursion to Mandeville Church, and 
 drawn up a report in which they expressed their dissatisfac- 
 tion of the utterly unecclesiastical way in which the restoration 
 of twenty-five years before had been carried out. Amongst other 
 things, they said that " the remains of the rood-screen bearing 
 traces of a crucifix, had been .removed, and that a double 
 piscina, mentioned by Dugdale in his Monasticon, had disap- 
 peared." 
 
 But what they " felt bound to protest against more than any- 
 thing else was that the hideous and post-Reformation practice 
 of ' pues ' "—that was the way they spelt " pews "— " had been 
 retained ; " and they especially criticised "the green baize ' pue ' 
 of the Mandevilles," in which the family had been wont to show 
 themselves at church for generations. 
 
94 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " What made this puing more deplorable,'' they went on to 
 say, was, " that under the pues several brasses were concealed : 
 three of them of ecclesiastics in cope, stole, chasuble, and amice, 
 — invaluable examples of ecclesiastical vestments, which were 
 thus lost to the religious world by the selfishness of the family." 
 
 These were very hard words for my poor Aunt, who did her 
 very best for the rickety old edifice, which, till then, was as cold 
 and comfortless as a barn. I have often observed that good old 
 churches, like very good people, have a way of being very cold to 
 their visitors. My Aunt had made this church as warm and 
 snug as possible. 
 
 Old Betty Briggs said, " There bean't no more rheumatics, 
 Master Edward, in church since Lady Mandeville done up the 
 church." 
 
 My Aunt also had it drained and whitewashed ; and I am 
 sorry to say that a very lanky figure of a giant, which was faintly 
 visible among the damp, green plaster near the door, and which 
 the village boys called " Long Tom of Coventry," — a relation, I 
 suppose, of Peeping Tom — altogether disappeared in the opera- 
 tion. I little expected to see my friend " Long Tom " reappear 
 after so many years. 
 
 " We are informed," says an appendix to the report, headed 
 Frescoes in Mandeville Church, " by the Bev. Dr. Thurifer, Priest 
 of the Church of the Immaculate' Conception at Dumbleton, 
 that, before the late so-called ' restoration,' there was a splendid 
 fresco of Saint Christopher bearing the infant Jesus, and above 
 them the figure of the ever-blessed Virgin standing on a crescent. 
 Out of the mouth of the Saviour proceeded the legend, ' Ave 
 Maria, mater purissima, stella maris.' . . . The rest of the 
 inscription was unfortunately covered by a Protestant slab^ 
 bearing the following inscription : — 
 
 Satrttr to tije JBftemDtg 
 
 OF 
 
 EBENEZER BIGGS, 
 
 FORTY YEARS STEWARD 
 
 AT 
 
 MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 THIS STONE WAS ERECTED TO A FAITHFUL SERVANT 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN MANDEVILLE, ESQ., 
 
 OF MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 BORN MARCH 1, 1670. DIED JULY 22, 1750. 
 
 " We grieve to state that the whole of this most interesting 
 mural painting, which to doubt dates from the early part of the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 95 
 
 thirteenth century, judging by the character of the writing, 
 perished in the so-called restoration in the year 183—." 
 
 I am inclined to think it better that St. Christopher, or Long 
 Tom of Coventry, should perish together with the parish rheu- 
 matism at once and for ever, so far as its being caught at church 
 was concerned, than that he should continue to sprawl over the 
 wall, green with the accumulated damp of centuries. 
 
 No doubt, if Aunt Mandeville had lived a quarter of a century 
 later, she would have done her restoration better, and perhaps 
 the report would have been less severe ; but one thing I am sure 
 she would have clung to had she been alive, and that was her 
 pew. A church without a pew ! Free seats ! Every beggar 
 sitting next to you, and elbowing you out of your own seat ! 
 That was an equality and fraternity which her liberalism never 
 contemplated. I think I see her now in her bonnet, which was 
 neither large nor small, a real bonnet, not one of these strings 
 and roses which are now called bonnets ; still less a hat — how 
 she would have hated hats ! — with her glossy hair braided over 
 her white marble brow, and her brown eyes- sparkling when the- 
 choir sang well, sitting up as "Straight as an arrow, with her Bible 
 on the desk before her, in her great green baize pew, nearly in 
 front of the pulpit, and listening to the sermon, which she never 
 failed to criticise if it was dull or over long. Once when a 
 clergyman came to the Hall on a visit and offered to preach for 
 the rector, old Brooks leant over him at dinner, as soon as he 
 heard the offer made to the rector, and whispered : 
 
 " Above all things, Mr. Mazzard, Mrs. Mandeville dislikes a 
 long sermon." 
 
 What the said Mazzard thought of this confidential commu- 
 nication I don't know. Perhaps he thought Brooks was a Jesuit 
 in the family, the keeper of my Aunt's conscience, and quite- 
 entitled to address him on the subject ; but, whatever he thought, 
 I am sure, if his discourse sinned either in prosiness or length, 
 he would be sure to hear of it from Aunt Mandeville. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 HOW WE WENT TO ILFRACOMBE. 
 
 My last Long Vacation at Oxford had now come. Next term 
 I was to pass my examination for my last go, and to put on my 
 bachelor's gown, and after residing one more term to leave the 
 university. I was quite ready for the examination, and troubled 
 
96 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 my head little about it. I had not been altogether idle, in spite 
 of the scene I have related about ^Eschylus and "alas ! : alas !" 
 " ah me ! ah me ! " As usual, I was to be with my Aunt at the 
 sea. It was two years I think after she lent Mandeville Hall to 
 Sir Benjamin Bullion, and — excuse the expression, — brought the 
 ghost to life again. Perhaps you will wonder, undergraduates of 
 " the House," and fathers whose sons those undergraduates are, 
 why I did not go to Nova Zembla, or the Faroe Islands, or Sicily, 
 or some such quiet out-of-the-way place on a reading party. 
 For two reasons ; one because I had no faith in reading parties, 
 which as often as not end in dead plucks ; and, secondly, because 
 I was not silly or stupid enough to read with a tutor through 
 the Long Vacation for a common pass. Perhaps it would have 
 been better for me if I had gone anywhere else but where I did 
 go, and that was to Ilfracombe with my Aunt. Those reasons 
 apart, I am sure she would never have suffered me to be away 
 three months from her ; Bhe would have been afraid that I might 
 become fonder of some one else than of her. Not that she even 
 allowed herself to imagine that I could be in love. She wished 
 me to marry some one, but she did not wish me to be in love. 
 No ! whether it was man or whether it was woman, she was 
 afraid of all of them, and kept me with her lest I should love 
 her less, and not do as she wished. Next to me, and perhaps 
 before me, she loved the estate. 
 
 You will say, Aunt Mandeville was a most unreasonable 
 woman ; but, reader, have you never met an unreasonable 
 woman in your life 1 And are you not an unreasonable man, if 
 you are a man, to say such a thing of my Aunt ? Of course she 
 was unreasonable ; most people are when they are very fond of 
 another human being, and very jealous besides. If she had not 
 loved me so much, she would not have been what you call so 
 " unreasonable." It would have mattered little to her with 
 whom I went to this place or that. She would have said, " It 
 is quite natural that the boy should amuse himself in the com- 
 pany of young people of his own age ; " but that was not the way 
 in which Aunt Mandeville looked at the matter. I belonged to 
 her. She never conquered the feeling that I was her property. 
 I was all in all to her, and she wished me to be the same to her. 
 " We have one life, Edward," she used to say ; " let us never 
 part." This was why I had so few friends, and why so few 
 people came to see us at Mandeville Hall ; there was no question, 
 and could be no question, of my ever liking better to be with, 
 any one else than my Aunt Mandeville. 
 
 Among all the places which we had visited from year to year 
 it so happened we had never been to Ilfracombe. Then it was 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 97 
 
 a place not so easy to get at by land, and to go by sea you had 
 to sleep a night in Bristol or Clifton. Things may be better 
 now. I have no doubt they are ; but all I say is, then you had 
 to sleep a night at either of those places. I say nothing more, 
 out of respect to the feelings of the families of the former hotel- 
 keepers, who, I hope, sleep as soundly, whether in their beds or 
 in their graves, as we did not in the year 183-. 
 
 Well ! we set off from Mandeville Hall. We posted along in 
 a procession not unlike that famous one of my father in quest of 
 the Enchantress. My Aunt and I in a chariot, with Brooks, — 
 the ever-inquisitive Brooks, — on the rumble. Then, in a sort of 
 landau or berline, came my Aunt's maid, and the housekeeper, 
 and the cook, and I believe an upper-housemaid. On the box were 
 two footmen. Ever so many other servants, and a carriage and 
 horses, had been sent round by land I don't know how far. The 
 carriages in which we travelled were to be housed somewhere in 
 Bristol, whence we were to go to Ilfracombe in a steamer, the 
 first I think on which my Aunt had ever set her foot. After 
 two days' posting we reached the town of Bath, and in due time 
 Bristol. I purposely, for the reasons given above, refrain from 
 saying where we put up in that ancient city ; but I must add 
 that when we woke up in the morning we might with justice 
 have applied to Bristol what the traveller said of Stony Strat- 
 ford. If you have forgotten the story, or never heard it, I pity 
 you ; I am not going to repeat it. I am also bound to say that 
 the inmates of our beds had proved most impartial. My Aunt 
 was a slight, tall woman, and ■ her maid a short, squat figure ; 
 but both their faces looked as though they were recovering from 
 the small-pox. So, too, I was slim and spare, Brooks stout and 
 fat ; but in each case our assailants had shown great impartiality 
 of attack. Their plan of operations was simple : it consisted in 
 stinging us all over, so that, as Brooks said, with a face of scarlet : 
 
 " Master Edward, you couldn't so much as lay a pin between 
 the bites." 
 
 Breakfast over, we hurried to the Quay under the Hot Wells, 
 and there found the steamer Diana ready to start, blowing off 
 her steam every now and then like a sea-horse. I am sure I 
 don't know if sea-horses do snort, except in poetry ; so, as this 
 is a true story all in prose, you had better read grampus or por- 
 poise for sea-horse, both of which mammals, as I well know, do 
 snort and blow off their steam through their noses or spout- 
 holes. 
 
 I handed my Aunt on board, and got her a good seat aft, not 
 far from the companion. Brooks did the same for the upper 
 servants, and the footmen did the same for the maids. The 
 
98 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 luggage — what a pile of it ! — was hardly on board, and covered 
 with a tarpaulin, when a bell rang. " Any more for the shore V 
 shouted the captain. A few friends of intending passengers 
 hastened along the gangway, the hawser was loosed, and away 
 went the Diana, on the top of the ebb tide, down the Avon 
 under St. Vincent's Rocks. I remember it was just about the 
 time when the first bar of the present Suspension Bridge had 
 been laid across the Avon. I believe it was thought a wonderful 
 thing then, just as the Great Western's feat in running across to 
 New York under steam was thought a feat so bold as to be well- 
 nigh impious ! Well ! we have done many more such " im- 
 pious " things since ; and it will be well for us, here and here- 
 after, if we never do any more " impious " things than steaming 
 across the Atlantic. 
 
 As we ran down to Pyll, at the mouth of the Avon, we had 
 time — those of us who had any eyes in their head' — to see that 
 it was blowing very hard, and that we were likely to have a 
 rough passage. One is so landlocked going down the Avon that 
 one can scarcely feel how hard the wind blows ; but still one 
 may look out for squalls when one sees, as I saw, haycocks 
 flying, and large limbs of trees cracking and splitting before the 
 gale. 
 
 Even Brooks began to suspect something. 
 
 " See them haycocks yonder, and them boughs flying, Master 
 Edward. Do you think we are going to have a storm V 
 
 I have said that Aunt Mandeville was an excellent sailor, and 
 as for me the entrails of Horace's reapers on land were not more 
 " dour " than mine on sea. 
 
 " Storm, Brooks ; I should think so. Have you got your 
 life-belt ready ? You'll have to swim for it before the day is 
 over — 
 
 " Half o'er, half o'er, to Aberdour 
 Is forty fathoms deep, 
 And there lies Mr. Butler Brooks, 
 And all the housemaids at his feet. " 
 
 " Oh ! Mr. Edward, don't be so unfeeling. I'm sure Mrs. 
 Mandeville would be the last lady in the world to take her 
 servants to sea in a storm. Think of Mrs. Brooks in Warwick- 
 shire, and the friends and sweethearts of them poor maids. Why 
 not persuade the captain to turn back?" 
 
 " You had better try, Brooks. Here he comes." As I said 
 this the captain, a fine specimen of the British sailor, came up 
 from his cabin, where he had gone for a minute to put on a 
 sou-wester. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 99 
 
 " Oh, captain !" said Mr. Brooks, " -what do you think of the 
 •weather 1 Hadn't we better turn back 1" 
 
 " Turn back ! " said the captain, with an expression which I 
 had rather not repeat, but if it had been literally carried out 
 would have placed Mr. Brooks in the position of Tobit. " Turn 
 back ? Why out of what Loo-nattic Assylum did you escape 
 this morning, and where's your keeper ?" 
 
 " Sir," said Mr. Brooks, his dignity getting the better of his 
 fear, " you are quite mistaken. I have escaped from no ' Assy- 
 lum,' nor have I any keeper on board. I am as sane as you, 
 and I only wished to know if it was quite safe to venture out to 
 sea when the wind is so high. Mrs. Mandeville has a great 
 objection to go to sea in a storm." 
 
 " Then," said the captain, " if you are Mrs. Mandeville's 
 keeper, may I ask why you let her come on board in a strong 
 wind? Foul or fair, the Diana goes to sea, if you call- a run 
 down the North Devon coast ' sea,' which I don't." 
 
 " Mrs. Mandeville is my missus " Brooks was beginning. 
 
 " May I axe your name ? But I suppose it's Mandeville, as 
 you say Mrs. Mandeville is your missus 1" 
 
 " My name, captain !" said Brooks, with awful solemnity, 
 speaking with minute guns, for all the world like the late Sir 
 Bobert Peel in a great debate ; " my name it is Brooks, which is 
 not Mandeville ; leastways, as I said before, Mrs. Mandeville is 
 my missus." 
 
 " If she's your missus, she ought to take better care on you, 
 nor to let you make a fool of yourself, axing silly questions, and 
 stopping the working of the ship. But I've no time to listen to 
 you." Then to the man at the helm : 
 
 " Hard a starboard ! Can't you see that schooner J" Then, 
 having dodged the coaster, close hauled on the starboard tack, 
 and who, by rights, ought to have ported her helm, the captain 
 bellowed out " steady," and the word being caught up and re- 
 peated by the man at the wheel, he dived down below again 
 for a minute, leaving Mr. Brooks, very much discomfited, on 
 
 " Steady, indeed," said Brooks ; " call this steady," as the 
 Diana, who was a lively craft, began to lift and dip her nose in 
 the sea. " Call this ' steady.' Master Edward, do you call this 
 ' steady V Cook, do you call this ' steady ? ' " appealing to a heap 
 of collapsed humanity which lay huddled up on a seat where the 
 cook had sat in full-blown dignity ten minutes before. "Steady !" 
 he reiterated ruefully, as he leant his head over the side and 
 made no vain oblation to the marine divinities. 
 
 Up to this time there had been really no sea at all. Brooks 
 r h 2 
 
100 ' ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and the cook belonged to that class of persons who are sick 
 before they put their foot in a boat. These are they who, in the 
 upper classes, try all sorts of specifics against sea-sickness. 
 Creosote, chloroform, chlorodyne, nux vomica, and arsenic, 
 among the active remedies ; and as mechanical means, bags of 
 ice all down their spine and hot -water bottles on the pit of the 
 stomach. But, in truth, for such persons there is no cure for 
 their enemy. Fear has turned their flank even before embark- 
 ing. Let them lie down beneath boats and booms, on benches, 
 sofas, hatchways, and there spend their time, if the voyage is 
 short, in ejaculations and brandy-and-water, till the wished-for 
 haven is made. If the voyage is long, and they must pass a 
 triste noche on board, they had better creep into a berth, lie flat 
 on their backs, gnaw a hard biscuit, and try to doze away the 
 weary hours. 
 
 There sat Aunt Mandeville on the deck, looking as firm as 
 though she were in her pew in Mandeville church, and when the 
 captain asked, " How do you feel, maim 1" surprising him with a 
 " I enjoy it very much indeed, captain ! " 
 
 There were other passengers. A girls' school going down to 
 Ilfracombe for an excursion ; a party which ought to have held 
 good, " wind and weather permitting," but which occurred, 
 nevertheless, the tickets having been taken the day before. 
 Some of the young ladies were already in the state of Brooks. 
 The principal, or lady-superior as she would be called now, was 
 too frightened to be ill, and irritated the mate, a huge Cornish 
 man, by asking him, when she saw the pumps going to get rid of 
 some bilge-water, " whether we were in great danger ? " 
 
 " Danger, marm ! they ain't no danger ; only we shall have a 
 dollop of a sea when we gets into Bridgewater Bay — you won't 
 find it there as calm as this." 
 
 " Then why do you use the pumps 1 I thought they never 
 took to the pumps till the ship was in danger." 
 
 " Ve takes to the pumps because the vessel 's not so tight as 
 she should be, and we can't get shot of the bilge-water in no 
 other way. It's nasty-smelling stuff. Take care ; if you lean 
 over so, you'll get splashed. ''' 
 
 It was too late to warn the principal ; she, too, looked hard 
 .over the side and followed Brooks. 
 
 Then there was an old colonel, a Devonshire Squire ; he was 
 a good sailor, and as cheery as a bird. He began to talk to my 
 Aunt, and pointed out the places as we passed them. Weston- 
 super-Mare, Clevedon, the flat and steep Holms, Cardiff Bay, 
 where we saw one or two vessels stranded, Bridgewater Bay, 
 Minehead. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 101 
 
 Whoever christened the Diana ought to be ashamed of herself. 
 A Diana ought to be light and lively, able, if a ship, to do her 
 ten knots or more, to overtake other vessels in the chase, and to 
 outsail all rivals. Not so was our Diana. We had the wind aft, 
 and yet she crawled along, doing scarcely her six knots. She 
 ought to have been renamed the Tortoise, for such a sea-slug 
 never had boiler in her. 
 
 In Bridgewater Bay, just in that " dollop " of a sea which the 
 mate had promised us, dinner was served. It consisted, I need 
 hardly say, of a boiled leg of mutton and turnips, under-done in 
 the usual way, with the red gravy spurting out of it as soon as 
 cut. My Aunt had sandwiches on deck ; but I obeyed the cap- 
 tain's call, and sat down with him and the colonel. We proposed 
 a broil, but the captain couldn't think of it. 
 
 " Biled " mutton, he maintained, was the sweetest and whole- 
 somest thing on earth or sea. 
 
 " Not that I don't like ' biled ' beef, too, if it's ' rare,' like 
 this." 
 
 And, with that, he fell to swallowing large gobbets of meat, 
 like Polyphemus or Gargantua. 
 
 The colonel and I satisfied our hunger, which was intense, 
 with a few morsels of the best-done parts of the leg, and ran up 
 on deck to take a look at the weather. The sea had got even 
 beyond the mate's dollop ; and, as soon as the captain came on 
 deck, he ordered the sails to be close-reefed. 
 
 " Can't afford to throw away the wind," he said ; " but it 
 blows strong, and we shall feel it worse off Porlock." 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 HOW I SAW SOMEBODY ON BOARD THE STEAMER. 
 
 And now, for the first time, I was aware of a couple stowed 
 away under one of the boats, which sheltered them from the 
 spray, which now began to fly about as the sea grew whiter and 
 " gurlier," — to use the old Scotch word — and the tops of each 
 " white horse " were cut straight off by the keen wind. 
 
 One of them was a tall, elderly man, evidently a gentleman ; 
 and the other was as plainly a lady, and a young one ; but they 
 were so muffled up that it was hard to tell what they were 
 
 I wondered then, I wonder still, and I shall wonder on till I 
 
102 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 die, whether ■women feel the same curiosity to know what a 
 muffled-up man is like that men do to know what a veiled 
 woman is like. I know it is sometimes supposed that women 
 have more curiosity than men ; but it is a mistake — just as it 
 is a mistake to think that women are greater gossips than: men ; 
 and that they can't keep a secret better. Why, the greatest 
 blabs and gossips, and the most ridiculously inquisitive mortals 
 I have ever met, have been men. Look at old Fetch-and- carry 
 at the Club ! — can any woman be a greater gossip than he % 
 And, as for curiosity, why, he'd watch a whole night, with his 
 feet up to the ankles in snow, to know how late you came home 
 in the morning ; and, ten to one, just as you were drawing your 
 latch-key out of the door, he'd come across the street, in still 
 deeper snow, to ask you where you had been, and what you had 
 been about — " coming home at that late hour." 
 
 Whenever I dine at the Club, which isn't often, I know he 
 asks the steward what I have for dinner — what wine I drink — 
 if I had oysters before and coffee after — what oysters I had, 
 natives at half-a-crown, or Medinas at eighteenpence — and so on 
 ad infinitum. Poor old fellow ! he hasn't much to do ; and I 
 take it out in laughing at him, and hoaxing him with stories 
 that never happened. I don't grudge him the pleasure of 
 knowing what I eat and what my dinner costs ; but don't any 
 of you dare to tell me he isn't curious, and that he doesn't enjoy 
 going about gossiping from house to house, and blabbing, as 
 much as any old woman. They say that the imbibing of brandy 
 can be instantly detected by its appearance in the brain ; but 
 I'll back a story to run from old Fetch-and-carry's ear to his 
 tongue far faster than any spirit from the stomach to the cere- 
 bellum. 
 
 I wonder, then, I say, whether women are as inquisitive about 
 men, when muffled up, as men are about women in the same 
 case. I am inclined to think they are not. Why have men in 
 the East risked their lives, in the good old times of the sack and 
 the bowstring, in breaking into harems, and in the West braving 
 the terrors of the Inquisition — its racks, and fires, and stakes — 
 in scaling convents ? Why, even in England when men did such 
 ■wicked things, was there such pleasure in getting over a board- 
 ing-school wall, and running off in the night with one of the 
 young ladies ? The inhabitants of the harem, the convent, and 
 the boarding-school, were in each case, be it observed, mere pigs in 
 pokes, who might have charms, and might have none ! Why ? 
 Because whatever is hid away, and muffled up, and guarded by 
 blacks, and duennas, and teachers, is supposed to be infinitely 
 more lovely than what is exposed to the light of day. Fruit in 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 103 
 
 a garden is far more fruit than that which grows by the road- 
 side, hanging in every one's reach ; and so it is with women. If 
 you want your daughter to run away, shut her up. This will 
 give her beauty, if she has none, and increase any charms that 
 she may have tenfold ; and if you want any one to run away 
 with her, this receipt will be more infallible still. There will be 
 a mystery hanging over her which will draw lovers to her from 
 all quarters. Nay, even the pig-faced lady would have had 
 many admirers if she had never shown her face, been married in 
 a Honiton-lace veil, and persuaded her husband that she was 
 under a vow never to raise it. More than this. I am sure that 
 man would have lived happily all his life with that famous lady, 
 and never found out her pigfacedness till she had died in her 
 tenth confinement, all because her beauty was hidden and con- 
 cealed. 
 
 So there was I pacing the deck and holding on hard every 
 now and then, as the Diana rolled and pitched most ungrace- 
 fully, with the muffled couple before me. They bore the wea- 
 ther very .fairly, and for a long while held out no signal of dis- 
 tress. That was in their favour. They were not of that class 
 of travellers by sea whose hearts are ever in their mouth. They 
 might suffer inwardly, but not evidently as those baser natures 
 which I have already described. Thus we played at pitch-and- 
 toss, the great waves rolling in upon us from the west sou-west; 
 and the Sea-slug, or the Tortoise miscalled Diana, floundered 
 about by them in a most ungainly way. As the wind was on 
 Shore we had to stand well out in respectful distance from the 
 bold coast of North Devon, now opening on' our lee. Still the 
 muffled couple, their heads bowed on their bosoms, made no 
 sign. I felt like that student at Sais who stood and read on the 
 veil of the granite statue : "I am what I am, and you are what 
 you are ; and between us is no fellowship of feeling.'' Then I 
 revenged myself in thinking what the couple eould be — a Jew 
 and his wife on a wedding tour ; an attorney and his daughter ; 
 a solicitor and his niece. How long I should have gone on 
 thinking no one can tell, had not the sea, sympathising with my 
 curiosity, given the Diana such a buffet that she pitched, rolled 
 and tossed, and lurched all at once. In a moment both the 
 muffled sphynxes — no ! I will not call them sphynges — were 
 thrown on their knees on the deck. There is something ridi- 
 culous in seeing even your friend suddenly "decanted" in the 
 hunting field ; what, then, was it to me to behold two utter 
 strangers on their knees before me, as though in the act of 
 imploring my forgiveness for having puzzled me so long. If I 
 had been a bold, bad young man, I should have flown to the 
 
104 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 assistance of the muffled lady, and lifted her tenderly to the 
 seat. Instead of this, I was a very shy young man with ladies, 
 though when the ice was broken I could talk to them fast 
 enough. Just for all the world like those silly young men now- 
 a-days, who have made mesalliances because they daren't open 
 their mouths to a lady in society. 
 
 Instead, then, of flying to help the lady, I turned my atten- 
 tion to her male companion. I swear I did this from no base 
 desire to curry favour with what was evidently the lady's pro- 
 tector, were she young or old. It was all shyness and the love 
 of my species that made me behave as I did. My virtue was 
 instantly rewarded. In a voice weak with struggling so long 
 against his internal foe, the gentleman said : 
 . "Pray attend to my daughter, whom I am quite unable to 
 help. I can crawl up myself." 
 
 However, before he ended these few words I had re-seated 
 him. It -was the work of a second, half done before he began to 
 speak ; and then I turned to the daughter, whom, half on her 
 feet, another lurch had thrown floundering again. 
 
 Very gently and very shyly I lifted her up. She was more 
 frightened than hurt at the fall, but I had to lift her before I 
 could replace her at her father's side. 
 
 What is there in the touch of young female flesh and blood 
 which sends such a thrill through a young man's veins ? I 
 should like to ask this question of a jury of matrons. Here was 
 I in the most uupoetical of positions hauling up a half-seasick 
 young lady, muffled up to the roots of her hair, and yet I felt a 
 thrill. 
 
 The Diana now began to behave in such an outrageous 
 way, and made up for her sea-sluggishness by a series of starts 
 and jumps, as though she were the hunted deer itself, and 
 not the goddess of the chase. I could no longer pace the deck 
 without risk of being lurched overboard. No orang-outang could 
 have done it. Aunt Mandeville called to me to sit down, as it 
 gave her the fidgets to see me passing and repassing and stag- 
 gering to and fro. I had to sit down somewhere ; so I sat down 
 by the muffled young lady. Can any one say that I was at all 
 pushing or bold 1 Besides, had not her own father handed her 
 over to my care ? 
 
 I sat down, therefore, with a good conscience ; and, just as I 
 did so, the father, on whom the lurches and liveliness of the 
 Diana were by no means lost, slid off the seat on to the deck, 
 drew a sort of roquelaure or cloak closer about him, and saying, 
 " My morale is still strong, but my physique is vanquished ; 
 pray, sir, continue your kindness and attend to my daughter," — 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 105 
 
 resigned himself to the inevitable with the grand air of an early 
 martyr. 
 
 Twice enjoined to attend to his daughter, what was I to do t 
 He could not think it rude if I spoke to her, and asked her how 
 she felt. No ! I don't think that was what I said first. I am 
 sure it wasn't. I said, " The weather is very bad ; " and, then, 
 when no answer was returned to this evident truism, I asked, 
 
 " I hope you feel better ? " 
 
 " A little. Shall we be much longer on our voyage 1 '' 
 
 The ice was broken. No person can be really sea-sick and utter 
 so long a sentence. I forget what I said next. Something stupid, 
 no doubt. Most young men are very stupid in these matters 
 at twenty, — and I am sure I was. I remember, though, that she 
 said she was afraid her father was much worse than she was. 
 
 "Papa is not at all strong. Do you know anything that 
 would do him any good 1 " 
 
 Was I a doctor to be able to cure sea-sickness ? Luckily, I 
 remembered the last words of old Mindererus to my Aunt. 
 
 " My dear Mrs. Mandeville, should you feel at all ill, don't 
 forget that a glass of weak brandy-and-water is the best thing 
 you can take." 
 
 My aunt, as a perfect sailor, laughed at the doctor's prescrip- 
 tion. As for brandy-and-water, I don't suppose all the Roman 
 Emperors and all the Popes of Eome put together, would ever 
 have got her to drink a drop of it. But I now remembered it. 
 So I went down the companion — that is to say, I made a dash 
 at the stairs — and succeeded in hitting them. Down below I 
 found the steward, with his assistant, a greasy, unwashed cub, 
 eating the remains of the leg of mutton. I think I still see, as 
 I write, the great lumps of cold fat which they were swallowing 
 like Esquimaux when I appeared. I carefully turned my head 
 away while the mixture was being made, that I might not see 
 that it had mutton fat in it. Then I clutched it and a hard 
 biscuit. If captains' biscuits are so called because of their hard- 
 ness, this was an admiral's biscuit, so adamantine did it seem. 
 If it was hard work to get down the companion, the return 
 passage was harder. But I made it tolerably well, only losing 
 half the brandy-and-water on the way. The other half was 
 more than enough for the prostrate father, who lay yellow as a 
 guinea, when one could see his face. By fits and starts, I got 
 about a wine-glassful of my tumbler down his throat. He de- 
 clared himself much better in a husky voice, and I returned to 
 my young lady. 
 
 To my surprise I found her, too, much better. So far from 
 hurting her, she thought her fall had done her good. It was so 
 
106 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 kind of me to take care of papa. Whereabouts were we ? would 
 we soon be there ? All these questions to come out of a hood, 
 and never to see her face 1 Yes ! once I saw the tip of her 
 nose. It was not red. 
 
 Now, had I been as the young men of this time, I should 
 have been as cool as the South Pole ; I say the South Pole, be- 
 cause that is said to be cooler than the North. I should have 
 plied her with questions, asked her if she read The Owl, what 
 pastimes she liked 1 did she like croquet 1 had she been abroad 1 
 When she was in London had she seen Schneider ? been to 
 Wimbledon and Hurlingham? wasn't the "Zoo" low now on 
 Sundays 1 how she liked the shady side of Eotten Row, between 
 one and two p.m., and such like. 
 
 But I was a shy young man of that time, and mainly con- 
 fined myself to answering the young lady's questions. As for 
 our voyage, I explained dur whereabouts as well as I could. We 
 had passed Porlock, and were off Linton — that was twenty miles 
 from Ilfracombe. Here Exmoor made a bow to the sea, and 
 here they hunted the red deer; and somewhere hereabouts — 
 though where I scarcely know, though it really stares one in 
 the face as you pass by it on the sea — was the famous Valley of 
 Bocks. In about three hours at our present rate perhaps, or 
 two and a half, we should be at Ilfracombe, and then we should 
 have to land in long " gigs." Did she know what I meant by 
 " gigs 1 "■ Yes, she knew ; a gig was a sort of boat ; her uncle 
 the Admiral often talked of going on shore in his gig. 
 
 Now I for once grew crafty, and tried to find out her Chris- 
 tian name. What was the name of her uncle's ship? — the 
 Victoria. " How oddly names were given ! " 1 remarked. 
 "Very oddly," she said. " Hers was an odd name." 
 "Indeed?" 
 
 " You could never guess it." 
 "May I try?" 
 «' Certainly." 
 
 So I guessed ever so long, trying all sorts of names. Then 
 she gave me what she called " Lights.'' 
 
 "It is the name of a nymph, and a fountain, and a ship, and 
 the ancient poets and the modern poets have sung of it, and it 
 is the refrain of a famous sea-song ; and now can't you guess ?" 
 "Perhaps I may," I said, "for I begin to see daylight 
 through your lights ; and, in return, I will give you some. 
 Shelley says that some one of your name came down from the 
 ' Acroceraunian Mountains,' and a great sea-song writer has 
 called the ship after which you were called 'Saucy.' Havel 
 guessed it now ? " 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 107 
 
 "Yes ; but pray see after papa, he lies so still." 
 
 " Willingly ; but will you tell me one thing 1 " 
 
 " Yes, if you will go to papa." 
 
 " Where's your sea-sickness ? " 
 
 " Gone — fled, perhaps, to the ' Acroceraunian Mountains.' " 
 
 " Who cured it 1 " 
 
 "The fall, to be sure." 
 
 "Nothing else?" 
 
 " No, nothing." 
 
 Here my Aunt Mandeville called out " Edward." 
 
 As I rose to go, Miss Arethusa said, " Now we are equal. I 
 know your name, and you have guessed mine, but not before I 
 had given you so many ' lights ' that you could not help it." 
 
 Between my seat and that on which my Aunt sat, I said to 
 myself, " I have never been so warmed up in my life. Nursing 
 young ladies who are sea-sick is not so unpleasant." 
 
 My Aunt only wanted me to ask the captain how far we were 
 off Ilfracombe. 
 
 I sought that rough diamond, and found him at tea. No 
 degenerate five o'clock tea was that. Ham and eggs, and 
 tea and jam. Down .they all went, as he himself said, " like 
 winkin'." 
 
 " If I didn't eat my meals like winkin', I should never have 
 them regular. They would come altogether one atop of t'other. 
 Would I take any tea 1 '' 
 
 " No ! Thanks. I only came to find out how soon we were 
 likely to be at Ilfracombe." 
 
 " Very soon ; we had got the tide with us now, and were off 
 Watermouth. Tell the lady in half-an-hour." 
 
 After reporting progress to my Aunt, I stirred up Brooks, the 
 footmen, and the maids, who had all succumbed, and looked 
 very like Jonah after he had spent those three days inside the 
 whale. I say this advisedly. They had all such a half-masti- 
 cated look. 
 
 Then I returned to Arethusa. Arethusa what 1 That still 
 remained a blank. But alas ! I found the pond frozen over 
 again. Now it was all " Yes " and " No." There were no long 
 sentences. Yes, there was one longer — " She did not know ; " 
 that was an answer to a question how long she was going to 
 stay at Ilfracombe. 
 
 " After all," I said to myself, " it doesn't matter. I don't 
 suppose we shall see anything more of them." 
 
 Observe here how I still said "we." My Aunt Mandeville 
 and I were still one in my mind's eye. I did not yet dare to 
 say, " I shall not see more of them." 
 
108 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 About this time the approach of the end of the voyage 
 worked its usual miracle on the prostrate passengers, who ten 
 minutes before were on the eve of giving up the ghost. First, 
 Arethusa's father, the man of unvanquished morale, rose from 
 the deck, and in a faint voice thanked me for my kindness to 
 him and his daughter. He did not, however, tell me his name, 
 but merely said, " I hope we shall meet again." A very vague 
 hope ; very much like a general invitation to dinner, or to shoot. 
 It sinned, as the lawyers say, " for want of particularity." 
 
 Rather disgusted to find, as I thought, my brandy-and-water 
 returning so soon to my own bosom, I again looked up Brooks, 
 and found him haranguing the maids and footmen on the " hin- 
 famous be-aviour of one of them sailors," who had called him, it 
 seems, " the son of a sea-cook," because he would not get out of 
 the way. 
 
 " Look at me, John, and you, too, Thomas. Look at me 
 butler at Mandeville Hall for better nor thirty years, me, who 
 'ave had the key of the cellar all those years, — me ' the son of a 
 sea-cook ! ' I knows a land-cook when I sees one, which it is 
 you Mrs. Jellybag, but whoever seed or heerd of a sea-cook be- 
 fore. Master Edward, now, did you ever see a sea-cook ? " 
 
 " No, Brooks ; but if you go on making that row they'll call 
 you a sea-ass instead of a land one.'' 
 
 This silenced Brooks, and it was high time, for we were just 
 off the little harbour of Ilfracombe, and there were the long gigs 
 coming off to take us out of the Diana. 
 
 Now it is with sea-gigs as with land-gigs, ever since Mr. W. 
 Weare's murder. The sole possession of a gig makes a man 
 " respectable," whether on sea or land. The captain's gig is the 
 noblest boat that swims, and the bagman's gig is the most 
 respectable vehicle that runs on wheels. We Mandevilles had 
 one whole gig for ourselves and servants, and another for our 
 baggage. In the third gig went the now distant Arethusa and 
 her thankless father, as I thought him. 
 
 " Drank my brandy-and-water, and gave me over his daughter 
 to nurse, and then only hope to see me again." Such were the 
 thoughts that filled my mind as we pulled rapidly in our 
 splendid eight-oared gig over the rolling waves. 
 
 Let me not forget to say that Brooks, by a sad mishap on 
 being handed down into the boat, slipped into the sea, was 
 pulled out by a boathook which caught him by the waist-band, 
 and after all called a " lubber " by the mate for his clumsiness. 
 
 " A sea-cook and a lubber, Master Edward! Pretty names 
 to call a confidential servant." 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 109 
 
 CHAPTEE XIX. 
 
 HOW WE LANDED AT ILFBACOMBE. 
 
 We landed at the pier between the harbours, and paced up 
 against a strong wind to the hotel. I think it rejoiced in the 
 name Britannia, and very glad we were to be there, after a 
 voyage of ten hours. I think it was about eight o'clock, but I 
 am sure that no one in the hotel slept more soundly on that 
 night than I, Edward Halfacre. 
 
 My Aunt was tired, as well she might be, between the post- 
 ing from Mandeville Hall, the bad beds at Bristol, and the 
 rough passage to Ilfracombe. She was usually an early riser, 
 but she did not rise very early that July morning. I went 
 downstairs, threw open the window of our sitting-room, which 
 had a balcony overlooking the sea, and as I stepped out I said 
 to myself, but out loud, " I wonder where Arethusa is 1 " 
 
 Observe, I could only call her Arethusa, because I did not 
 know her surname. 
 
 N.B.— Warning to elderly fathers always to give their cards 
 to those to whom they confide their daughters on steamboats, 
 unless they wish them to call their daughters by their Christian 
 names. 
 
 With the words in my mouth, " I wonder where Arethusa 
 is 2 " I stepped out, and there, on a continuation of our balcony, 
 which belonged to the sitting room next to us, stood a young 
 lady who nodded to me at once, for though I had never seen 
 her face, that is to say, no more of it than the tip of her nose, 
 she had many opportunities of seeing mine. 
 
 What, then, was Arethusa like ? She was of middle height ; 
 that is to say, she was what I call every man's money. Very 
 tall women ought to have lived before the Flood. It is a very 
 long time back, and would make them very old, but I have a 
 very good reason for putting them thus. " There were giants in 
 those days," and they would all have got husbands at once. Now- 
 a-days, a very tall woman is a drug in the wife market. Short 
 men, no doubt, are very bold and courageous, as is the manner 
 of dwarfs and boys standing on their inches, and frequently 
 getting into a quarrel merely because they are short, and feel 
 sure some one is going to insult them ; but every short man, 
 or every middle-sized man, is not bold enough to marry a woman 
 to kiss whom he must have a ladder. 
 
 But Arethusa was just the height that every man . might 
 marry, whether, tall or short — not so short as to look insigni- 
 
110 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ficant by the side of a tall man, and not tall enough to over- 
 shadow a short husband. She looked, too, taller .than she was — 
 an undoubted gift of some women, but how gotten no one 
 knows. Her figure was round and slim ; Bhe had small hands 
 and feet, the feet being the smallest in proportion ; she had 
 Violet-blue eyes — a very deep blue — but very bright and large 
 besides. Her complexion was milk-white, with a slight flush 
 when animated on her cheeks, and under the soft, white skin 
 you could see the blue veins. Her hair was very dark-brown, 
 one shade off black, I should say, but there was a dash of golden 
 hair among it, which gave it in some lights a sunny glory. Her 
 lips were full — not too [full, but not thin ; her chin was like a 
 Greek coin of one of Alexander's successors, but which I cannot 
 call to mind now. She had a delicate nose, with just a tiny rise 
 in it, as if it had once half a mind to be Koman, but changed 
 its half mind before the intention could take effect. She had 
 strong, regular, white teeth, and very small ears. And now I 
 think I have given you a perfect photograph of her, though 
 when I first saw her there were no such things as photographs. 
 
 After all, I have left out her expression. She might have 
 had all the charms that I have said, and yet been hideous. 
 Expression in the face is like charity among the virtues. With- 
 out that perfect gift all our virtues are worth nothing. Are- 
 thusa had a most sweet and winning smile, and an earnest way 
 of looking at you out of her great blue eyes that sank deep 
 into your soul. This is very poetical language, but it expresses 
 what I felt after I had known her a little time. 
 
 Of course I did not discern all these beauties there and then 
 on that balcony. Perfect beauty, as hers was, comes on one by 
 little and little. Like a great mountain, you cannot grasp it all 
 at once. Besides, I was too much scared. Have I not told you 
 that I was very shy ? I had only mechanically wondered where 
 Arethusa was, and, by turning the catch of a window, there she 
 stood before me. Such a trick of natural magic was enough to 
 frighten one out of one's senses. I was like the Necromancer's 
 pupil, who had called the devil, and, much to his astonishment, 
 the devil came. 
 
 Fright, I suppose, gave me boldness. I went to Arethusa 
 
 along the balcony, and said, " Good morning, Miss " and 
 
 here I stopped short and marked the Miss emphatically. 
 
 " And good morning, Mr. " said Arethusa, making my 
 
 blank still blanker than her own. 
 
 " Halfacre." 
 
 " Halfacre ! What an odd name ! Why not Wholeacre 
 while you were about it ?" 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. Ill 
 
 " It is a very old name," I babbled apologetically. 
 
 "Then the sooner you change it the better. I hate old 
 things, especially if they are ugly. If it were my name, I would 
 change it at once." 
 
 "Very likely. Young ladies change their names, but men 
 don't ; and now may I ask what the name is which you like so 
 much better than mine % " 
 
 " Chichester." 
 
 " Chichester of Arlington Court 1 If so, my Aunt knows 
 them." 
 
 "Not the Chicbesters of Arlington Court. We are distant 
 cousins of those Chichesters ; but is your Aunt's name Half- 
 acre too 1 " 
 
 "My Aunt's name is Mandeville. Perhaps you like that 
 better than Halfacre ? " I said, dryly, because I felt nettled at 
 hearing my fine old name ridiculed. 
 
 " I say at once I like it much better. It came in with the 
 Conquest, of course." 
 
 "And the Halfacres were here long before the Con- 
 quest?" 
 
 " No doubt ; and that's why they're called Halfacres, of 
 course ; the Normans took away all their land except half-an- 
 acre, and kept all the rest for themselves. I've read it all in 
 Magnall's Questions and Mrs. Markham. If you don't take 
 care, I'll talk to you about Doomsday." 
 
 Of course had I been equal to the occasion, I should have 
 told Arethusa to talk on till Doomsday, but I said nothing of 
 the kind. I felt rather hurt at being laughed at, as I thought, 
 and I began to consider how old Arethusa was. Looking at 
 her again, and running over her face and figure at a glance, I 
 set her down at my own age, perhaps a year younger ; but then 
 the indicice cetatis are not strongly marked in young people, and 
 I might well be over the mark in my estimate of her age. 
 
 But I felt that whatever her age, she was more than a match 
 for me in wit, and as I thought myself a perfect man — had I 
 not been called " man " at Oxford ever since I was seventeen and 
 a half ? — I felt vexed, not reflecting that in all times, even in 
 those good old times when girls, like plums, still had the bloom 
 on them till they were twenty — a girl eighteen or twenty has 
 been quite equal to a man five years older. 
 
 While this was passing through my mind, — it takes long to 
 tell ; but it was in action the work of an instant, — I heard my 
 Aunt's voice calling me from the sitting-room, and at the same 
 moment the head of Arethusa's father appeared at the open 
 window, and said : 
 
112 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Arethusa,"— I am not sure that he did not call her " Toosy " 
 — " Breakfast's ready." 
 
 I saw that he saw me, but no recognition passed, and he still 
 remained in my mind as an impersonal somebody, a mythic 
 giver of general invitations to meet him somewhere — that is, 
 nowhere in particular, at no given tinie. Arethusa I knew 
 something of. I felt she could laugh at me, but her father was 
 as much a reality to me as Castor and Pollux. 
 
 I found Aunt Mandeville making tea. She felt all the better 
 for her sleep, and said she had enjoyed the " sail," as she called 
 it, wonderfully. 
 
 " Far better than Brooks, Edward ; they tell me he has got 
 a fit of lumbago after his cold bath ; and besides, they say he 
 takes on so, and is so worritted at being called names by the 
 vulgar sailors." 
 
 " How long are we to stay in this hotel, Auntie?" 
 
 "Only until I can get a house large enough to hold us. 
 They say there is one up the valley, at Wildersmouth. After 
 breakfast we will go to look at it, and explore the place. But 
 what were the names of our fellow-passengers of whom you 
 took such care ? I was glad to see you helped the father first, 
 and that you went and got him something from below. That 
 was just as young men ought to behave, and not to be too 
 forward in thrusting their attentions on young ladies, who are 
 generally too much abashed by the act of boldness to avail 
 themselves of the mistaken kindness." 
 
 Poor Aunt Mandeville ! she had evidently Hannah More's 
 ideal young ladies in her eye, all bashfulness and bread and 
 butter, cream-ices that will melt if one looks warmly at them. 
 I am inclined to think that such young ladies were nearly 
 extinct in her time, and Arethusa was evidently not one of the 
 class. What Aunt Mandeville would have done had she lived 
 in these degenerate days I am sure I really cannot tell. One 
 turn in Eotten Row in the season, or at the Botanic Gardens, or 
 one visit to the Eton and Harrow Match, one service at St. 
 Andrew's, Wells Street, or one croquet-party at Lady Snap- 
 dragon's, would have driven her to desperation, as she saw how 
 young ladies now dress, and how they talk to young men, even 
 when they smoke out of doors, and answer them in their own 
 slang. 
 
 " Their name is Chichester, very distant relations of Arthur 
 Chichester, who is up at Christ Church, and lives at Arlington 
 Court, somewhere hereabouts." 
 
 " I have heard your Uncle Mandeville talk of Jack Chichester, 
 who was a gay man about town when your uncle left Oxford. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 113 
 
 He was in the Guards, and distinguished himself at Waterloo ; 
 afterwards I think he exchanged into a line regiment in India! 
 
 Your Uncle seemed very fond of him, for he often wondered > 
 
 and he was not much given to wonder — where old Jack Chi- 
 chester was." 
 
 These recollections were cut short by the rueful visage of 
 Brooks, who came limping in on a stick, and to tell us the plea- 
 sant information that ' most of Master Edward's things were as 
 wet as dung, and all along of them careless sailors in their gig, 
 who never put their ' tarpolly,' as they calls it, over the port- 
 manteau, which it has got soaked with sea- water." 
 
 " Then," said I, " you must soak them again in fregfi water, 
 — the woollen things, — I mean, and have them driedind ironed. 
 As for the linen things, they need only be washed; and they'll 
 be all right." / 
 
 " 'Orrid hout-of-the-way place ! " muttered Brooks ; " wish 
 we had never set foot in it ; never a clear-starcher, nor a soul 
 as knows how to wash a shirt in it. I'll be bound ! " 
 
 So saying he limped off, declaring that if he once sat down 
 with this lumbago on him, he would never be able to get up 
 again. 
 
 Now-a-days, we should have punctured him with a pierced 
 needle, like the fang of a rattlesnake, and injected morphia on 
 the sciatic nerve ; and he would have had rest ; but then he 
 had to try his old remedies of opodeldock and hartshorn and oil ; 
 and if they didn't do him any good, to grin and bear it. 
 
 Leaving Brooks to himself, Aunt Mandeville- and I sallied out. 
 First, we started up the long, rambling street, that makes a 
 bend from the bight of the inner harbour, and then sprawls and 
 straggles up the hill. Just where the Barnstaple road turns off, 
 it has half a mind, as we had, to go up there ; but it was out of 
 breath, I suppose, as we were, and thought better of it, and so 
 took the lower line. After a while we found the street began to 
 descend again, and to grow less and less respectable. So we 
 retraced our steps a little way, and turned down a side road ; 
 there were houses on one side of it, but not enough to make a 
 street. This road led us by a steep descent down into the 
 valley or combe, under the Torrs or cliffs. Here we came upon 
 the Wilder, a brook which runs through the valley ; and perched 
 up in a field on the other side of the stream was the house of 
 which we were in search. Outside it was prettily planted, and 
 the myrtles and fuchsias, and all flowering shrubs, grew luxu- 
 riantly in the deep red soil. There were a few trees about it, 
 and a paddock. Inside it was not more scantily furnished or 
 more uncomfortable than sea-side houses usually are. There 
 
114 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 were the regulation arm-chairs, which would have given Brooks 
 a fit of lumbago even to look at. There was a crick in the back, 
 and a cramp in each arm of them. Then there was a horsehair 
 sofa, constructed — with a view to drainage, 1 suppose, in that 
 damp climate, — on an incline, so that any one who lay down on 
 it instantly glided off the slippery surface. And there was 
 another sofa, a kind of monster between an arm-chair and a 
 sofa — an arm-chair with a long tail to it, running off at an 
 angle ; just such a couch as that bed of misery on which the 
 victims of the Inquisition used to be stretched before they under- 
 went the peine forte et dure, or on which our criminals, who 
 refused to plead, were " pressed " of yore — a sofa on which it 
 was impossible to sit or he, turn or twist yourself whichever way 
 you might. cabinet makers ! — not Messrs. Gladstone and 
 Disraeli, but ye Messrs. Hollands, Gillows, and Trollopes of our 
 watering-places — pity the sorrows of a poor old cripple, and 
 never make one of those arm-chair sofas ! 
 
 Those were not the days when the Scarlet Fever — -like the 
 Chisholm, or the O'Donohoe, or the McGillicuddy of the Reeks 
 — regularly went out of town to the sea-side every summer. No 
 one then expected to find him ubiquitous at every watering- 
 place at once. So we asked no questions as to whether he had 
 lately lived in Wildersmouth House — that was the name of our 
 new abode. Perhaps had we asked, and he had been there, we 
 should have been assured he had not. He is a personage whom 
 no lodging-house keeper likes to confess that she has taken in, 
 so she keeps the secret, until you wake, or your wife wakes, or 
 your children wake one fine morning — just as you have declared 
 only the evening before, that you think the place most delightful 
 — with the worst cold you or they ever had in their lives, fol- 
 lowed by a flush, a glow, a fever, head symptoms and throat 
 symptoms. The doctor comes ; your house is immediately 
 divided into the clean and the unclean — the sheep and the 
 goats. You drench, the children with belladonna as a prophy- 
 lactic, and send them back to town. If you have it, your wife 
 stays to nurse you. If she has it, you stay to nurse her. If 
 one of the children, you both stay. The result is a very jolly 
 holiday. The owner of the house turns you out as soon as she 
 can, making you pay a month's rent to purify the house of a 
 disease which she is ready to take her Bible oath you must have 
 brought with you. , When you pay Dr. Bryony his bill, he tells 
 you he thinks you escaped very well ; for the last fatal case of 
 scarlet fever he had was buried from that house, two days before 
 you came. If you ever came again, and would write to him 
 beforehand, he would take care that you were put into an unh> 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 115 
 
 feoted house. But, of course, you never go to that place again. 
 You have had enough of it. So you shake the dust off your 
 feet, and the golden dust out of your purse, and depart, feeling 
 quite sure that twenty-four hours -will not pass before a fresh 
 family succeeds you in your scarlet fever lodgings. 
 
 But things were not so bad as that at Ilfracombe in 183 — . 
 We asked no questions, and so we were told no lies. My Aunt 
 liked the situation, before which lay the sea, seen through the 
 cove at Wildersmouth, with the Capstan hill, then innocent of 
 a walk round it, and the old light-house chapel perched over the 
 entrance to the harbour beyond it. Half way up the path from 
 Wildersmouth to the- Bathing cove was a gate. I remember 
 that gate well ; it was five-barred, and I used to jump over it 
 half-a-dozen times a day on my way up or down. As the old 
 Marquis of Millionford said to the great Duke of Wellington, 
 when they saw a shepherd-boy munching a turnip on Salisbury 
 Plain, with a splendid appetite, aided by a set of bright white 
 teeth : " I would give all my wealth, which I have got, and all 
 your glory, which I have not got, to be able to eat a turnip like 
 that boy ; " so would I give all the wealth which I have not got, 
 and all the glory which I have still less got, to be as I then 
 was, able to jump over that five-barred gate half-a-dozen times 
 a-day. 
 
 I have always been fond of Ilfracombe— when it doesn't rain. 
 I remember when we first went there we stayed in for some 
 days because it rained every day, and we thought we would not 
 go out till it cleared. But the inhabitants, who showed us no 
 small kindness, came to us in waterproofs — I think they were 
 about the first macintoshes made — and besought us to come 
 out, for as to calling that drizzle rain, they assured us it was to 
 them real summer weather. 
 
 But Ilfracombe, with the sun on it and the lights over the 
 bounding green waves, and the surf dashing in its many coves, 
 and the spray and foam flying, and rainbows gleaming on the 
 broken clouds, is a sight seldom to be seen in England. Lovely, 
 too, is it at night, when the moon is at the full. I remember 
 the harvest moon in August the year we were there, how it rose 
 over Wildersmouth, full and yellow, with a warmth which 
 seemed its own, just as the sun set ; and how Aunt Mandeville, 
 and Colonel Chichester, and I, and Arethusa sat and looked at 
 it, till the dew fell fast and thick. 
 
 But I am getting on too fast. Where were we 1 Oh ! we 
 
 had just taken Wildersmouth House, and were on our way back 
 
 to the hotel to despatch Brooks and the servants to their new 
 
 abode. 
 
 i2 
 
] 1 6 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 HOW I SAW NOTHING OP ARETHUSA. 
 
 Just as we passed through the gate of which I have spoken, 
 two persons met us. I saw at once they were Arethusa and her 
 father. They both recognised me this time, and I bowed in 
 return and held open the gate for them till they had passed, on. 
 
 " Who were those, Edward 1 " said my Aunt, surprised at my 
 having found persons to bow to in a new place. " You are like 
 a sailor ; you find friends everywhere." 
 
 " Those are the Chichesters — our fellow-passengers. They 
 were so muffled up on board that you could not recognise 
 them." 
 
 " And how then did you recognise them ? " said my Aunt, 
 beginning to be jealous. 
 
 " I saw them in the hotel this morning, and then they 
 recognised me. They were unmuflled, you know, and so I knew 
 them. They of course knew me." 
 
 I did not tell Auntie that I had had a long conversation with 
 Arethusa on the balcony before breakfast. Why I did not I am 
 sure I don't know. Perhaps you will say with the Psalmist, 
 " The heart of man is deceitful above the weights." You are 
 quite welcome, spiteful old moralist reader, to say what you 
 please of me, who am as much a nonentity to you as Arethusa' s 
 father then was to me — one of whom you know nothing, and 
 shall know nothing, except what I choose to tell you ; but to 
 any fair and candid reader, not over-biblical, not too cut-and- 
 dried, who is. not for ever bringing her "precious balms" out of 
 her medicine-chest — drugs and balms hard and heavy enough to 
 break my head — I will declare, on the honour of a gentleman, 
 that I really do not know, and did not know, why I said nothing 
 to my Aunt Mandeville about my interview with Arethusa. 
 
 The servants were soon despatched, all except Brooks, whose 
 lumbago had come on " worser nor ever," according to his own 
 account, and who wanted us to stay where we " was " for 
 another night. In fact, he tried to play the tyrant over my 
 Aunt at Ilfracombe just as he was wont at Mandeville Hall ; 
 but once off her own dunghill, on which she was weak where 
 others are strong, she was strong where others are weak. She 
 threw off her slavery with the sod, and was mistress over 
 Brooks. 
 
 But we had a little scene— a tableau vivant of petty domestic 
 troubles, in which Brooks unassisted played all the parts. He 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 117 
 
 was sure that we should all get our deaths of cold ; he'd be 
 bound there hadn't been a fire in Wildersmouth House since this 
 time last year ; bitten to death we were certain to be ; full of 
 earwigs and blackbeetles, he'd be cock-sure — " Odd rabbet 'em!" 
 This last mysterious expression, and " Drat it ! " were two 
 favourite expletives of Brooks, when he had reached such a 
 fever-pitch of indignation that he had to let off the steam, lest, 
 what answered to a boiler inside him should burst. They were 
 safety valves, in fact. What the meaning of them is I know, 
 and so do you, philological brother ; but I am not going to 
 analyse their construction or meaning more fully, for this is a 
 book in which there is no swearing. . 
 
 Then "the beer wasn't in the house, and if it wasn't in the 
 house who was to fetch it 1 Nor was there any wine for missus. 
 Nothing for dinner? No, not so. much as a chop; and how 
 could he stir to see about all these things with this here lumbago 
 biting his back 1 " 
 
 But as some one had to do it, and my Aunt Mandeville 
 couldn't, and I was supposed to have no experience, Brooks had 
 to do it. He and the cook got what was needful. The servants 
 had their dinner at the hotel before we left. Then they laid in 
 tea and supper for themselves, and dinner for us ; and, in spite 
 of Brooks's forebodings, ; we were very comfortable that first 
 night at Wildersmouth House j and so we continued till our 
 time was up. 
 
 Of course the reader expects that I was dying to get on more 
 intimate terms with Arethusa, and he is preparedjfto see me 
 taking every sensational. way to effect my object. For instance, 
 she might be described as climbing a crag — one of those 
 treacherous slate rocks not far from Wildersmouth — and as 
 having got half way up on to a ledge, from which she could 
 neither ascend nor descend. There, though naturally brave as a 
 lion, she would be compelled by hunger, or some other motive 
 from which not even lions are free, to wring her hands or wave 
 her handkerchief for help. Her aged, grizzle-haired sire would 
 be flourishing the telescope, by means of which he has just 
 detected his daughter's dangerous position, on the beach. Just 
 as the young lioness— lady, I mean— had resolved that the only 
 means of escape would be to throw herself down into the arms 
 of her parent— a step. by which her neck and his spine would be 
 infallibly broken— I should be descried jumping across the 
 Wilder, just where I afterwards sprained my ankle, in the 
 highest physical development of which a muscular Christian is 
 capable. No ! I should not be crossing the beach ; it is highly 
 improper in a muscular Christian to save a young lady from 
 
118 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 below. English ladies are not yet Bloomers. I should be 
 descried coming down from, the Torrs, my stately figure rendered 
 still more herculean by the sun shining behind me as I strode 
 along the ridge. To see the young lady perched up there like 
 a guillemot or a puffin, and to understand her difficulty, would 
 be the work of a second. I would let myself down by a rope. 
 Where did I get the rope from i silly question ! Most mus- 
 cular Christians, especially if they are High-churchmen, always 
 carry rope enough with them to hang themselves coiled round 
 their waists. However, in this case I need not have had it 
 round my waist ; a pet lamb would have been tethered to a 
 stake by a cord long enough and strong enough to bear my 
 weight and Arethusa's — say twenty stone. No muscular 
 Christian now-a-days weighs less than thirteen stone ; and 
 Arethusa, slim and slight, not more than seven — say eight, and 
 make the total twenty-one. Or, smugglers should have been 
 there, plying their traffic by night, and should have forgotten 
 the rope by which they dragged their tubs and kegs up the face 
 of the rock. By one of these three ropes, or all of them twisted 
 together in a true lover's knot — if one of them, like the cow's 
 tail that reached to the moon, had not been long enough — I 
 should have swung myself over the edge, first tying the other 
 end fast to the bole of a gigantic oak that grew close to the 
 cliff. I should have reached Arethusa just as she had repeated 
 the Nicene Creed, or, better still, chanted it to Gregorian tones 
 before throwing herself over. I should have caught her in my 
 arms, and swarmed up the rope again, disdaining to await her 
 father's arrival with men to haul us up. To his surprise he 
 would have found us idly stretched on the turf, and talking of 
 the odds on the International University Boatrace, as cool as 
 cucumbers and as harmless as doves. I should then have 
 declared my passion, and implored his forgiveness for daring to 
 take the lovely Arethusa in my arms ; on which he would 
 have made answer, "Having taken so much, you had better 
 take her altogether." We should have rushed at him both at 
 once and embraced his venerable form : Arethusa in front and 
 I behind. What more can I add, except that we should have 
 been married' that day week, as we both hated long engagements, 
 at St. George's, Hanover Square, with full choral service 1 I know 
 Dr. Howarth won't hear of it in ordinary cases, but ours would 
 have been an extraordinary one, and even that reverend Minos 
 would have relaxed his rules. The Bishop of Bullocksrnithy, 
 assisted by the disestablished but not disendowed Archbishop of 
 Armagh and Father Ignatius, would have performed the cere- 
 mony. We should then have lived happily all our days, had 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 119 
 
 half as many children as Hecuba, and died universally re- 
 spected ; if I had not, as I grieve to say is sometimes the case 
 with muscular Christians, grown morose and melancholy, and 
 left my wife and family, because I felt that I had work to do in 
 the Fijee Islands. 
 
 In the same way, and with as much probability, I might have 
 saved Arethusa and her father, if they had been cut off by the 
 waves, just as the sea had reached their necks ; but as I have 
 seen this patent-safety escape tried with success already, in one 
 or two novels, I should have scorned imitation, and preferred 
 the course already described. 
 
 Again, they might have been crossing a field by a footpath ; 
 or perhaps it would have been better to make them,, trespass, 
 and have been attacked by a ferocious Devon bull. I should 
 have been crossing also, and attacked the bull as he is tackled 
 in that long-forgotten book, " Sandford and Merton," which 
 little boys now read homosopathically to make them sleep. 
 They would escape, but I having been tossed twice, the second 
 time on to a haystack, so that I could not be tossed thrice, 
 should have lain there in a fainting state till the neighbours 
 came with a ladder and got me down. I should have lingered 
 a long time with several ribs broken, nursed by Aunt Mande- 
 ville, Arethusa, and her father, till a treaty of alliance had been 
 agreed on between the colonel and my Aunt, and we should 
 have been married in the way already described. 
 
 But, alas ! this is no sensational story reared in the forcing- 
 house of fiction, it is sober, bitter truth ; and let me tell you 
 bitter truth is wholesome enough, if you will listen to and be 
 warned by me. How do the feelings and affections of the 
 human heart grow ? You might as well ask the grass how and 
 why it grows : the seed-corn why it springs ; why it grows 
 faster at one time than another : cut by cold winds, nipped by 
 frost, rained on, snowed on, hailed on, but it still grows on till 
 it is either ripe or rotten, a full crop : a mere average or a 
 failure. Time and place and season, opportunity and chance, 
 have more to do with our affections than we fancy. There lies 
 the seed ready to grow if it has the chance ; but it will not 
 grow without external influences ; and when it does grow, it is 
 liable to just as many mishaps as any grain of wheat that is 
 sown in the richest field. 
 
 If I could have saved Arethusa's life in any way, or done her 
 any service, I should only have been too happy ; but then I 
 never had any opportunity. For a long time we went on bowing 
 when we met, but that was all. I am sure I don't know that 
 we should ever have known more of them had it not been for 
 
120 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the merest accident ; and not at all a sensational one either. 
 We were caught in the rain down at Wildersmouth, without our 
 waterproofs, and with no umbrellas ; we had forgotten we were 
 in Devonshire. The sun shone so brightly when we set out, it 
 seemed as though we were in Italy. We had scarce sat down 
 on the beach, when it rained in torrents, so we stood up under 
 a rock, with a great overhanging shelf of slaty schist over us. It 
 so happened that under the very same rock was cowering 
 Arethusa's father, without his daughter, but with an umbrella. 
 Now I should say that an umbrella was about the most useless 
 thing that a man can carry — of course as I abuse them I never 
 carry one. In fact, I left off carrying them after losing three 
 running, one wet summer, at the club. I remember of course the 
 celebrated Popish umbrella which converted young Soaphead, who 
 was at Oxford with me, to the Church of Eome. He was at 
 Kome doing the churches in wet weather, and either lent his 
 umbrella to a cardinal, or a cardinal lent him his. Whichever 
 way it was he was converted, and I believe he now bears as his 
 crest a green silk umbrella, displayed proper, in memory of the 
 proud event, with the motto, " Spectemur in imbre" instead of 
 his old family crest, a hare courant, with the motto, " Peur 
 gagne peu." But as I consider going over to the Church of 
 Eome to be a very doubtful good; I should not be inclined to 
 quote Soaphead's case as proving the good of umbrellas. 
 
 But to show that there is good in everything, I must quote 
 the colonel's umbrella. There he was with his umbrella, nest 
 to a lady without one. As for me, I was made neither of salt 
 nor of sugar, and there was no fear of my melting in the rain. 
 Nor am I one of those interesting, consumptive heroes who take 
 orders, go into the church, marry, have ten children, and then 
 go to Madeira to die, leaving their family a burden to society. No ! 
 I am not consumptive, except at my meals, and then I am very 
 much so. Let no eating-house keeper undertake to feed me for 
 a fixed sum, if he does, he will have the worst of it. There was 
 then no fear for me ; nor was there for my Aunt. She could 
 bear a wetting as well as any one, if she had made up her mind 
 to it and was clad accordingly. It was a sight to do your heart 
 good to see her trudging across the park to Mandeville village 
 in her grey cloak and clogs, in pouring rain, to visit some sick 
 person. But there was one thing my Aunt had no mind to, and 
 that was what she called " spoiling her things." She was old- 
 fashioned enough to care for " her things ; " and though she had 
 many dresses, and on the whole dressed in very good taste, she 
 could not bear to come home with a good " gown," as she called 
 it, " all of a draggle." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 121 
 
 So there she was without an umbrella, next to an old gentle- 
 man who had one. I remember it was a green silk umbrella, 
 with a cane handle and ivory ball top. It was a memorable 
 umbrella to me. Now, I have told you that. I, am of a very 
 shy nature. All these years I have been making up my mind 
 to tell you this story, and haven't finished it yet. Had I been 
 next to a lady to whom I had no introduction, I should never 
 have been bold enough to speak to her, : and offer my 
 umbrella. I might have thrown it down on the sand in a 
 savage way and fled, leaving it to her to make use of it, and 
 trusting to her honesty to restore it, or I might have sent 
 some one else to her to offer her the umbrella ; but I, Edward 
 Halfacre, would never have plucked up courage to speak to her 
 first, even to do her a service. It is a feeling which has lost me 
 many friends, and perhaps saved me from many enemies through 
 life. 
 
 But old Colonel Chichester — I call him old, though he was 
 about fifty-eight. You call him old too 1 Well, then, we shan't 
 quarrel; but perhaps, when you are fifty-eight, you mayn't like 
 to be called old. Old Colonel Chichester was a very different 
 man. He was a man of the world, had been a soldier, seen 
 much of men and women in all countries, and, besides, was 
 naturally polite. He was quite the man who might do any- 
 thing he pleased because he had " such good manners." Have 
 you ever met such a man, reader ? If you have not, and are 
 just visiting one of these gentlemen for the first time, all I say 
 is, Beware of men whose manners are so good that they may do 
 anything they like. They are the sort of men who may steal 
 a horse out of a field when others mayn't look at him over the 
 fence. Very pleasant fellows, if horse-stealing were not a crime, 
 however politely it is done. 
 
 I ought to beg old Colonel Chichester's pardon for taking 
 away his- character because he had good manners. He was 
 equal to the occasion, and soon turned to my Aunt Mandeville,- 
 and said, — 
 
 " I see you have no umbrella, madam, allow me to place mine 
 at your disposal." 
 
 I particularly remarked that he said " madam " and not 
 "ma'am." 
 
 My Aunt turned round and looked at the Colonel with some- 
 thing like a toss of her head, as much as to say, " It is not every 
 one's umbrella that I would accept, even though I don't like to 
 get wet." 
 
 However her pride lasted but a second. It was stifled as soon 
 as it was born. Love for her clothes got the better of the old 
 
122 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Halfacre hauteur, and she said, with one of her most gracious 
 smiles, and there was no one who smiled more winningly than 
 my Aunt Mandeville : 
 
 " I shall be very glad to accept it, if you will stay here under 
 shelter until I send it back to you." 
 
 The Colonel assented with a low bow, the umbrella was 
 handed over, and I bore it aloft over my Aunt up to Wilders- 
 mouth House. I remember thinking as I felt the round ivory 
 top that I had got the ball in my own hands now. The first 
 move in the game had been made, and though I was not yet in 
 love with Arethusa, I felt that soon I should be again on speaking 
 terms with her. Feelings are so masked and veiled, even from 
 oneself, that I firmly believe I only then fancied I wished to 
 renew our acquaintance that I might pay her off for having 
 laughed at my family name. 
 
 As soon as Aunt Mandeville was safely housed, she sent mo 
 back with the umbrella. 
 
 " Run back quickly, Edward, and don't be awkward ; say 
 something civil to the old gentleman for me. I am so much 
 obliged to him. See, there are but a few spots on my black silk. 
 Curl must come and wipe them off at once." 
 
 Down I ran to Wildersmouth as fast as I could, taking little 
 heed of sheltering myself under the umbrella, which played 
 such an important part in the drama of my destiny. Is not 
 that a fine sentence — the " drama of my destiny 1 " If a drama 
 is only another name for a play, I have found the drama of my 
 destiny anything but play. 
 
 I found the Colonel sticking like a limpet to the rock, and I 
 found another limpet with him whom I had not expected to see. 
 Arethusa was by his side ; and there I stood before them, bound 
 to deliver the umbrella to its owner, and to say something civil, 
 and not to be awkward. 
 
 I don't know if any of you share my feeling, that it is far 
 easier to speak to one person than to two. Whether it be that 
 if you say anything silly there is a witness to your silliness, or 
 whether you feel that two to one is hardly fair, I don't know ; 
 but though, as I ran down, I said to myself, " Now, perhaps, I 
 shall speak to Arethusa : " when I found her standing before me 
 I wished her a thousand miles off, and that I had only the old 
 Colonel to whom to deliver my message. 
 
 However there they were, and I had to make the best of it. 
 
 " My Aunt is very much obliged to you for your umbrella, 
 sir," I said ; " and she bade me say how sorry she was to keep 
 you standing in the rain while she took it away." 
 
 As I said these words I felt I was blushing like a peony, but 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 123 
 
 I dexterously held the umbrella, which, might be called our 
 master of the ceremonies, over my head. 
 
 " I am very glad that your Aunt has been able to make use 
 of it," said the Colonel, reaching out his hand for the 
 umbrella. 
 
 I gave it up very slowly because it hid my scarlet face, and 
 because I felt as though in parting with its ball handle the 
 whole globe was slipping out of my hand. 
 
 But the Colonel clutched it as though it were only an ivory 
 handle, and not a master of the ceremonies, an introducer, or. 
 anything you like that brings two people together. 
 
 After he had hold of it, he turned to Arethusa, who stood 
 beside him, dripping like her own fountain, and said, — • 
 
 " Toosy, you must be nearly wet through, we had better make 
 the best of our way home ; " and accordingly away they went ; 
 Arethusa not so much as giving me one glance, and her father 
 not even saying, " I hope we shall see you again." 
 
 I looked after them, rooted to the ground, and felt that I had 
 made very little out of the opportunity which the umbrella had 
 given me of speaking to Arethusa. Slowly did I retrace my 
 steps to Wildersmouth House, and I must have been long about 
 it, though it was only two or three hundred yards from the rock 
 of refuge ; for I found luncheon waiting, and Brooks in a fever. 
 He always was in a fever if any one kept luncheon waiting, for 
 then he could not get what he called "his meals regular," for his 
 dinner followed our luncheon. 
 
 " Well, Edward," said my Aunt, " you have been rather long 
 in delivering my message to Colonel Chichester. Did you walk 
 home with him 1 I wonder where he lives i " 
 
 " No, Auntie, they walked off alone." 
 
 " They 1 " said my Aunt, " how did Colonel Chichester become 
 plural ; when I left him he was alone under the rock." 
 
 " Yes, Auntie, and when I found him, Miss Chichester was 
 standing by him. How she came there I cannot tell. She 
 was on the other side of the rock, I suppose. I gave the 
 Colonel the umbrella, with a few civil words. He said he waa 
 glad to have lent it to you ; and they, that is to say, he and 
 Miss Chichester, walked off together. If I have been a long 
 time coming I can't understand it, for I only went there and 
 back, and I am sure I was not with them two minutes." 
 
 Here Brooks cut in. It was at. luncheon, and he considered 
 himself free to speak. 
 
 " I see Master Edward a-coming up the lane, and he stop five 
 minutes, at least, at the gate half-way up. He looked up the 
 lane, and down the lane, and threw stones into the brook, and 
 
124 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 walked backwards and forwards four or five times. I says to 
 myself, Brooks, Master Edward can never know how near 
 lunch it be ; and I made signs to him, but he took no heed, 
 and when he did come he walked slowly like, as if it were a hot 
 day in June, instead of raining cats and dogs." 
 
 So the wretch had been watching me from the dining-room 
 window, and now paid me off for delaying his dinner. 
 
 " Perhaps Master Edward was thinking, Brooks. He has a 
 great deal to think of just now. He is going to take his degree 
 in November." 
 
 I did not dare to look at Aunt Mandeville to see if she was 
 laughing at me. Perhaps it was only my guilty conscience 
 which made me take such a deep interest in the willow pattern 
 of the plate befoi'e me. We all know now that it represents a 
 heart-rending Chinese love-story ; but perhaps if the luncheon 
 had lasted long enough, I might have gazed down into my plate 
 until I had discovered the meaning of the pattern, but my tor- 
 mentor Brooks would not let me look long enough. 
 
 " Will you have any more mutton, Master Edward ? '' he 
 asked ; and before I could answer " yes " or " no " he had 
 snatched off my' plate. His real wish was to carry off the leg of 
 mutton for himself, but the result of his greediness was to make 
 me look my Aunt Mandeville full in the face. 
 
 Oh ! that I had been in a land where butler-killing was no 
 murder ! I would have put that " sneak " Brooks to death by 
 slow torture. 
 
 • After all, when I did look straight at Aunt Mandeville there 
 was nothing so dreadful to see. There she sat looking as happy 
 as usual. So far from saying anything which could hurt my 
 morbid feelings, she repeated her question as to where the Chi- 
 ehesters lived, and even asked me to try and find out their 
 house. 
 
 I remember in my ignorance thinking, " Well, she can't sea 
 into my heart ; she can't know how much I wish to speak to 
 Arethusa, or she would never ask me to find out where they 
 live." 
 
 I remember, too, thinking myself very prudent in answer- 
 ing— 
 
 "Oh, I'm sure, I don't know where they live,'' which was 
 quite true. " Of course they live somewhere in the town, and 
 it won't be hard to find out." 
 
 There I ought to have let the matter rest, -but I could not be 
 quiet, and at breakfast next morning I asked Aunt Mandeville 
 if she still wished to know where the Chichesters lived. 
 
 " Oh," said my Aunt, answering me in mj own words, " of 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 125 
 
 course they live somewhere in the town, and we can easily find 
 out if we want.'' 
 
 That day, which was finer than usual, that is to say, it did 
 not rain more than six hours, I spent in my bed-room reading, 
 only coming down, d, la Brooks, to get " my meals regular." 
 
 However it was fated that I and Arethusa were to know each 
 other, and no shyness or awkwardness on my part, no suspicion 
 or jealousy on that of my Aunt, no coolness of the Colonel, and 
 no malignity of Brooks, could avert it. What was to be, was. 
 
 First when the Colonel met my Aunt, which he did twenty 
 times a day, he took off his hat ; that is, he took it off the first 
 two or three times. After that such frequent bowing, threaten- 
 ing the utter wear and tear of his beaver, became ridiculous, and 
 instead of bowing he used to smile. Then he held the gate 
 open for my Aunt at least once a day ; and last, though not 
 least, he and Arethusa were put into the same pew with us at 
 church, and Auntie lent him half her hymn-book, and I lent 
 Arethusa half of mine. How I blessed pews, and pew-openers, 
 and hymn-books ! 
 
 Why is it, let me ask, that every one feels entitled to offer 
 another his or her hymn-book, not only when they are in the 
 pew together, but often when they are each in separate pews, 
 and often two pews off? It is all the same whether you are 
 short or long-sighted, whether you can sing or not ; let the 
 psalm be given out, and the organ or harmonium growl, and 
 any one who has a hymn-book is not easy till he has got a 
 partner who is hymn-bookless. Still more charitable are they 
 who, sitting in a pew behind you, tap you on the back, or scratch 
 your neck, to hand you a hymn-book. If there were arrest for 
 debt on Sunday the first process would add a new terror to 
 church, as surely as the second suggests a wasp or hornet getting 
 down your collar behind. You turn round in dismay, and find 
 it is only an old lady or a young lady, a marchioness or a maid-of- 
 all-work with a hymn-book which she wishes to lend you. Take 
 it you must, and you must hold it open, and try to sing ; and 
 when the singing is over you must return it gracefully, with a 
 bow, to its owner. If you don't, you are set down for a heathen 
 brute. • I ask again, Why is it 1 If you meet a lady in the 
 street, or in a railway carriage, and you sneeze, she does not at 
 once insist on your sharing her handkerchief. If you have no- 
 cold, and she has a novel, and you none, she does not instantly 
 ask you to read it with her. I ask for the third time, Why is 
 this exception made in the case of prayer and specially of hymn- 
 books 1 
 
 However, there they were in our pew. Fate had thrown us 
 
126 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 under their umbrella, and we were obliged to them ; and now 
 Fate had made them borrow our hymn-books, and they were 
 obliged to us. There I was, standing side by side with Arethusa, 
 she singing, and very well too, out of my hymn-book. It was 
 "Jerusalem the Golden," I remember. Had I the power I would 
 have changed it into "0 Ilfracombe the Golden," the " " being 
 added to fill up the odd syllable ; and there was Colonel Chi- 
 chester standing close up to my Aunt — a perfect happy family ; 
 the only drawback being that Brooks and the rest of the ser- 
 vants were all in the front row of the gallery, taking note of what 
 we did. 
 
 If I blessed the umbrella before, I blessed the hymn-books 
 tenfold now. I am afraid that I neglected the one for the other, 
 though I ought to have remembered that you need a hymn-book 
 only once a week at Ilfracombe, while you want an umbrella ten 
 times a-day. 
 
 But the hymn-books had it all their own way that Sunday. 
 We walked home together as far as Wildersmouth House, and 
 when we parted my Aunt said she should be very happy to call 
 on Miss Chichester, if Colonel Chichester would allow it. 
 
 "Nothing would give him greater pleasure," said the Colonel; 
 and I could not help remarking that as he said those few words 
 he did not turn as red as a turkey-cock, like a certain young gen- 
 tleman whom I could have named. 
 
 With that we parted, and Auntie and I went home to 
 luncheon. 
 
 She said little or nothing, — certainly nothing about the Chi- 
 chesters. She did not even wonder this time where they lived. 
 
 All that afternoon I spent in my own room, nominally reading 
 divinity, but really humming "Jerusalem the Golden," and think- 
 ing of Arethusa Chichester; but I beg you all to take notice that 
 I was not the least in love with her — I only wanted to pay her 
 off for laughing at me. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 HOW I SAW SOMETHING OF AEETHTOA. 
 
 When these visits passed between my Aunt and -Miss Chi- 
 chester I was artful enough 4ot to go with my Aunt, though she 
 • asked me to do so. I had to read a play of Sophocles, or the 
 First Georgic, or something ; I hardly know what. I made a 
 (Classical excuse, and it passed muster. I think I spent all the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 127 
 
 time my Aunt was away in holding the hymn-book just as I had 
 held it when Arethusa held the other half. I knew the very 
 spot where her tiny thumb had rested, and I am ashamed to 
 say I kissed it. Very silly and very natural I Boys were boys 
 then, and girls girls. "We were not so wise as young people are 
 uow-a-days. We felt more and thought less ; and I rather think we 
 had the best of it. There was false feeling and sham affection 
 then as now; but the genuine article was, at any rate, sometimes 
 to be found. It was with love then as with antiques and objects 
 of art. There were shams and forgeries then, and many- bought 
 them and were taken in; but it was possible to go into a dealer's 
 shop and to find a genuine bit of china, a majolica plate, a piece 
 of silver, a cabinet, untouched and unrestored. Now, you may 
 search London, and find nothing but sham antiques, and so it 
 was with love then, and so it is with love now. We were great 
 fools. We squandered our affections recklessly, and often on 
 worthless objects ; but, at any rate, we sometimes got someth ng 
 genuine and natural. 
 
 But to come back to Ilfracombe. When my Aunt returned, 
 she said that Miss Chichester seemed a nice girl. " Very pretty, 
 too," she thought her. As for Colonel Chichester, who should 
 he turn out to be but the very " Jack Chichester of the Guards," 
 the friend of my Uncle Mandeville before he married ? 
 
 " He was wild enough then," said my Aunt, " but he seems a 
 very courteous old gentleman now, and time, no doubt, has 
 brought with it repentance for his former follies." 
 
 " Did he ask after me, Aunt 1 " ♦ 
 
 This was all I dared to say of the Chichesters. 
 
 " Oh ! yes. He spoke of you as his ' young friend,' who had 
 given him the brandy-and-water on board the steamer, which did 
 him so much good. I thought it had been tea you brought on 
 deck, Edward 1 " 
 
 " Dr. Mindererus said brandy-and-water was what we were to 
 take if we were sea-sick, and I thought what was good for us 
 must be good for the Colonel. That was why I brought it. It 
 seemed to do him great good." 
 
 " Exactly what he said to-day ; " said my Aunt. " If it had not 
 been for that glass of brandy-said-water- he did not think he 
 should have reached Ilfracombe-.alive.'* 
 
 In a day or so Miss Chichester came to call on my Aunt, and 
 her father came with her. When he .saw me he said he was glad 
 to see me ; and Arethusa, for the "first time, looked as though 
 she were glad to see me, and we all talked and laughed, and so 
 the visit ended very happily. 
 
 That evening we all met at Wildersmouth, for a wonder not 
 
128 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 . in the rain. The green umbrella was not unfolded. It remained 
 unnoticed in the Colonel's hand. Then we sat down upon the 
 -rooks, and the Colonel told us some stories of the Burmese War; 
 rather in the tom-tom and gum-gum style, but such stories were 
 not then so well known as they are now. India was an unknown 
 land. Faith in the pagoda tree was still firm. In fact, we were 
 less accustomed to a diet of curry and rice then than we are now, 
 and nothing pleased us more than an occasional dish of it. My 
 Aunt was infinitely amused at the stories, and I would have been 
 delighted had the Colonel told her the first joke in Joe Miller as 
 his own, or tried to palm off upon us — as we have known some 
 . bold bad story-tellers in these latter days, — Mr. Canning's stale 
 story of the elephants coming last into the ark, because they 
 stayed to pack up their trunks. 
 
 When the story-telling was over we saw them home to their 
 cottage, — Combe Martin Cottage, I remember it was called, — 
 and we turned back and walked home and went to bed; and the 
 morning and the evening were the first day. 
 
 When I came to reflect, — which act of the intellect did not 
 begin till I crept into bed, — how I had behaved to Arethusa and 
 she to me, I could not call to mind anything which showed her 
 that I had any leaning towards her, and still less anything on 
 her part whicii could at all prove that she cared in the least for 
 me. Young people are carried along by their natural guardians 
 and protectors like logs on a current, or bathers in a strong tide- 
 way. The bathers think, and the logs would think if they could, 
 that they are getting on swimmingly, and that they are having 
 their way; but it is the irresistible current that carries them both 
 on, until it lands them somewhere far from what they hoped. 
 In this case, both Arethusa and I were playthings of the Colonel 
 and my Aunt Mandeville ; we had as yet no wishes of our own, 
 and the elders did with us pretty much as they liked. When 
 young people get so far as to have a will of their own, they soon 
 find they have a current of their own, or a wind of their own, 
 which sets right against the current of their temporal pastors 
 and masters, and causes great storms and high seas of passion 
 in which many gallant hopes go down, as richly-laden vessels 
 founder in a gale. 
 
 For the present we all swam together in harmony. The elders 
 not only proposed but disposed, and we were only too happy to 
 follow. Neither my Aunt nor Colonel Chichester dreamt that 
 either I or Arethusa could think of falling in love with one 
 another. My Aunt considered me still a boy; and as for the Colonel, 
 the last thing which breaks on a father's mind is the bitter fact, 
 of which every one around him has been long aware, that "his 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 129 
 
 darling daughter has made up her mind to exchange his society 
 for that of a husband. The very jealousy of my Aunt had 
 blinded her eyes. She saw nothing but me, and it never crossed 
 her mind that I could think of any woman as my wife till she 
 had first thought of her for me. 
 
 These worthy protectors of such inflammable elements as two 
 human hearts, than which at twenty not even nitro-glycerine or 
 dynamite is more explosive, did everything that in them lay to 
 bring Arethusa and me together when once the ice was broken. 
 We went off on ponies to Linton, along the cliff, enjoying 
 the finest sea-scenery in England; we lingered at Heddon- 
 mouth, and had a pic-nic partie carree on the shore ; we stayed 
 two days at the delightful Valley of Eocks Hotel ; we rode up 
 the valley; we walked down to Linmouth, aud very hot we were 
 walking back ; we rode back to Ilfracombe by moonlight, losing 
 the way and not arriving till one a.m. 
 
 Well might Brooks hold up his hands and exclaim : 
 
 "Missus out till one in the morning in this damp part ! 
 Whatever would Dr. Mindererus say 1 " 
 
 Then we rode to Morte Bay and Woollacomb Sands, and saw 
 Mortehoe Church, where one of Beckett's assassins lies; and 
 coming back, Arethusa dropped her brooch, and we both turned 
 back to look for it, and I found it and pinned it on and pricked 
 my finger. Ah me ! what a sweet wound was that ! 
 
 Then, growing bolder, we set off in my Aunt's carriage, which, 
 after lengthened travels, had reached Ilfracombe, and drove to 
 Barnstaple and Bideford, and Clovelly and Clovelly Court, and 
 Hartland Point. We were away nearly a week, for, though the 
 distances were not great, the horses were as great slugs as the 
 coachman ; and as for Brooks, who undertook to be beforehand 
 for us with our light portmanteaus, somehow or other he was 
 always in the wrong place, and we lost hours upon hours waiting 
 for him. 
 
 All this was delightful, only the time went so very fast. 
 Sunday was no sooner gone than it was back again. They had 
 got their own hymn-books by that time, but they still sat in our 
 pew, the Colonel next to my Aunt, — of course I made way for 
 my elders, — then Arethusa, and last I, keeping the fifth seat 
 against all comers. It is in a crowded church, with pushing 
 pew-openers, almost as anxious an office as guarding the " siege 
 perilous" in a tournament against all comers. Sometimes 
 though, however wide we spread ourselves. .out, we were invaded. 
 There were no crinolines in those days-j-that utterly extinct, or 
 half-extinct, or curtailed article of female attire had not come in, it 
 was before it was even.born or thought of, as the nurses say. Still 
 
 K 
 
130 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 less were our looped-up, bunched-up behind dresses known. 
 Ladies' "coats," as my Aunt used to call them, were short and 
 rather scanty ; when the wind blew they showed the shape a good 
 deal more than some of our modern umbrella-cases. It was hard 
 for a lady then to spread herself out, but Arethusa and my Aunt 
 did it as well as they could. The old Colonel puffed himself up 
 till he grew as red as a turkey-cock, and looked twice as savage. 
 I did my best to scare away all comers. Sometimes, though, we 
 did not succeed. I remember once, a man came and remained 
 through the service, but disappeared just at the end of the last 
 psalm. He vanished as suddenly as a ghost ; though next to 
 him, I never missed him. You will say I was looking at 
 Arethusa. I scorn the imputation. He was gone, however, and 
 returned no more that day. Next Sunday the same man came 
 again. I watched him all through the last verse of the last 
 psalm. It was a Hallelujah psalm, and lo ! at the end of the 
 singing, just at the "jah," the fifth sitter vanished ; withered 
 away and glided out more like a ghost than anything else. His 
 face worked as though he had something to say, but he made no 
 mockery of holding a handkerchief up to his nose, nor did he 
 cough or sneeze violently. No ; he quietly glided out — I believe 
 that preterite is " glode " — and was gone. 
 
 " Very odd man, that," said the Colonel. 
 
 " I suppose," said my Aunt, " the poor man was ill or some- 
 thing. Perhaps he felt faint." 
 
 " Very odd man," repeated the Colonel. " Odder still he 
 should feel faint two Sundays running, just at the very same 
 part of the service. Reminds me of a man in the 200th Bengal 
 Fusileers, who ran away regularly from two affairs in the 
 Burmese war. His time was the very first shot on the enemy's 
 side." 
 
 Nothing more was said, and the third Sunday came. At 
 the end of the last psalm, at the very last versicle, away 
 faded the fifth sitter in the same spectral way. We all wondered 
 a good deal at his strange manners, and could not at all explain 
 it ; but I have lived a little longer now, and feel sure that our 
 fifth sitter, who was a most respectable-looking man, and, for 
 aught I know, may have come to church in his own gig, must 
 have been the founder and apostle of that great heretical sect 
 who cannot bear bad sermons, and went about the country pro- 
 testing against them in this quiet way, and now his silent leaven 
 has leavened a great mass of followers. 
 
 The Colonel was of a different way of thinking. He had not 
 the eye to discern a true prophet. He would have served him 
 after his own fashion — that is, if he had found him in canton- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 131 
 
 ments in Bundelound, lie would have made him sit out three 
 sermons and given him three hundred lashes afterwards. 
 
 Yes ! the time went very fast, week by week, month by month, 
 till July, August, and most of September were over. On the 
 23rd of October "the House " met again, so that I had not long 
 to stay at Ilfracombe. Perhaps you think I had been making 
 the best of my opportunities by making love to Arethusa 1 
 Have I not told you that I was very shy 1 and what is life, the 
 moralists tell us, but a waste of opportunities. I beg you to 
 believe that I never said one word about love to Arethusa for 
 three months. Why should I ? We were always together ; she 
 saw no one else. There was a literate of St. Bees, — a very in- 
 dustrious worker, as you may imagine, by the hive he had 
 flown from, — who used to come down to the beach, stretching 
 his gaunt limbs, as you may have seen a fly, and for that matter 
 a bee, come out and stretch its legs and wings in a warm October 
 day. He was slovenly in his dress, wore highlows, and dirty white 
 cotton socks, which used to hang down over his highlows. A 
 modest, unassuming man, a great gatherer of sea-anemones and 
 searcher for pebbles. We never took any notice of him, nor he 
 of us, except to get out of one another's, way. He is now a 
 bishop. Don't tell me that a literate of St. Bees has never been 
 a bishop. I tell you he is a bishop, and what is more, richly 
 deserves to be one. 
 
 What am I ? Listen a little longer, and you shall hear as 
 much of my life as I .choose to tell you. 
 
 So I had no rivals ; no fear. It never occurred to me that 
 Arethusa could care for any one else. All I knew was, that I 
 saw her every day, and was happy. It was not till a week before 
 we were to part, that I began to see that all this sitting "on rocks," 
 all this " musing o'er flood and field," must have an end. We 
 used to sit side by side looking over the Bristol Channel, by 
 day, or till late at night watching the furnaces near Swansea, 
 very often without saying a word. It was not a week before all 
 this was to end. I say, that a light seemed to break upon me, 
 and I felt, " in ten days you two will have to part." 
 
 The light had been there all the while, as though the dawn 
 should say, while it is not midnight, " in four hours I shall be 
 with you." Who cares at midnight how soon the day will dawn, 
 and what cared I a month off that in four weeks I should lose 
 Arethusa'! But a week off, the light shone and the dawn broke, 
 just as hell blazes before the dying sinner ; and the parting 
 took a terrible reality to me, just as the Day of Judgment looms 
 at the very door of the unrepentant on his death-bed. 
 
 What did Arethusa think 1 What a silly question ! What 
 
 K 2 
 
132 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 should a well-brought-up young lady think of a mau who has 
 never dared to ask her what she thinks? No doubt she thought 
 a great deal more than she said, a very easy task, involving no 
 great waste of thought, for she had said nothing. Of course it 
 is well understood that a young lady, though she says nothing, 
 can very well show her dislike for a young man. If, therefore, 
 she makes no outward and visible sign of inward aversion, — if 
 she allows him to sit by her ever so long without changing her 
 seat, — if she is up before breakfast and meets him quite by acci- 
 dent,- — now-a-days if she gives him her photograph, though this 
 may mean very little, as when Prince Arthur presented his pho- 
 tograph to the Council of Military Education for passing him into 
 Woolwich Academy, — nay, even in the old prosaic fashion of working 
 him slippers. In these, and many ways, does a girl show that she 
 has no aversion to a man ; Only men are so silly, they will not 
 understand that not being averse is a very long way from love. 
 They will jump to conclusions, and many a man has had his 
 affections blighted because the girl who worked him a pair of 
 slippers, or knitted him a comforter, afterwards refused an offer 
 of his hand, — the hand, be it observed, in nine cases out of ten, 
 being empty. 
 
 So there I was, knowing absolutely nothing of Arethusa's 
 feelings, except that we had been together three months. Some 
 of you young ladies may call me a " muff," and so I was, no 
 doubt, a muff, a kind of man which has been defined as " a 
 thing that holds a pretty girl's hand without squeezing it." 
 Nay, I swear that I had never even got so far in these three 
 months as to be in the position of a muff. I had never even 
 held Arethusa's hand. I don't call shaking hands, "holding 
 hands." You all know it is quite another thing. 
 
 One day of the week had passed. It was a bitter day. My 
 Aunt despatched the coachman and the horses, and wrote home 
 to the servants to have the beds aired and the Hall ready for 
 us. Brooks was already in a flurry, partly with packing, and 
 more at the thought of getting to what he called " civilised 
 parts." by which he understood a house where he could have 
 more of his own way, lord it over the under-servants at dinner 
 in the servants' hall, and meet his equals after dinner in the 
 housekeeper's room over a glass of my Aunt's old port. I have 
 no doubt that the thought ever uppermost in his mind was that 
 he should soon again have " his meals regular." 
 
 "Master Edward, Master Edward !" he cried, as I came back 
 from bathing, " missis is going back by the steamer this day 
 week, and in ten days we shall be all back at Mandeville Hall. 
 Won't that be nice, Master Edward 1 " 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 133 
 
 Very nice. I wonder if the lout ever had an Arethusa to get 
 him his meals regular 1 
 
 I rather think that I stayed in to read,— that is to say, to 
 sulk, — all that morning. 
 
 At luncheon my Aunt added fresh fuel to my fire by saying, 
 as though it were the most natural thing in the world : 
 
 "Next week, in fact, this very day week, Edward, we will go 
 back by the Diana to Bristol, on our way to home. I shall be 
 very sorry to part with Colonel Chichester and his daughter," 
 
 " So shall 1, Aunt." 
 
 I was not hypocrite enough to say that I was glad to go back 
 to Mandeville Hall. I felt shocked — yes, shocked! — at the 
 cruel way in which my Aunt spoke of parting from Arethusa, 
 and I felt outraged at the calm proposal to go back to our 
 own home. 
 
 Then my Aunt went on to say, in the most provoking way : 
 " One would almost wish never to have met people at all ; it is 
 so painful to part with them." But she said it in a passionless, 
 business-like manner, that showed how little she felt the -force 
 of what she was saying. 
 
 After luncheon I walked down to Wildersmouth, and there I 
 found Arethusa picking up seaweed, as she used to pick it up 
 every day. What she did with the weeds she gathered no dne 
 knew, but there she always was every day, gathering seaweeds 
 for an hour or so. Her father was reading " The Times," which it 
 was then thought a wonder to get two days old. Dear me ! 
 what pre- Adamite days those were, if we reflect on our express 
 mail trains and telegrams ! 
 
 Arethusa had already been told of our intended departure. 
 My Aunt had met her in the morning, when I was sulking, or 
 my Aunt's maid had met her maid, open-mouthed to tell a bit 
 of news, and glad to get away from the land of clouted cream 
 and squab-pie and cider. 
 
 "So you are going away next week, Mr. Halfacre 1" said 
 Arethusa, plucking the LopTiospermum Jfirubescens — I know that 
 is not the name of a seaweed, but I have not the Nature 
 Printed Seaweeds by me to refer to — to pieces which she held in 
 her hand. 
 
 "Yes ; we are." That was all I said. 
 
 " Well, everything must come to an end, and so, I suppose 
 must our visit to Ilfracombe ; I am sure, though, I don't know 
 when we shall go'away from this dull place. If we dp this year 
 as we have done before, we shall go and pay some shooting visits 
 in South Devon, and return to town about Christmas." 
 
 So she called it a dull place ; but whether it was dull from 
 
134 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 what it had been, or from what it was to be, I could not tell ; 
 but I ventured to say, " Wherever I go I shall feel very dull, too." 
 
 Arethusa caught me up in an instant. 
 
 " I did not say that I should be dull. I only said it was a 
 dull place, a fact which you cannot deny." 
 
 I was not going to argue the point with her, so I replied, in a 
 fatuous sort of way • 
 
 "Yes, I daresay it is a dull place ; but " 
 
 Here I verily believe I was about to say, " But with you, Miss 
 Chichester, what place could be dull 1 " But at that most 
 critical moment the Colonel's head appeared round the rock, and 
 proposed a walk to Watermouth. I do not know that I ever 
 felt my respect for Arethusa's father so sorely tried as it was by 
 this most cruel proposition. Why could he not have gone on 
 reading about the Bombardment of Acre at a time when we 
 were within an ace of going to war with France ; were it only 
 for five minutes longer, until I had settled matters with Are- 
 thusa, and, at least, found out whether she cared for me. But 
 there was no help for it. To Watermouth we all three walked, 
 and from Watermouth we came back, my heart bleeding — I 
 suppose you will not allow me to say my mouth was watering — 
 all the while with a desire to be alone once more with Arethusa. 
 When we got home it was late ; there was only just time to 
 dress for dinner, but it was full moon that night, and we had 
 agreed that we would all meet about nine o'clock at Wilders- 
 mouth. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 HOT I SAID SOMETHING TO ARETHUSA. 
 
 I wondeb if my Aunt Mandeville thought me dull at dinner ; 
 I had scarce a word to say, 
 
 " Poor fellow ! you are fagged with reading all the morning, 
 and then by being dragged off to Watermouth by that Colonel, 
 whose constitution seems quite iron-bound. To see him row in 
 a dingy is something marvellous. Eat your dinner,' and don't 
 talk. You will soon be better. When you get away from this 
 dull place you will soon recover your spirits, and feel the benefit 
 of change of air. In fact, I wonder how we have been all so 
 well in this damp nook. It certainly has rained every other 
 day. It must be a dreadful place for rheumatism in the winter." 
 
 So my Aunt ran on, I all the while saying nothing, while 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 135 
 
 Brooks had the insolence to make a face at me behind my 
 Aunt's chair when she spoke of the dampness and rheumatic 
 character of Ilfracombe. 
 
 " Drink your wine, Master Edward, it will do you good," said 
 Brooks, in a husky whisper, as he saw that I had left my glass 
 of port untasted. This, my young readers will remember, was 
 before the days of Gladstone claret. 
 
 We had figs at dessert, and I will tell you how I remember 
 that very trivial event. All that part of Devonshire is famous 
 for figs. Go to Clovelly, and buy some off the old Abbey wall, 
 if you doubt my word ; and my Aunt, as she took one, said 
 something of Devonshire being the Garden of Eden. I said 
 mechanically "yes ; " but it was some time, in the sad state of 
 heart and brain-softening in which I then was, before I put the 
 figs and the Garden of Eden together, and reflected that our 
 first parents must have had figs if they had fig-leaves ; for I 
 will not pay the fig-trees of Eden the bad compliment of sup- 
 posing that they were all as barren as their descendant in the 
 Gospels. 
 
 That was why I remember that we had figs at dessert that 
 day. North Devon had been to me the Garden of Eden. My 
 Aunt sewed the figs fast on to that blissful recollection, and 
 there the figs have been dangling in my memory ever since. 
 Whenever I think of figs I think of the Garden of Eden, and 
 the fall of our first parents, in whose footsteps we have all so 
 faithfully followed ; and when I think of the Garden of Eden I 
 think of Ilfracombe. 
 
 Just about nine my Aunt and I set out, Brooks standing at the 
 door and hoping we should not catch the " rheumatiz." We saw 
 Arethusa and her father seated on the rocks ; on one particular 
 rock on the other side of the little stream which there spreads 
 itself out over the sand and pebbles- before it loses itself in 
 the sea. 
 
 There on the other side of the stream of that Jordan that divided 
 me from the promised land, I saw her who made the promised 
 land alone worth having. I ran from my Aunt's side and 
 thought I would leap over the stream as I had leapt it a hundred 
 times before ; when, just as I took off in my leap, my right foot 
 rested on a round stone, I twisted and sprained my ankle as I 
 leapt, and, what was worse, on alighting on the other side I fell 
 on the sprained ankle, and crushed it up completely. Down I 
 fell just at the foot of Arethusa's rock, and there, what with 
 pain, and rage, and shame, I fainted. When I came to myself, 
 the old Colonel was sprinkling my forehead with sea-water, and 
 my Aimt and Arethusa stood by me looking as pale as ghosts in 
 
136 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the moonlight, but then it might only have been the moon- 
 light. 
 
 " Gad ! " said the Colonel. He never swore more than " Gad," 
 and then only on great occasions, like Brooks -with his " Drat 
 it " and " Odd-rabbetem ! " " We did not expect at our next 
 meeting to pick you up a fainting man. _ Toosy saw you first 
 floundering and falling in the moonlight, and she was first down 
 from the rock to help you. Young feet are nimbler than old 
 bones." 
 
 He did not know how he was healing my heart by his words. 
 It seemed that the agony of the sprain was not worth thinking 
 of. So she had been the first to see me, and the first to fly to 
 help me from the rock. 
 
 " How are you, Edward ? " said my Aunt. " Does your ankle 
 pain you very much 1 " 
 
 "A good deal, Aunt. But never mind, I shall soon be all 
 right again. What is a sprained ankle, after all 1 " 
 
 "Let me tell you," said the Colonel, "a sprained ankle is 
 often much worse than a broken leg. There was a fellow in my 
 regiment who sprained his ankle out tiger-hunting, and he was 
 never able to march afterwards — had to sell out and leave the 
 service. Saw him last year at Buxton, hobbling about." 
 
 I couldn't stand, so Brooks came down, " fit to catch his death 
 of cold in the dark," with the two footmen, and they made a 
 sort of litter out of a plank and shawls, and I was stretched on 
 it, and so carried up to Wildersmouth. 
 
 Brooks, when they got me up to bed, and while he was super- 
 intending my undressing, said he " never see such a limb in his 
 life, all mashed and jammed like; more like jelly than flesh." 
 
 That was the report with which the wretch rushed downstairs 
 and sickened my Aunt. When I myself looked at my leg, I 
 never saw anything so swollen and misshapen. The Colonel 
 offered to go for a doctor, and in a little while the head iEscu- 
 lapius of Ilfracombe appeared. He was a nice, pleasant man. 
 Poor fellow, he was dead when I was last there. 
 
 He merely said it was a bad sprain. He was no alarmist, but 
 just what a doctor should be — frightening no one, and not 
 frightened himself ; putting a good face on the ugliest case, till 
 its features got too bad to be concealed from the patient or the 
 patient's friends. In a few days, he said, he hoped I shouldjbe in 
 a fair way to recovery ; at present I must be quiet, and on no 
 account put my leg to the ground, — a most unnecessary caution, 
 for I could no more have walked. than flown upon that leg. 
 
 After the doctor had made his report, and departed . to get 
 some leeches, the Colonel also took his leave, and I knew that 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 137 
 
 Arethusa had been in the house all the while. I heard him call 
 to her to come, and as I lay with the window open, I heard her 
 dainty feet trip along the gravel walk. The gate slammed after 
 them, and they were gone into the bright moonlight night. 
 
 My Aunt was with me as soon as I was undressed. She was 
 with me when the doctor came, and though she went downstairs 
 with him, she returned almost immediately, and insisted on sit- 
 ting up with me the greater part of the night. It was a great 
 fuss to make about a strain, but then I had scarcely ever been 
 ill, and I was all in all to my Aunt. 
 
 Next morning the limb was not quite so big, but it was very 
 red ; and when the doctor came, heisaid he was sorry he hadn't 
 sent more leeches, but it was too late now, so he deluged the 
 limb with evaporating lotions with such effect, that in a day or 
 two the swelling went down, and the whole limb, nearly up to 
 the knee, grew black, and blue, and green. 
 
 As I lay in bed I remember doing a sum of Profit and Loss, 
 and trying to find out whether I was better off with regard to 
 Arethusa for having sprained my ankle. The conclusion I came 
 to was that I was much better off. First, and foremost, Arethusa 
 had shown that she cared for me by rushing down the rock to 
 help me. I had in fact got my question answered without 
 putting it to her. Next, the accident had thrown my Aunt and 
 the Chichesters closer together. Every day the Colonel and 
 Arethusa came to inquire for me. I knew their footsteps long 
 before they rang the bell. The Colonel strode along, grinding 
 the gravel as though he were a bison or a rhinoceros trampling 
 the ground. Arethusa's feet pattered over it like a gazelle ; . and 
 though last, not least, the sprain would surely delay our de- 
 parture. It was like a reprieve to a condemned criminal : he 
 not only feels respited for the time, but also that no one will 
 have the cruelty, to hang him after he has been once reprieved. 
 A week is everything in love, and a week more with Arethusa 
 seemed an eternity of enjoyment. 
 
 I knew we should not go home so soon, by the sour face of 
 Brooks, the morning after the accident. It needed not his words 
 to tell me the state of the case. 
 
 " This here sad accident, Master Edward, have had the effect 
 of countermanding our departure, which it was to have been 
 next Wednesday. Missis have sent to the steamboat, and 
 ordered it for the week after_ next. A sad trial to us poor 
 servants, Master Edward, to have to stay here all along of your 
 leg. They have no proper beer in these parts, and the cider as 
 they drink instead is like swallowing a carving-knife— it do lie 
 so sharp and cold on the pit of the stomach." 
 
138 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 I got up, you may be sure, as soon as ever I could. I was not 
 going to waste those precious ten days in bed. I gave my Aunt 
 no rest. I must go out. I was pining for the fresh air down at 
 Wildersmouth. It wasn't the same air at all at Wildersmouth 
 House. It lost all its saltness and savour in blowing up the 
 valley. Could I not ride on a pony, on a side-saddle 1 This was 
 a bright idea. My Aunt was only too glad to humour me in 
 every way. A pony, as quiet as a lamb, and a side-saddle were 
 got, and so, with the sound leg in the stirrup, and the lame one 
 hanging over the pummel, I made a triumphal procession from 
 the house to the cove ; and there, to my great joy, I met Are- 
 thusa and her father. Aunt Mandeville, I need not say, walked 
 by the pony's side. 
 
 To see Arethusa was something, and to thank her even 
 publicly for coming to help me was another something. I hope 
 I thanked her gracefully, — my Aunt called it " a very pretty 
 speech." Arethusa bowed, and blushed, and muttered something 
 about its being " a pleasure as well as a duty," and her father 
 only thought of her keen eyes. He believed she could " see to 
 pick up a pin in the dark," and as for running down a rock, " she 
 was as fleet and sure-footed as a chamois." 
 
 So far, so well ; but let any one try to make love off a pony 
 with a lame leg, — I mean with a lame leg off a pony, of course ; 
 and let him try to do it in the presence of the natural guardians 
 and protectors of both the lovers, and he will find it no easy 
 work. Besides, the pony, that innocent, as quiet as a lamb, was 
 as obstinate as a mule. He was a silly, unpoetical pony. No 
 Bucephalus or Pegasus would ever have sprung from him. He 
 cared not a bit for Wildersmouth and its surf, throwing sea-weeds, 
 red and green, at your feet at every wave. What he wanted 
 was grass. Several times he tried to bolt across the Wilder 
 into the meadow beyond. If I could only have persuaded Are- 
 thusa to bolt with us, it would have been well ; but who ever 
 heard of a young lady not only running — that one has heard of 
 — but actually leaping after her lover 1 Arethusa neither ran nor 
 leapt. She called the pony " stupid," and offered to lead him. 
 Her offer was accepted, but she only led the brute round and 
 round the cove, my Aunt and her father being in close attend- 
 ance, and so the time soon came that, what with the pony's fits 
 and starts, I had had quite enough of riding on a side-saddle for 
 that day at least, and I was very glad to get back to Wilders- 
 mouth House, and be Carried up to bed. 
 
 Next day was a great improvement, 1 only used the pony to 
 ride down to Wildersmouth, and then I was lifted off and laid 
 on shawls just above high- water mark. There I lay all the after- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 139 
 
 noon, and Arethusa sat beside me. The Colonel and my Aunt 
 sat close by, but they were engaged in playing piqiiette, a game 
 very conducive to disputes, and therefore very engrossing. While 
 they were hard at some discussion as to the " score," I was think- 
 ing how I might best score my name on the heart of Arethusa, 
 or so get it into her head that she should never be able to 
 throw it out. I was thinking, I say, for in this as in all matters 
 through life, my ingrained shyness has been a great drawback 
 to me. 
 
 " I hope you feel much better, Mr. Halfacre ? " 
 
 " Yes, thank you, much better." Then, after a pause — taking 
 advantage of the dispute in the game, which just then waxed 
 warm, — " How good it was of you, Miss Chichester, to show so 
 much sympathy for one so undeserving of it as myself." 
 
 " You forget the Christian precept, to do as you would be 
 done by. I only did for you what I should expect you to do 
 for me." 
 
 " For you, and for no one else 1 " 
 
 " That I call a Heathen, and not a Christian precept. You 
 ought to do it not only for me, but for the least and poorest 
 Christian in the world." 
 
 " But suppose I would rather be a Heathen, and do something 
 for you, than a Christian and let all the rest of the world share it." 
 
 " I shan't allow you to suppose any such wicked thing," said 
 Arethusa. " Besides, how do you know that I showed any more 
 sympathy for you than I should for any one else under like 
 circumstances 1 " 
 
 " I inferred it from what your father said ; from the very first 
 words that I heard when I recovered my senses." 
 
 " Ah ! but one ought not to be too quick in drawing inferences. 
 That is behaving like a horse that will start as soon as the car- 
 riage-door is opened, and will not wait for any one to get in. 
 Inferences sometimes run away with one." 
 
 " I am sure I wish you were an inference," said I, with an 
 excess of impudence of which none but very shy people are ever 
 guilty ; and then, seeing that I was putting the case as though 
 she were going to run away with me, I blushed deeply, and said, 
 " No ; that is not what I mean. I meant to say that I wished 
 I were an inference." 
 
 " It doesn't much matter what you mean," said Arethusa. " I 
 should say, though, that you are hasty in drawing inferences. As 
 for running away, it is clear that it is high time that I should 
 run away from you. You know you can't follow me." 
 
 With these words she tripped away as light as Ariel over the 
 yellow sands, and as elfish and uncanny. In another minute she 
 
140 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 was perched on the top of the very rock whence she had flown to 
 my rescue, and there she remained for some time surveying the 
 scene of her victory and my defeat, and, as it seemed to me, 
 glorying in her dexterity in evading an awkward question. I 
 remember, too, that as she stood there the western sun fell on her, 
 and her rich brown hair shone with a glory of its own, as she 
 stood transfigured, to my longing eyes. Then she slowly turned 
 away, gliding down on the other side of the rock to reappear at 
 the furthest end of the cove, under the Capstan Hill, seemingly 
 deep in her favourite pursuit— seaweed-gathering. 
 
 " Where's Toosy 1 What, left you alone to go and pick up 
 that rubbish 1 She was here but a minute ago." Thus spoke 
 the Colonel, quite forgetting that time flies quite as fast in dis- 
 putes at cards as in lovers' quarrels. 
 
 " Come back, Toosy ! comeback!" cried out her father. And 
 she came back ; but she never came close to me, and there I lay, 
 feeling that I had lost another chance ; nay, that I had lost the 
 assurance that her father had given me. Had she not resolved 
 all her sympathy for me into mere Christian love — diluted and 
 watered her feeling for me by making me share it with all the 
 beggars in the universe. Out upon such sympathy ! And then, 
 how cruelly she turned on me when I put my foot into it ! 
 Lame as I was, that was a most unkind cut to compare me to a 
 restless runaway horse. 
 
 Added to all this, I had evidently scared and frightened her. 
 She did not choose to sit by a man so shy and awkward as to be 
 capable of putting her to the blush by such bold suggestions. 
 Nor was this all. I had to confess that she had maintained her 
 self-possession throughout, continuing calm, while I was warm, 
 and fairly defeating me on ground which I myself had chosen 
 for the attack. 
 
 No ! I was as little pleased with myself as she was plainly dis- 
 pleased with me. I turned over and groaned. My Aunt 
 thought it came from my ankle, but it came straight from the 
 heart. " Did 1 feel cold 1 " Yes, I did. I had lain there too 
 long. I should like to go home. So they laid what was left of 
 my proud hopes on the pony, and I went home in no very 
 amiable frame of mind. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 141 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 HOW I PARTED FROM ARETHUSA. i 
 
 All that night I lay awake resolving, and the sum of my 
 resolution was that I would have it " out " with Arethusa the 
 very next time we were alone. 
 
 My Aunt saw that I was wan and haggard next morning. It 
 was more air that I needed. I must go down to Wildersmouth 
 as soon as might be after breakfast. I could have hobbled down 
 with a stick ; but for another day I was condemned to the pony 
 and the side-saddle, punished with my own invention, " hoised 
 with my own petard." The bed on the shore was made, and 
 strewn with wraps as before. My Aunt was writing letters, and 
 I devoutly hoped that the Colonel was in his counting-house 
 counting out his money, or even usurping the Queen's rights, 
 and eating bread and honey — doing anything, in short, except 
 escorting his daughter down to the beach. 
 
 Guess my surprise when he came, and came alone. I gazed 
 to see Arethusa sailing after him like the gallant ship, from 
 which she took her name, in chase of the Belle Poule. In vain. 
 No " undraped eye," as the modest Bermudians say for naked 
 eye ; no binocular, night, or fog-glass could discern her. She was 
 nowhere to be seen — neither on the rock of last night, nor upon 
 the Capstan Hill. Where was she 1 She would soon come. She, 
 too, was writing letters — perhaps writing to me. Vain supposi- 
 tions and questions, soon scattered to the winds by the Colonel, 
 who came up, and asked, in the politest manner possible, after 
 my Aunt's health, and how my ankle felt. They were both very 
 well — that is, my Aunt was very well, and my ankle better. 
 Then, in turn, I inquired how Miss Chichester was, and whether 
 she had stayed out too long last night in the moonlight. 
 
 " You're quite right to say in the moonlight," said the Colonel. 
 " Nothing is so bad as the moonlight. Talk of the sun, the sun 
 is nothing to the moon. Meat and milk turn sooner in moon- 
 light than sunlight ; and as for sleeping in the moonlight, it's 
 the worst thing you can do. There was a fellow of ours who fell 
 asleep out in the moonlight in India after dinner. He was stone- 
 blind ever afterwards, and quite dazed in wits. But we didn't 
 sleep in it last night.", 
 
 So he ran on thinking of the moonlight, while I was thinking 
 of Arethusa. 
 
142 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 After his lecture on the moon came to an end, I said : 
 
 " I am glad Miss Chichester took no harm from the night air. 
 Will she come down to the beach this morning 1 " 
 
 '■' What, don't you know ? " said the Colonel. " Toosy went 
 off this morning with her maid. I forget. It was all settled 
 the day after you sprained your ankle. She's gone to spend a 
 month with her Aunt Buller in South Devon. You won't see 
 her again in Ilfracombe. Didn't she say good-bye 1 Just like 
 her. She hates leave-taking." 
 
 I am sure that when I heard this I must have looked like an 
 idiot. Here was another effect of my shyness. I had scared 
 her away, and so lost the very opportunity of saying something 
 tender, and getting a response. Of course she would have bid 
 me good-bye if I hadn't been fool enough to frighten her away. 
 As for her Aunt Buller, I wished her seven thousand fathoms 
 down in the sea, if it is so deep, and deeper, ten times deeper, if 
 it is deeper still. 
 
 I don't know what I said to the Colonel, or what he said to 
 me. I know when my Aunt joined us a few minutes afterwards, 
 that he said he feared " his young friend had been working too 
 bard." I did not look so well as I did a week or two before. 
 My Aunt quite agreed with the Colonel, and then they both 
 went on to agree that we had all had enough of Ilfracombe. 
 " Even Toosy," said the Colonel, " hadn't been well of late. A 
 visit to her Aunt Buller would do her good." 
 
 " No doubt of it," said my Aunt. " There is nothing so good 
 for young people as change when they feel dull and hipped. 
 Edward will feel all the better for a week or so at Mandeville 
 Hall before he goes back to Oxford." 
 
 My Aunt never would understand the " ups " and " downs " 
 of undergraduate life. She always talked of my going " down '' 
 from Oxford as "coming home," and of my going "up" as 
 ''■ going back." 
 
 " Just the same with Toosy," said the Colonel. " She'll be 
 all the better with her Aunt Buller. The 10th Lancers are 
 quartered at Exeter, and as Aunt Buller is veiy hospitable, she 
 will soon have amusement enough." 
 
 " Do the 10th dance yet 1 " asked my Aunt. " It used to be 
 a joke against the regiment, when I was a girl, that they were 
 too fine to dance." 
 
 " Dance ! " said the Colonel. " Gad ! I should think they did. 
 They have always danced since I knew them. I know they 
 dance now, for ' Toosy ' danced with several of them at the 
 Hampshire ball last winter. They were quartered at Winchester 
 then, and only had the route given them for Exeter in the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 143 
 
 spring. There are some fine young fellows among them, just 
 what Light Cavalry ought to be." 
 
 " I daresay," said my Aunt. " They always were a 
 dashing, smart regiment. How nice it -will be for Miss Chi- 
 chester ! " 
 
 Thus did the estimable pair, in the innocence of their hearts, 
 go on by the hour, and torture me, Edward Halfacre, with the 
 pangs of jealousy. As for Aunt Buller, drowning was too good 
 for her. I could now have impaled her, or burnt her to death, 
 or minced her, or brushed her to death, as they do in China ; 
 or thrown her, as Ella of Northumbria did Eagnar Lodbrog, into 
 a pit full of snakes ; or stripped her, and buttered her, and left 
 her to be stung to death by gnats on an island off the Musquito 
 shore. It was bad enough to take Arethusa from me, but worse 
 to expose her to the fascinations of a whole cavalry regiment. 
 How cruel, too, to let me know, in that accidental way, that she 
 could find old partners,, and nice ones too, " fine young fellows " 
 in the 10th ! 
 
 There was no denying it. I groaned aloud, much in the same 
 way as one of the major prophets might have done ; a good 
 loud groan, no sob or sigh ; no woman's work, but a most mas- 
 culine groan. 
 
 " Gad ! " said the Colonel, " I scarcely ever heard such a 
 groan as that, except when one picks up the wounded after an 
 affair." 
 
 He never used the word battle. 
 
 " Are you ill, Edward 1 " asked my Aunt. 
 
 " No, Aunt ; only my ankle." 
 
 What a convenient thing that sprain was ! Here I held up 
 my crushed ankle before their eyes, and they could . not see 
 through it into my heart. 
 
 Well, there was no denying it. Arethusa was gone, and gone 
 without a word. I was ready enough to go now, and only too 
 sorry that we had to stay another week. I discarded the pony, 
 tried to stand on the lame foot, and found it much stronger 
 than I could have thought. Then I began to hobble about on 
 drutches, and, let me tell you, no cripple of the dark ages ever 
 limped so devoutly to St. James of Compostella, to St. Thomas 
 of Canterbury, or to our Lady Walsingham or Loretto, as I did 
 to every place where I had sat with Arethusa ; but as each 
 pilgrim has his own pet shrine at which he offers up his most 
 particular prayers, and trusts to get absolution for his bosom 
 sins, so the centre of my devotions, round which all lesser acts 
 of worship revolved, was that rock at Wildersmouth under which 
 we crouched when the umbrella became our master of the cere- 
 
144 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 monies ; on which. Arethusa sat and flew to my help as I fell ; 
 and on which I last saw her in the sunlight on the afternoon 
 when I scared her away from my side. In the middle ages I 
 should have retired from the world, scooped me out a cell from 
 the rock, or builded me a hermitage of boulder from the beach, 
 and so, subsisting on seaweed and my own nails, I should have 
 spent a life of penitence in the odour of sanctity ; in the nine- 
 teenth century, this hard-hearted generation of reality, I had to 
 go back to Oxford and take my degree. 
 
 And now we are leaving Ilfracombe. The same steamer, the 
 sea-slug Diana, the same captain, the same ' mate, steward, and 
 cabin-boy, the same gig, the same rude seamen, the same 
 " lubbers," and " sea-cooks," applied to Brooks and hurting his 
 feelings. The same sea-sickness on the part of the servants, and 
 the same good behaviour on that of me and my Aunt. There 
 was even another leg of boiled mutton, exactly like the one we 
 had going down, the same raw cooking, the same red gravy. 
 Everything was the same except that there was no Colonel 
 Chichester, and no Arethusa, and that the weather was perfectly 
 fine. 
 
 My Aunt was in unusual spirits. Colonel Chichester, with 
 his wonted politeness, had gone off with us in the gig to see the 
 last of us. He even repeated what he had said as we landed, 
 "he hoped he should see me again somewhere." To which -my 
 Aunt, as I thought most properly and gracefully said, she 
 " hoped she should soon see him and Miss Chichester at Man- 
 deville Hall." 
 
 " We are birds of passage," he said, " without any fixed home 
 of our own, except in London. Here to-day and gone to- 
 morrow, 
 
 ' To-day red, 
 To-morrow dead,' 
 
 as the German proverb says. I did think of going to Leaming- 
 ton this winter to hunt ; if so, we shall be sure to pay our 
 respects at Mandeville Hall." 
 
 That was all the comfort I got. A very general invitation 
 from a man who, by his own showing, was as hard to find as a 
 swallow, a snipe, or a woodcock. What was the good of his 
 house in London to me 1 Did I ever go to London ? I was as 
 likely to go with the snipes and woodcocks in the spring to those 
 Northern regions, the edge of Lapland, or the wilds of Nova 
 Zembla and Spitzbergen where, as naturalists tell us, the mass 
 of that dainty class of birds are in the habit of laying their eggs. 
 And see what he said, when my Aunt Mandeville departed from 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFDL LIFE. 145 
 
 her invariable rule and went out of her way to ask him to Man- 
 deville Hall. He might come if he came to Leamington to 
 hunt. Suppose he did not come to hunt. Suppose he fell into 
 a ditch out shooting, and sprained his ankle as I had done, and 
 couldn't come to Leamington to hunt. What was the good of 
 a special invitation to such a selfish old man of the world as 
 Arethusa's father 1 
 
 I was so out of patience with him that I did not even beg 
 him to remember me to Miss Chichester. So we climbed the 
 steamer's side, and left Colonel Chichester waving his handker- 
 chief in the air, and bobbing up and down on the waves. " A 
 hard-hearted old wretch," I remember calling him to myself. 
 " Quite fit to run in double harness with Arethusa's Aunt Buller 
 — Aunt Buller! Arethusa ! ye 10th ! ye wasp-waisted 
 regiment of dandies ! woe betide you, if you, or any of you, take 
 my Arethusa from me ! " 
 
 And here observe the unreasonable impetuosity of youth. 
 " My Arethusa ! " I did not scruple to call " mine " a young 
 lady who, perhaps, looked on me as a boy, though she was two 
 years younger than myself, and who, so far from returning my 
 affection, had evaded home questions and suggestions, and then 
 ran off and left me to myself. 
 
 No ! I would have no " boiled mutton," charm the captain 
 and steward ever so wisely. Let them eat it all. I wasn't at 
 all hungry. I would have one' of Aunt Mandeville's sandwiches. 
 No suffering father of an interesting daughter would, on this 
 return voyage, have had, — I will not say a glass of brandy-and- 
 water, but a cup of cold water from my hand. Had I not 
 brandy-and-watered a father in extremis going down, and pro- 
 bably saved his life 1 All for what 1 To hear him say, after an 
 intimacy of more than three months, that he hoped he should 
 " see his young friend somewhere." 
 
 Was not such behaviour enough to freeze the genial flow of 
 charity in my soul, to say nothing of the fact that, though there 
 were some sea-sick parents, there were none that had daughters 
 like Arethusa 1 But I declare, had Venus herself been on board, 
 or had she risen from the sea-spray in all her beauty, and hailed 
 the Diana, and come on board, I would have been faithful to 
 my Arethusa, with whom, ye young men and maidens, I will 
 confess that I was now desperately in love. 
 
 We reached Bristol safely, and went to another hotel, where 
 the inhabitants treated us just as we had been treated before. 
 I didn't know whether our sins were as scarlet next morning, 
 but I know our faces were. The travelling-carriages were un- 
 housed and post- horsed. We rumbled off in our old family pro- 
 
 L 
 
146 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 cession. Jogged and jolted out of sorts and temper, we got 
 safe, in three days, back to Mandeville Hall, and, no doubt, all 
 enjoyed what, in a small way, is the greatest blessing in life, the 
 comfort of sleeping in one's own bed. 
 
 I limped about for a few days in a very disconsolate way. I 
 was too lame to go out shooting, and if I had not been lame I 
 should not have cared to shoot. 
 
 . " Never knew such a thing as this afore, Mr. Brooks," said the 
 head-keeper. " Here's Master Edward says he doesn't care how 
 many coveys there are, and I been a-nursing them better nor 
 my own infants all summer." 
 
 "Something a come over him besides that sprain," replied 
 Brooks. " My opinion it's all along of that sour cider, which it 
 is enough to cut you in two, if you're forced to drink it, which 
 we poor servants was obliged to do in that vinegar cruet, Ilfra- 
 combe. Talk of rocks and scenery, it's all very well if you have 
 the comfort of your meals 'regular;' but scenery, without 
 your meals at proper times, 'specially when it's washed down 
 with sour cider, lies very heavy at the pit of the stomach. 
 Master Edward did drink some of it, contrary to my advice, and 
 that's what's having an effect on him now. He's pining away 
 like. But once he gets his meals regular he'll be all right." 
 
 That was the diagnosis of Brooks on my case. 
 
 As for me, I felt that, if I could only have one little line 
 from Arethusa telling me that she was not indifferent to me, I 
 should be quite cured, and would shoot again against the best 
 of them. 
 
 My Aunt put it all down to the sprain and to reading. I 
 really believe she thought I could have taken my degree without 
 once opening a book, though no one would have been more dis- 
 appointed than she had I been plucked. 
 
 CHAPTEK XXIV. 
 
 HOW I TOOK MY DEGREE. 
 
 I went up to Oxford, where I had been a " man" any time 
 these three years. I was nearly twenty-one — twenty-one that 
 Christmas, and so I was to all intents and purposes a man. I 
 went up to Oxford, I say, and all my friends in "the House" at 
 once said, " Halfacre has been reading too hard for his ' greats.' 
 He looks very seedy." 
 
 How little they knew of the human heart, and its power to 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 147 
 
 turn any one into paste, to knead up the flour of our existence 
 into dough, and then leave it. Here I was, an unleavened cake 
 that wouldn't rise, because Arethusa had left me without saying 
 good-bye. My friends in " the House " did all they could for 
 me, — that is, they did everything to hinder me in taking my 
 degree. They took me down the river in skiffs ; they made me 
 go and see pigeon-matches shot at the weirs ; they gave me 
 breakfast-parties and supper-parties. It was all no good. 
 Nothing could dispel my melancholy. It was the Sorrows of 
 Werther over again, and a repetition of his Charlotte and her 
 bread and butter. 
 
 Day by day went on, and at last the fatal day for going into 
 the schools came. The clerk of the schools — I remember his 
 name was Purdue ; what an enfant perdu I felt ! — came to 
 summon me before the examiners. One or two had been 
 frightened by their severity to take their names off the list, and 
 so my name came on a day before its time. 
 
 " Sorry to say, sir," ,said the ever bland Purdue, who had 
 acted as Jack Ketch to so many undergraduates, " sorry to say, 
 sir, that the examiners would be glad of your presence in the 
 schools to-day. To be sure they have plucked a good many 
 gentlemen this time ; what they call ' raising the standard.' 
 Of course you are safe to pass." 
 
 Then I put on my white tie and bands, and in full academicals 
 presented myself before the examiners. 
 
 I have already told you that I was well up in divinity. I was 
 not like the man who declined to say anything about Saul, 
 because that was "a way the examiners had of getting into 
 Kings." I need not say he was plucked ; but he had reasons 
 for stopping the entry into Kings at once, for of all the boggy 
 places in a divinity examination commend me to Kings. Sup- 
 pose an examiner chose to examine you about the battles in Gob, 
 and as to Ishbibenob and his fingers' and toes ; suppose he was 
 curious about Athaliah, and you thought Athaliah was a man ; 
 suppose he plucked you because you could not tell him anything 
 about Mahalal Shashbash ? All this, and far worse, he might 
 ask you out of Kings. Then he might teaze you on the differ- 
 ences between Kings and Chronicles. For instance, he might 
 ask you why the " almug " trees of one are the " algum " trees 
 of the other. It was no answer to say that it didn't matter, 
 that it was all the same ; such an answer to a don on the other 
 side of the table was " impudence," and punished accordingly. 
 Then there was Jehu, that very Christian character ; of him you 
 
 were expected to know more than of Balliol knew in my 
 
 time. All he knew of Jehu was that he was "a furious driver," 
 
 l 2 
 
148 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and that was not such a bad answer, because the only thing 
 
 that of Balliol could do was to drive a tandem. 
 
 But, as I have said, for me divinity had no terrors. I remem- 
 ber they put me on in the Gospel of St. John, and the visit of 
 Nicodemus. When I came to the part, " the wind bloweth 
 where it listeth," I thought, " Oh, for a wind that would waft 
 me to Arethusa ! " but I boggled through the passage, and was 
 complimented by the examiner for my divinity. Then they put 
 me on in Virgil, and in that passage of the Georgics — 
 
 " Juvat ire jugis," etcetera. 
 
 The passage I mean about the Castalian spring. After I had 
 construed it, the examiner asked me if I remembered the names 
 of any other famous springs. There were many, I said, — the 
 fountain of Bandusia, mentioned by Horace, Aganippe, and the 
 fountain of Arethusa. " What did I know of the fountain of 
 Arethusa? — who was Arethusa?" Now you don't suppose, 
 though those were only the days of LempriSre, that I had not 
 read up every notice of Arethusa in that famous dictionaiy. At 
 the present time, with the help of Smith's famous dictionaries, I 
 should have done better ; but what I wish to point out is, that 
 I did then as well as I could. I told the examiners everything 
 about Arethusa; and after I had exhausted L'empriere, and 
 quoted passage after passage in which she is named out of the 
 classics, I gave them Shelley's poem at full length. 
 
 The examiners were in ecstasy. I fancy they had never 
 examined a man in love before, who had happened in the 
 examination to be able to bring in the object of his affections. 
 So far from being plucked, the examiners thanked me when my 
 examination was over, and formally asked me to go in for 
 honours. A man who had shown such an acquaintance with the 
 history and adventures of a rather obscure nymph must have 
 great knowledge of the classics as a whole. This polite invita- 
 tion I was wise enough to decline, remembering the " alas ! 
 alas ! " and " ah me ! ah me ! " of my tutor. But there I was, 
 with my certificate of passing, my testamur in my hand, and this, 
 too, was all owing to Arethusa. 
 
 I went down in triumph, and my Aunt was delighted at my 
 success and the compliment paid me by the examiners ; but I 
 did not tell her that it was all owing to Arethusa. She would 
 have laughed at me if I had mentioned the matter. As for me, 
 I only longed to meet Arethusa once more, for I felt myself 
 twice as much a man as I had been before. Had I not now a 
 bachelor's gown on my back 2 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 149 
 
 All that winter I spent at home at Mandeville Hall. I had 
 now left Oxford, and was no more an undergraduate and a boy. 
 I am afraid I gave myself great airs. I would not allow Brooks 
 to say "Master Edward." "No, no, Brooks ! I am now Mister 
 Edward, if you please." 
 
 " But it sounds more familiar like. Many a time and oft 
 have I been out birdsnesting with you, and how many times have 
 I been longstop to you at cricket, Master Edward — I beg your 
 pardon — Mister Edward ? " 
 
 " Familiar or not, I am no longer Master but Mister Edward, 
 Brooks." For I thought how dreadful it would be if Arethusa 
 came to the Hall and heard the servants still calling me " Master 
 Edward," like a child. 
 
 But Arethusa never came. All that winter I waited, and she 
 never came. The worst was that no one knew their address. 
 A letter written by my Aunt just before Christmas never reached 
 Colonel Chichester, — at least, that most polite of men did not 
 answer it — a piece of rudeness he would never commit. Where 
 were they 1 Still at Aunt Buller's 1 Still dancing with the 
 10th? The 10th were as odious to me as the ever-victorious 
 Tenth Boman Legion, so long quartered in Britain, were to the 
 naked Piots, on whose bodies their javelins and short swords 
 made much havoc. 
 
 What did I do all that winter 1 I hunted and shot, and shot 
 and hunted ; I never went away from home lest some day cards 
 should be left, " Colonel Chichester, Miss Chichester, 6, Curry 
 Crescent, Leamington." On Sundays I would have taught like 
 my Aunt Mandeville in the school, only, in spite of my degree, 
 I dreaded the bogginess of Scripture, and thought how easy it 
 might be for such a Sunday school teacher as I should be to be 
 "overthrown in stony places." But though I refrained from 
 such a rash step, I was held up as a model young man ; " so 
 quiet," " so domestic," " making himself everything to dear 
 Mrs. Mandeville." They little knew that the reason why I 
 never left Mandeville Hall for a day was fear lest I should miss 
 Arethusa. 
 
 But Arethusa never came. Spring came, and no Arethusa ; 
 I grew restless, and could not sleep. 
 
 " I did think," said Mr. Brooks, " as how it was along of his 
 meals. Loss of meals can't never be made up in this life, what- 
 ever they may be in the next, which it isn't at all likely. But 
 seeing he's now had his meals regular at Oxford and here for a 
 better nor three months, I can't make out what it is." 
 
 My Aunt still thought it was all that reading. "Those 
 examiners," she said, " do set such hard questions to young 
 
150 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 men ; I wonder how their brains ever stand it. I am sure I 
 wish there were no examinations." 
 
 Dear Aunt Mandeville, what would she have said had she 
 lived in these days of competitive examinations, when the time 
 is coming when every man under fifty will be examined every 
 day before he goes out, to see if he is fit for his place 1 In those 
 days I can safely say that our brains were not overworked with 
 reading. To amuse me, my Aunt was unusually hospitable. 
 My coming of age at Christmas was celebrated in true old 
 English style. The Hall was full of guests — which it had not 
 been for many a day. All the spare rooms were occupied, and 
 we even put a married couple into Queen Elizabeth's room, 
 where no one had slept since Blogg of bristle and tallow judg- 
 ment had seen " the White Lady." 
 
 The reason why we did this was plain ; we had no wish to 
 have another scene, and it is well known that no ghost ever 
 appears — no ghost of decent character, I mean — to a man and 
 his wife. Even ghosts have manners, and no ghost would ever 
 show himself, would ever walk suddenly into the presence of two- 
 persons, especially of different sexes. We had no apparition, 
 therefore, and every one but myself had a very merry time of it. 
 I alone, though I seemed to be very happy, was as dull as ditch- 
 water, and went through all the festivities in a mechanical 
 manner. Some persons thought it pride ; some, bad manners ; 
 some, weak digestion ; others, Puseyism just beginning to show 
 the tip of its nose : but no one put it down to its true cause — 
 want of Arethusa. 
 
 I grew so pale and wan that old Mindererus put on his glasses 
 and said, after a long look at me : 
 
 " Bless the boy, I can't tell what's the matter with him ; he 
 looks so woebegone." 
 
 So things went on till Easter, which fell early that year ; and 
 then, when Lent was over, my Aunt Mandeville had more than 
 one serious conversation all alone with the doctor. What they 
 talked of nobody knew ; but I had no doubt it related to me, 
 for after his last and longest visit, my Aunt said very gently 
 after dinner, 
 
 " I am thinking of going to town, Edward." 
 
 " Oh, indeed, Aunt ; how soon will you be back?" 
 
 " I do not mean for a short visit ; I mean for the season. It 
 is a long time since I have been in town, and I feel as though 
 I should like to see it again." 
 
 To any one who really knew my Aunt Mandeville, this was a 
 most astounding proposal. Never was a woman less town and 
 more country-made. She hated London, and loved the country, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 151 
 
 and yet she quietly said she was going to town for the season. 
 I should have been less surprised if she had announced her in- 
 tention of becoming a Bible-woman in Madagascar, or of 
 visiting my parents, who were so deeply mortgaged to the West 
 Indies. I even tried to remonstrate with her, but it was no 
 good. She must and would go. Quite apart from herself, she 
 was sure it would do me good. I had not looked well for months, 
 and a little gaiety in town would be good for me ; besides, I 
 ought to make new friends. Why was I to be shut up with 
 her all my life ? it was moping work living with an old woman. 
 In short, whatever I said, she had some good answer. 
 
 The result was that at the end of Easter week, Brooks, 
 groaning both in body and spirit, was sent off to London to 
 look for a house, and in two days he wrote word to my Aunt 
 that he had taken her what he called " a mansion " in Brook 
 Street. 
 
 " A very nice street it used to be when I was young,'' said 
 my Aunt. " Close to the Park, and very airy." 
 
 " When will you go, Aunt 1 " 
 
 " As soon as we can get ready, — the end of this week. We 
 have lost some of the season already." 
 
 That was Tuesday, and on Thursday we set off to post up 
 from Mandeville Hall, and on Saturday evening we reached 
 Brook Street, just in time to have some tea and go to bed. 
 
 All this time I was like a machine. It never occurred to me 
 that I might meet Arethusa in town. She had almost become 
 as mythic as her classical namesake. Who could find her ? She 
 might be running underground in any part of England, dis- 
 appearing wilfully, and reappearing as capriciously in some other 
 part. Were she in town, ten to one she would be gone next 
 day. No, it was not worth taking the trouble to look for such 
 an Arethusa of the wisp. She might show herself if she 
 pleased — I would take no pains to find her. And yet while all 
 this was passing through my head, I would willingly have given 
 ten years of my life to have seen her for one instant. 
 
 Next morning we got up, had breakfast, and went to 
 Boanerges Chapel, not a stone's throw off. The very first 
 person I saw, not five pews off, was Arethusa, demurely seated 
 by her father's side. 
 
 Do you think it would have been idolatry had I there and 
 then gone over to the Mandeville faith, and fallen down and 
 worshipped my Aunt on the spot, for bringing me to town 
 against my will 1 
 
152 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXV. 
 
 HOW I WENT TO EVENING CHURCH, AND GOT UP NEXT MOENING 
 WITH THE SWEEPS. 
 
 As soon as the sermon was over, — how I wished there had 
 been none at all ! — and as we were going out of the chapel, I 
 whispered to my Aunt : 
 
 " There are the Chichesters.'' 
 
 " Where, Edward 1 " 
 
 " Just before us." 
 
 The Colonel was never long in getting out of church, and 
 besides, on this occasion, he had five pews start of us. I don't 
 know whether Arethusa's eyes had been as sharp as mine ; 
 perhaps not, for we were behind, and she was not like a fly with 
 eyes in her head. Her father had certainly not seen us. As 
 we passed them, — to do which I had to hurry my Aunt a little, 
 I turned, and the Colonel saw me. 
 
 " Glad to see you in London, Mrs. Mandeville. This is an 
 unexpected pleasure." 
 
 My Aunt particularly disliked greetings in church. " Churches 
 were made for prayers and sermons," she said ; "not for bowing 
 and handshaking." She, therefore, answered the Colonel's 
 salutation with a very slight and very dignified bow, and we 
 passed on. She was not very fond of talking to people on 
 Sundays even out of church ; but at the door the Chichesters 
 overtook us in their turn, and then Auntie was fairly at bay, 
 and had to open her mouth. 
 
 " I am glad to see you, Colonel Chichester, and Miss Chiches- 
 ter, too." 
 
 Meantime I held out my hand to Arethusa, and Arethusa 
 shook it. 
 
 ' ' Who would have thought of seeing you in town 1 " said the 
 Colonel ; " where are you staying ? '' 
 
 "In Brook Street, No. — ," said my Aunt; "and where 
 are you 1 " 
 
 " Our house is not far off," said the Colonel, "No. — , South 
 Street." 
 
 " Now that we know where we live," said my Aunt, " I hope 
 we shall see something of one another ; " and then having, as she 
 thought, quite broken her Sunday rule of never speaking to any 
 one going to or returning from church, she bade the Chichesters 
 good-bye, and we went home. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 153 
 
 What had Arethusa said 1 Only one little sentence, but that 
 was enough to make me very happy ; it was this : 
 
 "I am so glad to see you." "You," without touching on 
 that odious " Mr. Halfacre," which would have come dragging 
 along at the end of such a sweet sentence like a coach and six, 
 or the German Passive ; two of the most cumbrous inventions 
 that the mind of man has ever conceived. 
 
 I went home, therefore, in better spirits than I had been for 
 months ; but as a morbid mind must have something to fret 
 about, I must say I did not quite like my Aunt's Sunday stiff- 
 ness to the Chichesters ; and as for her expressed wish to see 
 something of them, it looked as though she had stolen a leaf 
 out of Colonel Chichester's book, and betaken herself to in- 
 definite invitations. 
 
 However, I was much happier ; ate my luncheon " regular " 
 in a way to please even Brooks, and altogether was in such good 
 humour that I went to evening service with my Aunt, thereby 
 losing my dinner. You must recollect, all ye miserable sinners 
 who are wicked enough to require to go to church twice and thrice 
 a-Sunday, and yet can manage to get back just in time for a 
 dinner of three courses at a quarter past eight, that in those 
 days we dined at seven, or at latest half-past, and therefore 
 evening service was attended with the consequence I have 
 mentioned. 
 
 And here let me ask you, — Do you not hate an early dinner 
 in London on Sunday? Is it not notorious that going to 
 church makes one more hungry than a ten-mile walk 1 and 
 what I ask, if you have an early dinner, and go to evening 
 service, is one to do with one's appetite about eight o'clock ? 
 You have "tea," you say. "Tea ! " I say, with a note of ad- 
 miration. " Tea with bread and butter," you answer again. I 
 again repeat, " Tea with bread and butter ! " with another note 
 of admiration. You get angry at my greediness, and say, 
 " Well ! tea with bread and butter, and cold beef, and chicken, 
 and ham and eggs, and a lobster and salad, and fried plum- 
 pudding : will that satisfy you 1 " To all which I answer, 
 " Yes ; " if you are as good as your word, and keep faith in, 
 having all those things ready for me, I will come next Sunday 
 evening and take " tea " with you, and I will come all the more 
 readily if you will substitute a bottle of Bordeaux for the tea- 
 pot, and let us have two dozen oysters before we begin. 
 
 You will say, " Why, that is a regular dinner.'' And so I 
 assure you I mean it to be if I go with you first to Boanerges 
 Chapel next Sunday evening, and then home to tea with you. 
 Two or three times in my life I have been near dying of early 
 
154 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 dinner and tea. Once I went to a house in the country, and 
 missed the early dinner altogether, the train being late, and 
 had nothing but "the tea" from nine a.m. one day to the same 
 hour next day, the "tea" being not at all "strong" either in 
 itself or its accessories. Oh, the agonies of hunger that I suf- 
 fered after that tea, lying awake all night and wishing for the 
 morn ! resolving never to go to that house without a loaf of 
 bread and a tongue in my portmanteau. 
 
 But the atrocities of those early dinners, and weak teas have 
 made me forget my story. Yes, I was very good ; that Sunday 
 evening I went again to Boanerges Chapel with Auntie. You 
 will say it was all because I thought Arethusa would be there. 
 I knew better; she was not likely to come without her father, 
 and Colonel Chichester was not the man to go without his 
 dinner. He was very well bred and very selfish. He was kind 
 enough when an act of kindness stood before him, staring him 
 in the face ; but as to going out of his way to do a good deed, 
 it was a thing he never thought of. He would have called it 
 knight-errantry to have gone out of his usual course for 
 anything. 
 
 I believe, though, that I did manage to get Auntie into the 
 very pew in which Arethusa had sat in the morning. It was a 
 far nicer pew to sit in than the one which belonged to our 
 " mansion." 
 
 After that " function," as it would now be called, was over, 
 we went home, and had what my Aunt boldly called " supper." 
 Did not Brooks preside over it 1 and with all his faults, — which 
 from long-suffering we had got almost to regard as virtues — 
 there was one thing which you were sure to get when Brooks 
 watched over the board, and that was, more than enough. 
 There was no starvation in any of his arrangements. He thought 
 the honour of the family was concerned in the abundance of its 
 food, quite as much as in the morals of its members ; and if he 
 had been a great reformer, he would have laid down a code 
 of morality in which what he called " skimping " and " flint- 
 skinning " — stint and meanness, in short — would be proscribed 
 as the eighth and greatest deadly sin. 
 
 Once when we went into Cheshire, — that most hospitable and 
 cheese-toasting of counties — a county, I should say, in which as 
 a general rule, " cheese-paring " is unknown — it was our misfor- 
 tune to stay with a miser. You all know the sort of man, — or 
 if you don't know him, be warned by me, and decline his 
 acquaintance. Though rolling in wealth, he never had anything 
 but bread-and-butter for breakfast. There was a hen, and when 
 it laid an egg, he and his wife drew lots for it for breakfast. It 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 155 
 
 ■was a little better when we were there, — he had dried haddocks. 
 You don't like dried haddocks. They are dry enough when 
 they first come out of the sea, and they don't get any softer or 
 better tasted by drying. Well ! there we agree. I don't like 
 them either ; but we had them every morning with this 
 miser ; the worst thing of all being that he thought all the time 
 that he was going to great expense for our sakes. He was the 
 man who, having ordered one rabbit for dinner, when his agent 
 was coming for the day, countermanded it when he heard that 
 the agent, like a wise man, would not stay to dinner. And this 
 on an estate where the rabbits bred by thousands, as the tenants 
 said, when they walked through their fields just before harvest 
 with tears in their eyes. 
 
 Brooks was grand on that occasion. He shook the dust off 
 his feet as he left " Hungry Hall," as he called it. 
 
 "A nasty, beggarly lot! All the coachmen. as come here 
 during our visit never had one drop of beer, or a crust and a bit 
 of cheese. Twenty miles here, some on 'em ; and twenty back. 
 As for meals ' regular,' the bell rang every day like clockwork ; 
 but when we was all gathered in the servants' hall, there was 
 nothing but cold boiled beef, and a scrap or two of cold mutton. 
 Small beer, worser nor that Devonshire cider ; and cheese so 
 poor, a mouse wouldn't have ran away with it, — no ! not if she 
 had been starving. I "tell you, Master Edward, we drinks more 
 beer at Mandeville Hall in one week — ay, and ten times as 
 
 strong, every drop on it as they do at ' Hungry Hall ' in 
 
 the whole year." 
 
 But, I am bound to say that in every other house at which 
 we stayed, in a lengthened Cheshire progress, the food, and 
 drink, and entertainment generally, were such as to call down 
 the enthusiastic praise of such a fastidious critic of creature 
 comforts as Mr. Brooks. 
 
 This chapter is all on eating and drinking. See the bad 
 effects of supper on Sunday on the juvenile mind. It has quite' 
 diverted me from my story. 
 
 Next day I was up with the sweeps. In the country it would 
 have been with the lark ; but the sweeps, so far as I know, are 
 the only early birds in London, and I do not know whether any 
 one will agree with me in thinking John Milton would have 
 written 
 
 " Sweet is the breath of morn, his rising sweet 
 With charm of earliest sweeps," 
 
 had he lived in this century. But is there not a charm about 
 "earliest sweeps;" especially when they mistake their orders 
 
156 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and knock up the wrong house 1 Yes ! to me there was on that 
 April morning. That was before the days of Ramoneurs and 
 sweeping-machines. The climbing boys were still climbing, and 
 still boys. Children of tender years were still forced to climb 
 chimneys. It was, in 'fact, just before their emancipation. 
 Those grimy, stunted fellows, whom old ladies now pity and 
 relieve, are not boys, but grown men, invaluable to master 
 sweeps for their undersize, but free to go up a " chimbley " or 
 not as they choose. There is no law in England to prevent a 
 man of forty from going up a chimney if he chooses. And these 
 men choose it. It is their profession. Praise them, therefore, 
 but you need not pity them. If there is anything they detest 
 it is a Ramoneur company which has taken the soot out of 
 their bags. 
 
 But I say it was sweet to me on that April morning, in the 
 twilight, to hear a most melodious sweep calling out, " Sweeep," 
 " sweeeep," " sweeeep ;" to see the little fellow first ring up our 
 cook, and then the cook opposite, who, by the sloth with which 
 she or the kitchenmaid appeared, did not seem to think the 
 sweep-song so beautiful. Brooks, too, I daresay, as he turned 
 on his lowly couch and heard the ringing, and the constant cry 
 of "Sweeep," "sweeep," "sweeeep," exclaimed, "Drat them 
 sweeps ! od rabbit them ! " By which, perhaps, he meant to say 
 that he wished anything he detested were providentially turned 
 into a Welsh rabbit. I do not spell it " rarebit," but phoneti- 
 cally — a dainty which he particularly affected. 
 
 In due time my little songster, my blackbird, my sweep, 
 appeared at the top of a chimney-pot. It was a very tall red 
 one, I remember. How he got up so high, and out of such a 
 narrow tube, was wonderful. He was but a little fellow, not 
 ten years old, I should say, and there, with brush and shovel 
 out of the top, he repeated his song several times ; singing as 
 the wild birds sing at dawn in May, to themselves alone, and 
 merely for the sake of the sweet melody. But not for himself 
 alone, for me who was dressing myself in a wild kind of way, as 
 though Arethusa were waiting for me in Grosven6r Square — 
 and for two great master-sweeps who were looking up at him 
 from the street to see that he sang prettily and did his dirty 
 work well. Then he came down, it seemed to me in no time, 
 in less time than it took me to brush my curly hair, and went 
 off with the master-sweeps, one of whom gave him a curse and 
 the other a kick for keeping them so long waiting. Poor little 
 fellow ! I wonder where he is now. Has he, too, lived through 
 all his soot and grime and got to be a master-sweep 1 And 
 does he keep a man as old, but far smaller than himself, to go 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE.. 157 
 
 up " them crooked chimbleys as no machine vill sweep 1 " — a 
 grown man whom he cannot kick, — and does he ease his feelings 
 by cursing the Ramtmeur ? 
 
 All this chimney-sweeping and dressing took less time to do 
 than to tell about. I was up long before all the servants. What 
 was I to do ? It was not six o'clock. If I stayed indoors, the 
 housemaids would be astir about seven, flitting about the house 
 as restless as bats, and about as useful, sweeping dust from one 
 stair to another, and finally into a cupboard. Opening the 
 shutters, — that, I own, is useful ; but tidying the room • what 
 a wrong use of words is that. What housemaid has eye enough 
 to set a chair, a sofa, or a table straight ; or if they have them, 
 they far prefer setting them straight at those companies of the 
 Guards, who passed our house in the early morning, their band 
 playing, and all the maids as surely running to the windows to 
 see "the pretty soldiers." Then the dust that they raise, 
 where does it go to 1 Out of the windows it is to be hoped, if 
 the windows are open ; but if they are not, on to the sofas, 
 behind the chairs, under the cabinets, and up on their tops. You 
 can lay a ghost, I have heard, once for all, — at- least, bell, book, 
 and candle used to do so, — but the ghost of the dust in a 
 London house is only laid every day to rise again the next 
 morning. 
 
 The same thing goes on in every room ; but the worst of all 
 rooms for a servant to tidy is a library. How often have all 
 " master's nasty books all lying open so untidy on the table," 
 been tidied and shut up and restored to their places on the 
 shelves by the zealous housemaid. The unhappy master who 
 with great care and trouble has laid those books open over- 
 night, and flatters himself that next day, having at last got all 
 his references to the learned authors ready, he will really. set to 
 work on his opus magnum, the treatise which shall render him 
 famous for ever ; it may be on The Sneezes of the Patriarchs, 
 " De Patriarcharum Sternutandi Ratione," or " On the use of 
 Handkerchiefs among the Kich," or " On the name of the 
 mother of Moses, . as derived from the evidence of Hiero- 
 glyphics," — this unhappy master, I say, comes down to break- 
 fast, and having discussed that repast in charity with all men 
 and housemaids, retires to work in his library, only to find that 
 all his week's labour has been thrown away. 
 
 Beware of over zeal, ye housemaids, ye generation of " wipers," 
 as Brooks would call them ; or at least flee from the wrath of 
 the master whom ye have so wilfully provoked. 
 
 As soon as I got down, then, I put on my hat and went out. 
 I went to South Street, and looked up at what I felt quite sure 
 
158 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 was Arethusa's •window. I might as -well have tried to look 
 through a hrick wall. It was a small but comfortable-looking 
 house, of old red brick ; but, of cpurse, every blind in the house 
 was close drawn, and where there weren't blinds the shutters 
 were shut. No. — South Street was still deep in death's 
 brother, sleep. But, sleeping or waking, there was the casket 
 which contained the jewel — there the shrine in which re- 
 posed the body of my saint. I felt like the pilgrim who 
 approached the shrine of his patron, his Becket, on a day when 
 it was not open ; he had to content himself with knowing that 
 inside that mock house of shining silver gilt and blazing with 
 gems, reposed the object of his adoration ; and so I felt. Except 
 that he worshipped merely a few dry bones, to which his fancy 
 gave life and power, while my shrine contained a living body, 
 instead of a skeleton ; eyes as bright as any diamond, instead 
 of empty sockets ; pearly teeth half-seen through parting lips, 
 instead of one or two yellow stumps on grinning jawbones ; a 
 slender waist, instead of mere ribs and backbone : — in short, one 
 glowing rounded whole, instead of a dry framework of bones. 
 Yes ! I am not at all sure, as we are all sinners, that I do not 
 much prefer a live sinner of eighteen to the most venerable 
 defunct saint of eighty ! But I am quite sure that on that 
 April morning, all the sinners and saints that ever did wrong or 
 good would have been found wanting if weighed in the scales of 
 my eyes against my Arethusa. 
 
 I walked up and down the street once or twice. I went down 
 South Street the other day, and looked at No. — . It looked 
 as red as ever ; like an old beauty, its complexion had been 
 restored by rouge. There was the shrine, but where was the 
 saint ? Fled, gone, passed away from me for ever. The street, up 
 and down which it once seemed happiness to pace, seemed gloomy 
 and confined. There was no air in it. It is fashionable enough 
 still, as the old beauties, to whom I have compared No. — , are 
 still fashionable ; but to me it has lost its charms, as they have. 
 I walked away into Hyde Park to try to breathe. 
 
 On that morning, too, I had to fly to Hyde Park. I had no 
 excuse for walking up and down the street. A policeman — they 
 had then not very long displaced the " old Charlies," and were 
 as clean-sweeping as new brooms — came along the street. I 
 don't believe he even looked at me, but I felt sure that he knew 
 I had come there to look at Arethusa's house, and I felt thank- 
 ful that he did not take me up. Then, up from the steps of an 
 area, crawled a hideous, slatternly thing, which called itself a 
 woman — a thing with frizzy hair all down her neck, with dirty 
 dress, unlaced boots, and a mop and pail. It was a kitchen 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 159 
 
 maid, about to clean the steps. Then another came a little 
 lower down ; last of all, came a milkman with his cry. It did 
 not sound half so melodious as that of the little sweep. I now 
 thought it was time to beat a retreat. It was a warm morning 
 for April, so I thought I would go down to the Serpentine, and 
 see the people bathe. There . were not so many bathers, and 
 those not so rough as some are now, and I felt tempted to bathe 
 too, had I not been alone. I would have bathed had not the 
 horrid thought seized me, " If I bathe and somebody runs off 
 with my clothes, what shall I do ? If he is a beggar and leaves 
 me his clothes, shall I put them on, and so present myself 
 before my Aunt at breakfast 1 or shall I disdain them and climb 
 up into a tree, and there remain, like Adam, in a state of inno- 
 cence, but in sore fear of the police, till I am discovered at 
 mid-day and dragged off to Marlborough Street as a fiend in 
 human shape 2 " 
 
 On second thoughts, therefore, I determined not to bathe, but 
 to watch the bathers. They were well behaved and amusing ; 
 but even a lover gets hungry on an April morning. I began to 
 feel I wanted my breakfast, and retraced my steps to Brook 
 Street. I took care to pass through South Street again, and 
 then all the shutters were open, the blinds in some of the bed- 
 rooms drawn up, and so I went home wondering whether 
 Arethusa's room was one of those with its blinds drawn up, or 
 with them still down. Dear me ! to think of the idleness of 
 love, and how it makes a man waste his time on the most trivial 
 things, as though they were matters of momentous importance. 
 They tell you the style is the man ; and so I think it is, for we 
 know that love changes a man, and if it does that it can also 
 change his style, and make him write platitudes for sense and 
 use all sorts of long words, first cousins to " platitude," instead 
 of short ones. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 HOW WE SPENT OUR SEASON. 
 
 My Aunt was not yet down, but the plague of housemaids 
 had come and gone. I wished for half-an-hour for breakfast and 
 the newspaper, and they both came at once. 
 
 My Aunt was very good about the Chichesters. She went and 
 called on them- that very day, and there was the usual return 
 visit ; but it was some time before I had an opportunity of being 
 alone with Arethusa. 
 
160 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 On the whole, we had a very pleasant season ; we knew all 
 Warwickshire and the bordering counties. There were no 
 " Warwickshire scandals," thank God. in those days. We were 
 all very well behaved, and very great friends. 
 
 The Chichesters knew all Devonshire and all Cornwall ; but 
 in those days Cornwall did not come much to town. Between 
 us, therefore, we knew a good many people. They introduced 
 us to their friends, and we did the same good turn to them 
 with ours. 
 
 You must remember that my Aunt had not been in town for 
 the season for years, so that she had, as it were, to start afresh 
 in London society. But though hard to know, every one who 
 really knew her liked her ; she was so straightforward, and yet 
 so feminine. It was that straightforwardness which led our old 
 nurse to compare her to a " rampaging cow " when I was born. 
 She had set her heart on my being a girl, and for years she 
 could not help showing her disappointment ; but long before I 
 came to her she had become reconciled to the fact of my boy- 
 hood, and, like a wise woman, made the best of what she could 
 not help. Besides, she was much older, and age had mellowed, 
 and not soured her. She was good fruit, and improved with 
 age, like wine ; but I warn you again that she was as jealous as 
 ever, and still had a will of her own when thwarted. 
 
 She used often to say that there were few persons with whom 
 it was worth while to be angry, and that she could only be very 
 angry with those whom she loved. . For the rest of the world — 
 for servants and tradesmen, if they cheated her ; for vulgar 
 people, if they sinned against the rules of society ; for fools, who 
 said or did the wrong thing in the wrong place ; for the great 
 mass of the world, to whom she was in her heart indifferent, and 
 who yet came into collision with her, in spite of all her efforts 
 to keep the peace — she had plenty of mock anger : anger, as 
 like real anger as stage thunder and lightning is to a real storm. 
 She might scold them till you thought the roof would fall over 
 their heads, but in truth it was all sham wrath — a very good 
 imitation that frightened those who did not know her a good 
 deal, but still a sham. Very proud she was, too, and not the 
 least vain. There were so few things that she would stoop to 
 that her whole life was like her figure, as upright as a dart ; 
 but no one knew the vanity of earthly things better than she 
 did, and few were really so humble-minded in their heart of 
 hearts. 
 
 We had very nice society, therefore — better in quality than 
 quantity. One good point about Auntie was that she hated 
 herds, and never would have more than ten people to dinner, a 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 161 
 
 restriction which Brooks much deplored : " A-working and 
 slaving, and cleaning the plate and laying the table, all for 
 nothing." 
 
 Still less would she cram her " mansion " to suffocation at a 
 ball or rout. These drums and balls of the present time, at 
 which you are lucky if you can get up as far as the first landing, 
 would have been her detestation. No ! she said she would leave 
 room enough for people to show their things— for ladies to show 
 their dresses, she meant — " For my part," she often declared, 
 " I like to see young people dance. None of your slipping and 
 sliding for me ; show your steps." 
 
 I daresay many a young lady who reads this will call Aunt 
 Mandeville " a horrid, old-fashioned fright," or " an awful bore," 
 and me " a regular old fogy " for recording such silly things ; 
 but Auntie is past their praise or blame, and as for me, I console 
 myself with knowing that I am quite right. Life, it seems to 
 me, even in a London season, is too short for a crush ; and as 
 for my Aunt's fancy, that people like to show their things, I 
 put it to any sensible, well-dressed woman who was at the 
 Academy Eeception in their new building last season, whether 
 they were ever so well seen, or saw so well, at any party of the 
 season, — not excepting the Indian and Foreign Office receptions, 
 — which came next to the Academy; while as for your great 
 houses, however great, their drums, balls, or receptions, from 
 Marlborough House down, were mere crams and crushes. 
 "This will be the end of old dresses," said Lady Sweet- 
 apple at the Academy. " How glad I am that I have on a new 
 dress." 
 
 And very lovely, I am bound to say, did Lady Sweetapple 
 look in Wirth's very last, which, I believe, you may get not very 
 far from Belgrave Square, without all the fuss and bother of 
 going or sending to Paris for them. Some ladies, I know, like 
 going to Paris to be measured — for not to be measured is to have 
 a misfit ; — but others do not ; or their husbands and fathers do 
 not ; and so let them thank me for this information. 
 
 So what with the Pennyroyals of Cheshire, and the Lurdanes 
 and Merediths of Warwickshire, and the Whitey-Browns of 
 Oxfordshire, — a very old family are the Whitey-Browns ; they 
 came in with the Conqueror, and set up the first paper-mill, on 
 the tenure of presenting Norman William and his successors 
 with three quires of note-paper at their coronation for ever, — 
 and the Quarendons of Devonshire, and Arethusa's Aunt Buller; 
 with all these, I say, and their friends, and their friends' friends, 
 we had very agreeable society all that season. I could tell 
 you a good deal of what I saw and learnt in London ; of all 
 
162 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 my virtues and good behaviour ; but I prefer to tell you more of 
 Arethusa. 
 
 One thing, though, I daresay you would like to know. I 
 have given you a description of Arethusa, and how she looked. 
 Wouldn't you like to knbw what manner of young man I was ? 
 I hear you say, " Do tell us." So I begin. 
 
 It is a long, long way to look back upon, and as no one man 
 or woman knows exactly what they are like, — all looking-glasses 
 are so deceptive, I daresay this description of myself, when I 
 was just about two-and-twenty, will either go much beyond or 
 fall far short of the original ; but as you wish me to make the 
 attempt, you say you will make it easier for me by asking me 
 questions. I don't know that that will make it any easier; but 
 put your questions, and I will try to answer them. 
 
 How tall was I ? 
 
 A thorough woman's question ; always thinking of six feet. 
 I was not six feet ; between five feet nine and ten, — what I dare- 
 say you call a dwarf, you who have set your heart on marrying a 
 Life-Guardsman ; and yet I'll be bound my heart is as big as 
 that of any Life-Guardsman, let alone the fact that very tall 
 men are subject to varicose veins and other drawbacks, and 
 string-halts. You don't know what " varicose veins " are. Then 
 there's all the more reason that you should ask any doctor if 
 he would advise you to marry a man with varicose veins, and 
 see what he says. They are of very respectable antiquity. 
 They came in long before the Conquest. Marius had them when 
 he was sitting in the ruins of Caithage ; and much, no doubt, 
 they added to his misery ; in fact, if he had not had them, he 
 would never have sat in the ruins of Carthage at all. He would 
 have run away ; but having them, he was obliged to sit down ; 
 and so would have lost his life, had he not looked so fiercely at 
 the executioner, that he could not lay hand on him. 
 
 What was the colour of my hair ? 
 
 Brown, dark brown ; not so dark as Arethusa's ; nor with so 
 many gold threads in it ; but brown dashed with gold. We 
 were too alike, then, to suit one another, you say. Don't be in 
 a hurry ; we are still a long way from being married. Let us 
 return to my hair. You must know that all my life my hair 
 has been my weak point. In this I was a regular Halfacre or 
 Harfager, or Fair Hair, — that I was always known by the extra- 
 ordinary abundance of my hair, which fell round my forehead 
 and neck in great locks. I don't mean those taggy, effeminate 
 curls which you see on some fellows, but locks as soft as silk. 
 I hate hair as coarse as horsehair. Mine was none of your 
 Spanish hair, out of which you might make a scrubbing-brush. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 163 
 
 You might have squeezed it all up at once into your hand, and 
 ■when you opened your palm, it would all have flown out in a 
 great flood of hair. 
 
 My complexion? was not so white as Arethusa's, — more 
 ruddy, but fresh and fair. 
 
 My nose ? was ordinary, as the passports say. 
 
 My eyes? very like Aunt Mandeville's, — a bright dark 
 brown ; very soft when I was pleased, which, of course, I waB 
 very often ; and very fierce, nay savage, when angry, which was 
 very seldom. 
 
 My figure was slight and slim, but I was much stronger than 
 I looked, as one or two sons of Belial who have provoked me in 
 life have found. Still I was no Hercules, though I could swim 
 pretty well, and go through all the sports and games of life 
 decently. I think I liked riding better than anything else, and 
 you know what that ridiculous Oxford tutor said of my hunting 
 the fox in June. For the rest, I had good teeth, small ears, and 
 small hands and feet ; and to answer all your inquisitive ques- 
 tions at once, I passed muster at a ball, or dinner, or on horse- 
 back, or out shooting, or on the water, or at cricket, or tennis, 
 pretty well. But I was not an Admirable Crichton. I daresay 
 you will be spiteful enough to say that I was not half good- 
 looking enough for Arethusa, and I am ready, even at this 
 distance of time, to admit it ; but then you must remember 
 that I am a lover drawing Arethusa's portrait, and perhaps if 
 you had seen my picture drawn by any one who was as much 
 in love with me as I was with her, you would find it much 
 better-looking than I could dare to draw it. Go to ! There is 
 still some modesty left in the world. When she retired from 
 the rising generation, she took refuge with the old fogies. 
 
 One thing you have forgotten to ask : Could I dance ? Yes ; 
 and if I may say so, I danced well. I have every reason to 
 believe that I was in those days a very nice partner. Of one 
 thing I am quite sure, — I was no " crusher." I did not dash 
 along regardless of time and tune, dragging my partner with me, 
 making their things fly about, and too often tearing them, as, I 
 grieve to say, I have remarked to be the practice of too- many 
 young men. It was only this very last season, at Lady Pagoda's 
 ball. You all know Lady Pagoda, who has that enormous 
 diamond tiara. It was only at her last ball that I saw one of 
 these crushers dash into the mMee, as he called it, with a fair 
 young girl in her first season. He clawed her round the waist 
 like a gorilla, — I mean that he was the gorilla, of course, — and 
 tore round and round like a mad thing. A very few turns and 
 his unhappy partner came out as " ragged as a cuckoo," as a 
 
 m % 
 
164 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 very vulgar hunting squire, whom Lady Pagoda had stupidly 
 invited, remarked with great brutality. Old Lady Oneehicken 
 was standing by me with her only daughter, the great heiress, 
 and when she saw this dreadful exhibition she muttered to her- 
 self, " What a terrible man ! " Let not that crusher ever make 
 up to Miss Oneehicken. I warn him Lady Oneehicken would as 
 soon think of giving her daughter in marriage to a long-handed 
 ape as to him. 
 
 But on the honour of a good partner, I was no crusher, and 
 Arethusa said that I danced " extremely well." I could see, 
 too, that the mammas had no aversion to me, and that their 
 daughters liked me to dance with them. There were two or 
 three fellows of my own age, who despised dancing, and yet 
 went to balls. They used to stand behind the folding doors, or 
 in corners of ball-rooms, or on balconies, or landings, and very, 
 very frequently in refreshment and supper-rooms. But wherever 
 they were, they were always in the way. One of them in par- 
 ticular was very offensive. He would cross the ball-room right 
 in the midst of a waltz. The consequence was that he was 
 bumped up against here, and kicked there, and cannoned against, 
 and hustled so long as he was in the fair way of the waltzers, a 
 couple or two of whom he sometimes contrived to throw down, 
 making what he called " a jolly game of sacks in the mill ; " but 
 on the whole, like the cow on the railway, he generally got the 
 worst of it, for if he escaped being tripped up himself, he only fell 
 into the hands of angry mothers and chaperons, who scolded him 
 most fearfully for crossing the ball-room at that critical moment. 
 
 " What dances did we dance ? Well ! we were great waltzers. 
 There were some quadrilles, and occasional lancers, and ma- 
 zurkas ; but the great difference between the dancing of that 
 day and this was that polking was unknown. We danced 
 the Cotillon pretty much as you dance it now, only to 
 my mind not so ridiculously. But of all the dances in the 
 world, I say there is nothing like a waltz, when, being a good 
 dancer yourself, you have a young and pretty girl for your 
 partner, who can dance well. It is quite a mistake to suppose 
 that all young ladies can dance well, — just as it is to suppose 
 that they can all play well. 
 
 Did Arethusa dance well? Very well. She was quite the 
 nicest partner I ever had. With such a good ear, and such 
 intelligence in waltzing. It was very different waltzing with 
 any one' else. That was all love, and love is blind, you say. 
 She had faults in dancing, as in other things, only I could not 
 see them. No, it was not love ; it was truth. She was the 
 best partner I ever had, either at home or abroad. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 165 
 
 It is time to tell you something about Arethusa. The last 
 you heard of her was that she was asleep somewhere in South 
 Street. Very true ; it is a dull, stupid story. Who cares for a 
 man's old love of more than twenty years ago ? It is quite 
 wonderful that he cares for her himself. Why not throw her 
 off out of his memory, as the Top did the Ball in Andersen's 
 story 1 Ah ! why not 1 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 HOW I HAD IT OUT WITH ARETHUSA. 
 
 I have already told you that Arethusa and I saw one another 
 often all that season. When I found I could see her almost every 
 day, and certainly every other night, I left off getting up with the 
 sweeps, and pacing up and down South Street at unseasonable 
 hours. I got more and more fond of her, and she seemed always 
 very glad to see me, but it was a long time before I' got a chance 
 of having an explanation with her, or an opportunity of discover- 
 ing her feelings. I have always said that one week in a country- 
 house was worth a whole London season for finding out the 
 condition of a young lady's affections. In London we are so 
 shut up and confined in our brick boxes, that we can do nothing 
 without being seen or heard. In fact, as there are few houses 
 large enough in London for receptions, there are still fewer in 
 which a man can make love. It is perfectly true that Love 
 laughs at London houses just as heartily as he does at lock- 
 smiths ; but then he is very often sulky in town, and won't 
 laugh at all ; but take him into the country, and you will find 
 him all smiles. What he loves best is freedom. Love is a 
 great radical and revolutionist. He hates the four walls of 
 dining-rooms and drawing-rooms. Open-air meetings are his 
 delight. If he revives a little on a landing, or a conservatory, 
 or a tea-room, or even a cloak-room, ten to one he is put out of 
 countenance, and obliged to wear a mask by some horrid old 
 tabby of either sex, who, instead of passing on, or through, or 
 taking a cup of tea, or cloaking her silly old self, lingers there 
 and listens to all that Love has to say. So, to spite her, he 
 says nothing but " good-night," puts on his hat, and is gone. 
 In old days, if he saw a cat crossing the square, he would throw 
 a stone at her for the old tabby's sake ; but if he did any such 
 wicked deed now the police would take him up. In fact, in 
 these days of fellow-feeling for asses and other animals, one might 
 as well stone an old tabby herself as a cat in the streets. 
 
166 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ; " Oh, that Auntie would ask Arethusa and her father down 
 rto Mandeville Hall, to shoot partridges in September." That 
 .was a form of prayer that I very often repeated. It was my 
 ■special prayer "against dearth," and "for rain/' and (t fair 
 weather," all in one. 
 
 But though I hoped for this invitation with a very fervent 
 hope, I did npt neglect any opportunity of being alone with 
 Arethusa. Once, when the Chichesters dined with us, and the 
 Colonel was about to take his daughter downstairs, I persuaded 
 Scatterbrains, who had dined with us, and who was always a good 
 fellow, to decoy the Colonel down the back stairs, to show him a 
 new rifle in my den. He went off as innocent as a lamb with 
 my confederate, supposing that Arethusa would stay where she 
 was till he returned. But as soon as his back was turned, I 
 told Arethusa that she ought to go down ; her father would not 
 be a minute, and would be waiting for her in the hall. Down 
 we went, and found no Colonel. It was not at all likely that 
 we should, for Scatterbrains was particularly enjoined to show 
 him the lock and the trigger, and the barrel and the nipple, 
 and to take the barrel off" the stock, and explain a curious 
 breechloading movement that it had. It was, in fact, one of the 
 earliest breechloaders^in that there was no deception. The 
 trick lay only in insisting upon showing it there and then to the 
 old sportsman. 
 
 So far, the plot succeeded ; and yet it was, so far as Arethusa 
 and myself were concerned, a miserable failure. Why ? All 
 because of Brooks, who would come after us into the library of 
 the " mansion," just to see if Miss Chichester had her " things 
 all right that wet night." I had already despatched my Aunt's 
 maid upstairs on a wild-goose chase after Arethusa's gloves, 
 which she said she knew she had put down somewhere before 
 playing a piece. She little knew that I had them all the while 
 in my pocket. 
 
 And yet here was all this ingenuity wasted and another 
 golden chance gone, because Brooks, who was far too stupid and 
 conceited to take a hint, would stand there with Arethusa's 
 cloak in his hand, as staunch as any pointer, and resolved to 
 keep the field till Colonel Chichester appeared, talking at a great 
 rate to Scatterbrains, who could not help laughing -at my face of 
 disgust. ' 
 
 At the same moment, down ran Mrs. Curl, to say "she 
 couldn't find Miss Chichesters gloves nowhere." All that was 
 to be done was to cloak her in the presence of four or five 
 witnesses, to sympathise with her loss — crocodile that I was ! — 
 with her gloves in my pocket, to assure her that if found they 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 167 
 
 should be sent — which of course they were next day, — to hand 
 her to their carriage, to be laughed at by Scatterbrains, and to 
 go to bed cursing Brooks as the marplot of my destiny, 
 
 I forgot to tell you that Arethusa had long before that made 
 it all right about that horrid Aunt Buller and the 10th down in 
 Devonshire. So far from being hospitable, her aunt never had 
 a single party all the winter, nor did one? of the 10th enter the 
 house. Aunt Buller was first of all laid up with a swollen face 
 — the mumps, in short — which Arethusa caught. 
 
 " That spoilt my beauty for a long time," she said, " and after 
 that I had one cold after the other, and all so bad that I scarce 
 stirred out of the house all the winter and spring. That was 
 really the reason why papa never went to hunt at Leamington." 
 
 How unjust I had been to her ! While she was suffering I 
 had been accusing her of flirting with a whole regiment of old 
 partners. I ought to have believed, betfer things of her. 
 
 But pray observe how much in love I must have been with 
 her when she made this declaration df ill health. If a man's 
 affection can survive an attack of that most unromantic of 
 diseases, the mumps, which may truly be said to be all pain and 
 no honour ; a malady even more ridiculous than a toothache. 
 If he can, besides the mumps, outlive four or five bad colds 
 running, he must be over head and ears in love with the afflicted 
 object of his affections. Quite different from Victor Hugo's fine 
 gentleman, who went and blew his brainsout because some one 
 asked after his cold. It was such a very dishonourable dis- 
 ease ! 
 
 But at last I had my chance, and used it. It was at Chiswick. 
 You don't know where Chiswick is ! That only shows how young 
 you must be. Suppose I said at the Royal Horticultural Gardens 
 at South Kensington, would you know where I meant? Of course 
 you would. It is where the Rose Shows and the American Plants 
 are, and where the receptions are chiefly attended by Market 
 Gardeners and Seedsmen. They had the impudence to have one 
 the very night of the Academy reception last season. Well, 
 don't be in a passion ; even Market Gardeners and Seedsmen 
 must have receptions sometimes. Don't grudge them their 
 bonnets and clogs. But in my day Chiswick was what the Horti- 
 cultural Gardens now are, only a great deal better. Besides, 
 there was the Duke of Devonshire's villa and grounds, which on 
 grand occasions were thrown open to the public. Many a rare 
 tree my poor father sent to these gardens, and it used to be a 
 melancholy pleasure to go and look at them. The company at 
 the fetes was very good, too. There were no Botanic Gardens to 
 divert horticultural attention ; just as there was then but one 
 
168 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Opera at the old house in the Haymarket. Neither in flori- 
 culture nor in bravuras were the public, as now, between two 
 bundles of hay, unable to make up their minds which to choose, 
 and so choosing to go to neither. One used to drive down to 
 Chiswick, and ride down to it, and very pleasant it was — if you 
 could find your carriage or your groom on coming back. 
 
 See what explanations your ridiculous youth forces me to give. 
 It was at Chiswick, at the Horticultural FSte, at the end of 
 June 183-, that I had it out with Arethusa. We went thither : 
 I, protected by Aunt Mandeville, and Arethusa by her father. 
 In these days, I know it is quite absurd to suppose that young 
 ladies ever want protection. That has entirely disappeared ; 
 there is now free trade in love as well as in everything else. 
 That kind of protection is extinct. Our young ladies and old 
 mammas, like our merchants, buy in the cheapest and sell in the 
 dearest markets. That is why you see the Duke of Doubloon 
 marrying Miss Pennyfarthing, a half-educated thing that would 
 be dear at any money, yet he pays enormously for her. That 
 is what I call free trade in marriage. An article of that kind 
 speaks for itself. It is every.man's money, and as for protection, 
 it is the man rather than the woman who needs it. Who will 
 bring in a Bill for the relief of distressed bridegrooms ? 
 
 But then there was protection. No one went anywhere without 
 their natural protectors. But still, even then, it was possible to 
 give one's natural guardians the slip, especially if love felt strong 
 and healthy in his open air. And so it happened that day. The 
 flowers, and the fruit, and the parterres, were lovely. The 
 Colonel had been in India, and my Aunt was an ardent flori- 
 culturist. He led her away, with a temperature out-of-doors at 
 80° in the shade, into an orchid house to show her — no, not the 
 Victoria Begia, that had not yet been discovered — no matter, it 
 was something that answered to that lily ; something which, for 
 a floriculturist not to have seen, was set down in a phrase which 
 Lord Brougham had just invented, as " crass ignorance." Neither 
 the Colonel nor my Aunt was going to be thought capable of 
 " crass ignorance." It was the right thing to say that you had 
 seen the " Gutta Serena," — suppose we call it by that name, — and 
 so the Colonel went to say that he had seen it. If it had been 
 the Amaurosis Galigans, it would have been all the same to him. 
 My Aunt wished to see it, for her love of flowers was great ; so 
 they both plunged into that forcing-house, into an atmosphere 
 like that of a Turkish bath. As for Arethusa and myself, we 
 were warm enough already. We were not going to be boiled to 
 death. I, at any rate, was fair enough and red enough already, 
 and I feared I might come out like a lobster if I went into that 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 169 
 
 pit, which was as the burning fiery furnace, and crammed with 
 an admiring crowd. We held aloof then, and, instead of waiting 
 for them, passed on into the crowd, looked at this bed and that, 
 turned down an alley or two to the right, and two more to the 
 left, found ourselves under a shady beech, where there was wel- 
 come shade, and neither flowers nor fine people — and, in one 
 word, were lost for a season. 
 
 It is very odd, under such circumstances, how soon one makes 
 up one's mind to be lost. It never struck me, at least, that the 
 Colonel and Aunt Mandeville might be looking for us. If they 
 were, aud could not find us, we had a ready excuse — we were 
 lost and had been looking for them. At last, tired with the 
 quest, we had followed the directions of the Humane Society for 
 persons who are lost, " Sit down under a tree and wait till they 
 find you." 
 
 You say you never heard of any such directions issued by the 
 Humane Society for persons who are lost. You know what they 
 say about drowning persons, " Don't roll the body on casks or 
 kick it, or hold it with its head down," or many other things 
 which no one is ever likely to do ;. but, as for these directions 
 for the lost, you never heard of them. All that I can say is that 
 I believe they do exist, and, if they don't, they ought to exist. 
 If you don't sit down you may be both running after one another 
 for hours; but if you sit still they must find you, though it may 
 be a long while first. 
 
 Those were the arguments which I made use of with Arethusa, 
 when it broke upon our minds that we were lost. She thought 
 them quite conclusive. Whether she hoped it might be a long 
 time first, was not so evident, but I am sure I most cordially 
 hoped it. 
 
 So there I was, sitting down before the citadel which I was- 
 resolved to take, and with no one to relieve the fortress before I 
 could carry it by assault. / 
 
 All attacks on fortifications begin, I believe, by jj/nying sap. 
 Perhaps, as everything is altered, flying saps com*? last now — 
 your last parallel first ; but if so, it was not so waen I sat down 
 before Arethusa. You must know that I was (pits ignorant of 
 the strength of the garrison, though, as even me Duke of Wel- 
 lington had his first and fruitless siege of Badegoz, and the failure 
 at Burgos, I had already had some experience of Arethusa's 
 power of self-defence. I had, in fact, attempted to carry a first- 
 class fortress by a rush, an escalade without regular ap- 
 proaches, and I had been beaten oflf. This time I proceeded 
 according to the rules and regulations of Vauban or Cohorn, or 
 both. 
 
170 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 As soon, therefore, as we sat down, I began operations by a 
 flying sap, and my first trace was : 
 
 " We have seen much of each other, Miss Chichester." 
 
 Who would have thought that • so innocent an observation 
 could work so much mischief ? It was as if the garrison of 
 Julich, which, I believe, is one of the strongest places in the 
 world, should look over their earth-works, and see a knot of French 
 sappers disguised as boors working in a green meadow with 
 pickaxe and shovel. If they thought anything of the occurrence, 
 it might be to laugh at the awkwardness of the rustics. 
 
 "Just so," Arethusa replied, in a half-mocking way. " Do you 
 think so, Mr. Halfacre ? " 
 
 My flying sap finished, I instantly began to trace my first 
 parallel and to get under cover. 
 
 " We have known one another more than 'a year.'' This was 
 a story, for it was only eleven months ; but it was necessary to 
 make use of a little inequality in the ground to seize a mound 
 of vantage. , And this was best done by a "bold assertion. 
 
 " I did not think it had been quite so long," said Arethusa, 
 dreamily- " but it is no matter." 
 
 This was a sally on the part of the garrison to feel the enemy's 
 intentions, and to find out if his attack was serious ; I ought, of 
 course, to have gone on with my second parallel, and not have 
 rushed out of the trenches to drive the enemy back. But once 
 again I swarmed out of my cover and attacked her in the open. 
 
 "Do you mean to say, Arethusa, that it does not matter how 
 long we have known each other ? " 
 
 Before I could reach the foe he was back again behind his 
 earth- works. His object was gained ; all he wished to know was 
 whether this was a real attack., • 
 
 Arethusa looked very hard at me, and said : 
 
 " Now, listen to me, Edward Halfacre. 1 don't call you Ed- 
 ward, and I don't like you to cajl me Arethusa. Not yet, at 
 least — I mean not at all. I have known you long enough to 
 like you ; but not enough for what you mean. I know very 
 well what you were going to say, and I hope, for my sake, you 
 will not sayit. ■ There is a time for all things, and the time for 
 this has not come yet. There, now ! don't expectime to say any 
 more." 
 
 This was a needless request, for the Directions to the Lost 
 held quite good, whether issued by the Humane Society or not. 
 In the distance, but not so very far off, appeared Colonel Chi- 
 chester and Aunt Mandeville, who, having satisfied their curiosity 
 as to the Amaurosis Galigans, were now in full chase of the lost 
 ones. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 171 
 
 "It shall be as you say," I said, mournfully, to Arethusa. 
 "But may I not hope?" 
 
 " Hope springs eternal in the human breast," said Arethusa, 
 smiling, and rising with a spring as if the elastic turf had lifted 
 her up. " I am not going to disprove what Enfield's Speaker 
 affirms. But not a word of this ; and no Arethusas." 
 
 " My dear Toosy," said the Colonel, " where have you been 1 " 
 
 " Nowhere," said Arethusa, with a dexterity that would have 
 graced an attorney-general. " Nowhere. We were waiting for 
 you." 
 
 " We only just went into house No. 6," said my Aunt, " to 
 see the Guttd Serena and Amaurosis Caligans, those new dis- 
 coveries in Botany, and when we came out you were nowhere to 
 be found." 
 
 " That is just what I said, dear Mrs. Mandeville,'' said 
 Arethusa, with still greater cleverness. " I said we went 
 nowhere, and you say we were nowhere to be found. We were, 
 in fact, just where you said we were." . 
 
 " I don't quite see that, Toosy," said the Colonel ; " yon must 
 have been somewhere." 
 
 " And that somewhere was here, waiting for you, dearest 
 papa, till you had seen those rare plants. As for me, <I really 
 cannot go into those stuffy forcing-houses ; I always feel ready 
 to faint." 
 
 All this while I stood rooted to the ground, and said nothing, 
 but my admiration for Arethusa increased every minute. She 
 had found out my intentions, foiled my attack, and left me in a 
 delightful state of doubt and uncertainty as to her feelings. I 
 might hope or not hope, as I pleased. , I might fill up my trenches 
 and retire from before the place. And then the next minute 
 she was engaging, — light frigate that she was ! — two such old 
 three-deckers as the Colonel and Aunt Mandeville, and had 
 given them such a warm reception that they were forced to 
 sheer off. 
 
 " Well," said the Colonel, when Arethusa's encounter with 
 Aunt Mandeville was over, " we had better get home as soon as 
 we can. It will take a long, time to get the carriages up, and if 
 we don't take care we shall be late for dinner." 
 
 So saying, selfish old fellow that he was ! — he made a profound 
 bow to my Aunt, and walked off with his , daughter, who gave 
 me a look of intelligence as she went, as much as to say, " Re- 
 member what I told you." Why did he go off in that base 
 way, and leave me alone with Aunt Mandeville, and without 
 the protection of Arethusa ? 
 
 When they were gone, I walked silently alongside of Aunt 
 
172 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Mandeville, who said nothing till we had found our carriage and 
 were driving back to town. When we had got just opposite to 
 what was then the New Church at Turnham Green, she turned 
 sharp round on me, and said, glaring at me with her fierce 
 brown eyes : 
 
 " Is there anything between you and Arethusa Chichester 1" 
 
 This she said in the voice that the wolf that suckled Komulus 
 and Remus might be supposed to have uttered, could she have 
 spoken, and had she come upon the bold Sabine who carried 
 them off. 
 
 " No, Auntie," I said; "nothing." 
 
 It was the very truth, but not the whole truth. There was 
 nothing between us. Arethusa's refusal to listen to my propo- 
 sition had hindered that ; but towards her I had all the devo- 
 tion of the fondest lover. And here see how useful it is for a 
 lover to know the force of the English prepositions. By a skilful 
 use of them I could lead Aunt Mandeville astray, and yet con- 
 tinue to worship Arethusa in my heart. 
 
 To my surprise, knowing how really guilty I felt, Aunt Man- 
 deville was satisfied with this denial. The brown eyes became 
 soft, the wolf-scowl departed from her face, and all the way up 
 to town she was as kind and gracious to me as ever. Poor 
 Auntie, she forgot the force of the prepositions when she said 
 between, and gave me a loophole out of which to wriggle. Had 
 she said, " Do you love Arethusa Chichester ? " it would have 
 been quite another thing, and I felt I must have faltered out 
 " Yes ;" but the blessed word " between " saved me. No ! there 
 is no part of English grammar that lovers ought to study more 
 closely than the chapter " On the Force of the Prepositions." 
 
 That night we met the Chichesters out at dinner, and after- 
 wards we all went to a ball at Lady Onechicken's. I sat next 
 to Arethusa at dinner, but not a single word passed between us 
 of what had happened under that beech at Chiswick. I did, 
 indeed, say something in praise of the clever way in which 
 she had got us oat of the blame of being lost ; but all she said 
 was : 
 
 " Was it clever ? I did not know it." 
 
 At Lady Onechicken's I danced one quadrille, two waltzes, 
 and the Lancers with Arethusa. The quadrille and one waltz 
 were before supper, and the others after. I got the second 
 waltz because the partner to whom she was engaged thought 
 more of his supper than of his waltz, and only appeared when 
 our waltz was half over, with a piece of lobster sticking in his 
 moustache. I saw it, and rejoiced to find that he was one of 
 that odious 10th up on leave from Exeter. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. . 173 
 
 " Very sorry, Captain Martingale," said Arethnsa ; " but if 
 you will stay down in the supper-room, you can't expect me to 
 wait for you." 
 
 " Do you never wait ?" replied the Captain, who ought, from 
 the style of his rejoinder, to have been in a heavy regiment. 
 
 " Never ! " was the answer, as we began to spin round again, 
 and then, in a much lower voice, which seemed meant for me : 
 " Never, except for people worth waiting for." 
 
 The Colonel, by the time the Lancers were over, had done his 
 whist, and was ready to go. So was my Aunt, so was Arethusa, 
 and so I need not say was I when Arethusa was gone. 
 
 Dear me ! I went to bed weary, but sleepless. All that night 
 I lay awake, wondering whether Arethusa did care for me a 
 little just in the very bottom of her heart. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 HOW THE SEASON CAME TO AN END. 
 
 After this, somehow or other, I did not care to stay much 
 longer in town. July was upon us. My Aunt had not been 
 away so long for twenty years from Mandeville Hall. She was 
 eager to get back. Her object in coming to town had been 
 fully gained. I had quite recovered my health, and until 
 that Chiswick fete my spirits had been all that could, be desired. 
 I was ready to go ; Brooks and the servants were ready to go ; 
 and it was settled that we should go about the 15th of July. 
 Seasons were not so exhausting then as they are now, but at all 
 times, after the mad heat of June, July leaves you little but the 
 dregs of the season. Still, before we do go, let me describe a 
 London dinner of peculiar atrocity. When I say it was given by 
 a dean — the Dean of Dunderhead ; not the Dean either of 
 St. Paul's or of Westminster ; not a rural dean, but the Dean of 
 Dunderhead — you see at once that we ought to have had a very 
 good dinner, and so I expected it to be. In a little while you 
 shall hear what sort of dinner it was, but first let me describe 
 the company. I know an incumbent of the West End, who 
 always couples the word "important" with any aristocratic 
 gathering. There was a very " important " party at Lady A.'s ; 
 or the Duke of B. had a very " important circle to dinner ; " or 
 " I am going to read prayers with a ' very important' member of 
 my congregation." Well ! the Dean's was a very " important " 
 dinner. He himself was "important," — none of your 2000Z. 
 
174 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 a-year deans, but a real dignitary of the Church. Then there were 
 the Earl of Richborough and his wife, both most " important " 
 people, made still more " important " by the fact that the Earl 
 had thirty thousand acres in a ring-fence. There, too, was 
 Archdeacon Malison, that very rabid Churchman, who is always 
 declaiming about Convocation, and that is a subject on which 
 even an archdeacon cannot always talk at dinner. Then there 
 was Mr. Starchshanks, the Dean's banker, a vulgar bullet-headed 
 man, the back of whose neck was swollen like the head of the 
 puff-adder. Our banker wore a curious diaper velvet waistcoat, 
 which I believe was woven out of crossed cheques. He was a 
 lover of china, and fancied he knew what a good dinner was ; 
 poor fellow, how I pitied him ! Then, there were the Dean's 
 wife, and Lady Richborough, and the banker's wife — a great 
 deal too good for him, — and the Archdeacon's wife — too bad for 
 any one, a thing all toque and turban, with a huge gold chain 
 round her neck Then there was a young guardsman, who could 
 not speak, and a young lady who could, and one or two others 
 of either sex, fat and sleek, that looked like cotton wool, in 
 which we were to be all packed at dinner lest we should break. 
 Those were all 1 No ! I have forgotten another, who came in 
 just as dinner was announced, a long and dull speaker, the 
 Protestant Member for Dunderhead, who — it was on a Wednes- 
 day in the Session, — had just been sending the Pope and his 
 Jesuits to a place that shall be nameless, in a speech which 
 bored the House for hours. After the House rose he had 
 attended a meeting of the Ladies' Committee for Converting the 
 College of Cardinals to Protestantism by Counter-irritation, and 
 there he had electrified those good people by telling them how 
 he once nearly trod off the Pope's toe when he was presented to 
 him at the Vatican, instead of kissing it before the Puseyites, 
 those wolves in sheep's clothing. We were glad that he came, 
 for the conversation had not been lively, and was, in fact, mono- 
 syllabic, " Oh," and " Yes " being the largest words uttered by 
 some of the party, and even these with an expression of fatigue, 
 as though the speaker had just scaled the Matterhorn. But I 
 bore up, for was there not a good dinner coming 1 At length, a 
 solemn bald-headed man threw open the door, and almost whis- 
 pered, " Dinner is served." There was a little excitement, and 
 the lady in the toque nodded it to and fro " with a short, 
 uneasy motion," like the Ancient Mariner's ship ; — by the way, 
 it slipped a little to one side, and made its wearer a most absurd 
 figure for the rest of the evening. No woman offered to set it 
 right, perhaps because they were all too hungry to see it. 
 Down we went in double file to the dining-room. It was a 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 175 
 
 long coffin-like apartment, a little Eaton Place in short, a street 
 in which one always feels as I fancy the grave must feel. It 
 was a long, and not a round table, — a sure sign of a dull party. 
 If you have wit, or wisdom, or beauty at your board, by all 
 means have a round table, especially if you have a good dinner 
 as well ; but if your party was like the Dean of Duuderhead's 
 party, let the table be oblong. At a round table every one can 
 see. every one else, and all hear what every one says. So if 
 there be a fool of the company, or a lady with a pig's face, or a 
 pair of lovers, or anything horrible and hideous, you find it out 
 at once, and there is a fly in the ointment. But at a long table, 
 if there be fools, they may not sit next you ; if there be ogres, 
 they need not sit opposite to you ; if there be a bore who will 
 not hold his tongue, you may not hear him. Add to which, if 
 you are so silly as to be in love, you may, if fate and the 
 mistress of the house manage matters well, sit next to the ob- 
 ject of your affections, and have her pretty much to yourself. 
 No lover, bore, fright, or fool, ought to be suffered to sit at a 
 round table, but as even these guilty wretches must dine some- 
 where, they are least offensive at an oblong one. Thank heaven, 
 the Dean's was an oblong table. As ill-luck would have it, my 
 lot fell to sit over against the lady with the sidelong toque, and 
 as I gazed at her it ever seemed to slip more and more on one 
 side. On one side of me was the Archdeacon, and on the other 
 the Member for Dunderhead. Somehow all the men and women 
 had got together like court-cards in an unshuffled pack. Two 
 or three frantic efforts were made by Mrs. Dean to shuffle them. 
 The Archdeacon tried to run across, and the banker puffed like 
 a steam-engine, trying to get away from his wife's side, but it 
 ■was all no good. We remained helplessly " clubbed," like a Vo- 
 lunteer regiment in these latter days trying to get out of Hyde 
 Park ; we all sank down on our seats " aa we were ; " the Dean 
 gave a short grace, and the repast began. 
 
 During all our troubles I repeated one short prayer, " Thank 
 heaven, we shall have a good dinner," for my faith was large in 
 the Church. And now came the proof. There were no oysters, 
 — in a layman a venial, but in a dignitary of the Church an un- 
 pardonable sin. Can a Dean who does not begin his dinner 
 with oysters be sound on the question of faBting in Lent ? A 
 grave question ; for as sneezing represents the last traces of a 
 mortal influenza, of which, as the Targums assure us, all the 
 patriarchs, Methuselah included, died, and as the Sergeant-at- 
 Law's coif is the last relic of the monk's cowl and the benefit of 
 clergy, so doth the oyster-eating of our ecclesiastics represent 
 the last rags and remnants of Popish fasting in the English 
 
176 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Church. No ritualist would have omitted oysters before 
 meat, but our Dean was no ritualist, so we had no oysters. But 
 we had soup? Of course we had, and such a mess ! — something 
 that looked like melted size, and smelled and tasted accordingly, 
 with parboiled carrots, contending for their vegetable life, swim- 
 ming about in it, came round to me. I swallowed it down, for 
 I was an hungered, but it was pain" and grief to me. It was 
 downright glue and gelatine. Then I looked, and not only 
 looked, but looked round, for a glass of wine. It was very rude, 
 — I know it ; but if there be one article of faith laid down by 
 all the doctors at every general council, and accepted by all,- 
 orthodox and heterodox alike, it is this, " After soup let sherry 
 follow." Yet here, in a Dean's house, and not that of Dean 
 Close, be it remarked, no sherry followed. Yes ! I looked 
 round, but I could see nothing but that bald-headed butler's 
 back, washing his hands in a Balad-bowl, or making the cham- 
 pagne, or doing some deed of darkness. A butler should be 
 like a soldier : he should never show his back ; he ought to be 
 all front, ever in the van, pouring cool wine down the gullets of 
 the guests when fatigued with eating. But this hairless condor 
 of the desert never came with the sherry. My throat was dry 
 as dust, and the fish came. Now, the sight of fish to a thirsty 
 man is an empty mockery. A fish is an animal that lives iu 
 the water ; its very sight is suggestive of something cool ; it not 
 only requires sherry before it, but sherry after it ; it must have 
 something to swim in even after it is eaten ; — so that fish with- 
 out wine is an abomination. Yet that wine never came. I 
 forgot to say that the fish itself was salmon — a female salmon 
 that had wasted all her love on some ungrateful gravel-bed in 
 the Spey, and whose flesh was white, stringy, and tasteless. 
 She was as like a true salmon as a parsnip is to a carrot. What 
 can that butler be at ? I thought. Here we have been glued 
 up, and never unglued ; we have swallowed a slice of nasty 
 garbage, which they call salmon, and still there is no wine. 
 Had I been a Bedouin Chief, a tameless child of the desert, I 
 would have made his caitiff head fly off with my yataghan ; but 
 I was a son of society, restrained by good breeding and the fear 
 of the gallows, so I sat still, and cursed him. There was no 
 conversation. The Archdeacon and the Member, who did not 
 know glue from soup, or salmon from skate, had their mouths 
 full, and could not speak. So I had time to watch this butler, 
 though I nearly caught a crick in the neck in doing it. At last 
 the wretch turned round, and showed his guilty face. Up he 
 stalked from the sarcophagus at the end of the funereal cham- 
 ber, and in his hand, or rather with both hands, he held a 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 177 
 
 bottle. One would have thought, by his solemnity and sloth, 
 that he had been high-priest of Halicarnassus, holding in his 
 hands the precious alabaster vase marked with the cipher of 
 Xerxes, which Artemisia filled with good drink for the use of 
 her husband's ghost, and which the curious reader may see in 
 the innermost chamber of the British Museum, side by side 
 with the Townley Vase. Slowly he came, and slowly he went 
 round, as though performing a sacred but melancholy rite. We 
 were fourteen, and, being a most expert arithmetician, like 
 Michael Cassio, I at once calculated my chance — I was last but 
 one in the round — of getting any of that bottle ! I did get 
 some, and this was how it was. His orders evidently were to 
 make the wine go round, and he did it with a vengeance. Each 
 man got half a glass, and some of the women none. I gulped 
 down my share at once, for really I was like men who have been 
 five days without water on a raft ; I was that thirsty, I could 
 have swallowed baboon's blood, let alone Marsala, as this wine 
 was. 
 
 After the Marsala came the entrees, four of them, foul and 
 frigid. The first entree had the face of a sweetbread and the 
 savour of a shoe. No Arctic traveller who devoured his boots 
 ever had a tougher job. The second entree had the form of a 
 chicken and the taste of a cock. Twelve hours' boiling would 
 not have turned him into a cockyleekie. The third entree had 
 the face of a calf done en fricandeau, and the taste of a bull. 
 No army contractor in the West Indies ever treated the troops 
 with such beef. The fourth entree had the face of a pigeon and 
 the taste of a carrion crow. I ate of them all on principle. 
 " Never refuse a dish because it is bad," said my grandmother. 
 " If you do, how can you ever know a good one 1 " These dishes 
 were handed round in great state by waiters who blew down the 
 back of our necks. One asthmatic fellow, in particular, I could 
 tell by his panting when he was three guests off. "And all this 
 while, what was the butler doing 1 Was there no more wine ? " 
 You may well ask. The wretch had turned his back on us 
 again, and was working on at something, as we could see by the 
 twitching of his elbows. At last, even the dignity of the Dean 
 was roused. Six dishes, and only one bottle of Marsala amongst 
 fourteen of us ! The very plates would soon rise up in judg- 
 ment against such serving, so our host called out — " Struggles, 
 champagne ! " That was all he said ; but if you had heard 
 them and been Prime Minister, and the Archbishopric of Dun- 
 derhead had been vacant, you would have made the Dean of 
 Dunderhead Archbishop of that ilk on the spot. Thus adjured, 
 Struggles again advanced, holding another bottle. Halfway 
 
 N 
 
178 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 between the sideboard and the table the bottle gave a faint 
 pop ; on went the butler, and leaning over Lord Richborough's. 
 chair dribbled a tiny thread of fluid into a tall champagne glass. 
 Now if I have a hatred of anything, next to breaking the com- 
 mandments, it is of those old-fashioned tall glasses. The man 
 who invented the round flat sort ought to be buried at the 
 expense of all wine-bibbers under a cairn, piled high with the 
 bottoms of broken champagne bottles. Talk of Dead Sea apples, 
 fairy gold, and ropes of sea-sand ! they are realities compared 
 with the drink to be got out of one of these old-fashioned 
 glasses. Drink it up quick indeed ! You had better. Swallow 
 down the froth as fast as you can, for when that is over the 
 glass is empty. With those glasses, a bottle of wine is a 
 widow's cruse ! there is no knowing how many times it will go 
 round. That bottle, to my certain knowledge, went twice 
 round, and to the last it went on dribbling just as cheerlessly as 
 at first. But let me get on. Next came the inevitable saddle 
 of mutton, and the inseparable fowls and tongue. Both were 
 cold, and badly served. Then there were the usual tasteless 
 new potatoes, infected with the disease while yet babies, — little 
 infants, who would have died of teething in their beds had they 
 not been dug up and eaten. Then there was what the menu 
 called a puree aux epinards. What a liar's hand it was that 
 scrawled that card, and dared to dignify a mess of sodden 
 spinach by a name which is the pierre de touche — the very touch- 
 stone of a French cook's knowledge. " Let him make me a 
 puree aux epinards," said the greediest man in France, when he 
 was about to engage a new cook. " If he can make that to my 
 taste, he can do anything." But there is spinach and spinach. 
 In France the tender blade is taken just as it springs from the 
 soil. Out of this the French chef makes his puree, fresh and 
 tender as a new-born babe is to cannibal taste. In England, 
 our gardeners wait till the young blade becomes a leaf, a branch, 
 a tree, and only then, when, like a grain of mustard-seed, it has 
 so waxed that the fowls of the air can take shelter under it, is it 
 hewn down and served up as spinach. There were asparagus as 
 bitter as endive, and green peas as big as bullets, any one of 
 which would have brought down its man if fired at him through 
 a breech-loader. There was a salad, too. Ye gods ! what a 
 salad ! This it was in which the white-headed vulture, among 
 men called Struggles, had been wringing his hands when he was 
 not serving us with wine. The sauce was .bought at the oil- 
 man's, and was rough and rancid. Nevertheless, I am a lover 
 of salad, and I ventured on some, though I helped myself with 
 averted eyes. And now I am just going to get my first whole- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 179 
 
 some mouthful, and, deep in gastronomic expectation, I turn my 
 eyeballs on my plate. At once all hope of appetite is over. 
 What do I see crawling and wriggling about under my nose ? 
 A worm — a distinct, unmistakeable red worm, which had lurked 
 among the lettuce, and which, had I been short-sighted, I 
 should have eaten. 
 
 Then came a lobster salad and stuffed pigeons. The deanery 
 at Dunderhead must have had a dovecot. As the lobster salad 
 contained lettuce, I avoided it. It might harbour another 
 worm, and I might have eaten what will one day eat me. I 
 contented myself with pigeons, said to be very heating food. 
 Nay, as my chance of sustenance was now getting small, I even 
 took a whole pigeon, a proceeding which seemed to frighten the 
 waiter at my back, for he puffed and blew like a grampus. But 
 it was all no good. I was not going to be starved by any 
 dean. I kept my pigeon, ate him, and washed him down with 
 a swift draught of water from a tepid carafe. As I did this deed 
 of heroism — for is no* London water, according to the faculty, 
 one great cause of chJRlera ? — I turned and looked reproachfully 
 at Struggles, in thqrvain hope that he would rush forward and 
 serve me at the last moment with a glass of Marsala. It was 
 no good. There he stood bolt upright behind the Dean's chair, 
 with shining forehead and ample white waistcoat, and never a 
 step did he make onward, never a finger did he hold out to save 
 me from martyrdom. Then came, by way of quenching my 
 thirst, toasted cheese, without even a drop of beer or ale. No, 
 nor even a glass of port wine with it ; and that in a dean's house, 
 too ! Never has my respect for the Church recovered the shock 
 of that day's dinner. There it lies in my memory, buried under 
 a big black stone. 
 
 There was the usual dessert. Ices in a profuse state of per- 
 spiration, looking as if they had run a long way, and run hard 
 too from Gunter's to save their time. There is nothing so 
 strange and monstrous as a hot ice. It is like a very cool 
 man getting into a rage. It does so surprise you ; who would 
 have thought it ? And there was ginger, old, and hot, and 
 stringy. And there were strawberries, dusty and deliquescent ; 
 old maids with all bloom and rosiness taken off their faces, 
 which had settled down into the hue of red ochre. Figs there 
 were, which must have gone round the world with Captain Cook; 
 and almonds and raisins — the raisins certainly some of Robinson 
 Crusoe's curing. Sweet biscuits there were also, which are an 
 abomination to wine-drinkers. That was all, and more than 
 enough. The wines were Port and Marsala, not a drop else ; 
 it was before Gladstonian Burgundy, which fools drink for claret, 
 
 N 2 
 
180 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and wonder why they have such a headache next morning, when 
 they only drank one bottle of that cheap light wine. They 
 little know, as an old Frenchman says — " Ces vins-lh sont trls 
 capiteusc, et meme mahains, quand Us sont neufs." 
 
 That was the Dean's dinner, though at the last I must put in 
 a good word for Marsala, which, when good, is a pure, wholesome 
 wine, and fathers a deal more sherry than the world wots of. 
 
 But was there no conversation ? You may well ask. But 
 first you must answer another question : What do you call con- 
 versation ? Do you call interjections and ejaculations, such as 
 "Ah!" "Oh!" "Indeed!" "Very!" Quite so!" "I shouldn't 
 wonder," " Very likely ! " do you call such words, thrown to a 
 dog, conversation ? If so, Lord Richborough was a great con- 
 verser, for he said many things quite as witty as those I have 
 named. Or do you think conversation depends on colloquy or 
 on soliloquy ? If the latter, the Member for Dunderhead was a 
 great converser, for he poured out all his morning speech anew, 
 and scarce left the Pope a leg to stand upon. Everything went 
 down before that dull flow of speech, which rose as the tide 
 rises in muddy Thames, and sweeps on full of dead cats, and 
 rats, and dogs, those carcases representing the abuse against the 
 Jesuits with which the honourable member's oration was loaded. 
 Or do you call a furious denunciation of modern thought and 
 progress conversation ? If so, the Archdeacon, in the intervals 
 of eating, was a great converser. Those were the days of Blanco 
 White. You never heard of Blanco White ? Well, for Blanco 
 White read " Essays and Reviews," and suppose he declared it 
 to be " a very trashy book, written by idiots." And warming as 
 he went, and perhaps following his own example in preaching 
 sermons, on the principle of selection, he took unto himself an 
 old story from the last century, and said : " Now, sir, I don't 
 know what you think, but this I say, that these progressive 
 writers are dangerous men. Yes, sir, I repeat it deliberately, 
 ' dangerous ; ' and I will tell you what the end of it will be 
 with their absurd speculating, — they will rob us of all our beliefs. 
 They have already taken away the belief in a devil, and if they 
 are allowed to go on, they will deny the existence of a God ; 
 and the end of it will be that we shall have neither God nor 
 devil, and go out of the world with nothing to make us com- 
 fortable on our deathbeds. " If you call that conversation, that 
 was the Archdeacon's notion of it. 
 
 The women said little or nothing. The Dean's wife was dis- 
 tracted, like Martha, with the cares of serving. She alone 
 seemed a bar to the wickedness of Struggles, and it was to her 
 disjointed attempts at speech that Lord Bichborough was 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 181 
 
 pleased to say the witty sentences we have mentioned. The 
 Archdeacon's wife was partly absorbed in efforts to set her head- 
 dress straight, and partly lost in admiration of her husband's 
 eloquence. As for the banker's wife, she ought to have sat next 
 to me, but fate tied herjto her husband's side, an unsympathising, 
 balance-seeking, cheque-refusing wretch, — I beg leave to say he 
 was not my banker, who was diametrically his opposite, — on 
 whom all his wife's charms were wasted, save the hundred 
 thousand golden reasons that he had for marrying her. After 
 dinner I conversed with her a little, and then fled the Dean's 
 house, with Aunt Mandeville, shaking the dust from off my 
 shoes as I left it, and vowing that nothing should ever induce 
 me to trust my digestion to his cookery for the future. 
 
 I should not have remembered the Dean's dinner so minutely 
 had it not been the night on which Aunt Mandeville, whose 
 jealous fit had quite passed off, invited Arethusa and her father 
 to Mandeville Hall on the 31st of August. 
 
 After the dinner we went to Lord Pennyroyal's ball. He was 
 a widower, and gave parties where you met good company, and 
 had a very bad supper. Somewhere or other I have a cluster of 
 artificial glass grapes, broken off the top bunch of an epergne, or 
 whatever it is called. Below these were real grapes, but above, 
 in the top baskets of the epergne, were grapes of glass. It was 
 Arethusa who found out the false fruit. "Not those; I want 
 some off the top up there." 
 
 I thought this very unreasonable, as the grapes below were 
 very good ; but I did as I was told, broke off a few grapes, and 
 gave them to her. 
 
 "Thank you so much," she said. "These were what I 
 wanted. What good wine they would make ! " and off she went, 
 holding the sham grapes in her hand till she was tired of hold- 
 ing them, and gave me them to keep. 
 
 We four were waiting on the stairs for those carriages, which 
 lagged just as much then as now. It was almost our last night. 
 We were to leave town in two or three days. The Colonel had 
 said something in the usual form about sorrow at parting, when 
 my Aunt replied : 
 
 " You and Miss Chichester treated us very badly last winter 
 in not coming to see us as you promised. Will you behave 
 better this year, and come to Mandeville Hall on the 31st of 
 August 1 we are not going to the sea this summer. We have 
 too much to do at home for that ; but if you will come we will 
 do our best to amuse you, and the partridge-shooting is ex- 
 cellent." 
 
 You will remember those were the very words with which my 
 
182 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Aunt wound up her invitation to Sir Benjamin Bullion. As my 
 Aunt used them again, I thought of the strange story told by 
 the unhappy Blogg, and hoped that the Colonel might have as 
 good shooting as the banker, and less luck than Blogg in seeing 
 the ghost. By the way, let me mention that I once met Miss 
 Blogg, the eldest of the tallow-merchant's olive-branches, out at 
 a party, and waltzed with her. She was a nice, natural girl, but 
 waltzed too much as though she were made of cork. 
 
 Besides thinking of Blogg, I thought of Arethusa, while my 
 Aunt was speaking, and feared, of course, that the Colonel would 
 say he must go to Aunt Buller's for the 1st of September. It 
 was a great relief, therefore, to hear him say, as I had heard him 
 say a hundred times at least before, " that nothing would give 
 him greater pleasure." But let me tell you he said this stock 
 phrase on that occasion, as it seemed to me, in a way that made 
 it quite new. " Nothing would give him greater pleasure." 
 What a sweet sentence ! 
 
 " But will, you come 1 " I whispered to Arethusa. " I will 
 promise to behave well." 
 
 " I think we shall certainly come," said Arethusa. " I know 
 papa would like to see Mandeville Hall again very much. He 
 was often there in your Uncle's time. You know they were 
 great friends." 
 
 Then "Colonel Chichester's carriage" was shouted out, I 
 verily believe by the same linkman who still haunts West End 
 parties, and whose importunity seems rather to increase with 
 age. They were huddled into their carriage, drove off, and ours 
 soon followed. That night I slept the sleep of the blessed, and 
 defied all larks, housemaids, and sweeps. But in my dreams 
 I am sure I said, " Arethusa coming to Mandeville Hall — how 
 delightful!" 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 HOW WE WENT BACK TO MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 I daresay all you prudent mothers and aunts who, having no 
 children of your own, take care of those of others, are wondering 
 how it was that Aunt Mandeville, her jealousy once roused by 
 Arethusa, was so very short-sighted as to ask that young lady 
 to Mandeville Hall, and so throw me into the very temptation 
 which she dreaded. The answer is that my Aunt was one of 
 those straightforward persons who very often do most imprudent 
 
AKNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 183 
 
 things. Besides, she was very proud, and never thought that 
 any girl could win my affection from her against her will. She 
 had glared at me once, and almost yelled at me ; but as soon as 
 I said, " there was nothing between us," she believed what I 
 said. Then her pride came in, and I am sure she paid herself 
 the compliment of supposing that I could never care for any girl 
 more than I did for her. At any rate, she was quite easy on 
 the matter, or she would never have asked the Chichesters to 
 come to us. 
 
 Added to this, she had other objects, or more properly another 
 object in view for me ; and there is nothing that blinds your 
 eyes more to one object than to have another object ever in view. 
 The object in this case, I am sorry to say, was no other than 
 that I should marry the next estate — that's how I put it — but, 
 of course, I was to marry the heiress to whom that estate be- 
 longed. It so happened that this estate "rounded off'' ours, as 
 it was termed. " Surrounded " would have been a better word, 
 for in parts it so ran into and overlapped our land, that it was 
 hard to tell, unless you were the agent of either property, which 
 was Mandeville and which was Harbury land. 
 
 One of the greatest curses of land — one of its heaviest burdens, 
 it seems to me, — is that landowners, especially of fine estates, so 
 often lose themselves in their land. They, in fact, belong to the 
 land, rather than the land to them ; and when a man or woman 
 once gets on this quicksand, he speedily sinks his identity in that 
 of his estate. All landowners, good and bad people alike, are 
 exposed to this kind of craze ; and I really believe that there is 
 scarce any act of cruelty or harshness towards those who are 
 nearest and dearest to them that persons who suffer from this 
 madness will not inflict, and excuse themselves all the while by 
 saying, " It is all for the good of the estate." 
 
 As for my Aunt, I firmly believe she had in her purpose pre- 
 destinated me to marry Mary Harbury as soon as ever I came 
 from the West Indies ; I being then of the mature age of ten, 
 as you know, while Mary was only five. In every thing else I 
 might have free will; but in this' of marriage, my will was 
 to bow to her predestination. The worst was, as often happens, 
 when people have made up their minds to be as the Medes and 
 Persians, that they keep their resolution a close secret, even 
 from the persons most interested in knowing it. It has been 
 settled once for all. No one shall gainsay it. What is the need 
 of talking of it ? This is an axiom to be accepted, not discussedi 
 as that the earth is round, — the sun the centre of our system, — 
 what must be, must be ; ending with, " It's all for the good of 
 the estate." 
 
181 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Thus it was that my Aunt, all those years, had kept this 
 alliance, which was to round off our estates and unite the Man- 
 deville and Harbury properties, a profound secret. But now that 
 I was nearly twenty-two, and Mary Harbury sixteen, she began 
 to think it time to consider the feelings of the young people, and 
 to draw them more together. This was one reason why we did 
 not go to the sea that year. 
 
 So down we went to Mandeville Hall, and had it not been for 
 what followed, I should have enjoyed myself through the rest of 
 Julyand all August in counting the days and waiting for Arethusa, 
 How glad, too, every one was to see us back ! The housekeeper 
 was in ecstasies. What stories she told about airing the beds ; 
 how the maids had slept in them all round ; how they had been 
 put out in the sun ; how a shower of rain had very nearly fallen 
 on them, only the whole strength of the household turned out 
 and dragged them indoors. What preserves she had made, and 
 how much more, and how much home-wine besides she should 
 have made, had it not been for those nasty birds that ate up half 
 the crop of small fruit. And then she hoped we were all well, 
 and that Master Edward had got back his health and recovered 
 his reading ; and, " Dear heart ! how well Mistress do look." 
 .And so she gabbled on, as though she had spent all the time we 
 were away in taking lessons in elocution from the family parrot. 
 
 Next it was the gardener's turn. Never had he known such 
 contrary weather. 'Twas a'most always wet when it should have 
 been dry, and dry when it ought to have been wet. Why red 
 spiders were made he never could tell ! All he knew was, they 
 had got into the houses and spoiled half the grapes. As for 
 apples and pears, they'd be a rare short crop. In all his born 
 days he never see such bloom. Just as if it>had snowed on them 
 from the skies ; but first one frost took the pears, and a while 
 after another took the apples, and cut them off as it were with a 
 knife. Walnuts 1 Well, there'd be about enough for pickling, 
 but never a nut more to crack. So he went on with his litany, 
 and had we believed him, we should have gone to bed with the 
 unpleasant feeling that there would be neither great nor small 
 fruit that year at Mandeville Hall ; but we knew our man — a 
 second Andrew Fairservice — and did not believe him j and after 
 all we had very good fruit that autumn. 
 
 As the Chichesters were coming for the 1st of September, I 
 was more anxious about the game, and was glad to find the 
 head gamekeeper in a more cheerful mood. " Yes, there would 
 be lots of partridges and hares ; there always had been, and he 
 hoped always would be as long as he lived at Mandeville Hall. 
 Indeed there were a-nigh too many hares ; and when we began 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 185 
 
 shooting we must mind and give some ground'game away to the 
 farmers, else they'd be coming up to the Hall and telling my 
 lady ' that them hares wouldn't leave a blade of corn on the 
 estate.' " What about the pheasants ? " Yes, there'd be a good 
 few of them too. The breeding time had been good ; the scent 
 had been so good last hunting season that the foxes had a hard 
 time of it. There were not nearly so many litters of cubs as he 
 had often known, and so there were more pheasants." You must 
 bear in mind that those were not the days of egg-stealing and 
 hen-hatching. The hen pheasants, with few exceptions, were 
 expected to do their own sitting and hatching ; and so I suppose 
 they were better mothers. Perhaps there were fewer foxes. 
 Who can tell 2 But, at any rate, there were many more wild 
 broods, and much less tame hatching, than we have now-a-days. 
 
 In a few days after we had made ourselves at home again, 
 during which time I have no doubt Brooks had been great on 
 London and its comforts and discomforts in the servants' hall, 
 supported in all he said by his faithful and ancient ally, Mr. 
 .Ribbons, the coachman. After a few days, I say, I began to 
 perceive that my Aunt had something on her mind, and that it 
 related to me. I was so lost in my day-dreams about Arethusa 
 — so busy in casting up and then obliterating in my mental 
 calendar each day that was passing between our meeting — that 
 I was slow to take the hints which my Aunt let fall. 
 
 " Don't you think, Edward, we might drive over to Harbury, 
 and call on Mrs. Harbury ? " 
 
 " Yes, I thought we might, some day ; but that day I was 
 engaged to ride over to Leamington, on business." 
 
 " But you might do both. It's not so far round to Harbury, 
 by Leamington. Why not start early, do your business in 
 Leamington, and then go on to Harbury to luncheon t "' 
 
 So I had to go ; but I am ashamed to say that I dawdled so 
 long in Leamington, having my hair cut, baying fishing-tackle, 
 and talking to a horse-dealer, that I got to Harbury just too late 
 to catch the Harburys, who went out every day for a drive at 
 three o'clock as regularly as if their veins had been filled with 
 clockwork instead of blood. 
 
 I must tell you that I felt innocent enough till I returned 
 from this ride, and was not in the least conscious of guilt in not 
 catching the Harburys. In my frame of mind any young lady, 
 except Arethusa, was a bore, and to be shunned accordingly"; 
 but I was not in the least aware that my Aunt had set her heart 
 on my seeing them, till she said : 
 
 " Very provoking, I must say, that you lingered so long in 
 Leamington ; you must have lost an hour and a half, at least, 
 
186 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 there. You surely might have had your hair cut, and hought 
 your tackle, and settled your affairs with Mr. Horseball, in half- 
 an hour, and then you would not have missed the Harburys." 
 
 " But, Auntie," I said, very innocently, " what harm is there 
 in missing them ? " 
 
 " They are our nearest neighbours, except the Grubbs, and 
 them I hardly call neighbours," said my Aunt. " The estates 
 join, and Mary Harbury is a very nice girl ; I should like you 
 to see more of her." 
 
 That was all Auntie said then, but she had nearly couched 
 me of that cataract of love which blinded me to anything or 
 any one except Arethusa. The scales seemed to fall from my 
 eyes, and I began to suspect my Aunt and to loathe Mary 
 Harbury. How many vows of eternal constancy I offered 
 up that night to the fountain of Arethusa I am afraid to count. 
 
 Next day I was still more alarmed. 
 
 " I dare say the Harburys will be glad to hear something of 
 our London season ; I will write and ask them to come and 
 dine quietly with us the day after to-morrow." 
 
 To say was to do with Aunt Mandeville, and so the note was 
 sent that very afternoon by a groom, who was to bring back an 
 answer ; and when the answer came, in the shape of a three- 
 cornered note, it said, " They would be very happy." 
 
 " ' Very happy !' Indeed," I remember repeating indignantly 
 to myself ; " and I suppose I am expected to be very happy, 
 too ; we shall see ! " and then came another torrent of vows to 
 Arethusa. 
 
 When the day after to-morrow came, my Aunt was a little 
 less placid than usual, and said that she had also asked our 
 rector, Mr. St. Faith, and Major Plunger, from Leamington, a 
 heavy cavalry officer. 
 
 " The rector will take me in to dinner, Edward, and Major 
 Plunger Mrs. Harbury, and you must take in Mary Harbury, 
 and mind you make yourself very pleasant to her. I think her 
 a very nice girl." 
 
 Had I ever said she was not a nice girl ? Why did my Aunt 
 go out of her way to impress the fact on me ? I began to be 
 terribly afraid of my Aunt's intentions. 
 
 People used to dine at seven in those days ; and so, at ten 
 minutes to that hour, wheels were heard rolling up the avenue ; 
 but before any one could arrive who had come on wheels, in 
 glided our rector, Mr. St. Faith, to whom I now beg leave to 
 introduce you. , Mr. St. Faith was a B.D., and what used to be 
 called a sound divine. He was neither high nor low. He was 
 not a broad churchman, though that was a term then unknown. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 187 
 
 He certainly was not a deep one. He was neither progressive 
 nor retrograde. He abhorred heresy in all its shapes, avoided 
 the rock of innovation, detested Eome and Geneva alike ; and 
 if he had any dogma, it was that the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury was supreme within these realms in matters of faith, but 
 only so far as the sovereign would suffer him to be so ; in a 
 word, he was quite content with the Church of England, and 
 with his particular position in it; and being vexed with no 
 doubts and difficulties, he was perfectly free, and had full time 
 to discharge the duties of his office. " There was so much," he 
 used to say, " to be said on both sides, that he was on neither 
 side, but remained in the middle." In fact, he was just what 
 the framers of the formularies of the Church of England 'meant 
 clergymen to be, and was a living proof that a man may hold 
 heartily most contradictory opinions, and yet discharge his 
 duty conscientiously. As for the Thirty-nine Articles, he had 
 learnt them by heart, been examined in them, answered the 
 questions put to him to the satisfaction of the examiners, signed 
 them, and sworn to them several times, and then forgotten 
 them all, except so far as to say, " I believe in the thirty-nine 
 articles, and what they say I say." His form was like his faith 
 — sleek, round, and comfortable. He was not at all thin, and 
 yet no one could call him fat. The top of his head was bald, 
 just in a round like a priest's tonsure, and in Elizabeth's time 
 he would have been imprisoned, and perhaps burnt at the stake 
 as a seminary priest, on the mere evidence of his scalp. He was 
 of middle height, with a round, cheerful face, and bright, broad 
 forehead, beneath which twinkled two grey eyes — small they 
 were, but, though small, they were gems of the purest water, 
 and shone far more brilliantly than those great fishy saucer- 
 eyes which some folk have. I never knew any one more scru- 
 pulously neat in his dress. His linen was always snowy-white ; 
 and there was a story that once, having lost his portmanteau, 
 with all his stock of clothes, for three days, he was forced to 
 wear the same shirt for that space of time, and yet it was 
 whiter at the end of the third day than the shirt of any other 
 man would have been after one day's wear. He was, in fact, of 
 that easy, even temper, that his clothes never wore out, nor was 
 his linen soiled ; no dust or dirt could cling to him. 
 
 I need hardly say he was Aunt Mandeville's right-hand man. 
 He knew the face of every man, woman, and child for miles 
 round ; and if there was any drainage to be done at a cottage, 
 or if. a fever broke out, there was good parson St. Faith sure to 
 be found laying down the levels, or preaching to the people 
 about the duty of cleanliness and decent living, quite as vigo- 
 
188 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 rously as he inculcated religion and morality every Sunday from 
 the pulpit. 
 
 That was our parson, who had walked from the Rectory ; but 
 I could fill a volume singiug his praises, so I pass on to the 
 next of the wheel-borne guests, who are just entering the hall 
 in a body. 
 
 First came Mrs. Harbury. How shall I describe her 1 She 
 was what is called a good woman — and then people stopped 
 short as much as to take breath before telling you in what her 
 goodness consisted. I can only repeat that she was a very good 
 woman, but a very unwise one. She was so virtuous and- so 
 uncompromising that people fled from her virtue to vice as a 
 relief ; it was very wicked of them, but so it was, and she was 
 as much to blame as a pretender to music who plays a sonata of 
 Beethoven at sight, and frightens all the company out of the 
 room. If this be Beethoven we will not listen to him. Mrs. 
 Harbury ought to have been described as a woman with the 
 best intentions and the worst results. Her lecturing on very 
 venial sins had frightened half-a-dozen, and perhaps many more, 
 village maidens away from Harbury up to London, in order 
 that they might escape the rancour of " Madam " Harbury's 
 tongue. 
 
 " Susan couldn't a-bear Madame Harbury's scolding for falling 
 asleep one Sunday afternoon in the summer, and so she went up 
 to see a cousin in London and was lost." 
 
 Thin-blooded herself, well to do, and beyond the reach of any 
 temptation, she had no charity, and the pleasure of her life was 
 to make existence as uncomfortable as she could to others. No 
 one had ever heard of Old Harbury, — at least, no one ever spoke 
 of him, — but if when he was alive he ever committed any sin, 
 however slight, and it came to Madame Harbury's ears, all I can 
 ejaculate is, — " Heaven help Old Harbury ! " 
 
 This rigid Christian had. a daughter, the Mary Harbury of 
 whom you have heard. Now, I am not about to speak ill of Mary 
 Harbury. My Aunt was quite right ; she was a very nice girl ; 
 lively, good-looking, sweet-tempered, and amusing. For an 
 heiress, she was rather attractive. But then I hate heiresses. 
 No, I don't hate, I pity them ; the greater the heiress, the more 
 I pity her. Like great diamonds, their value increases so 
 rapidly with the size of their property that at last no one can 
 afford to buy them, and they remain to be stared at, not to 
 be owned. 
 
 What man of any self-respect can marry a great heiress, even 
 with the best of tempers ; but suppose her not to be good- 
 tempered, and to be given to throwing her money in her hus- 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 18!) 
 
 band's teeth, till she gets to — "My money, Sir!" or, "My 
 money, Mr. Dolt ! " How can that man's home fail to be a hell 
 upon earth 1 No doubt, as there are exceptions to every rule, 
 there are exceptions to this ; and as it is possible for a rich man 
 to enter into the kingdom of heaven, so it may be possible for a 
 man to marry a great heiress and be happy ; but all things 
 considered, were I bound to belong in some way to a great 
 heiress, I think I would sooner be her child — provided he were 
 a healthy one — than her husband. 
 
 Such were the reflections with which I looked on the really 
 nice Mary Harbury, as she entered the Hall under the virtuous, 
 wing of her too moral mother. What were they like ? Yes ! I 
 had forgotten. Mrs. Harbury was tall and spare, — gaunt and 
 gawky, some people would have said. She had something of the 
 look of a nun escaped from a convent where she had been 
 starved, and whipped, and chained, and then broken loose. 
 There was an air of moral maceration about her, which showed 
 how a really fine form and face had been worn down and effaced 
 by the lack of that great and perfect gift of charity, which gives 
 a polish to all our actions, and is woman's best cosmetic. No- 
 doubt its genial and kindly influence makes us really beautiful 
 both in body and soul. As it was, Mrs. Harbury was red- 
 nosed, sharp-visaged, and defiant ; the tips of her fingers felt 
 as cold as that charity of which she stood so much in need, and 
 when you shook hands with her, a thrill passed from her which 
 went straight to the marrow of your bones, and made your skin 
 creep. It would have taken at least a ton of coals to restore 
 Madam Harbury's circulation, and when she put her feet into a 
 warm bath, the water froze. Altogether, she was a pleasant 
 woman to have for a mother-in-law. 
 
 Well ! but Mary Harbury 1 Don't be impatient ; here you 
 have her. Mary Harbury was tall, — taller decidedly than 
 Arethusa. She was dark, but not very dark ; her eyes were 
 brown, but, bless you ! they were no eyes at all compared to 
 Aunt Mandeville's brown eyes. Her face was oval ; she had 
 good lips, though the upper lip was rather thin, as though her 
 mother had made it all herself, without the help of any one. 
 Her teeth were white, and she had a very pretty smile. She had a 
 good figure, but it had not that lissom, snakelike look that 
 Arethusa's back had, that caught yoii in its coils long before 
 you saw her face ; and when you saw Arethusa's face, you were 
 beyond all hope. No ! Mary Harbury's back and waist were a 
 back and waist and nothing more ; and her face was a face, and 
 her smile a smile, and nothing more ; but Arethusa's eyes were 
 blue and deep as her own fountain ; her hair was a net, out of 
 
190 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the meshes of which no mortal man once snared could escape. 
 In a word, what could I say more of Arethusa Chichester or of 
 Mary Harbury ? and how shall I compare them except by saying 
 that I was madly in love with Arethusa and did not care one 
 bit for Mary Harbury ? 
 
 There only remains Major Plunger to describe. The Major 
 was a most unfortunate man, in that he lived in those unwar- 
 like days. The 105th Prince Eegent's Own Dragoon Guards, 
 the distinguished regiment to which he belonged, had not been 
 out of England since Waterloo ; in fact, it was one of those 
 pieces of cavalry furniture which are too heavy to send out of 
 England for military service except on very extraordinary occa- 
 sions. The Major was a brave man, as brave as a lion if he had 
 been where lions ought to be — abroad in the desert ; but at 
 home he was as heavy as a bullock. Poor fellow ! he lived 
 before his time. The Balaclava charge would have been the 
 place for him, and he would have blundered through it with 
 the rest of those gallant fellows, and either been killed or 
 have escaped to find himself famous. But there he was in the 
 year 183-, heavy and inglorious. Having entered the army 
 in the year after the battle of Waterloo, and spent his time 
 since between Peterloo and Parsonstown, now in England in the 
 manufacturing districts, now in Ireland suppressing party pro- 
 cessions. 
 
 But it is time we had dinner, and in due time Brooks 
 appeared and announced it, and we all went off with our 
 allotted partners to the dining-room. Don't be afraid, I am 
 not going to bore you with the details of another dinner. Our 
 dinners were as unlike the Dean's dinner as could be. They 
 were like the whales and the creeping things in the first 
 chapter of Genesis. You have forgotten what they were like ? 
 Just turn to the chapter then, and you will see that they were 
 " very good ; " and so were Aunt Mandeville's dinners. 
 
 What did we talk about 1 All sorts of things. Mr. St. 
 Faith talked to my Aunt about Becky Martin's case, and how 
 she would have to go to the county hospital if she were ever to 
 becured of her lameness, — the said Becky Martin having fallen 
 down and broken her leg, which had been set all awry by Dr. 
 Mindererus's assistant. Major Plunger talked? No! he did 
 not.talk ; he answered when he was questioned ; that is to say 
 if he had anything to answer. If not, he said " Oh ! " " Just 
 so," or downright "I don't know." On this occasion Madam, 
 Harbury plied him with dogmatic questions, and even got so far 
 as to ask him what he thought of Original Sin. When the 
 unhappy Major said that he scarce knew what original sin was, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 191 
 
 Madame Harbury was greatly shocked, and repeated the Article 
 beginning, " Original or birth sin lieth not in the following of 
 Adam as the Pelagians do vainly fable," &c, much to the admi- 
 ration of Mr. St. Faith, who innocently whispered to me, " I 
 couldn't have repeated that Article, — no, not for a hundred 
 pounds." But the poor Major got still more into the mire by 
 blurting out, " Well ! Mrs. Harbury, I think one has quite 
 enough trouble with the sins one commits every day without 
 bothering oneself about those which Adam and Eve may have 
 committed." An opinion for which he ought to have been 
 made full Colonel on the spot in the Church Militant, but 
 which, alas ! only drew down on him a series of questions on 
 the creeds and catechisms, which must have made him sigh for 
 a cool cannonade in exchange for the rasping religion of 
 Madam Harbury. 
 
 What did I talk about to Mary Harbury? We all know 
 that the heart of man is desperately wicked and deceitful above 
 the weights, and so it was with my heart that night. I knew 
 that my Aunt wished me to be agreeable to Mary Harbury, and 
 so I was wicked enough to throw dirt in Auntie's eyes. Mary 
 Harbury, on her side, seemed quite flattered, and, as I rattled 
 on about London and its pleasures, asked questions, till her 
 brown eyes shone with something of the Mandeville lustre. I 
 could see — nay, I could feel, that my Aunt was greatly pleased, 
 and even before the guests were out of the house, she had told 
 me, with one of her sweetest smiles : 
 
 " You behaved very well at dinner, Edward. How nice it 
 would be to round off the Mandeville and Harbury estates in a 
 ring-fence ! " 
 
 " A ring-fence ! " Yes ! That was just it ! A wedding- 
 ring fence. Something that would cabin and confine me all my 
 days, and keep me away from my darling, fast bound in misery 
 and matrimony. So, with a smile on my face and a frown at 
 my heart, I went to bed, renewing my vows to Arethusa, and 
 defying my Aunt Mandeville and all her works to wed me to 
 Mary Harbury. 
 
192 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 HOW AUGUST PASSED AT MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 Next morning things got worse and worse. My Aunt was 
 full of the Harburys. She thought Mary such a nice girl : so 
 lively, and so full of animation. 
 
 " Do you know I like her a deal better than Arethusa Chi- 
 chester — don't you, Edward 1 " 
 
 Here was a home-thrust. 
 
 " Why, Auntie, I know Miss Chichester very well, and Miss 
 Harbury very little, so I don't see how I can be expected to 
 like the one I know least of better than the one of whom I know 
 most." 
 
 I thought this answer most dextrous and diplomatic, and it 
 put my Aunt off till after luncheon ; but in the afternoon she 
 returned to the charge, and while we were out for a drive, 
 she said outright, she would be so glad if I married Miss 
 Harbury. 
 
 This was really too much ; but Aunt Mandeville's eagerness 
 left me a loophole to creep out. 
 
 "They'll think we wish to jump down their throats, Auntie, 
 if I say anything about it. Mary Harbury i3 only just out of 
 the nursery — barely seventeen, if so much. She cannot know 
 her own mind ; and I, too, have as yet seen little or nothing of 
 life. I think I had better wait a while before I ask any one to 
 marry me." 
 
 This very diplomatic speech made my Aunt draw in her 
 horns. She saw there was sense in what I said, and dropped 
 the subject, only repeating : 
 
 " How I should like to round off the Mandeville and Harbury 
 properties in a ring-fence." 
 
 Poor Auntie ! there she was ready to sacrifice my young 
 heart to her grand idea. For the sake of rounding off the 
 estate she counted my will and my affections as dust. This is 
 the kind of tyranny that makes freemen of us all, and emanci- 
 pates us even from our parents. From that very day, much as 
 I loved Aunt Mandeville, I hardened my heart against her 
 matrimonial schemes, and inwardly swore I would not have my 
 young heart sold in the marriage-market. 
 
 The best of it was that, up to that summer, Aunt Mandeville 
 had rather kept aloof from the Harburys. She was about as 
 antipathetic as it was possible to be to Madam Harbury. I 
 don't believe the two women had a thought or a feeling in 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 193 
 
 common ; nor did my Aunt even know what her neighbour's 
 feelings would be as to the match. For all we knew she might 
 have made up her mind to marry her daughter to some Dissent- 
 ing minister, all for the sake of setting an example of humility 
 and godliness. But for all that, Aunt Mandeville, in her obsti- 
 nate heart of hearts, was bent on the match, and resolved to 
 bring it about if possible. She was not the woman to give up 
 her intentions, once formed ; least of all, one so eminently 
 calculated to increase the welfare of the estate. As for me, her 
 nephew, Edward Halfacre — why, I belonged to the estate just 
 as she belonged to it ; and for the good of it, I was not to have 
 any will of my own. 
 
 I ought to have told you that when the ladies left the room 
 after dinner, and we men remained behind, Major Plunger, re- 
 lieved from the incubus of Madam Harbury, and feeling less like 
 a charity boy called on to give an acoount of his belief, refreshed 
 himself with several glasses of the old Mandeville port, and began 
 to talk in a more natural way. He told us of the regiment, and 
 how the men, old soldiers and recruits alike, would drink so. 
 " Beef and beer,'' he said, " made them so heavy that it was very 
 difficult to get horses up to their weight." The Colonel was at 
 his wits' end, and the worst was, the " figure," as he called it, of 
 weight-bearing horses rose rapidly. "It isn't only the home 
 demand," he went on. " Those foreigners " — here he added 
 some expletives, complimentary neither to the eyes nor limbs of 
 the said foreigners — " Those foreigners now look to the English 
 market for their remounts, and show their faces at every English 
 horse-fair. Here at Leamington we have got a Prussian military 
 agent, a Captain in what they call their Horse Guards, who 
 buys up all the likely animals from the breeders and farmers, 
 even before they come to the fairs, and completely fore- 
 stalls us. He goes out hunting, too, and is good friends with 
 every one. The Colonel one day at mess last winter said 
 ' he didn't mean to say anything unkind or ungentlemanlike^ 
 but if any of our cornets could only ride over the Count and 
 break his neck — why, horses would be cheaper next Coventry 
 fair ! '" 
 
 Mr. St. Faith rather champed and chewed at this speech of 
 Major Plunger's, which, of course, he thought very un-Christian ; 
 but he sat it out, while I listened in wonder to hear so long an 
 oration from the Major ; then, wishing to turn the conversation,, 
 and to say something, Mr. St. Faith vaguely asked, " By the way, 
 what is this Prussian officer's name 1 " 
 
 " That I'm sure I can't say," said Major Plunger ; " at least, 
 I can't pronounce it at all. I've heard it over and over again, 
 
 o 
 
194 ANNALS OF £N EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 but it always escapes me, and I have never got my tongue over 
 it. It begins easy and ends hard, that's all I know." 
 
 " Very like sin, Edward," said Mr. St. Faith. " That always 
 begins easy and ends hard. I wonder, though, what the name 
 is. What is the easy beginning, Major ? " 
 
 " Man," said the Major, " and then it goes on into toif-some- 
 thing, but what toif-something is, I'm sure I can't say. The 
 worst is with these nasty foreign names, they never look the 
 same when they are written as they sound when they are spoken ; 
 so no one can make them out, even on paper. All I can say is, 
 there is no toif in this fellow's name on paper, but teuf. Now 
 if a man will have his name written teuf, and pronounce it toif, 
 how can he expect to have it understood ? " 
 
 " Very true, Major," went on the Eector, in his soft, easy way. 
 " It is very wrong in the foreigners to have such hard names. I 
 wonder what they have to say to such easy English names as 
 ' Cholmondeley,' and ' Cirencester ; ' and down here in War- 
 wickshire to some of our local names. This very Major, riding 
 home from Coventry to Leamington, might be told to keep to 
 the left after ' Stychall ' toll-gate ; but when he came to the 
 gate, and found it written up ' Stivichale,' he might think he had 
 gone wrong. Don't you think English names are just as hard 
 to foreigners as foreign names to Englishmen y Six to one side, 
 and half-a-dozen to the other." / 
 
 " 1 don't know anything about it," said the Major, doggedly, 
 whose inner man was now strengthened by half a bottle of port ; 
 " but I only wish these foreigners, with their jaw- breaking names, 
 wouldn't come here buying up our horses, and making us lose 
 our front teeth in trying to speak to them." 
 
 Mr. St. Faith made no reply, and as it was now clear that the 
 Major had spirit enough in him to have attempted to answer 
 that awful question in the Catechism, beginning, " My good 
 child, know this," should Madam Harbury put it to him, we left 
 our wine and sought the ladies. 
 
 I am sure I ought to apologise for bringing in this conversa- 
 tion all out of its place, but I really was so full of telling you 
 about my Aunt and her schemes for settling me for life in a 
 ring-fence, that I forgot till now this very edifying bit of after- 
 dinner conversation. 
 
 How did the month of August go ? Very slowly. How I 
 grudged it its odd day ! Why had it thirty-one days 1 But 
 thirty-one days it had, and there was no help for it. Did I ever 
 tell you I was of a poetical turn ? I fancy most of us are poetical 
 when we are young and in love. We are prosaic enough in after- 
 life, but love warms us up and makes us " numerous." I see 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. ,195 
 
 already that you do not understand what I mean by " numerous.'' 
 I don't think, if you are an ordinary reader, you have any notion 
 of what I mean. You must be quite puzzled. You, worthy Mr. 
 Commonplace, when Mrs. C, the wife of your bosom, who has 
 talked prose and read poetry to you for forty years, comes to 
 this passage, of course will cry out " Numerous ! how can love 
 make a man ' numerous ? ' how can any man be ' numerous,' my 
 dear ? It must be a misprint — they print novels so badly now-a- 
 days— for 'humorous.' Even then I don't see the sense, I 
 always thought that love made a man melancholy and dull ; 
 that it was no joke, in fact. I know well what I felt, Anna 
 Maria, when I thought old Deputy Baggs, who was worth a 
 plum, was to be what is termed ' your favoured suitor.' Did I 
 feel ' humorous 1 ' No, I felt murderous ! " 
 
 With all deference to Mr. Commonplace, who, in his way, is I 
 daresay as good a judge of tallow and bristles as Mr. Blogg, I 
 say that " numerous " is no misprint. I say that true love does 
 make us " numerous," — the blind boy " lisps in numbers." Do 
 you see my meaning now, Mr. Commonplace 1 What do you 
 understand by "numbers?" Don't answer " arithmetic," and 
 conjure up the fearful image of Cupid, slate-pencil in hand, doing 
 a sum in double rule of three. Pigs of lead, for instance, a sum 
 just suited to your capacity, Mr. Commonplace. No, " numbers " 
 mean verse and metre, and "numerous verse" means not a 
 quantity of verses, but lines written with rhythm, rhyme, and 
 metre, as it may be. How strange it is that the most unbridled 
 feeling of our nature, the passion which mocks at all restraint, 
 and laughs at bonds and locksmiths, should be just that which 
 rushes into verse, and pours out its feelings in measured music. 
 Well ! however strange it may be, love makes a man do many 
 strange things ; and it made me write verse while I was waiting 
 for Arethusa. Nay, I wrote a whole poem, called Helen of Troy. 
 It was no imitation of Goethe's great revival of that fair woman; 
 for it was before I read " Faust." Don't be afraid, I am not 
 going to give you any of it. It has long since been confided to 
 those faithful flames which keep so many secrets. I cannot re- 
 member a line of it ; and now, if I give you a specimen or two 
 of my poetical powers, it is only to show you what a tyrant love 
 is, and how he throws some poetic fury into the dullest brains. 
 Here is something that begins innocently enough : 
 
 " A DIRGE. 
 
 " Spring-time coming, bees' sweet humming, 
 Woods and fields are loud with life ; 
 "Wild flowers springing, wood-birds singing, 
 Love's first whisper, love's first strife. 
 
 o2 
 
196 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Summer glowing, true love knowing 
 All that heart can care to know ; 
 Past the morning, but still scorning 
 Fear, whatever wind may blow. 
 
 '* Autumn failing, woman wailing, 
 
 As her loves drop dead like leaves ; 
 Swallows flitting, not one sitting 
 Underneath the cottage eaves. 
 
 " Winter snowing, north wind blowing, 
 "Weaving white earth's winding sheet, 
 Lovers once now palsy-stricken, 
 Theirs the pulse no joy can quicken. 
 Deaf, and blind, and mute they meet. 
 
 ' ' Then take the spring while it is spring, 
 Live warm in summer while it glows, 
 Nor wait till winter comes as king, 
 With crown of thorns that bear no rose." 
 
 Whether it ends so innocently is another matter ; but such as 
 it is, there it is, to show you that my love for Arethusa, bright 
 and pure though it was, often filled me with melancholy fore- 
 bodings. 
 
 What else did I do 1 
 
 I walked about the park, and fished in the river when there 
 were fishing days ; yes, and caught many a lusty trout, too, with 
 the tackle which I had bought the day I contrived to miss the 
 Harburys. The Avon ran through our park and under the hill. 
 The brook from Kenilworth fell into it, then bright and clear, 
 and full of fish ; now they are both black and vile with Coventry 
 and Kenilworth filth, and as Ashless as the Dead Sea. Then, 
 too, I looked after the pheasants, and walked over the fields and 
 through the coverts with the gamekeeper, and counted the broods 
 and coveys, and gloated over the good sport Colonel Chichester 
 would have when he came to Mandeville Hall with Arethusa. 
 Once or twice, too, for very idleness, I rode over to Leamington 
 to see the Heavies, and had luncheon with Major Plunger. One 
 day I remember we went over — the Major and I — to Warwick, 
 to the old curiosity shop, and I bought a set of silver beads, 
 which I meant to give to Arethusa. You shall hear all about 
 them very soon. After we had bought the beads, which were 
 very dear, though about a quarter the price they would have 
 cost in these modern ruination days, we were sauntering along 
 the High-street, when I saw a tall man coming up to us. The 
 Major had barely time to say, " Here's that Man-toif, or Toif- 
 man," before he was face to face with us. Major Plunger was 
 rather a shy man, particularly with strangers and foreigners ; 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. • 197 
 
 but something had to be done, and so he said with great presence 
 of mind for him, " Haw do you do, Count ? " — wisely excluding 
 the Toif, — " allow me to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Half- 
 acre." 
 
 "Charmed to make his acquaintance," said the Count, in 
 excellent English, "Just joined, I suppose. Have you got a 
 good charger ? " 
 
 " Mr. Halfacre is not one of us," said the Major, " nor is he 
 in the army at all." 
 
 " What a pity ! " said the Count, pronouncing the word rather 
 like " peety." " He would make a fine heavy cavalry officer." 
 
 " Did you do anything at Coventry fair 1 " said the Major, 
 returning to the ever-important question of the remounts. 
 " They say good horses will be dearer than ever. By the way, 
 Count, don't they breed horses in Germany, that they must send 
 you over here to buy up ours ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes," said the Count; " we have many horses, only not 
 so good as yours ; and then we have more cavalry regiments, 
 and stronger than yours, so we want all our own horses, and 
 yours besides." 
 
 "Why can't you get them from Koossia ? " said the Major. 
 " I always thought the Eoossians and Proossians went hand in 
 hand, and helped one another." 
 
 " Well,'' said the Count, " we have a Holy Alliance, and are 
 bound to help one another in time of war ; but in time of peace 
 the export of horses from Eussia is strictly prohibited, and so 
 we are forced to come here." 
 
 How long the Major might have gone on growling about the 
 Eoossians and Proossians, and their raising the price of horse- 
 flesh, no one can tell ; but the Count was in a hurry to get away, 
 feeling, no doubt, bored by the turn the conversation was taking, 
 so he raised his hat, and with a profound salutation to both of 
 us, off he went. 
 
 He was a fine, tall man, well set up after the true Prussian 
 military type ; fair, with cold, light-blue eyes, and a lemon- 
 coloured beard and moustache ; about thirty, I should say. 
 Dear me ! in those days I looked on a man of thirty as rather 
 old. 
 
 " What a bore not to know a fellow's name, and if you hear 
 it, not to be able to pronounce it," said the Major. " I really 
 must fiud it out." 
 
 On we went up the street to the " Bear and Eagged StafJ^ 
 the well-known inn in Warwick, and there we overtook 
 Count, and found out why he was in such a hurry. He had 
 just time to go into the "Bear" and pay his bill before 
 
198 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Tallyho started for Birmingham, whither he was going on one 
 of his horse-buying expeditions. 
 
 " Here is his portmanteau," said the Major, with a curiosity 
 which would have done credit to a female spy; "and now we will 
 read his name, and try to pronounce it. I won't go about any 
 longer meeting a fellow and not knowing his name." 
 
 As he said this he went up to the portmanteau, which was 
 labelled in large letters : 
 
 "GRAF MANTEUFFEL, 
 
 Prussian Legation, 
 
 London." 
 
 " Here it is, just as I told you. What Graf may be I'm sure 
 I can't tell ; some horrid Christian name, I suppose, the short 
 for ' Giraffe,' I daresay. He just looks like one — long, and lean 
 and yellow ; but here is Man : Man, Man ; Teuf, teuf — not 
 toif, mind you, Fel, fel. What does all that make — Man-teuf- 
 fel ? Maateuffel ; not a trace of toif in it. Here he comes, bill 
 in hand ; now listen to me." 
 
 " My dear Count Maniew/fel, you'll be late for the coach if 
 you don't take care." 
 
 It was evident by the puzzled look of the Count that the 
 Major's pronunciation of his name was at least strange, for he 
 hesitated a little, then smiled graciously, and said : 
 
 " My dear Major, you have not yet got it quite just. My 
 name is Mantoiffel, not Manteuffel." 
 
 " Then why the devil don't you spell it Mantoiffel 1 " said the 
 Major ; " and what, I should like to know, does ' Graf mean 1 " 
 
 " That, my dear friend," replied the Count, 1 " is something 
 which you do not possess, though, no doubt, your valour, so 
 often shown in the battle-field, proves that you richly merit it. 
 ' Graf ' is only a title — the German for Count, in fact, — and as 
 I am called Count in England or France, I am called ' Graf ' at 
 home in Germany. Both words mean the same thing." 
 
 And so, having crushed Major Plunger, the Count climbed up 
 to the box seat, and rattled down the street on the top of the 
 Tallyho. 
 
 " Thinks himself very clever, no doubt," said Major Plunger ; 
 " but why a man can call himself Teuf, if his name is really Toif, 
 I can't at all see." 
 
 . Young as I was, I could quite see that the Major had got the 
 Mat of it. He had shown bad manners and lost his temper, 
 mae the Count had rapped him over the knuckles without 
 ra ;ijg his temper or showing the slightest incivility. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 199 
 
 Still the Major went back to Leamington rather elated. Had 
 he not forced Count Manteuffel to pronounce his own name ? 
 
 As for me, I went back to Mandeville Hall well pleased that 
 another day was gone ; I also resolved to get Auntie to ask 
 Count Manteuffel once when the Chichesters came. " Then the 
 Colonel," I said to myself, " will have some one to talk to out 
 shooting, and I shall be left alone to think of Arethusa." 
 
 Now, the fifteenth of August came, and with it a letter from 
 Arethusa to my Aunt. I remember the thrill it gave me to see 
 her handwriting among the letters which lay on the breakfast- 
 table, waiting for my Aunt. How I longed for her appearance ! 
 She was fully two minutes late, and those dear, short, family 
 prayers, how long they seemed ! And the cook, how fat she 
 looked, waddling out of the room ; and Brooks, — brute, that he 
 was ! to stay behind to gossip with Aunt Mandeville and hinder 
 her from reading her letters ! 
 
 I watched her over my cup ; and I remember thinking she 
 will, of course, read Arethusa's letter first of -all. But Auntie 
 did nothing of the kind. The first letter was from our old friend 
 Sir Benjamin Bullion about an investment in consols. 
 
 " Very kind of him to take so much trouble, and to write 
 himself." 
 
 Then she read a charitable application. " Another clergyman, 
 with fifty pounds a-year, and ten children. Why do poverty and 
 progeny always go together, like twins ? What lady of good 
 family and means ever had three children at a birth, and claimed 
 the king's bounty? But the wife of the Bev. Felix Babbits has 
 had seven children in four years, and they are all doing well and 
 thriving, in spite of the starvation in which they have always 
 lived." Such reflections as these did my Aunt pour out over the 
 appeal of the Bev. Felix Babbits, ending with : " Well, poor 
 creatures, I suppose I must send them five pound. 
 
 " And here, I declare, is a letter from Miss Chichester. I 
 wonder what she says, Edward 1 Ferhaps it is to say that they 
 can't come on the 31st." 
 
 It was lucky for me that Aunt Mandeville did not look at me 
 as she said this, else she would have seen my face as woe-begone 
 as that of the White Lady. 
 
 It was not a long letter, and, as soon as she had read it, Auntie 
 threw it over to me, with something like a mild reproach in her 
 " You may as well read it, Edward ; they are more your friends, 
 than mine ! " 
 
 This was what the letter said. As it was not marked private 
 I lay it before you, most inquisitive public. 
 
200 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Bullee Hall, South Molton, 
 " August 12th. 
 " Dear Mrs. Mandeville, 
 
 " My father bids me write and say that, if you still wish 
 us to come to you on the 31st, we shall be most happy to do so. 
 I hope we shall have better weather in Warwickshire than we 
 have had in Devon. It has poured incessantly since we came, 
 and one dry day would be a great relief. Will you please write 
 me a line, to say if you expect us on the 31st 1 With my father's 
 kind regards, 
 
 " Believe me, 
 
 " My dear Mrs. Mandeville, 
 
 " Very sincerely yours, 
 
 " Arethusa Chichester." 
 
 " A very proper letter," said my Aunt, gazing at me ; " very 
 business- like and to the purpose. Of course I shall write and 
 say that we expect them. I hope they will stay out the 
 month." 
 
 Lest a visit for a month in these degenerate days of three- 
 days' and five-days' visits should alarm you, let me tell you that 
 visits were much longer in those days, and of course much plea- 
 santer if the company were pleasant, and the reverse if they were 
 the reverse. There is a story of those days of long visits, that 
 a well-known bore, staying on a long visit in a country house, 
 cleared it out in a fortnight, and at last was left alone in it with 
 his hosts and one other man, who, in stepping out of a window 
 to escape the conversation of this very bore, fell down several 
 feet, and broke his leg. When they picked him up, he said, 
 " Thank God ! anything rather than an hour's talk with Mr. 
 McTeazer." The same Mr. McTeazer at last took to solitary 
 walks, and one day he took the pet retriever of the family with 
 him. When he came home, he said, " A most extraordinary 
 thing happened to me to-day. I took Bover out with me for a 
 walk, and just as we had gone a little way, I began to speak 
 kindly to him, when he looked up in my face, howled piteously, 
 and ran away home." 
 
 Even the dumb animals at last found him out, and fled from 
 him — the bore of bores. 
 
 But to return. Even in those days of long visits, Aunt 
 Mandeville's hatred of short visits was remarkable. " What," 
 she used to say, " is the good of people packing up, and taking 
 the trouble to leave home for a few days 1 As soon as you begin 
 to like them they are gone, and it's the same story with the next 
 lot. No ! don't ask people to stay with you at all if you don't 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 201 
 
 like them well enough to wish them to stay long. I wish no one 
 to come to Mandeville Hall who will not stay there a month." 
 
 These was sad, old-fogy notions, and would never pass current 
 now-a-days ; but so long as Aunt Mandeville lived, that was 
 the law at Mandeville Hall, and it was a law that sat lightly on 
 most people, for it was very pleasant living at Mandeville 
 Hall. 
 
 I was so overjoyed to think that. the Chichesters were really 
 coming, that I said nothing at all except : 
 
 " Very good of you, Auntie, to ask them for so long a time ; 
 I hope we shall be able to amuse them while they are here." 
 
 " Of course we shall, Edward. I like Colonel Chichester. 
 Indeed, they are both very pleasant. We will ask Mary Har- 
 bury over to spend a week, and then you will be able to see how 
 much better bred she is than Miss Chichester. So that with 
 her, and Mr. St. Faith, and Major Plunger, and the other officers 
 from Leamington, and that ' Man Toif,' of whom you told me 
 the other day, and who seems to be clever, we shall do very 
 well." 
 
 That very afternoon my Aunt wrote off to Miss Chichester, 
 saying that she would never forgive the Colonel if he broke his 
 promise to bring her to Mandeville Hall on the 31st of August ; 
 so the question of their coming was as good as settled. As for 
 me, as I thought it would please my Aunt, who was playing my 
 game so well for me, I rode over to Harbury and had a long 
 discussion with Madam Harbury on the future state of those 
 good men of old times who were left to the uncovenanted 
 mercies of God ; about which she confessed that she had great 
 doubts, while I maintained that I believed the patriarchs and 
 old heathens might expect to be very comfortable hereafter, 
 provided they had lived up to their lights while on earth. 
 
 As for Mary Harbury, she was working a sampler, on which 
 all the virtues were inculcated, as a pattern for one of the 
 school children. Having done my duty, I rode home, dined in 
 charity with all men, and went to bed — not, I am ashamed to 
 say, to dream of the condition of the ancient patriarchs and 
 philosophers, but to fancy that I was again seated under that 
 beech at Chiswick, with Arethusa by my side. 
 
 Why should I go on counting the days 1 The sun rose and 
 the sun set ; the morning and the evening made up day by day ; 
 and at last it was the 31st, and that afternoon Arethusa was to 
 arrive: 
 
 Of course it was a fine day. There was not a breath of air, 
 and all the park was covered with a golden haze. The hares 
 clung to their forms till you kicked them up. The partridges 
 
202 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 took dust baths on the roads and wherever there was dust, 
 quite unconscious of their fate on the morrow. The pheasants, 
 young and old, cock and hen, strutted in and out of the coverts, 
 as though they well knew that they had still a month's law. 
 The very wood-pigeons were less shy and wary than usual, and 
 I came within shot of several. Everything seemed to hold its 
 breath till my Arethusa came. 
 
 They were to make their way across country, by Bath and 
 Birmingham, and we were to send to meet them to Warwick. 
 I had gone out under pretence of seeing the keeper about the 
 guns and dogs for the morrow, but really to conceal my emotion 
 while expecting Arethusa. I would not have sat alone with 
 Auntie in the Hall for anything. I had got half way down the 
 avenue, about half a mile from the Hall, when I heard the 
 sound of wheels a long way off. Quick as thought I turned and 
 ran towards the house in all that airless summer heat, and only 
 got back just in time. Had the old coachman been hard on the 
 horses, I should have been late ; but, by being hard on my- 
 self, I reached the hall-door two minutes before them, and was 
 ready to receive Arethusa as she alighted. 
 
 Dear me ! how beautiful she looked, and how well her figure 
 showed as she tripped up the stone steps. One step brought 
 her into the old hall, followed by her father and myself ; and 
 there, with the White Lady looking down on us with her face of 
 unutterable woe, we four stood under the roof of Mandeville 
 Hall. 
 
 My Aunt was profuse in her inquiries. " How far had they come 
 that day?" " Only from Birmingham." " That was twenty miles 
 at least, and even to. start from such a smoky place was very 
 fatiguing." " Had they waited long for the carriage ? " " No, 
 only just time enough to have luncheon.'' That was before the 
 days of five o'clock tea for all the world ; but Arethusa and 
 Aunt Mandeville had some, while I took the Colonel a walk to 
 revive his recollection of the park. At seven we dined quietly, 
 four of us together, and before we sat down I thought it was 
 going to be the nicest dinner in every way. It was all one 
 course, and one dish — Arethusa, and Arethusa, and Are- 
 thusa. 
 
 How did she meet me ? Very sweetly and softly indeed. 
 One glance of recognition from those deep blue eyes ; one 
 hearty grasp of the outstretched hand ; one thrill that passed- 
 through both frames. That was all, and it was enough. 
 
 " I am so glad to be here," she said, as I handed her into 
 the dining-room out of the hall, and when we were seated she 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 203 
 
 " What a fine old place, and what family pictures ! You are 
 a happy man, Mr. Halfacre, to live here." 
 
 But I am not going to bore you with the commonplaces of 
 two lovers. They all repeat the set phrases out of the copy- 
 book of love — lessons learnt by generation after generation of 
 bygone lovers, and to be learnt by lovers yet to come. Trifles 
 that, seen through love's magic glass, are magnified into matters 
 of the greatest moment ; and which, seen by mere dull mortal 
 eyes, are mere specks and grains of dust. Nothing is so unin- 
 teresting as the ordinary conversation of lovers, except to the 
 happy pair themselves. Least of all interesting is it when one 
 of the 'pair feels that he is watched and bound to be on his good 
 behaviour, as I was. 
 
 The cost of the conversation, as they say in France, that 
 evening was therefore paid by the Colonel, who was infinitely 
 amusing, and made my Aunt laugh heartily by telling her of 
 Devonshire and its discomforts. 
 
 " You know we thought Ilfracombe very damp and wet last 
 year, but I assure you it was nothing to South Molton. I am ready 
 to swear that it rained day and night for a month without stop- 
 ping. Except in a water-cure establishment, I can't fancy any 
 one being there at all. As for Aunt Buller, she might as well live 
 in a bath at once. The partridges had all been drowned ; the 
 old birds, most of them early in the season, and the young ones 
 later on." He had scarce seen a feather all the time he was in 
 the west. 
 
 So he went on, and Arethusa and I escaped observation. I 
 felt awkward, as I knew my Aunt would watch me if she could. 
 That wretched Mary Harbury was ever rising up with her 
 sampler and thrusting it between me and Arethusa. As for 
 Arethusa, she was decidedly dull. She had caught the infection 
 from me, and seemed bored and constrained, but we looked at 
 one another a good deal, and I fancied, whenever I gazed at 
 her, I saw something which said, " Have patience with me, and 
 I will tell thee all." 
 
 On the whole then, though it was not so lively as I could 
 have wished, I was satisfied, and when we all went to bed early, 
 I said to myself as I laid my head on my pillow : " Under the 
 same roof at last with Arethusa, and that roof our own. Here 
 for a month too ! What a treasure of time that seems ! How 
 many and what happy things shall occur in this month of 
 September, 183- ?" 
 
204 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 ABBTHUSA AT MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 Next morning the Colonel and I were up betimes. Those 
 were the days when colonels, however old, went out shooting 
 before breakfast. We were out at six. There was a nice 
 breeze and a strong scent. The harvest had been early, and it 
 was nearly all in. As we beat the stubbles, covey after covey 
 of strong fine birds rose, and as we both shot well, — the Colonel 
 by far the better of the two — down fell bird after bird, and by 
 half-past eight we had a heavy bag, and returned to breakfast. 
 As for hares, there were so many that they quite bore out the 
 gamekeeper's boast, and I am sure we shot enough in those 
 two hours to pacify all the tenants, if those hares were sent to 
 them as presents. 
 
 We were too hungry to wait for the ladies, and had done 
 our breakfast by the time they came down j Arethusa looking 
 as blooming as a blush rose, and twice as sweet. Had she 
 slept well 1 asked my Aunt. 
 
 " Oh, very well. She had been so tired." 
 
 After breakfast she must see the house. It would be too hot 
 for shooting all the afternoon, and to judge by the shots all 
 round the house we must have shot game enough to last for a 
 month. So it was settled that I should take the Colonel and 
 Miss Chichester round, and that we would not shoot again till 
 the afternoon. 
 
 Alas ! alas ! how often have I looked back and thought of 
 that day when it seemed to me as though I were bringing my 
 bride into my own house, and showing her its treasures. It 
 seemed to me so kind that Auntie should let me show the 
 Hall, as though it were mine already ; for though Mandeville 
 Hall was my Aunt's out and out, to do with it as she pleased, 
 it appeared always taken for granted by her, as well as by every 
 one else, that the estate was to be mine after her death. True 
 there was that nasty Mary Harbury always rising up between me 
 and my love. But what cared I for Mary Harbury, if Arethusa 
 were true to me 1 Nay ! what did I care for Mandeville Hall, 
 or for the whole world, without Arethusa ? I rushed madly, 
 therefore, into the duty of showman, and it was just as well 
 that Aunt Mandeville retired to write letters, or perhaps 
 she might have seen things in my behaviour that she would 
 not have liked at all. As it was, I began my duty in solemn 
 form. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 205 
 
 We began in the hall, which I have already described to you 
 long ago. Colonel Chichester looked on the family pictures as 
 old friends. Many of the arms, too, he had handled in Mr. 
 Mandeville's time. Such and such a banner he remembered, 
 not because it was one that had been borne by some old Mande- 
 ville at Cressy or Agincourt, but because it had belonged to the 
 Mandeville troop of Yeomanry in the year 1815, and had been 
 presented by the Princess Charlotte. He lived with the things 
 with which he had lived, cared little for imagination, and had 
 small respect for antiquity. I am quite sure he thought a teapot 
 a much better thing than the Portland Vase. Arethusa was 
 rather sentimental, what the Germans call schwarmerisch, ro- 
 mantic, enthusiastic, but not the least vulgarly so. She looked 
 at the hall and its fine proportions, the ancient louvre in the 
 fretted roof, the two great stone chimney-pieces which had supers 
 seded that louvre ; the tapestry in which grim figures flared and 
 flaunted as the wind stirred it ; the long line of Mandevilles ; 
 the good swords and helmets ; the shirts and coats of mail ; the 
 morions and buff coats of the Commonwealth, — with soft swim- 
 ming eyes, and seemed to take in at one glance all the glory of 
 our ancient house. She asked few questions, not twenty in a 
 minute, like our jesting young ladies, never waiting to hear an 
 answer ; but every now and then she gazed tenderly at me, as 
 much as to say, " All this and the fame of it will be yours." 
 
 From the hall we went through the dining-room, drawing-room, 
 and library, — rooms panelled with black oak, off which Aunt 
 Mandeville had, with infinite trouble, got the white paint which 
 some Gothic Mandeville had daubed over it a century before. 
 In those two rooms were long rows of family pictures, so that the 
 mind was bewildered with Sir Giles, and Sir Roger, and Sir John, 
 Squire this and Squire that, and all their wives and children. 
 
 After we had exhausted them we went back into the hall, 
 and were just going up the staircase that led to the state rooms, 
 when Arethusa stopped before the White Lady, and said : 
 
 " Pray, who is this 1 Hers was the second face I saw on 
 coming here. Yours was the first, and as I entered the hall. I 
 saw those woeful features staring at me on the opposite wall." 
 
 " That," I said, " is our White Lady. I will show you her 
 room presently." 
 
 Upstairs we went, and I am sure no family housekeeper was 
 ever half so good a guide. The King's room, and Queen Eliza- 
 beth's room, that is, the White Lady's room, and the dressing- 
 room off it, and the long gallery into which all the rooms except 
 the dressing-room opened. I explained them all. There was a 
 deal to see and tell, but I am forced to say that I did not dilate 
 
206 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 very much on the White Lady and her history. I merely said 
 that one of those rooms was supposed to be haunted by the lady 
 from whom that portrait was taken, but that in all likelihood the 
 story arose out of her peculiar dress and her woe-begone face. 
 
 " Quite right," said Colonel Chichester. "There are no such 
 things as ghosts. All stuff and nonsense ; made up of indiges- 
 tion, family portraits, old furniture, and strange beds. Never 
 saw a ghost in my life, and hope I never shall." 
 
 " Do you believe in ghosts 1 " asked Arethusa, as we were 
 tripping downstairs, outstripping the Colonel, whose gout made 
 him come down one leg first. 
 
 " I believe in you, Arethusa," I replied; " and would that you 
 returned my belief." 
 
 " Don't be unreasonable ; when did I come here 1 — only 
 yesterday. Give a young lady law and time to recover her 
 feelings." 
 
 So here it was again, the same story ; as soon as I tried to 
 bring her to the point, she was as scared as a dove, and withdrew 
 her heart behind its natural defence — her tongue. 
 
 " What are you saying about ladies and law, Toosy?" said the 
 Colonel, who just then overtook us. " My advice to both ladies 
 and gentlemen is to have as little to do with law as possible." 
 
 " The law I was talking of, Papa, was another kind of law. 
 The law you give a fox, or an eagle, or a hare, or a partridge, or 
 anything that you are going to worry to death, before you begin 
 to worry them. That is a law which all noble natures ought to 
 practise. Doesn't some one say, ' Hurry no man's cattle ; ' that 
 means, don't go too close to their heels, — even a donkey may 
 kick your brains out, if you stoop low enough to tease him ! " 
 
 "Why, Toosy, you are quite an orator," said the ColoneL 
 " You'll be the first Speaker of a Woman's Parliament ! " 
 
 " That I shouldn't like to be,'' said Arethusa, " for the Speaker 
 hardly ever speaks, but sits and listens in a great wig, with a 
 mace before him. Whenever I go to parliament I hope to have 
 the free use of my tongue." 
 
 All this time I was partly divided between admiration at 
 Arethusa' s cleverness, and disgust at being put off again in my 
 love-making. But even then I made excuses for her, and thought 
 how silly and stupid I had been in not giving her the " law " 
 she spoke of. 
 
 " Tell you what, Halfacre," said the Colonel, " I've had quite 
 enough of this indoors work. My head reels with your family 
 pictures and ancient upholstery. After luncheon we must look 
 after the partridges." 
 
 "With all my heart, Colonel ; " and I must have said " With 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 207 
 
 all my heart " in a very resolute way, for Arethusa looked hard 
 at me, as though I were going to abandon her altogether for 
 outdoor sports. 
 
 We found Aunt Mandeville in the conservatory looking after 
 some of her pet plants. It was a noble building ; high enough 
 for palms— : the very first conservatory, I believe, that Paxton 
 built on the Crystal Palace ridge-and-furrow principle. There 
 were two magnificent passion-flowers, trained up on screens, in 
 it, dividing it into three equal parts, and under one of these we 
 sat down, with the lovely flowers hanging over our heads. 
 
 "Have you seen it [all?" asked my Aunt. "Edward must 
 have shown you everything. You have been more than two 
 hours at it." 
 
 "Oh, yes!" said Arethusa; "we have seen everything — 
 except the White Lady. She, of course, does not show herself 
 by day 1 " 
 
 My Aunt's face darkened. 
 
 " She shows herself when she pleases. Is she not a woman ? 
 And it is woman's right to choose her own time." 
 
 " I wish I believed in ghosts,'' said Arethusa. " Papa says 
 there is no such thing ; but that only means that he has never 
 seen one. How can he answer for all the rest of the world i " 
 
 " All in good time, Miss Chichester," said my Aunt, musingly; 
 " who can tell how many ghosts you may see before you die ? 
 But it is luncheon-time — let us go." 
 
 I think the White Lady had chilled us all. For my own part 
 I felt inclined to have her cut out of the frame again and restored 
 to her garret. This respect for ghosts which lay deep in Auntie's 
 character, along with her reverence for the family and the estate, 
 might lead to a quarrel with Arethusa if my darling expressed 
 herself in a free-thinking way. 
 
 As soon, then, as it was possible the Colonel and I made a 
 move and again girded up our loins for the slaughter. How 
 many brace of birds fell to our guns ; how we pursued them into 
 the turnips ; how beautifully the dogs behaved — those were not 
 on dogless days of " drives ; " there was then no skulking in lanes 
 and at corners of fields, shivering in the cold, while the beaters 
 drove the birds over your heads ; — how wet our feet got ; how 
 tired we were ; how hungry before dinner, and how sleepy after- 
 wards ; what bad company we were for the ladies, and how the 
 Colonel, in spite of supernatural efforts at politeness, fairly fell 
 fast asleep in an easy chair : how I was only prevented from fol- 
 lowing his example by a strong cup of tea, which made me lively 
 just when liveliness was of no use, and sleepless when I ought to 
 have been sleepy; how Aunt Mandeville and Arethusa gathered 
 
208 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 up their things and went up to bed at ten o'clock, leaving the 
 Colonel snoring, and me somnolent. This is what happened on 
 that golden First of September, a day that was to have made me 
 so supremely happy. 
 
 I have since read, in one of the Fathers, a chapter on what he 
 calls " The Intemperance of Sleep." In this respect that old 
 gentleman seems to have been remarkably abstemious ; for he 
 says four hours' sleep is as much as a man ought to have ; and 
 then he goes on to say that many men are " sleep-drunk ; " so 
 besotted with slumber that they lose their heads before men, and 
 seem as though they were intoxicated. " Against this vice," he 
 says, " there are many remedies. The first is, never to eat more 
 than one meal a-day, and that of parched peas. The second to 
 moisten the said peas with water. The third is, never to do any 
 work ; for work makes a man's body tired, and so brings on 
 sleep. The fourth is, to sit indoors in an uneasy seat, with a pin 
 at the back and at the top of it, so that if you lean or loll about, 
 you may be reminded of your duty. The fifth is, to tell your 
 beads constantly for about eighteen hours a-day. If you observe 
 all these rules," he says, " you shall certainly conquer sleep, and 
 lead a life of contemplation and prayer." This worthy man lived 
 a life of great sanctity and idleness somewhere in Egypt, near 
 the Natron Lake, and died at the age of ninety, having done 
 nothing but pray all his life. What Colonel Chichester would 
 have said to these rules, I cannot tell, — or Major Plunger. I 
 should like to have seen either of them sitting down to a dinner 
 of parched peas and water once a-day, and counting their beads 
 in an uneasy chair for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. 
 
 "By Jove ! I believe I have had a doze for five minutes," said 
 the Colonel. " All those turnips, ^-never was so tired in my life. 
 Where are the ladies ? — gone to bed ! then it's high time for us 
 to go too.'' To say was to do with the Colonel, especially in 
 matters of sleep. So he clutched his candle-stick, and I have no 
 doubt in very much less than half-an-hour he was hard at, work 
 in his dreams beating endless fields of swedes, and bagging many 
 hundred brace of birds. As for me, the tea having now roused 
 me, I sat up a little later ; but as I went to my room along the 
 gallery, and passed the Colonel's door, I heard sounds issuing 
 from it something between the roar of a distant waterfall and 
 the organ in Westminster Abbey. Those sounds proceeded from 
 the Colonel's nose, his horn of chase with which he hastened on 
 his phantom hounds, to beat those ghostly turnips, and point at 
 those spectral birds. Every man, when he dreams of the chase, 
 is the Wild Huntsman ; and if he snores, it is but the demon 
 clamour with which he urges on his grisly pack. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 209 
 
 Next morning rose in rain, and the Colonel did not care to 
 shoot. At breakfast my Aunt, on reading her letters, said : 
 
 " How nice ! Mary Harbury will come here the day after to- 
 morrow, that will be Monday, and Mrs. Harbury will spare 
 her to us for a week. I hope you will like Mary, Miss 
 Chichester." 
 
 " I hope I shall like any of your friends, Mrs. Mandeville," 
 was Arethusa's prudent reply. " How old is Miss Harbury ? " 
 
 " Quite young," I broke in, most impudently ; " barely seven- 
 teen, if so much." 
 
 " There are nice people of all ages," said my Aunt. " I like 
 Miss Harbury very much. They are our nearest neighbours, 
 and the estates touch." 
 
 I really was afraid that Aunt Mandeville was going to bring 
 in the ring-fence again ; but she stopped short of it, out of 
 respect to Arethusa, I suppose. Perhaps, because she was 
 afraid of letting the cat out of the bag ; of letting Arethusa 
 know that she wished me to marry Miss Harbury. At any 
 rate, she stopped short of the ring-fence, though I saw it plainly 
 enough in the distance. 
 
 " I remember Mrs. Harbury in old days," said the Colonel. 
 '' She wasn't what I call a nice person ; so disputatious, and so 
 ready to discuss religion with every one. Poor Mandeville 
 couldn't bear her ; and I remember old Harbury, too. He was 
 much older than his wife, and they were married several years 
 before their daughter was born. Well ! old Harbury used to 
 come over here, and dine in this bachelor house, merely for the 
 sake of escaping from Mrs. Harbury's tongue, who fairly drove 
 his soul out of his body, by informing him, in season and out of 
 season, to take no care for his body, and consider his immortal 
 soul. They said she used to feed him on rabbits, and that he 
 never had any butcher's meat. No wonder soul and body soon 
 parted. Fancy a man living entirely on rabbits ! Why, 
 they make some people sick, and to others they are positively 
 poisonous." 
 
 " Well ! " said my Aunt, returning to the charge, " I think 
 Mary Harbury a very nice girl." 
 
 The day after to-morrow, then, she was to come with her 
 sampler, no doubt, this very nice girl, whom I was to like better 
 than my own Arethusa. 
 
 " Don't you think, Edward," my Aunt went on, " we might 
 ask Major Plunger and one of the cornets, and, if he is in 
 Leamington, the Count with the unpronounceable name. Then 
 we shall be a merry party, and as soldiers are never afraid of 
 anything, some of them can sleep in the State rooms." 
 
 p 
 
210 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 My Aunt said this in a resolute way, as though she would 
 have given a good deal not to have been afraid of anything 
 herself. 
 
 Yes ! I thought we might. The more there were in the 
 house the less my attention for Arethusa would be remarked. 
 I was ready to ask the whole regiment if Auntie wished it. 
 
 So while the rain poured the notes were written and des- 
 patched. I wrote the one to Count Manteuffel in my Aunt's 
 name, as I was alone able to spell it. 
 
 "We will ask the Grubbs to dinner too," said my Aunt, 
 " and then we shall have done our duty. We ought to do our 
 duty, and as there is a moon they won't be upset." So the 
 Grubbs were asked to come and dine. 
 
 There was no shooting that afternoon, but the Colonel and I 
 played billiards and Arethusa scored. I was no player, and the 
 Colonel a very good one. He could give me fifty out of the 
 hundred and beat me soundly. We were not so sleepy that 
 evening, but nothing particular happened, except that I caught 
 myself out ever so many times staring in the maddest way at 
 Arethusa Chichester. 
 
 Bed-time came, and the morning, and the evening, were the 
 second day. The next day was Sunday, and I shall say nothing 
 about it. 
 
 On Monday morning all the answers came. The Grubbs 
 would be delighted, and so would Mr. St. Faith, — I had for- 
 gotten to say he was asked. As for Major Plunger, he would be 
 too happy to come and stay a week, and so would Cornet Twenty- 
 man. We had left the choice of the subaltern to the Major, 
 only premising that whoever came must be able to shoot. The 
 Count was delighted, — in a letter written in much better 
 English than Major Plunger's, — to make the acquaintance of so 
 charming a lady as Mrs. Mandeville. Nothing would give him 
 greater pleasure than to come, if he might only.be allowed to 
 go over to Leamington on business once or twice. 
 
 So they were all coming. Mary Harbury that day by her- 
 self ; and the day after, the officers and the Count. 
 
 Now you are not to suppose that it was in my nature to be 
 rude to Mary Harbury. She was my Aunt's friend*, and sure of 
 good treatment from me, only I utterly repudiated in -my heart 
 the honour for which my Aunt had predestined me. r 1 alto- 
 gether declined to make love to Mary Harbury, or look upon 
 her as my future wife. I was not going to be rounded off by 
 any one. 
 
 To make a long story short, she came, and was duly intro- 
 duced to the Chichesters, I saw Arethusa measure the new 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 211 
 
 comer from head to foot at a glance, and I thought I saw an 
 air of triumph in her own superior attractions, which seemed to 
 say, " If this is all that Warwickshire can show I am not at all 
 afraid." 
 
 Mary Harbury, on her part, rather shrunk back from Are- 
 thusa 's eye. She was much less confident, and, as it seemed to 
 me, much more of a girl and much less of a woman. When 
 she finished by pulling out that everlasting sampler, that Pene- 
 lope's web of moral maxims, worked in all the colours of the 
 rainbow, Arethusa's victory was complete, and I consigned Mary 
 Harbury and all her worsted works to the tasteless realms of 
 bread-and-butter. Nay it would not have astonished me to see 
 her come down to dinner in a pinafore, or to hear her beg piti- 
 fully for a little bit of lump sugar. 
 
 Mr. St. Faith came to dinner that day. My Aunt asked him 
 to make up the party, else we should have been two gentlemen 
 to three ladies, a thing Aunt Mandeville detested. It was well 
 that he came, for the wet day had depressed all our spirits, and 
 Mary Harbury's arrival had sunk mine lower still. 
 
 Talk of the use of the Church and of clergymen ! and dare to 
 complain of their bad sermons ! Why, such a man as Mr. St. 
 Faith, — though his sermons were usually chopped straw, champed 
 and chewed like an old horse with never a tooth :in his head, — 
 such a man, I say, was well worth thousands a-year, merely to 
 go round the country keeping every one in good humour. He 
 was so prosy in the pulpit, and so genial everywhere else. So 
 good-natured, so sympathetic, with just the slightest dash of 
 satire and irony in his composition. He was the leaven that 
 was hid away in a circuit of five Warwickshire parishes, and had 
 gradually leavened the whole dark mass. He was just the man 
 to have to dinner on a wet day, when every one is apt to brood 
 over his misfortunes and forget his manifold blessings. A 
 misanthrope or a hypochondriac would have hired him to go 
 about with him and make him merry ; and I have no doubt 
 that that unhappy Frenchman who, in the railway, had 
 such an air of sadness, " Pair si triste," that every one won- 
 dered at it till it was explained that he was going to be 
 guillotined at noon, parcequ'U va etre decapite d, midi ; — I say 1 
 have no doubt that unhappy criminal — a Tropmann perhaps-^ 
 would have spent his last hour more happily had he been 
 seated next Mr. St. Faith in the train. And he was so natural 
 and modest, and his kindness so oozed out of him without any 
 effort on his part, it really was quite beautiful to behold 
 him. 
 
 He then came and comforted us. The Colonel had a twinge 
 
 p 2 
 
212 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 of the gout, brought on by my Aunt's burgundy and over- walking. 
 Did Mr. St. Faith trample on him morally or rub him the 
 wrong way t Far from it ; he listened to the Colonel's com- 
 plaints with the air of a man who had never heard of the gout 
 before, and was so sympathetic that he seemed to take most of 
 the pain on himself. So amusing, too, that the Colonel so far 
 forgot his gout after dinner as to drink some more burgundy. 
 For my Aunt he had always some pleasant thing to say. It 
 wasn't true that Mary Cooper had come to grief in London. 
 Mary Cooper's aunt had seen her a week ago, and Mary was 
 quite well and happy in a very respectable place. 
 
 " I am very glad to hear it," said my Aunt ; " Mary was 
 always a good girl, and I said I never would believe she had 
 gone wrong till I heard it on better authority than Martha 
 Blink's word." What stories people did tell ! She would like 
 to know what Martha Blink said now ! 
 
 " She has very little to say," said Mr. St. Faith. " I saw her 
 to-day, and all she could say was that she heard a travelling 
 tinker from Birmingham say that when he was up in London 
 last month, at Bartholomew Fair, he'd take his oath he saw 
 Mary Cooper riding with a young man in a merry-go-round." 
 
 " Nasty, spiteful old thing, to go and take away a girl's cha- 
 racter on the word of a travelling tinker." 
 
 " Why, you see," put in Mr. St. Faith, who, like the Scotch 
 minister, would have prayed for the "puir de'il" if he had 
 thought him hard pressed, " Martha Blink is very old, and has 
 few friends. In spite of all we can do she has a hard%time of 
 it ; and if a poor old woman is not to use her tongue, which is 
 about the only active member she has left, I don't see what she 
 is to do. Besides, no one believes Martha Blink's stories. They 
 please her, and do no one else any harm." 
 
 Then turning to me, Mr. St. Faith said : " I hear you shot 
 famously, Edward ; hardly missing once ; and as for Colonel 
 Chichester, both the keepers declare they have not seen such a 
 shot this many a long day." If it wasn't worth a twinge of 
 the gout to gain such a character, all I can say is that the 
 Colonel was most unreasonable. 
 
 " I am coming over to Harbury very soon," said Mr. St. Faith 
 to Mary Harbury. " My schoolchildren want some new 
 patterns for a sampler, and I hear you have got such a pretty 
 one." 
 
 Now the, good man might just as well have invited himself 
 over to Harbury to eat bread-and-butter with Mary Harbury ; 
 at least, so it seemed to me ; but I was quite wrong. The 
 little kindly bit of flattery found its way in, and Mary Harbury, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 213 
 
 ■with many blushes, confessed she had brought the sampler 
 with her, and would be only too happy to show it him after 
 dinner. 
 
 How he found out that she was working a sampler no one 
 could, tell ; but Mr. St. Faith's ears were like the king's in the 
 proverb — everywhere. He heard and saw everything as it were 
 by instinct. 
 
 "Mamma," Mary Harbury went on, "is very anxious just 
 now about the state of the patriarchs and philosophers in a 
 future state. She had a long conversation with Mr. Halfacre, 
 the other day, about them, and said she thought his views very 
 vague and undecided. Wouldn't you come over some day, Mr. 
 St. Faith, and talk it over with her 1 " 
 
 " Certainly not," said Mr. St. Faith. Then, as it were, re- 
 membering that this was a very positive assertion, he went on : 
 " I think it matters very little to us what the patriarchs and 
 matriarchs and philosophers, male and female, have to expect 
 hereafter. We know enough of the goodness of God to feel 
 sure that, if they were good in their generation, He will be 
 good to them at the last day. I think, therefore, we may 
 safely leave them to Him, and think rather of our own future 
 state." 
 
 " So mamma does, — at least, she is always talking about it. 
 I sometimes think it a pity to live so much for the future, and 
 so little for the present." 
 
 " Yes ! " said Arethusa, very decidedly. " I recollect reading 
 a story once, in Italian, about a man who took the death of 
 Hector, in the Iliad, so much to heart, that he could get no 
 rest at nights. It strikes me that it is just as absurd to care 
 for the salvation of the patriarchs, who, I suppose, were very 
 worthy, good sort of people." 
 
 Mr. St. Faith was so amused at the notion of the patriarchs, 
 Methuselah and the rest of them, being described as very 
 worthy, good sort of people, that he burst out laughing, and 
 turned the conversation. I think, too, that he feared, if the 
 discussion was prolonged, Arethusa might bring out some very 
 decided opinions, not to the benefit of Madam. Harbury. 
 
 He dashed off, therefore, after his fit of laughter was over, 
 in another direction, and asked Arethusa what she thought of 
 Mandeville Hall. 
 
 " I think it quite charming ; and those old state rooms, and 
 the White Lady, picture and all. I think everything about the 
 place quite charming." 
 
 '■' Yes, there are many things charming about it, though I 
 don't know the White Lady is one of them. The worst is, no 
 
214 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 one seems to know anything about her history. Do you, Mrs. 
 Mandeville?" 
 
 My Aunt looked hard at me as she said : 
 
 " There is some story about her, but I believe it was not a 
 very pleasant one, and in every family there are things and 
 persons best forgotten. Perhaps the White Lady was one of 
 them." 
 
 Mr. St. Faith knew Aunt Mandeville well enough to see by 
 her manner that the White Lady was not a persona grata, and 
 that, in fact, he had made a mistake in asking about her, so he 
 dropped the subject ; but what he said was the truth. No one 
 except Aunt Mandeville and myself knew the rights of her 
 story. There was only a vague tradition that the White Lady, 
 at certain times of the moon, walked about Mandeville Hall. I 
 forgot to say that the Colonel had taken Aunt Mandeville, Mr. 
 St. Faith, Arethusa, and I, Mary Harbury, into dinner. As I 
 did so, I would not have sworn that she had not that wretched 
 sampler in her pocket, if she had one. But I was not so badly 
 placed, after all. My Aunt sat at the top of the table, and I 
 at the bottom ; on either hand of me were Arethusa and Mary 
 Harbury, while the Colonel was at my Aunt's right, and Mr. St. 
 Faith at her left. I had full opportunity, therefore, to look 
 right and left, and to declare, on the honour of a lover and a 
 gentleman, that Mary Harbury could in no way compare with 
 Arethusa Chichester. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 HOW WE WENT OUT FISHING, AND HOW I SAT UNDER THE 
 PASSION-FLOWER. 
 
 Mr. St. Faith was obliged to go away early, and when he 
 left us we all collapsed. The Colonel's gout returned ; Mary 
 Harbury pulled out her sampler, which, by the way, she had 
 forgotten, after all, to show him ; Arethusa tried some songs, 
 but they none of them suited her. I turned over the leaves for 
 her, and my Aunt and the Colonel played at piquet. But do 
 what we would, it was dull work. I wasn't going to sit by Mary 
 Harbury, and admire her sampler. If I stayed too long by 
 Arethusa's side, my Aunt might get angry. The Colonel's gout 
 made him the least bit impatient ; it must be confessed, too, that 
 the cards were much against him. My Aunt was as placid as 
 usual, and Mary Harbury seemed sunk in her own thoughts. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 215 
 
 Bed-time came, and away we went — I am sure all of us very 
 happy to go to bed, even though it were to listen to the steady 
 downpour out of doors. Next morning I was up early, gather- 
 ing a bouquet for each of the young ladies, but, like Benjamin's 
 mess, Arethusa's was the best and biggest. I remember I did 
 leave one lovely rose in Mary's bouquet, just to save appearances, 
 but before they came down I plucked it out and put it into Are- 
 thusa's, that there might be no mistake ! Arethusa's was received 
 with a smile, and Mary's with a grin. It was a great relief to 
 me to see that the awkward Mary shortly afterwards sat down 
 on hers, and crushed it all to pieces ; so that no one could tell, 
 in its shattered state, how much better Arethusa's had been. 
 
 "What a beautiful bouquet!" said my Aunt, as she saw 
 Arethusa's. " How fresh the flowers look after the rain ! Where 
 is yours, Mary? Of course you had one ?" 
 
 " Yes, indeed, I had," said Mary ; " Mr. Halfacre picked it for 
 me, but as ill-luck would have it, I have crushed it all to pieces." 
 So saying, she held it up for my Aunt's inspection. 
 
 " What do you say to some fishing, Colonel Chichester ? The 
 river is in fine condition, and full of trout.'' 
 
 " Nothing I should like better, if you can lend me a rod." 
 
 Yes, he could have a rod, and off we went. The young 
 ladies were to come down together across the park before 
 luncheon to see how we got on. 
 
 Well, we had very good sport. If the Colonel was a better 
 shot, I was a better fisherman. Besides, I knew the stream and 
 the flies. Perhaps the water was hardly clear enough, but 
 nothing is worse than too bright water. I forget how many 
 pounds of trout we caught ; all I know is that I caught" most, 
 and that they were all laid in a heap on the grass. About half- 
 past twelve, Arethusa and Mary Harbury came down, and were 
 amazed to see so many fish out of so small a stream. 
 
 " It is not so small as you think," said I, standing up for our 
 own Avon. 
 
 Arethusa and Mary both laughed at me, and Mary, brightening 
 up at my contradiction, and perhaps remembering the worse 
 bouquet, said : " Why I could step across it, or jump across it;" 
 and so saying, she ran like a wild thing down the steep bank 
 and tried to jump over the stream, which there ran fast and 
 deep down from the pool where we were fishing to a mill-dam 
 below. 
 
 It took us all so much by surprise that there was no time to 
 stop her. Few men could have leapt the river at that spot with 
 so bad a take off. It was just one of these things that seem so 
 easy, and yet are so hard to do. 
 
216 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 In another instant Mary Harbury was over head and ears in 
 the Avon, swept away rapidly towards the mill-dam. 
 
 Now I have told you long ago that I am not much of a hero ; 
 but what was to be done ? The Colonel was too old and gouty 
 to risk his life. So it was plainly my turn, and though, as I did 
 so, I thought of the sampler, and wished I had been going in to 
 fetch out Arethusa, in I went after Mary Harbury, swimming as 
 hard as I could to catch her up, as her white form rolled rapidly 
 down stream. I was only just in time, and time was everything. 
 I did overtake her just as she got to the mill-dam, and before 
 she got into the race, and I did succeed in pushing her to the 
 bank ; and then, getting my feet on the gravel, in dragging her 
 on to the grass up the bank. 
 
 It seemed to me the work of an instant, and indeed it took 
 little time. I deserved no praise except for my readiness in 
 dashing in. All the rest seemed to come of itself. As for Mary 
 Harbury she soon recovered her senses, and felt better than she 
 could have thought, considering she had swallowed a deal of 
 water. I can't say that she was nearly drowned, and so I did 
 not deserve the Humane Society's medal, but she certainly 
 would have been drowned if I had not caught her just when I 
 did. 
 
 As she lay on the bank coming to herself, 1 remember thinking 
 it would have been just as easy to save Arethusa. Why did 
 some good power not put it into Arethusa's head to jump over 
 the Avon in this silly way, and then I could have risked my life 
 to save her. But this poor Mary Harbury, with her sampler in 
 her pocket, why should I have to rush into the water after her 1 
 
 By this time Arethusa came running, quite out of breath, 
 having found a foot-bridge a little higher up. As for the Colonel, 
 he inspected the operations from the other bank, and now the 
 mill people came, having at last found out what was the matter, 
 and what sort of silver-fish they would have found in their dam 
 when the water was drawn off. They had a phaeton, and into 
 this we put Mary Harbury after we had made her swallow some 
 elder-wine, and so we carried her back in great glee to the Hall. 
 
 "Why, what in the world has been the matter?" said my 
 Aunt. " You have all been in the water, except Colonel Chi- 
 chester, I declare ; and as for you, Edward and Mary, you have 
 been over head and ears, I can see." 
 
 "Why," said Mary, faintly, "you see I was silly enough to try 
 to jump over the Avon where they were fishing, and then Mr. 
 Halfacre jumped in after me and caught me up and pulled me 
 out, and saved my life. That is alh my dear Mrs. Man- 
 deville." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 217 
 
 "All!" said my Aunt. "All, and more than enough. You 
 must go to bed, Mary, and I must send for Dr. Minderems." 
 
 It was all in vain for Mary Harbury to declare that she was 
 not bad enough to go to bed. To bed she went; Dr. Mindererus, 
 now getting on for eighty, came, put on his spectacles, and looked 
 at her tongue, felt her pulse, said she had undergone a great 
 shock, and must be kept quiet. 
 
 So Mary Harbury was disposed of for that afternoon at least. 
 As for me, I was, quite against my will, the hero of the hour. 
 The Colonel declared that 1 went into the Avon like a water-spaniel 
 after a winged duck, and fetched Mary out quite as cleverly as 
 any spaniel. 
 
 "Just like you young fellows; while we old fogies are making 
 up our minds, you go in and win. Of course you must propose to 
 Miss Harbury. She can't refuse you." 
 
 "Of course I shall do nothing of the kind. It would add a 
 new risk to saving young ladies' lives if one had to marry them 
 afterwards. Besides, this was no question of life-saving. The 
 miller or some of his men would have done the same, or the eddy 
 would have thrown Miss Harbury on to the bank, and she would 
 have scrambled out all right." 
 
 " No ! '' said Arethusa, with a burst of feeling for which I 
 blessed her. " Alive, not all the millers, nor all the millers' 
 men, in the world, would have brought Miss Harbury out. As 
 for the eddy, it only shot towards the bank to shoot off" again 
 into mid stream. No ! Mr. Halfacre, you saved Miss Harbury's 
 life." 
 
 Now was I not the most unfortunate of men, to go and save 
 the life of the girl for whom I did not care one bit, and to be 
 told I ought to marry her ? Why did not Arethusa Chichester 
 try to jump the Avon and fall in ? except that I am sure, had 
 she tried the leap, she would have cleared it like a roe, instead 
 of floundering into it like Mary Harbury. 
 
 However, there was no help for it. I was the hero of the day, 
 and when we went into luncheon, my Aunt seemed so pleased, 
 and Brooks was so patronising, that I had to accept the situation, 
 as the slang now is, and console myself with thinking that Mary 
 Harbury was safe in bed, taking Dr. Mindererus' saline draughts, 
 and that her sampler, which no doubt was in her pocket, was 
 spoiled for ever, while I was sitting next to Arethusa 
 Chichester. 
 
 After luncheon my Aunt sat down to write a long letter to 
 Mrs. Harbury, to tell her of the accident, and to ease her mind, 
 in case absurd reports got abroad. Give Brooks two hours' 
 start in the servants' ha.ll, and all Warwickshire would have 
 
218 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 heard by tea-time that Miss Harbury was going to be married 
 next week to Master Edward, " all along of Master Edward's 
 jumping into the water after her, like a Newfoundland dog, and 
 bringing her out." 
 
 Perhaps he might have added : " They were saying Miss Chi- 
 chester gave Miss Harbury a push and shoved her in, because 
 she too be in love with Master Edward." 
 
 Nothing is too absurd for the swallows of the frequenters of 
 the servants' hall; and so, if there is anything to be told in a 
 house, the sooner the heads of that household tell the truth 
 about it the better. 
 
 Aunt Mandeville therefore sat down and told the truth to 
 Mrs. Harbury. 
 
 The Colonel also retired to write letters. He had meant to 
 shoot, but the shock of seeing Mary Harbury rolling down the 
 stream had been too much for him, and he had some more 
 twinges of gout. 
 
 Mary Harbury in bed — my Aunt writing letters in her own 
 room — the Colonel doing the same in his '; where were I and 
 Arethusa Chichester ? Where do you think ? In the conser- 
 vatory, — with the fresh bloom of the passion-flower just clearing 
 our heads, — side by side. Now I felt that my hour was 
 come. 
 
 " That was well done and bravely done this morning, Mr, 
 Halfacre. I always knew your heart was in the right place." 
 
 " Indeed ! and what is the right place for my heart ? Pray 
 tell me!" 
 
 "The right place for every man's heart is his own breast. 
 Better in his own keeping than in that of any one else." 
 
 "But suppose it slips away from him in spite of himself; 
 suppose he can't keep it ; suppose he is like the giant who had 
 no heart in his body 1 " 
 
 I was a great fool to give Arethusa this chance. She caught 
 me up in a moment. 
 
 " The giant who had no heart in his body was a dolt, and 
 came to grief, and so will every one who is not master of his own 
 heart." 
 
 " I am not master of mine." I said, " and yet I shall come to 
 joy if you will keep it for me." 
 
 " And suppose I do as they did to the giant's heart in the 
 fairy tale ; suppose I squeeze it, and crush it, and break it, and 
 you die, like the poor giant 1" 
 
 " If I am dead I shall be past praying for ; but giant or no 
 giant, you have my heart, and if you crush it and break it I 
 shall die, and you will be a cruel woman, Arethusa." And then, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 219 
 
 throwing all tongue-fence on one side, I said : " Arethusa Chi- 
 chester, I am madly in love with you, and you know it." 
 
 " I do know it, and I do feel it, Edward Halfacre. And, if I 
 do not give way to the feeling myself, it is because I know and 
 feel, too, that your Aunt will never countenance the feeling. 
 Women are sharp-sighted creatures ; and though she is very 
 kind to me, I feel and see as plainly as if she had spoken it to 
 my face, that Mrs. Mandeville will never consent to our marriage. 
 It is not yesterday or to-day, but long ago, at Ilfracombe and in 
 London, that my woman's wit taught me this, and I said to 
 myself, why encourage this boyish passion ? Let it wither as 
 the corn by the way-side withered, and let me not be the cause 
 of quarrel between Edward Halfacre and his Aunt." 
 
 " But you do care for me a little, Arethusa ! Your feelings 
 towards me are not all duty to my Aunt." 
 
 " Perhaps I care for you a great deal too much. Who can 
 tell? — time will show. There, now be quiet, Mr. Halfacre — 
 Edward." 
 
 If you think I am going to tell you what brought about all 
 these disjointed expressions from Arethusa, you are much mis- 
 taken, most inquisitive reader. I hate curiosity in men and 
 women ; and, if you fancy I am writing this book to let you 
 know things which were done in confidence, and can only be 
 described as " strictly private," you ought to be ashamed of 
 yourself. Besides, have you no imagination? Must you see 
 everything in black and white ? Have you no soul ? Were you 
 never a lover? If not, I pity you. If you have been, how 
 would you like your secrets, your declarations, your approaches, 
 your storm to be made as public as the Gazette of the siege of 
 Sebastopol — a town which I may remind you was assaulted 
 many times before it fell 1 No ; at certain times all lovers 
 should take the veil. It was not for nothing that a mist fell 
 upon Dido and tineas when they entered that fatal cave. 
 Exercise your imagination, therefore, but do not dare to ask me 
 why it was that Arethusa uttered those fragments of speech. 
 
 I am sure I can't say if it were a thousand years or five 
 minutes that we had been sitting under that wicked Passion- 
 flower, when we heard Aunt Mandeville calling " Edward ! " at 
 one end of the conservatory, and Colonel Chichester "Toosy ! " 
 at the other. In this respect we were worse off than Adam and 
 Eve after they had eaten their forbidden fruit, for we heard two 
 voices. 
 
 I think it was the late lamented Prince Consort who said, "In 
 a doubtful case do nothing ; " and though it was long before he 
 said it, it was just what we did,— that is to say, we started 
 
220 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 asunder, and stood up at a sort of regulation distance apart — 
 just within shaking hands distance, in short. 
 
 "Why, Edward— Why, Toosy, I have been looking for you 
 everywhere." So spoke Aunt Mandeville and the Colonel, com- 
 bining their assault, as they came up to us. 
 
 Somehow or other I was more of a man since my exploits of 
 the morning and afternoon ; and I felt that, if I had gone into 
 the water for Mary Harbury, I would willingly go through fire 
 for Arethusa. So I stood up for both of us ; not like a certain 
 lord I know, who always gets behind his wife's petticoat, but 
 like a chivalrous lover. 
 
 " Why, Aunt, we knew both you and Colonel Chichester, were 
 writing letters, and so we sat down in the conservatory, and had 
 a talk." 
 
 " It must have been a long one," said Aunt Mandeville, " for 
 I sent off my letter to Harbury more than an hour ago, and the 
 Colonel was done writing his letters before I had done mine. I 
 saw him walking up and down on the terrace. You, Edward, I 
 fancied had gone out for a long walk, and I thought Miss Chi- 
 chester was in her own room, or with that poor dear Mary Har- 
 bury ; but I never expected that you had been all this time in 
 the conservatory." 
 
 Observe the " poor dear Mary Harbury." " Dear '' — cer- 
 tainly dear, at any price, and that I should have been forced by 
 circumstances to save her on the morning of the very afternoon 
 that I and Arethusa sat under the Passion-flower. 
 
 I could not quite make out whether Aunt Mandeville was 
 very angry, or only pretending ; perhaps it was only to bring in 
 "poor dear Mary Harbury;" but I could very well see that 
 Arethusa was quite right, and that my Aunt disliked her. Did 
 that make me like Mary Harbury any more 1 Let any lover 
 answer. Of one thing I am quite sure, that it is all in vain to 
 cram even a very nice young lady, as Mary Harbury was, down 
 a young man's throat against his will, especially if he has 
 already set his heart on some other young lady twice as nice 
 and twice as good-looking. It is not in human nature, I say; and 
 I hope none of you wise parents or guardians, who read this 
 most true and pathetic story, will ever think of doing anything 
 of the kind. If you do I can only say that I hope all your plans 
 and schemes will be foiled and thwarted. 
 
Annals of an eventful life. 221 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXIII. 
 
 HOW THE COUNT AND THE MAJOR CAME TO MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 That was the day the Count and Major Plunger and Cornet 
 Twentyman were to come to spend a week. As we were pretty 
 full on our side of the house, though we could have taken two of 
 them in, it was settled that they should all sleep on the other 
 side of the house, in the State rooms. If so, one of them must 
 have the White Lady's room, and this honour we intended 
 for the Count. Of course you are not to fancy that my Auut 
 at all encouraged the idea of a haunted room. There are people 
 I know who would give twenty thousand pounds more for an old 
 family mansion with a ghost in it : it is so respectable. But 
 these are generally nouveaux riches. In fact, ghosts are blessings 
 more appreciated by those who have them in their absence. 
 Aunt Mandeville, for instance, thought the White Lady rather a 
 bore, though I am sure she partly believed in her ; and so she 
 never would admit that there was so much as a haunted room in 
 the house. 
 
 She was not so unfeeling as that lady of quality whose butler 
 cut his throat, and who, in talking over the matter to the rest 
 of the servants, said, " Poor John has cut his throat, and is gone. 
 No doubt his ghost will walk about the house ; but remember 
 whoever sees him loses his or her place ; " the consequence being 
 that no one saw John. Aunt Mandeville was not so brutal as 
 that. Besides, the White Lady was one of the family, and not 
 to be treated as a servant ; but my Aunt never spoke of her, 
 except in the most distant way. 
 
 But enough of the White Lady. 
 
 The Count, and Major Plunger, and Cornet Twentyman have 
 all come over together, and have just been announced by Brooks, 
 who makes an awful hash of the Count's name. What he meant 
 to say no one can tell, but what he said sounded like " Mad- 
 shovel." Yes, " Count Madshovel," " Major Plunger," " Mr. 
 Twentyman." That was how he announced them. 
 
 My Aunt was most gracious, and the Count made her a pro- 
 found, bow. 
 
 " I am so very glad to see you, Count Mantoiffel," said Aunt 
 Mandeville, pronouncing the name like a born German. 
 
 " How very well you pronounce my unhappy name," said the 
 Count. " ' Mantoiffel ; ' quite right ; teuf in German spells 
 ' toif.' " 
 
222 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " My nephew, Mr. Halfacre, taught me," said Auntie. " It is 
 not so very difficult, after all, when you know that teuf spells 
 toif." 
 
 " But there is something still more odd about my name than 
 to hear it so well sounded in this house, for this, is the house the 
 Manteuffels sprang from. Yes," seeing my Aunt's face full of 
 wonder, " Mandeville Hall is what the Germans call the Stamm- 
 haus, the original seat of the Manteuffels. Manteuffel is only a 
 barbarous, middle-age, German rendering of Mandeville ; and 
 the first Count Manteuffel was an English knight called Mande- 
 ville, who went away from Warwickshire in the fourteenth 
 century to fight the heathen on the Baltic, and was made a 
 Count of the Holy Roman Empire. Strange, too, that Manteuffel, 
 if it means anything in German, means man devil; so that you 
 see in its barbarous spelling there is still Mandeville at the 
 bottom of it." 
 
 " Strange, indeed ! " said my Aunt. "As all the old Mande- 
 villes of this branch are extinct, I suppose we must welcome you 
 in Mandeville Hall as a cousin and collateral, though a long 
 way removed." 
 
 " I have no doubt of the truth of what I say ; we came from 
 England and Warwickshire, and we bear the same arms to this 
 day;" and then he held up the inevitable signet which all 
 Germans carry on their middle finger, and showed my Aunt the 
 old Mandeville coat : Argent, three lozenges conjoined in fesse, 
 gules, within a bordure sable. 
 
 " The same arms, I see," said my Aunt. " Some day or other 
 I must have a hunt among the family muniments and try to 
 find out something of this fourteenth century Mandeville who 
 went off to fight the heathen on the Baltic." 
 
 You should have seen the amazement of Major Plunger and 
 Cornet Twentyman as they stood by listening to this conversa- 
 tion. No village boy at a peep-show could have stared and 
 gaped more than the Major when he heard Aunt Mandeville 
 utter without an effort the Shibboleth of the Count's name. 
 Yes ! she said it as clear as a bell, " Mantoiffel :" there could 
 be no mistake about it. 
 
 " As you are one of the family," my Aunt went on to the 
 Count, "you won't object to sleep in one of the State rooms ; 
 they are not often slept in, but we are nearly full on our side, 
 aud we have put Major Plunger and Mr. Twentyman over on 
 that side with you, so you will have company." 
 
 " Oh, no ! " The Count was charmed to sleep wherever " my 
 lady " chose to put him. Besides, had he not with him his 
 friends those gallant soldiers, the Major and Mr. Twentyman % 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 223 
 
 As it was getting late we all went off to dress, and in due time 
 met in the hall before dinner. 
 
 We were only waiting for Dr. Mindererus, who had been 
 asked to fill Mary Harbury's place, and for the Grubbs, our 
 next-door neighbours. 
 
 How the Grubbs got into Mandeville parish, nobody knew. 
 They had been there for generations ; always the same. One 
 would have thought they would have died out or been ruined by 
 some extravagance, as their estate at the Warren was not at all 
 large ; but no, they neither died out nor were they ruined. On 
 the contrary, they seemed always thriving, never had too many 
 children, and looked very sleek and comfortable. There was a 
 report, or rather a tradition, that the house of Grubb was, like 
 the house of Austria, very lucky in its matrimonial alliances, 
 and that, whenever a Grubb married, he married for money — 
 now an alderman's niece, now a sheriff's daughter, now a grocer's 
 grandchild. It was also said that they had mines in Cornwall, 
 and stone-quarries in Ireland. They were fixtures in Mandeville 
 parish, like the stocks and the pound ; no one cared for them 
 very much, but then no one ever quarrelled with them, and so 
 every one got on tolerably with them. 
 
 While I have been telling you this, and letting you into some 
 parish secrets, they have been taking off their cloaks in the hall. 
 Now the Grubbs are upon us : " Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Grubb," 
 bellowed Brooks. 
 
 Mr. Grubb looked like what used to be called " a jolly good 
 fellow ; " and certainly his appearance might have inspired the 
 famous chorus that runs in those words. He looked like the 
 incarnation of old port. He was not so short as he looked, be- 
 cause he was very broad and deep. A section through the 
 middle of him lengthways would have shown great inequalities 
 of level. His great engineering difficulty was in front, and the 
 gradient from his knee to the highest button of his waistcoat 
 was about one in five. His face was ruddy, sleek, and shiny. 
 His nose was a lantern unto his paths : it shone like a carbuncle. 
 His eyes were small and twinkling ; his hands red, fat, and 
 flabby. But in spite of everything he had a genial look as 
 though he could go straight across country, crack a bottle, and 
 sing a good song against any man in " the shires." 
 
 He waddled up to Aunt Mandeville, and said, "How d'ye do, 
 madam 1 I hope you are quite well," and then he subsided into 
 ah easy chair, and began to talk to old Mindererus. 
 
 Mrs. Grubb was a very angular, gawky woman — very scraggy, 
 gaunt, and raw-boned. I do not know if you understand what 
 I mean when I say that she never sat down on any chintz cover 
 
224 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 that she did not ruck and rumple it all up. Chair-covers and 
 sofa-covers, chintz or tammy, — crHonnes, were not then invented, 
 silly ! — it was all alike ; — they all rose in rebellion under her. 
 A chair or a couch that she had just left, looked more like a 
 magpie's nest than anything else. I remember on that occasion 
 she wore an amber satin dress, with green trimming, and she had 
 on a scarlet toque or turban, with a bird of paradise on it. 
 Altogether she was fearfully and wonderfully clad. Lucky for 
 her that the Parish Bull — also a near neighbour — had not been 
 invited ; he really must have tossed her into the chandelier. 
 She had no conversation, and very little manners. In a word 
 she was neither useful nor ornamental ; but was she not the 
 wife of Grubb's bosom ? and, I'll be bound, a good wife into the 
 bargain, in spite of her bad taste. 
 
 Miss Grubb was what may be called the young lady of com- 
 merce, by which I do not at all mean that she was a tradesman's 
 daughter — far from it. I mean by the term that she was every- 
 body's money. She was like a reading-lamp, or a tea or a coffee- 
 pot ; now do you understand 1 You are so dull ! I mean, of 
 course, that she was just like many hundred thousand other 
 young ladies whom you may meet, if it be ever your ill luck to 
 meet so many ; against whom nothing can be said, but of whom 
 it can only be said that they are all exactly alike, — made to 
 order, — and therefore extremely uninteresting. You might as 
 soon fall in love with one of them, as be in raptures with the 
 bat's-wing burner over your hall-door. 
 
 It is true that some one in the borough of Warwick had said 
 Miss Grubb was very clever, and " that time would show ; " but 
 up to that time Miss Grubb had kept all her cleverness to her- 
 self. She was like some of Butler's sermons — not long, but 
 deep, — so deep that few can understand them. All I can say is, 
 that if Miss Grubb were deep, it was that sort of depth that 
 never came to the surface. 
 
 Looking back on them philosophically, I am inclined to believe 
 that the Grubb family here on earth were, when I knew them, 
 in a state of development and transition to a better state. To 
 them the world was really, what divines tell us, a probation ; 
 some day or other they would exchange this abode of clay for 
 the mansions of the angels. Here they were Grubbs, but there 
 they would be butterflies ; out of the brown chrysalis would 
 have shot forth a bright and airy thing. If this be true, Pro- 
 vidence had been most unkind to them, and has much to make 
 up to them in a future state, poor things ! Added to which 
 comes a very nasty thought. What if some of us gay things 
 should find that we have had our butterfly-wings here on earth, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 225 
 
 and may have to crawl about in another world as ugly, uninte- 
 resting, and unsociable as the Grubbs of Mandeville parish 1 
 
 At dinner, my Aunt gave her arm to Count Manteuffel ; I 
 was told off to Miss Grubb ; Major Plunger took Mrs. Grubb ; 
 Mr. Twentyman got the prize of the day, Arethusa ; Old Grubb 
 and Dr. Mindererus had no one at all. Was Mary Harbury 
 missed ? Not by me, and I should think not by any one else. 
 
 When I tell you that I sat at the bottom of the table, with 
 Old Grubb on one side and his daughter on the other, that be- 
 yond Old Grubb was Major Pluuger, and beyond Mrs. Grubb 
 Mr. Twentyman, you may imagine how many fences, — nay, I 
 may even say buffers — I had between me and any pleasure. All 
 the crystallisation of the company, all its art, and form, and 
 grace, were at the other end of the table. It was like looking 
 back at the Alps from the plains of Lombardy. Between me 
 and those snowy, sunny peaks, was a great waste of dull flatness. 
 I could hear that the Count was making himself very agreeable 
 to my Aunt, and that Dr. Mindererus, who was a good talker, 
 was mumbling out something round his one tooth to Arethusa. 
 On Mr. Twentyman's side, absolute silence reigned. He was a 
 good horseman and a brave officer, but talking was not his forte. 
 Besides he had a dread of saying anything to a lady, because, he 
 said, if he threw away the weather and other common topics, 
 who could tell that he might not be called on to say something 
 else ? Like a prudent general, therefore, he always kept the 
 weather in reserve, and rarely touched on it before dessert. 
 Then he might be heard bringing out some such lively expres- 
 sion as, — " It was very cold yesterday," in winter ; or, " How hot 
 it has been to-day," in summer ; but by that time of the repast 
 every right-minded young lady is distracted between trying to 
 put on her gloves, and watching the mistress of the house, so as 
 to catch her hint to move. How, I ask, can even such prodigal 
 attempts to sow the seed of conversation be expected to thrive ? 
 No ! if a man will wait till June to sow his wheat, he can't look 
 for a crop. 
 
 It is not recorded if Major Plunger said anything. My own 
 opinion is that Mrs. Grubb, in spite of her angularities, was 
 better company than her daughter. At any rate she would 
 have dropped her glove, or her fan, or her napkin, or her hand- 
 kerchief, one or all of them, over and over again. Or you might 
 have felt that she was gradually getting entangled in the table- 
 cloth, and if you did not come to the rescue everything would 
 be swept off the table. That alone would have brought about 
 conversation. A sense of common peril and present help would 
 have roused you and made Mrs. Grubb grateful, and you might 
 
 Q 
 
226 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 have talked about relapsing fever, or Convalescent Homes, or 
 even the Poor Eates, or Irish ingratitude, and have ended by 
 finding that after all this very angular person had some good 
 points, —as, indeed, an angular person must have points. You 
 would have been amused, and gone home, feeling that you had 
 been very unjust for several causes, and blessing that unhappy 
 habit of picking up everything, which brought about that little 
 entanglement with the tablecloth, and so opened the gate to a 
 very pleasant insight into your neighbour's character. All this, 
 mind you, if your mind had been free for this sort of moral 
 dissipation, and not absolutely engrossed as I was by the thought 
 of Arethusa under the Passion-flower, and how lovely she now 
 looked, with a flush of triumph on her face, sitting side by side 
 with that blockhead, Twentyman, on whom all her charms were 
 wasted, — because he was too great a dolt to avail himself of his 
 opportunity. 
 
 Some such feeling, no doubt, will be that of the lost with 
 Dives when they see Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. 
 
 Only one amusing thing happened during dinner to enliven 
 our end of the table. Mrs. Jellybag, our cook, was great in 
 confectionery, and, I suppose, hearing the Count was coming, 
 had built up an enormous Schloss Manteuffel of barley sugar, as 
 one of the sweets. Inside it was full, I fancy, of trifle, but the 
 walls were sugar of the stickiest sort. I do not think the 
 taciturn Twentyman had ever seen such a work of art in his 
 life. I have heard, indeed, that old Twentyman was a sugar- 
 baker, but he might be that, and yet not treat his children to 
 barley-sugar castles. Perhaps, like the poor shoemaker's wife, 
 sugar-bakers' children go sugarless to bed. It was clear, how- 
 ever, that Twentyman had a sweet tooth, for when the gorgeous 
 fabric came round, he dug into it with a will, destroyed the 
 fosse, and stormed the keep ; piling great heaps of spoil upon 
 his plate. I saw him stuff a huge piece into his jaws, and knew 
 at once it must be all up with him. He grew red in the face. 
 Eed, do I say ? he grew purple ! His eyes rolled ; he could not 
 open his mouth ; his tongue clove to his teeth ; he was caught 
 in a sugar-trap ; and Brooks — who patted him on the back, 
 fancying that he had a bone in his throat, — only made matters 
 worse. At last I had to lead him out of the room, and make 
 them bring a little hot water. By the aid of this he gradually 
 got the sugar out of his mouth and re-appeared. From that 
 day forth, I'll be bound, — sugar-baker or no sugar-baker, — Mr. 
 Twentyman, however many castles he may have sacked and 
 spoiled, has never ventured to eat another bit of a barley-sugar 
 castle. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 227 
 
 Still it was a dreary dinner, and had I not been consoled with 
 that scene in the conservatory, I could scarce have sat it out. 
 
 After dinner Major Plunger and Mr. Twentyman consoled 
 themselves with port ; Dr. Mindererus and I and Count Man- 
 teuffel had some talk, in which we found the foreigner quite a 
 match for both of us ; and then we joined the ladies. 
 
 We found Aunt Mandeville engaged in giving the Grubbs a 
 faithful account of the rescue in the morning ; and Miss Grubb, 
 who, I suppose, felt bound to say something, was in the act of 
 uttering, " Dear me, how very romantic ; just like Hero and 
 Leander." 
 
 In what the likeness to Hero and Leander consisted, let Miss 
 Grubb — now, no doubt, the happy mother of children, and 
 bound to teach them mythology — declare. I rather think that 
 before we came in my Aunt or Mrs. Grubb must have said of 
 me that I was a " hero," and Miss Grubb had mixed up my 
 being a hero with Hero and Leander ; only in that case she 
 must have made Hero a man, and Leander, — which she perhaps 
 spelled Leanda, — a woman. 
 
 All this was hushed up when we came in, so far as I was con- 
 cerned ; but the Grubbs were open-mouthed in inquiries for 
 Mary Harbury, whom they shortly went upstairs to inspect. It 
 was a great satisfaction to me, of course, to hear that the " poor 
 thing " was very comfortable, and Dr. Mindererus, who glided 
 upstairs shortly afterwards, gladdened us all by declaring that 
 she would be " quite well to-morrow." 
 
 I don't believe that any one ever came to Mandeville Hall 
 without being struck by the White Lady and asking after her 
 history. Count Manteuffel was no exception to this rule. I saw 
 him looking at the portrait in the hall before dinner, and again 
 as we passed through it to the drawing-room. When the little 
 excitement about Mary Harbury had passed over, he sat down 
 near my Aunt and said, in a very John Bullish sort of way : " I 
 should like to know something about the Lady in White, whose 
 picture is- in the hall." 
 
 " That is a picture,'' said my Aunt, pursuing her usual policy, 
 " about which the Mandeville family have no very pleasant recol- 
 lections. ■ We never talk of her." 
 
 The Count was not rude enough to carry his John Bullism 
 further and say, " Why, then, do you hang such a remarkable 
 picture up in the hall, if you don't allow people to talk of it 1 " 
 but he did not quite drop the subject, and said : " I only asked 
 because, at home, we Manteuffels have a White Lady of our own, 
 what we call a Weisse Frau, and the French a Dame Blanche. 
 Our White Lady is believed to walk about the castle at KonigSr 
 
 Q2 
 
228 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 berg at certain times of the moon. I suppose your White Lady 
 never does anything of the kind ? " 
 
 " I have never seen her," said Aunt Mandeville, evading the 
 question ; " but you can't believe in ghosts, Count Manteuifel ?" 
 
 Before the Count had time to answer, old Grubb, who had 
 been listening, came to her rescue and said : " Oh, do let us 
 have a good ghost story. Say that people don't believe in them ? 
 Why, there isn't a farmer in Warwickshire who doesn't believe 
 that the one-handed Boughton drives about the country at mid- 
 night in his coach and six, and makes wayfarers hold open the 
 gates for him. Then he throws them out of the coach something 
 which looks like chips of wood, and is left as worthless ; but it's 
 real gold, and old ' Thomas Noon,' who lives near Newbold 
 Grange, told me that his great-grandfather once held open a 
 gate for the one-handed Boughton, and had some of those chips 
 thrown out at him, which he left behind him ; but it so hap- 
 pened that one tiny chip fell into his shoe, and when he got up 
 next morning and took up his shoe, if there wasn't an old- 
 fashioned half-guinea. Thomas Noon said that his great-grand- 
 father wasn't long in getting back to the gate to pick up the 
 chips he had left ; but of course they were all gone. He kept 
 the bit of gold a long time, but at last a bad harvest came and 
 he parted with it." 
 
 " Just like our Wild Huntsman," said the Count ; " but if 
 you would like to hear something of a ghost-story — though it is 
 not quite a ghost-story — I will tell you one. 
 
 " One branch of my family is settled in Sweden, far up the 
 country among the hills, not far from the Norwegian frontier, 
 and where, like all hill-folk, the peasants are great believers in 
 witchcraft and supernatural beings. One thing that they firmly 
 believe is, that the hills and fells are peopled by a supernatural 
 fairy race, who are, as it were, half-men half-fairy, and ca,n, 
 under certain conditions, be brought to live with and behave 
 like good Christians. The girls are very pretty in the face ; 
 and, in fact, their only deformity is a cow's tail, which hangs on 
 them where cows' tails usually hang on cows. The comfort is 
 that if a young peasant falls in love with one of these lassies, and 
 carries her off and marries her, her cow's tail drops off when the 
 clergyman gives the bridal pair his blessing ; and in such a case 
 ■ it is the bridesmaids' duty to stand close behind and hide the 
 tail, and to pick it up and conceal it as soon as it falls off. 
 
 " Well, — to make a long story short, — once on a time there 
 was a young smith who had to go up to the fells to look after 
 some kine that were feeding up there, and as night, overtook 
 him he had to make for one of the shanties or shielings upon 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 229 
 
 the fell, built as a shelter for the lassies who are up there to 
 make. butter and cheese in the summer, and also fty belated 
 folk at all times of the year, like our smith. It was late autumn 
 and no Christian folk were left on the fell ; but when he got 
 near the shanty he saw a light through the window, and knew 
 there must be something ' uncanny ' inside. And so, indeed, 
 there was, for when he knocked at the door, and — when no one 
 came — opened it, and walked in with his ' God's peace,' if there 
 weren't two of the ugliest trolls he ever saw, with long cows' 
 tails behind and noses as long as pitchforks, cowering over the 
 fire, while, away in the corner, was the prettiest lass he had 
 ever set eyes on, trying to hide her cow's tail by keeping close 
 to the wall. 
 
 " He was in a terrible fright, but our smith was no coward. 
 He had his gun, too, and, though you can't shoot a troll dead, 
 you can bind him fast by firing a shot over him. The trolls, 
 every one knows, can't bear thunder ; and if a gun is fired Over 
 them, they think it is thunder, and it scatters their brains. So, 
 just as the two ugly trolls were going to fly at him, up to his 
 shoulder our smith puts his gun, and bang goes the shot over 
 their heads. There they all stood stiff, like Lot's wife, and there 
 he left the father and mother standing. As for the lassie he 
 went up to her, and cut her above her breath with his knife, 
 and then she was able to stir ; and next morning, when it was 
 light, he took her down with him into the dale, and, after she 
 had lived a little while with his father and mother, still with her 
 cow's tail dangling behind her, they all went to the church, and 
 they were married. The bridesmaids stood close behind, the 
 nasty cow's tail dropped off, and ever after she was like any 
 other decent woman. 
 
 " Were they happy ? Well, I am sorry to say not very. I 
 suppose a marriage with one of the hill-folk is a mistake — an 
 ' ill-assorted marriage,' as you call it. At any rate, there was 
 incompatibility of temper, and, to tell the truth, it was all on 
 the husband's side. She was patient and gentle as a lamb, 
 while he got drunk and scolded, and beat and banged her till 
 he made her black and blue. So things went on a long while, 
 till one day he had a horse to shoe in a great hurry for a 
 traveller who wanted to get down the country as quick as he 
 could. He was a good smith, — Anders, what you call Andrew; 
 but that day he seemed as if all his skill had left him ; now the 
 shoes were too small ; now they were too big. It iooked as 
 though the shoeing would never be over, and the traveller stood 
 by and swore, and his wife called the smith to dinner, but still 
 he never came because he could not get the horse shod. 
 
230 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Well, at last the wife went over to look after him herself, 
 and to know why he did not come when the brose was ready, 
 and the bairns calling out for their dinner. 
 
 " ' It's no use you coming bothering here,' said the smith. 
 ' Take that, and be off about your business. I must shoe this 
 horse.' 
 
 " Now you must know ' That ' was a good box on the ear, but 
 the wife bore it like an angel. 
 
 " ' And why can't you shoe the horse ? ' she said. 
 
 " ' I'm sure I can't tell, only the shoes, with all my hammer- 
 ing, will never come to fit the horse's foot.' 
 
 "'Tut!' said the wife; "naught but that? Just give me 
 the shoes that won't fit ? ' 
 
 " Well, the man gave her the shoes and looked on, and so did 
 the traveller ; and they both crossed themselves, as well they 
 might, at what they saw. 
 
 " The wife went up to the horse, first with one shoe and then 
 with all four ; and when she lifted up his leg, and found the 
 shoe either too big or too little, she just took it between, her 
 fingers, and bent it about till it fitted to a T. 
 
 "Then she turned to her husband, and said, in a low, soft 
 voice : ' This hand that bent the shoes could have stricken you 
 dead any time that you were banging me, had I so willed it. 
 Now shoe the horse, there's a good man, and come over to 
 dinner.' 
 
 " They say the smith was a better husband ever after ; and, 
 if he banged and beat any one, it was not his wife. 
 
 " That's my story," said the Count ; " and I should like to 
 know what you ladies think of it 1 " 
 
 Of course all the ladies liked it very much, and Mrs. Grubb, 
 who had by this time fidgeted the sofa on which she was sitting 
 into a rampant state, declared she wished there were many 
 wives like that in England. If there were, the men would not 
 have it all their own way. 
 
 Arethusa thought, and I quite agreed with her, it was a pity 
 the poor wife had not shown her strength before she had been 
 so often beaten. 
 
 " That would spoil the story," said the Count. " Besides, it 
 is well known that ' woman's mission is submission,' and this 
 story only inculcates the lesson." 
 
 Miss Grubb and Mr. Twentyman and Major Plunger said 
 nothing, as it was their nature to be silent. The Major, I 
 believe, was asleep with his eyes open. Perhaps some of the 
 sugar was still sticking in Mr. Twentyman's mouth. Dr. Min- 
 dererus, I must tell you, had slipped off in his quiet way, and 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 231 
 
 was fast asleep in his carriage about the time the story came to 
 an end. 
 
 But Mr. Grubb was alive and merry ; he would not be put 
 off from his ghost-story, and called on me for one. 
 
 "Well," I said, "what shall it be ?— shall it be the Sher- 
 brooke Ghost, that best authenticated of all ghost-stories? or 
 shall it be the Airlie Drummer, which was proved in a court of 
 law ? or shall it be the Brown Lady of Rainham, that most 
 loathly lady, who condescends to appear to footmen as well as 
 guardsmen, and is equally detestable to all ?" 
 
 No ! old Grubb would have none of those. He thought he 
 had heard them all. 
 
 " Do you know the Three Fishermen of Unst 1 " I asked. 
 
 " No ! he had never heard of them ; what did they do ?" 
 
 " Once on a time there were three fishermen of Unst " 
 
 " Where is Unst ? " asked Aunt Mandeville. " I never heard 
 of such a place." 
 
 Lucky for Aunt Mandeville that she wasn't a young gentle- 
 man — a candidate for some place in the Civil Serviee ; for 
 which it is absolutely necessary to have the geography of the 
 British Isles at their fingers' ends. 
 
 "Unst, Auntie, is the most northerly part of the British 
 Islands. It is one of the Shetland group ; and the great awk 
 used to breed there when there were any great awks ; and 
 Stevenson built there a magnificent lighthouse." 
 
 "How did you hear about it?" asked Twentyman, at last 
 opening his lips. I need not tell you that Twentyman would 
 never have passed for a direct commission now-a-days. 
 
 " Were you ever there ? " asked Grubb. 
 
 " If you ask me so many questions, I shall never get to my 
 story. You are as bad as the House of Commons on Friday 
 night, — all asking questions, and scarce waiting for an answer. 
 I have already answered my Aunt, and I now proceed to say to 
 you, Mr. Grubb, that I never was in Unst, and to you, Twenty- 
 man, that I heard all about it, and this story as well, from my 
 friend Scatterbrains, who was up there in his yacht." 
 
 " Who was Scatterbrains, and what was the name of his 
 yacht 1 " asked the incorrigible and over-curious Twentyman. 
 
 " I'll tell you if you will spell yacht," I answered. " If you 
 can't spell it, consult the Peerage and the Yachting Calendar, 
 and let me get on with my story." 
 
 " Get on then," said Twentyman ; " I'm not going back to 
 the nursery to spell yacht." 
 
 I am sure Twentyman never could spell yacht,- either in or 
 out of the nursery; any more than he could have spelled 
 
232 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " idiosyncrasy," or " irrelevant,'' or " veterinary," or " nonde- 
 script ;" but I am also quite sure that he would, have cut down 
 any three grammarians, were they Suidas, Hesychius, and 
 Photius, — whom he might have met in fair fight. But as it was, 
 I had silenced him, and was allowed to go on. 
 
 " Once on a time there were three fishers of Unst, and they 
 went out to fish, and never came back at night. They ought to 
 have been quite safe, the old wives said, as they sat knitting 
 their stockings out of Shetland wool ; for they had a child's 
 caul in the boat, — and who ever heard of any one being 
 drowned that had a child's caul ? Be that as it may, they 
 never came back, and their wives and children were in great 
 grief all that afternoon. But at night they came back ; for 
 when Mary Jameson, the wife of one of them, went to bed, she 
 thought she would know the truth ; and so she set a pail of 
 water, which she had drawn from the running stream without 
 taking breath, and she lighted nine candles, four in each corner 
 of the room, and the other five about the pail. Then she walked 
 nine times about the pail, the wrong way of the sun, and sang 
 or murmured out these words, — 
 
 " ' Ye for whom we greet and wail, 
 Come home and gather round this pail.' 
 
 Then she went to bed backwards, and when she put on her 
 night-gown she turned it inside out. You may fancy she did 
 not go to bed to sleep. No, it was to be awake and watch, and 
 sure enough between twelve and one, — not just at twelve ; but 
 between the hours — in came John Jameson, her husband, and 
 Tarn Brown, and Andrew Speirs, the two that had gone out with 
 him to the fishing, and she marked that Andrew had still the 
 child's caul round his neck in a bag. They looked round the 
 room, but said nothing ; but each went up to the pail, and 
 looked at his face in it ; and Mary saw their faces pale as 
 death, and how the sea-water dropped from their hair and 
 clothes. From the pail they all passed to the bedside, and 
 looked hard at Mary, as though they wished to say something ; 
 but they said nothing ; and then they stood for a moment near 
 the fire, where the embers burnt low, and so they passed out of- 
 the door, and were gone. 
 
 " And when they were gone, Mary put the place tidy, and 
 went and told the other wives, and they all knew that Mary had 
 seen the fetches of her husband and their own, and that neither 
 John Jameson, nor Tam Brown, nor Andrew Speirs would ever 
 come back to Bonny Unst. And so it was, for their boat was 
 found bottom up at Fetlar, but their bodies were never found." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 233 
 
 How did Mr. Grubb like that story ? Yes ! he liked it very 
 much. It made his flesh creep. He wondered why ghosts so 
 seldom talked. Why, for instance, John Jameson, like an honest 
 ghost, couldn't have spoken to his wife, and said something kind 
 to her, instead of going dripping about the house. 
 
 " I quite agree with you," said Major Plunger, jumping up out 
 of his sleep ; " dripping in a house is a very nasty thing. Puts me 
 in mind of a story I heard in Ireland, when we were aiding the 
 police in suppressing illicit stills-." 
 
 " What was the story ?" said Mr. Grubb. " Let's have it." 
 
 " Well," said Major Plunger, " I'm a bad hand at telling a story, 
 and I am very sleepy into the bargain ; but this is my story : 
 
 " We were up in Connemara, in the wildest part of the country 
 I ever saw, and we were ordered to go to a farm-house, the 
 owner of which was supposed to be a smuggler, and everything 
 that is bad. He looked a regular ruffian, I must say ; but 
 though we might have hanged him on the evidence of his face, 
 which would certainly have turned king's evidence against him, 
 we could find out nothing else, though we ransacked house, and 
 haggard, and bam. We even turned up a dunghill to see if 
 the still was not hidden in it, but it was nowhere to be found ! 
 
 " All the while we were searching, Tim Doolan, who owned 
 the ugly face, was standing by, cutting jokes, and laughing at us. 
 
 " ' Work wid a will, boys,' to our men and the police ; ' sure 
 it's nigh to it you are now ! Be gorra, you find it immadiately.' 
 
 "But we never found it, and the men got sulky and tired. 
 
 " ' No good losing your timper,' said Tim, ' if you be after 
 losing that, and don't find the still, you'll be badly off.' 
 
 " Then as they were turning up the dunghill : 
 
 " ' Now do spare that,' he said ; ' sure it's the only improve- 
 ment my father left me, and that dungheap is all my capital.' 
 
 " But for all that over it went. 
 
 " ' Well done, boys,' said Tim ; ' now be asy while I tell you 
 the histhory of that dunghill. It's an histhorical dunghill 
 every way, at least in this part of the country. Is there any 
 of you now that knows where that dunghill stood before, and 
 what it stood over ? ' 
 
 " Of course no one could tell. Besides what was the good of 
 knowing where a dunghill stood, and what it stood over. 
 
 " ' Well,' said Tim, ' I'll enlighten yer. That dunghill is one 
 of Our antiquities. It was first built by my great-grandfather, 
 not so long after the battle of the Boyne — bad luck to it ! It 
 was a grand dunghill to look at entirely, though you wouldnt' 
 think so to look at it now after you have mauled it about. 
 Well ! be gorra, not so long after my great-grandfather built it 
 
234 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 up, one day he was smoking as it may be here, thinking whether 
 he should do anything at all that day but smoke, and saying to 
 himself, ' That's a grand dunghill of mine ;' when all at once 
 he saw a little old man by his side in old-fashioned clothes, and 
 with a red peaked hat on his head. 
 
 " ' Good morning, Tim,' — my great-grandfather was called 
 Tim, as I am ; we are all Tims. 
 
 " ' Good morning, Tim,' says the old man. 
 
 " ' The same to you, sir,' says my great-grandfather. ' Sorry 
 I don't know your name.' 
 
 " ' Never mind my name, Tim,' says the old man. ' It's not 
 that I've come to spake about.' 
 
 " ' What is it, thin 1 ' says my great-grandfather, getting quite 
 fond of him like. 
 
 " ' It's about that nasty dunghill.' 
 
 " ' Nasty dunghill,' says my great-grandfather. ' Why you 
 ould thief of the world, there isn't a grander dunghill in all 
 Connemara ; look how it steams, as the rain falls on it. That 
 dung is too good to put on any field. It shall always stay 
 where it is.' 
 
 " ' It shan't,' said the old man, getting quite red with rage — as 
 red as his own hat. 
 
 " ' It shall,' said my great-grandfather. 
 
 " ' It shan't,' said the old man again. ' You'll be sorry for 
 this, Tim Doolan.' 
 
 " ' No, I shan't,' said my great-grandfather, and he was so 
 mad that he just turned round to fetch a stick to bate the ould 
 man who had insulted his dunghill, but lo ! when he turned to 
 look for him the ould fellow was gone. 
 
 " ' Ould spalpeen,' said my great-grandfather, ' to insult my 
 dunghill!' 
 
 " So saying he went indoors, and smoked all the rest of the 
 day, for he was too angry to work. 
 
 " Well, next day he couldn't work a bit, not for anger, but for 
 the rheumatism. One of the pigs, chasing the others over the 
 dunghill, fell down and broke its neck ; the milk wouldn't 
 churn ; the potatoes wouldn't boil ; in fact, nothing went right 
 in the house. 
 
 " This went on for a week or more, but the first fine day my 
 great-grandfather hobbled out with the rheumatism on him, and 
 thought of the butter, and the potatoes, and the pig, and last of 
 all he thought of his dunghill. 
 
 " ' I wonder, now,' he said to himself, ' what that ould 
 vagabond came to say, and why he wanted the dunghill moved. 
 Maybe it had something to do with my calamities.' 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 235 
 
 " ' Av course it had, Tim Doolan ! ' said the old man, who 
 seemed to rise out of the ground at my great-grandfather's 
 elbow as soon as ever he thought of him. : Av course, it had ; 
 and, mind yer, behave better this time, or worse will come of it' 
 
 " To tell you the truth, my great-grandfather was quite afraid 
 of the old fellow, though he scarce reached up to his waist. So 
 he took off his ,hat, made him a low bow, and said : ' I'd like to 
 have the honour of knowing your reverence's name.' 
 
 " ' Don't you be after calling me reverence, Tim Doolan,' said 
 the old fellow, ' because I'm not of your religion, but of one 
 much oulder still.' 
 
 " ' Well ! your honour ? ' 
 
 " ' That'll do very well, Tim Doolan ; and now I'll tell you 
 what I came about. I'm the King of the Fairies in these parts, 
 and my palace is just under this yard, and you have gone and 
 built that nasty dunghill right over my head, and all the muck 
 and mess drains through it, and drips down on my table, so that 
 we can't get a bit to ate that isn't full of dung, and that's what 
 I came to spake to you about the other day, and to beg you to 
 move the dunghill ; and if you move it, all shall go well with 
 you and yours, and you shall always keep your land ; and if you 
 don't, why, you'll have more rheumatism, and lose more pigs, 
 and have no butter and no potatoes. Do you understand me, 
 Tim Doolan, and are you after bating me with a stick this time, 
 for all you have the rheumatism 1 ' 
 
 " ' Do yer think I'd be after bating your honour 1 ' said my 
 great-grandfather. ' The dunghill shall be moved from over 
 your majesty's head as soon as ever I can handle a fork. Maybe, 
 as your majesty knows everything, you know when I shall lose 
 my rheumatism % ' 
 
 " ' When you get up to-morrow morning, Tim Doolan, it shall 
 be gone. But remember the dunghill ! ' 
 
 " He was gone again before my great-grandfather knew how 
 he went ; but he kept his word, and moved the dunghill to 
 where it now stands, and that's why I said it was an histhorical 
 dunghill, and whether you knew where it stood before it stood 
 where it now stands.' 
 
 " ' And did your great-grandfather lose his rheumatism ? ' 
 
 " ' Yes, be gorra, he did ; and the whole family have prospered 
 and done nothing ever since ; and as for their dunghill, there it 
 stands, and there it shall stand ; and the only stroke of work 
 I'll do this week will be to build it up again as grand as it was 
 before, as soon as ever your backs are turned.' " 
 
 "A capital story, Major!" said Mr. Grubb. "But it is 
 getting late, Anna Maria, dear ; we must be going home. The 
 
236 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 carriage is ready, no doubt. What a comfort that we have a 
 good moon to find our way through the park ! " 
 
 So the Grubbs' carriage came, and they departed, and then 
 we all went off to bed. Did I dream of passion-flowers or of 
 dunghills ? Who can tell i 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 HOW I WROTE SOME LOVE VERSES. 
 
 Next morning, very early, the Count, Major Plunger, Mr. 
 Twentyman, Colonel Chichester, and I, went out shooting. The 
 Count was a very good shot, — in fact, we were all very good 
 shots, and the birds suffered a good deal. Somehow or other, too, 
 partridges are much wilder now than they were when I was young. 
 Perhaps I am a little older, and not quite so quick ; but still I 
 think no one will deny that they are wilder. They feel the 
 effects of modern society as well as the rest of the world. We 
 are all of us wilder, no doubt. I suppose they are more shot at, 
 have less time to rest, are less domestic, and, in fact, more on 
 the wing. Where are now the bags that we made in 183- i 
 Nowhere, as far as I can tell. But this is not a lamentation 
 over the decrease of partridge or game in general. Let us get on. 
 
 When we got down to breakfast we found all the ladies, — yes, 
 even Mary Harbury, looking, as Mr. Twentyman said, " as fresh 
 as paint." All the better for her bath, I should have said. 
 
 As soon as she saw me she came up and thanked me so 
 prettily that it made quite a little scene. " How could she ever 
 repay me ? Had it not been for me, she must have been 
 drowned. She was just beginning to think it was all over. 
 The sound of water was in her ears when she felt a strong arm 
 clutch her, and turn her towards the bank. She knew nothing 
 more till she found herself stretched on the grass." 
 
 "Yes, indeed, Mary," said Aunt Mandeville, "you ought to 
 feel grateful to Edward, and so, I am sure, will your mamma. 
 As for me, I am quite proud of him. How odd it is that just 
 there the river divides the properties ! You fell in from our 
 bank, and were dragged on shore on yours." 
 
 Poor Aunt Mandeville ! I knew what she was thinking of. 
 In her mind's eye she saw the Avon effaced, and both the pro- 
 perties rounded off ; and she saw me standing at the altar in 
 Harbury Church, with Mary -Harbury by my side ; and she 
 heard, with the ears of her mind, Mr. Pursey, the rector of 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 237 
 
 Harbury, pronouncing the nuptial benediction in his snuffling 
 voice. 
 
 Poor Aunt Mandeville ! I say again. 
 
 When Mary Harbury's demonstrations were over we had time 
 to think of other things. 
 
 " Did you sleep well, Count Manteuffel ? '' asked Auntie, with 
 something like an anxious voice. 
 
 " Very well, indeed," said the Count ; " I did not even dream 
 of the White Lady ; and as for fairies and witches, they kept 
 away from me. How did you sleep, Major V 
 
 " Oh," said the Major, " I did not sleep very well at first. I 
 fancy there was some green in the tea. I tossed about a long 
 while, and, as always happens, just as I was getting well into my 
 sleep, it was time to get up." 
 
 No one asked Mr. Twentyman how he had slept. It is well 
 known that a Cornet of Heavy Dragoons always sleeps well, 
 except when on duty, then they are as wakeful as dragons. 
 
 It was again too hot to shoot in the middle of the day, so the 
 rest of the men played billiards, and I went up to write letters. 
 Letters do I say ? The excuse was letters, but I felt the poetic 
 fury coming on me after the cold bath of yesterday forenoon, 
 and the warm bath under the Passion-flower in the afternoon. 
 Besides, had I not those silver beads to give to Arethusa ? So 
 I sat down and wrote off some verses to Arethusa. These were 
 the first stanzas ; the rest, I am sorry to say; are too warm for 
 publication, though I assure you there was no harm in them. 
 
 TO MY MISTRESS, 
 
 WITH TWELVE SILVER BEADS. 
 
 " Go forth, ye twelve, so fair and bright, 
 Go guard my mistress through the night ; 
 And tell the sunshine of my soul 
 How slow the weary hours roll 
 Till she return to give me light ; 
 For love is blind save in her sight. 
 
 " Hang two by two on either arm, 
 Cling close and bind her with a charm ; 
 Ye shining spheres of silvern twist, 
 Clasp tight for me each dainty wrist, 
 Shut up her sleeve and keep her warm ; 
 Go, hold my darling free from harm. 
 
 " Breathe with her as she draws her breath, 
 List to the beating of her heart, 
 Feel every joy, share every smart, 
 And should she doubt my perfect faith, 
 Say he is constant e'en to death." 
 
 The rest you cannot have. 
 
238 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 There ! I have a melancholy pleasure in writing those few 
 verses out. Mummy poetry, dug out of the catacombs of the 
 memory. Do they still glow with the pulsation of my young 
 heart 1 One thing more, do not say that I tell you no secrets. 
 The secret of worming out a secret is not to ask for it. Leave 
 it alone, it will work its way out to upper air. Moles and 
 secrets are very much alike. I don't mean moles on the skin, 
 but moles in the earth. Both must come up sometimes to 
 breathe, and so these verses, kept a profound secret for so many 
 years, have lain stored up in my memory, only to come out at 
 last when every one whom they could offend is forgotten. 
 
 When I had written them out, and they seemed to flow from 
 me naturally, I put them into a little parcel with the beads, 
 which really were very pretty, and well worthy to be worn by 
 Arethusa, and longed for an opportunity to give them to her. 
 But how to do it was the difficulty. And how would she take 
 them .when they were given, that was quite another matter ! 
 However, I put them into my pocket, and like an idiot addressed 
 them on the outside "To my Mistress" in a large, round hand. 
 
 By this time, what with doubts, and difficulties, and hesita- 
 tions of all sorts, not so much in the writing as in the way to 
 present them, the bell for luncheon rang, and I went down, only 
 to find that odious Madam Harbury tete-artete with Aunt Man- 
 deville, overflowing with gratitude towards me for saving her 
 daughter. 
 
 Did you ever see a vinegar-cruet overflowing with oil, or milk, 
 or honey J If so, you may have a conception of Madam Har- 
 bury's gratitude. The vinegar-cruet was a vinegar-cruet still 
 inside, but outside it was covered with patches of oil, that would 
 not mix at all with its sour nature. So it was with Madam 
 Harbury ; she was brimfull of gratitude, but yet her thanks had 
 a dash of sourness. 
 
 " Think what it would have been if Mary had been drowned, 
 and not been regenerate. I care nothing for her body ; it is 
 her immortal soul that gives me deep concern. I am thankful 
 to say that I have every reason to believe that Mary has listened 
 to the call that comes to every one ; and that even had Mr. 
 Halfacre, humanly speaking, of course, not rescued her, she 
 ■would have been saved in a far higher sense than he has saved 
 her. What is life, dear Mrs. Mandeville, but a sea of troubles ? 
 Happy those who cross the sea soonest. They escape much 
 misery. After all then, though I feel deeply thankful that 
 Mr. Halfacre, under Providence, has been the means of saving 
 my child's life, I am not so sure that it is really for Mary's good 
 that she should have escaped this danger. Now her soul is safe, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 239 
 
 who can tell whether it will be as safe five, or ten, or twenty 
 years hence ? " 
 
 "Dear Mrs. Harbury," said Aunt Mandeville, "you really 
 must excuse me for saying that I think you are quite wrong. 
 Mary is a dear, good girl. I do not think you have any right 
 to reason from what she is at present to what she may be some 
 day or other. Surely, if we are told, ' Sufficient unto the day is 
 the evil thereof,' we may believe, on the other hand, that suffi- 
 cient unto the day is the good thereof. Let us be content with 
 the present, and do our duty in it, without any morbid fear of 
 what may happen to us or our friends some day or other, which, 
 after all, none of us may live to see." 
 
 " Very true," said Mrs. Harbury. " If I were sure we are 
 sent into the world to be content. Mr. Knagger, the eminent 
 Nonconformist divine, thinks we are not. He says, in one of 
 his tracts — which, oddly enough, I have here in my bag — that 
 we are sent here in order that we may be purified by the fire of 
 adversity, and come out as fine gold from the melting-pot, 
 before the throne of the Lamb. See here is the tract : ' No 
 Rest for God's Saints on Earth. Two Hundredth Thousand.' 
 Would you like to have it ? " 
 
 " No, thank you, not at all," said my Aunt. "lama sound 
 member of the Church of England. I dislike Nonconformist 
 divines and religious enthusiasm generally. Our good Mr. St. 
 Faith is my model clergyman, and I like him all the more 
 because he is weak in the pulpit and strong out of it." 
 
 " Alas ! alas ! " said Mrs. Harbury. " How true it is that 
 moderation is the downward path. Mr. Knagger also proves 
 this in another tract on Temperance, where he works out, 
 beyond all possibility of contradiction, that the via media, that 
 middle course which the Church of England has always steered, 
 is the real cause of her weakness. He compares her to the 
 lukewarm Laodiceans, and ends by saying that, so far as tem- 
 perance is concerned, he would rather be a downright drunkard 
 than one of those moderate people, who take a glass of wine 
 every day. Such people never know their own danger, and end 
 in perdition. Talking of this, I never let Mary touch a drop of 
 wine. I hope you gave her none after her accident." 
 
 " No, Mrs. Harbury," I broke in, seeing my Aunt in trouble. 
 " I can assure you Miss Harbury had no wine. We knew your 
 conscientious scruples, and respected them. We should have as 
 soon thought of giving Jonadab the sou of Eechab a glass of 
 wine, after dragging him out by the Humane Society's apparatus, 
 as of offering a glass of wine to Miss Harbury." 
 
 " Very nice, that allusion to Jonadab," said Mrs. Harbury, 
 
240 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 with an approving smile — the first she had smiled. "Quite 
 worthy of Mr. Knagger himself." 
 
 Poor Madam Harbury ! She little knew that Mary Harbury 
 had elder-wine poured down her throat at the mill, and that 
 Dr. Mindererus had ordered Brooks to mix her a strong glass of 
 brandy-and- water, to restore her circulation, as soon as ever he 
 felt her pulse. 
 
 All this time, — would you believe it? — this odious Madam 
 Harbury had not even seen her daughter. If anything could 
 have made me pity Mary Harbury, it was the way her mother 
 received her. As for Mary, she ran up to her mother in a 
 pretty, artless way, as little like that of one of Mr. Knagger's elect, 
 I should say, as it was possible to be. She wanted to give her 
 mother a kiss, and to be pressed to her bosom — if you can fancy 
 that Madam Harbury ever had such a useless appendage. But 
 the cold Calvinist or Banter, or whatever Madam Harbury was, 
 put her off, and merely said, " Mary, you have had a great mercy 
 vouchsafed to you ; I trust you are duly thankful." 
 
 " Indeed, mamma, I am so thankful to Mr. Halfacre that I 
 cannot find words to express my feelings. I am afraid he thinks 
 me very dull.'' 
 
 " It was not Mr. Halfacre of whom I was speaking, Mary," said 
 her mother, "but of the Lord. Mr. Halfacre is only a tool in 
 His hands to work out your escape.'' 
 
 " I know all that, dear mamma/' said Mary; " but still I can't 
 help thinking that if Mr. Halfacre had not been there, I should 
 have been drowned in the mill-dam." 
 
 " Very true ; but who raised up Mr. Halfacre, Mary 1 " 
 
 I felt very much inclined to say, "Aunt Mandeville, 
 and very nicely she has done it;" but that would have 
 been profane, and Madam Harbury would only have gone on 
 to ask who raised up Aunt Mandeville ; so I said nothing, 
 but looked at the pair. 
 
 " But mayn't I be thankful to Mr. Halfacre at all 1 " said 
 Mary, with something like a pout. " I suppose I mustn't, as, 
 aocording to you, he had so little to do with my rescue." 
 
 " Of course, you ought to be grateful to Mr. Halfacre, Mary, 
 and so am I, — that is to say, if this rescue is for the good of 
 your immortal soul, which, after all, is the only part of us worth 
 a moment's thought ; but what I meant was, that we are not to 
 forget the Creator in His works, and that we must look up first 
 to God, and then down on Mr. Halfacre, who was merely an in- 
 strument to carry out His eternal purpose." 
 
 Here was a pleasant mother-in-law to look forward to, who 
 looked on the man who had saved her daughter's life as though 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 241 
 
 he were one of the Humane Society's drags, and who could so 
 freeze up her own child in this over-Christian way. 
 
 It would have done your heart good to see dear Aunt Mande- 
 ville while this edifying scene was going on. There she sat, with 
 her hands folded, in a state of suspended animation, as it seemed; 
 but I knew if there were ever two souls more unlike than those 
 two, you would have to go far to find them. 
 
 Aunt Mandeville always tried to do her duty after her light. 
 She was the sworn foe of all irreligion and excess, but she was 
 not so very fond of heaven that she did not think life worth 
 living for. " Let us do our best here, 1 ' she used to say, " and 
 trust to God for what is to come." The other woman was so 
 painfully morbid that she fled from the present to the future ; 
 and living always in a false light, she could not bear the sunshine 
 of every-day life. Besides, she was of that self-crucifying spirit, 
 that she was afraid of being happy, lest it should be wrong. 
 Such women are the fair game of charlatans and pretenders to 
 piety, such as I verily believe, was that eminent Nonconformist, 
 by whom Madam Harbury swore — the Eev. Jabez Knagger. 
 
 But all this time we have forgotten our luncheon. You must 
 recollect, however, that those things take much longer to write 
 than to happen. It is possible, we all know, to say a good deal 
 more than you can write in five minutes. After all, we were not 
 much more than ten minutes late at that meal. 
 
 Fortunately Madam Harbury was very hungry, and for a 
 while her mouth was stopped to religious controversy, else no 
 one can say what might have befallen the unhappy Twentyman, 
 who sat next her. 
 
 I sat next to Mary Harbury. Yes, I did it from policy, with 
 a quiet sparkle of the eye to Arethusa, which was accepted by 
 the same telegraphic process. Mary had rather risen in my 
 estimation since her resistance to her mother just before. She 
 was really grateful, too, and again thanked me. 
 
 " Ah, but you must remember I was but a tool or an instru- 
 ment. A rake or a pitchfork in the old miller's hand would 
 have served just as well, you know, if it had been predestined 
 that you were to be saved." 
 
 I am sorry to say that Mary Harbury here said something 
 that sounded very much like "Fiddlesticks !" 
 
 " What is that you say ? " 
 
 " I say I am not such a rigid Calvinist as mamma. Besides, 
 if it was fated that I was to be saved by you, I accept my fate, 
 and bow to it." 
 
 I hope all you young ladies and gentlemen see what a pretty 
 speech this was from Mary Harbury ; and I only hope, if you 
 
242 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ever are in that most humiliating position of owing your life 
 to another human being, you will be able to make such a pretty 
 speech. 
 
 Of course I ought to have said, " I bow to it, and accept it, 
 too ; " and, in Scotland, such a speech before witnesses would 
 have made me and Mary Harbury man and wife. If you do not 
 believe what I say, you had better not go to Edinburgh and try, 
 or you will find what I say to be bitter truth. Why, if Mr. 
 Brown goes into a shop with a young lady, and says, " Send in a 
 bottle of ess Bouquet, or any other essence, to Mrs. Brown," 
 that's a marriage. So beware. 
 
 We are not quite so bad in England, but still young men can- 
 not be too careful of what they say; and had I made the speech 
 I have mentioned, every mother with marriageable daughters in 
 England would have said that I was morally bound to marry 
 Mary Harbury. What did I do ? I merely made the bow without 
 the speech, and so remained a free man. Perhaps I just then 
 felt that packet of verses burning in my pocket, and thought of 
 Arethusa. 
 
 The Count was between Arethusa and Aunt Mandeville, and 
 had small talk enough for both. It just seemed to me as though 
 he paid Arethusa too much attention, but, after yesterday, I was 
 not going to be jealous. 
 
 In the afternoon we were to shoot again, — that was what the 
 gentlemen had come for. Bird-slaughter and hare-murder, and 
 nothing more. They were fulfilling their mission, — they had not 
 come to make love. But I, who would have given anything for 
 an excuse to stay behind with Arethusa under the Passion-flower, 
 had to trudge about with the rest through the turnips, listening 
 to questions of my bird and your bird, and whose bird it was 
 that towered, and endless stuif of that sort. 
 
 How glad I was when the lengthening shadows ushered in the 
 decline of day, and when Colonel Chichester confessed himself 
 dead beat, and that he would be glad to go home. 
 
 At that time we were some way from the house, so I caught 
 at the opportunity, and offered to go home with him, and show 
 him the way, if the others, who were still keen after their Sport, 
 would only forgive me for being so rude as to leave them. 
 
 Oh, certainly they would forgive me ; so I gave the Colonel 
 my arm, and he hobbled off home. 
 
 The Colonel was what I call a direct man — he went straight at 
 his point. 
 
 " Very nice girl, Miss Harbury 1 " 
 
 " Very," I replied. 
 
 " Ought to be deuced obliged to you for her life." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 243 
 
 " Oh, no ; it was mere impulse." 
 
 " I daresay. That's not the way women look at these things. 
 She's getting fond of you, mark my word." 
 
 " More than I am of her," said I, rather irritated at the turn 
 the Colonel was taking. " I say now what I said before : I think 
 it very hard if a young man is not to do his best to pull a young 
 woman out of the water without being expected to marry her 
 afterwards." 
 
 " ' Expected ! ' I never said that. I only say Miss Harbury 
 is getting fond of you, and I can see your Aunt would be glad 
 if you married her." 
 
 " Then my Aunt will have to wait a long time, for I do not 
 feel myself at all getting fonder of Miss Harbury." 
 
 "Take my word for it, Half acre, you'll have to do it. 
 I've had some experience of these thingB. You can never let 
 such a chance slip of rounding off both properties in a ring 
 fence." 
 
 So here it was again ; that horrid ring-fence haunting me 
 everywhere. At home with my Aunt, and out shooting ; when 
 I was doing the charitable to a gouty old gentleman; all for the 
 sake of his daughter, here was the ring-fence hedging me in on 
 all sides. 
 
 I am a"fraid I thought an oath ; in fact, I am not sure I did 
 not actually utter it. If I did it flew away with the wind and 
 was lost. Sterne seems to think that oaths go up to heaven ; I 
 don't agree with Sterne, I think they go straight to hell, their 
 native home, and there abide our coming. I do not forget 
 though that hell is proverbially paved with good intentions, so 
 perhaps bad wishes have no place there. But, whether I swore 
 or not, what I said was this : 
 
 " Do you know, Colonel Chichester, I think landed proprietors 
 are too anxious for ring-fences. I cannot at all see why an estate 
 should be worse off if it is square than if it is round. Tastes 
 differ. I do not know that I should not prefer a long to a round 
 estate. But then, it is true, I have no land of my own. My 
 Aunt always says that Halfacre Hall, our own estate, is much 
 better because it lies all in a ring-fence, but I don't see it at all, 
 and much prefer the entangled Mandeville property which runs 
 into Harbury, just as the river runs, and that is anything but in 
 a ring-fence." 
 
 " You'll have to do it all the same," said the Colonel. " But 
 here we are close to the Hall. Thank you. so much for your 
 arm. I wonder where Toosy is." 
 
 Now could this benevolent old straightforward Colonel have 
 chosen any subject more ingeniously fitted to torment me than 
 
 r 2 
 
244 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 this ring-fence ; and there I had all the. time my packet clcise to 
 my heart addressed "To my Mistress." 
 
 I, too, -wondered -where Toosy was, but she was nowhere to be 
 found. How sanguine lovers are. and how unreasonable ! There 
 was I, as soon as I had kicked off my shooting-boots and clothed 
 myself like a son of civilisation, pacing up and down the conser- 
 vatory, wildly fancying that I was to have the same good luck 
 to-day as yesterday ; but six o'clock came, and no Arethusa. 
 Just as I was beginning to give up all hope, in she dashed like 
 a humming-bird among the blooms ; but I might as soon have 
 tried to catch a humming-bird with my hand. She was'ever on, 
 the wing, flitting about to get two roses for Mary Harbury and 
 herself. No sooner did I approach, off she went, as much as to 
 say, " No, Edward, not to-day," and, at last, just as I thought I 
 had caught her in a corner, in came Brooks calling out, " Master 
 Edward, Master Edward, Mrs. Mandeville desires to see you in 
 the library." 
 
 It was no good contending against Fate, all the less if Brooks 
 was her herald. So with a hasty "Another day, then, Arethusa," 
 I withdrew, and was ushered by Brooks into the library. 
 
 " All I wish to say, Edward, is that I am so pleased with what 
 you did yesterday, that I have written to Sir Benjamin Bullion- 
 to have £20,000, which I have in what they call Consols, handed 
 over to you. The stock will henceforth stand in your name. 
 You know long ago I wished you to be a girl, but now I am so 
 glad to have a man in the family." 
 
 " But, Auntie, why should you give me anything ? I don't 
 wish to have anything of my own, but to belong to you." 
 
 " Don't be silly, Edward ! the money will be of more use to 
 you than to me, and, besides, you ought to have something of 
 your own. You know you will have Mandeville Hall and all that 
 I have when I die ; but we are a long-lived family, and you may 
 have to wait a long while. Take this, like a good child ; in the 
 meantime, if you wish to oblige me, behave well to Mary Har- 
 bury." " 
 
 I must say I felt inclined to say, " May the £20,000 and 
 Mary Harbury perish together, if I am to give up Arethusa ; " 
 but my Aunt was so kind and gentle, and meant it all so kindly, 
 that I could only say, " You are always too good to me, Auntie." 
 Then I gave her a kiss and went away. 
 
 That day we had Mr. St. Faith to dinner, and we found him 
 a great comfort after Madam Harbury's Calvinism. 
 
 " Why, you're the talk of the country-side, Edward. Guy of 
 Warwick and the Dun Cow are as nothing to you, and won't be 
 for a week. Things go fast, too," he added in a much lower tone ; 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 245 
 
 " it is already whispered, over all the teapots in twenty parishes 
 that you and Miss Harbury are as good as man and wife. Well, 
 she is a good girl, and well brought up in spite of Madam Har- 
 bury. You're a lucky fellow, and then, too, what an advantage 
 to the estate ; why, Harbury and Mandeville will then be in a 
 ring-fence." 
 
 Now, had I sworn outright, don't you think I should have 
 been justified? ' Here was our most respected friend, the 
 man who had known me man and boy for fifteen years, com- 
 bining with all the old gossips in the county to make me over 
 to Mary Harbury, and destroy my dearest hopes. As the man 
 who having said he was going to America, only went because he 
 would have had to write so many letters to say that he had not 
 gone, so I, in spite of myself, might be forced by public opinion 
 to marry Mary Harbury. Nay, I was worse than that man. 
 He had said he would go, but I had never given any one the 
 slightest reason* to believe that I had any intention to marry 
 Mary Harbury. And then, that ring-fence, and the advantage 
 to the estate, is there anything that more completely proves the 
 hold land has on us in England when we become slaves to it in 
 this way, belonging to it rather than it to us 1 
 
 Mr. St. Faith's well-meant praise threw such a chill over me 
 that I could say nothing all dinner. Not Mr. Twentyinan him- 
 self could have been more taciturn ; nor John the Silentiary, 
 about whom you, of course, all know everything. I presume on 
 your knowledge ? Well, that is better than presuming on your 
 ignorance. If one had to turn aside at every step, to bring up 
 your knowledge in literary history, this sad story of mine would 
 never come to an end. 
 
 Be content, therefore, to knowthat I was as taciturn as Twenty- 
 man, and as silent as John the Silentiary — silent as a fish, if you 
 like that better. No one but the immortal Briggs ever heard 
 that " mute race " utter anything. Oh ! that Briggs and the 
 dear delightful John, who sketched him and created him, may 
 now be roaming together over some happy hunting-grounds, 
 scared by no cock pheasants, and worried to death by no organ- 
 grinders and unsympathetic neighbours ! 
 
 I must tell you that, after dinner, Arethusa and I and Mary 
 Harbury made a solemn league and covenant to have some fun. 
 We were supposed to be doing some music, but we only used 
 the notes to hide our voices. Major Plunger snored as usual, 
 bringing down bird after bird with each barrel in his dreams ; the 
 Count and Mr. St. Faith talked to Aunt Mandeville, and 
 Colonel Chichester and Mr. Twentyman listened, and said 
 nothing. 
 
246 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 OUR LEAGUE AND COVENANT. 
 
 While the Count was making himself very amusing to my 
 Aunt, quite getting the length of her foot, as Colonel Chi- 
 chester said next morning, we drew up our solemn league and 
 covenant. 
 
 I must tell you that Arethusa had already get out of me the 
 whole story of the White Lady. She was a young woman 
 of penetration, saw there was some mystery, set her heart on 
 mastering it, and succeeded. 
 
 Need I say — though women can keep secrets better than any 
 one else — better than men I mean, — that Arethusa considered 
 this an open secret, and told it to Mary Harbury on one of her 
 visits of condolence the day before. As soon as she left me in 
 the conservatory — flying, in fact, from my Aunt's angry eye — 
 she went straight up to Mary Harbury, and told her all about 
 the White Lady, wisely keeping her own particular secret, that 
 between herself and me, locked, as the novelists say, " in the 
 penetralia of her bosom." 
 
 How delightful it is to a woman to go and tell another 
 woman a secret, and yet to keep another, much more interest- 
 ing to that woman, behind ! No doubt my confession made 
 Arethusa much more inclined to be good friends with Mary 
 Harbury. Nothing is so bad for friendship as fear. As soon, 
 therefore, as Arethusa ceased to fear Mary Harbury, she felt 
 her heart open to her — all, except that little corner where our 
 secret lurked. 
 
 Now, Mary Harbury had before heard something of the White 
 Lady at Mandeville Hall, but without any details. She was 
 grateful, therefore, to hear all about it lying in bed. 
 
 " But do you believe it, dear ? " she asked of Arethusa. 
 
 " Believe it, Mary ! No, not at all," said Arethusa, scorn- 
 fully. "What an insult to ask a young lady of the nine- 
 teenth century, a child of the time, if she believes in such 
 nonsense ! " 
 
 " Yes, dear ; but the Bible believes in them," said Mary, 
 " and so we pught to believe in them, too." 
 
 " Well," said Arethusa, obstinately, " I do believe in the 
 Bible, — at least, I try to do so. Though some of it is very 
 hard to understand ; and I don't believe in ghosts." Having 
 said this, she shook her head, and stamped a foot as tiny as a 
 mouse. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 247 
 
 If you ask me how I know what the two girls talked about 
 as Mary Harbury lay there, I answer, Arethusa told me some of 
 it, and I guessed the rest. Don't say I invented, for I knew 
 Arethusa so well, and my heart beat so much in unison with 
 hers, that I seemed to know as well what she would do or say, 
 under any given conditions, when she was away from me as when 
 she was by my side. 
 
 Now, after dinner, Arethusa proposed to me a piece of 
 wickedness. Observe that it was here, as with the apple, a 
 woman was the tempter. If you are a woman, you may say 
 you had rather be a tempter than an idiot, as Adam was, and I 
 hasten to disarm your wrath by saying that I am on your side. 
 All I say is, that Arethusa first proposed the plot, that Mary 
 Harbury seconded it, and that I had the resolution to follow 
 them. 
 
 " Let us," said Arethusa, in a deep whisper — " let us dress 
 up Mary Harbury to-morrow night when the September moon 
 will be at the full, and let us frighten that lemon-haired Count, 
 and see if he is really as little afraid of ghosts as ha pretends 
 to be." 
 
 " Yes, let us," said Mary Harbury. 
 
 " Yes, let us," said I ; and the compact was made, and we 
 were all sworn to secresy by a formula of nods and smiles; 
 
 How Mary Harbury's face lighted up at the thought, and 
 how pleased she was that Arethusa took so much notice of her. 
 Poor thing ! she little knew that the cause of Arethusa' s gra- 
 ciousness was the triumph that every woman feels in winning a 
 man's heart to herself. It is so easy to be good and gracious 
 on the field of conquest with the shout of victory ringing in our 
 ears. 
 
 Next morning, after breakfast, we all three met in the con- 
 servatory under the Passion-flower. That was our trysting- 
 tree. As I stood under it, I felt how much the flower could 
 tell if it could speak, and how much we two knew which Mary 
 Harbury did not know. This is that irony of love which makes 
 it so sweet. To seem to every one but the loved object to be 
 doing, or saying things which, except to him or to her, have a 
 different sound and meaning than meets the common ear and 
 sense. That Passion-flower was quite another passion-flower to 
 Arethusa and to me than it was to Mary Harbury. It was 
 transfigured in our hearts with a glory not ..its own ; but 
 to Mary it was merely a beautiful passion-flower, and nothing 
 more. , . 
 
 " Now," said Arethusa, " Mary and I will go into the Hall 
 and have a.good look at the White Lady. Why I said that we 
 
248 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 would dress you, dear, was because, though it's not flattering to 
 compare you to a ghost, you are more pale than I am, and, with 
 a little powder, will be much more ghostlike than I. Your 
 nose, too, is like ; and as for your eyes — yes, they will do very 
 well. Let us see if you can put on a rueful countenance, 
 though you'll never look half so doleful as she does in the 
 picture." 
 
 " I'm sure I can't tell," said Mary ; " but if I only look half 
 as doleful as I felt when I fell into the water, I'm sure I shall 
 look more woe-begone than any ghost." 
 
 Off to the hall, then, we went. Colonel Chichester was there, 
 but he soon moved off when he saw us looking at the pictures. 
 He did not care much for it, and he had long ago heard all about 
 the Mandeville ancestors. So we had the hall to ourselves. By 
 great good luck the Count and Major Plunger had agreed to go 
 off to Coventry for the day to look after those everlasting 
 remounts, so we were, in fact, in luck's way ; and, after the 
 girls had taken a good look at the White Lady, they retired to 
 Arethusafs room, locked the door to keep out their maids, and 
 fell hard at work making the White Lady's clothes. She was 
 simply clad in a white silk skirt of a soft material, — taffeta or 
 something of the sort, — and she wore a white wimple and a 
 string of pearls round her neck. It so happened that Mary 
 Harbury had a string of pearls, so that the ghost's toilet was 
 soon made. 
 
 I was just going out to shoot with Twentyman, the taciturn ; 
 — poor fellow, he was as good as gold, though he was so silent, 
 and, as he cared for nothing but shooting, I was glad to do him 
 this good turn, — I was just going out with him I say, when I 
 heard Arethusa and Mary running down the staircase, at our 
 end of the Hall, laughing as merrily as two jays in a wood. 
 Mary leant over the balustrade, and called out : 
 
 " It does beautifully, Mr. Halfacre." 
 
 Whether Twentyman thought anything of this speech I can- 
 not say, at any rate he made no remark about it, except in an 
 absent way, " How loud those girls laugh ! " 
 
 When we came back from shooting Arethusa and Mary was 
 sitting as demure as cats in Aunt Mandeville's room, and Mrs. 
 Grubb was paying a visit, and saying how neither Mr. Grubb 
 nor she could get a wink of sleep the night they dined at the 
 Hall, because of those horrid ghost stories. 
 
 " That's a good joke, Mrs. Grubb," said I ; " for it was Mr. 
 Grubb himself who made us tell them. After all, I don't 
 think they were so very horrid." 
 
 " What ! not that nasty, dripping story of yours about the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 249 
 
 ' Three Fishermen of Unst,' " said Mrs. Grubb. " I think you 
 must have made it out. I have hunted in the Gazetteer, and 
 I can't find any such place as Unst in England." 
 
 " Very likely not, for Unst is not in England, but in Scotland. 
 You will not find it in an ' English Gazetteer,' but you can read 
 a long account of it in the ' New Statistical Account of Scot- 
 land.'" 
 
 " Dear me, I had forgot," said Mrs. Grubb ; " but, account or 
 no account, I don't believe one word of it." 
 
 " Then why couldn't you sleep 1 '' 
 
 " Because Mr. Grubb would toss about so, and groan. Once 
 he woke up, and swore he saw Tim Doolan in the room, and 
 wanted me to turn him out. Fancy that." 
 
 " Very hard indeed, Mrs. Grubb, that you should have to turn 
 persons out of your room whom you only know by hearsay, and 
 very wrong of Mr. Grubb to ask you to do it." 
 
 " Just as I think," said Mrs. Grubb, who had by this time 
 rubbed and rumpled the chintz of her chair into the highest pitch 
 of irritation. " But I must be off home, or Mr. Grubb will be 
 thinking that I have become a ghost, or something of the kind." 
 
 CHAPTER. XXXVI. 
 
 THE WHITE LADY. 
 
 We three conspirators against the Count were like little 
 children all that afternoon. We clung together, to my Aunt's 
 delight, who saw, in our taking to Mary Harbury, an earnest for 
 the future. Up and down the house we went, along the galleries, 
 into the chapel, then out on the terrace, wondering if we should 
 succeed in frightening him. 
 
 At last Arethusa said, " It's all very well talking of frightening 
 him, but it's very like the old story of belling the cat. How 
 shall we do it ? " 
 
 " Why," said Mary, " you know I am to be the White Lady ; 
 and so, when they are all in bed and asleep, I will slip out of my 
 room into yours, and when we come out into the gallery, on our 
 side of the house, Mr. Halfacre must meet us. Then we will all 
 steal downstairs into the hall, and across it, and up the other 
 staircase to their wing, and then " 
 
 " Go on," said Arethusa. " What then ] " 
 
 " Why, then," said Mary, " we must all go into the Count's 
 room, and frighten him." 
 
250 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Ghosts don't go about like French policemen," said Arethusa, 
 " two by two. I never heard of a double ghost, or twin ghosts; 
 still less of three ghosts together, — human nature wouldn't bear 
 it. We can't all go in together." 
 
 " How then shall it be % " said Mary ; " for frighten him we 
 will." 
 
 " This is what I think," said Arethusa. " You must go in 
 alone, and Mr. Halfacre and I will stand outside, close to the 
 door. All you have to do is to walk round the room very slowly, 
 and to wring your hands at his bedside. You must carry a taper, 
 or else he won't see you." 
 
 " Do ghosts carry tapers ? " said Mary. " Where do they get 
 them?" 
 
 " How silly you are ! " said Arethusa. " There are no such 
 things as ghosts. If there were they could carry tapers just as 
 easily as they carry their own heads, as some of them are sup- 
 posed to do. You must carry a taper, dear ; for the very good 
 reason that if you don't, the Count won't be able to see you. 
 By rights, the moon ought to shine into the room, as it always 
 did in the old uncomfortable times, when our ancestors had no 
 curtains, blinds, or shutters. But we can't trust to the moon ; 
 nor to his having a night-light ; and so, as I have said before, it 
 all comes to this, you must carry a taper." 
 
 " Well ! " said Mary, " to please you, I'll carry a taper. I 
 suppose it ought to have a long winding-sheet, hanging down on 
 one side ; but to tell you the truth, I don't think it right to go 
 into the Count's room." 
 
 " Nothing venture, nothing have," said Arethusa. " You want 
 to frighten him, just for the fun of the thing, and you won't go 
 into the room of an old man like that because you are afraid. 
 Shan't we be outside, and ready to help you ? /Take my word 
 for it, he'll be too frightened to stir." 
 
 Oh, Arethusa ! an old man like that ; why, Count Manteuffel 
 was not more than thirty ; how could you call him old ? 
 
 " Well," said Mary Harbury, " not to spoil sport, I'll give in ; 
 but mind and stand close to the door; and if you hear the least 
 noise, rush in, and protect me." 
 
 So it was settled that Mary was to play the ghost, and to go 
 into the Count's room ; and that we were to give her all the help 
 we could. 
 
 " Don't yoii think, Miss Harbury," I said, as the afternoon 
 wore away, " that it would be as well if you tried on the ghost's 
 dress in your own room, so as to make sure that you have it all 
 right 1 " 
 
 " A very good thought," said Mary ; and away she skipped 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 251 
 
 up the staircase— light-hearted thing that she was ! — and I was 
 left alone with Arethusa. 
 
 Now, of course, was the time to have presented my beads with 
 the verses. Can yon tell me why I did not do it ? Had I known 
 as much then as I know now, I should have presented them on 
 the spot. Most men have one chance of doing anything in life ; 
 some are so lucky as to have two. Few have more. My advice, 
 therefore, to young men and women, is to make the most of any 
 chance they may have, lest they should not have another. 
 
 But though I felt them burning at my side, I had not courage 
 enough to give Arethusa the packet. All I said was : 
 
 " Arethusa ! I admire you more than ever. You could per- 
 suade Mary Harbury to do anything." 
 
 "No pretty speeches, Edward, if you please," said Arethusa. 
 " I believe you love me, and that is enough. I return your 
 affection, but I desire no compliments. I daresay, now, you 
 think me very selfish in making Mary Harbury play the ghost, 
 and go into the Count's room, which, after all, is a very strange 
 thing for a young lady to do. Shall I tell you why I don't play 
 the ghost myself? " 
 
 " No doubt you have a very good reason ; what is it 1 " 
 
 "Listen, then. Of course, after the play has been played out, 
 and the Count frightened, every one in the house will hear of it, 
 and your Aunt will be very angry. At the bottom of her heart, 
 I feel that she believes in the White Lady, and she will think it 
 a great breach of politeness to frighten the Count ; but she will 
 be much less angry with Mary Harbury than with any one else, 
 because I can see that she gets fonder and fonder of Mary, while 
 she likes me less and less." 
 
 " What will Colonel Chichester say 1 " 
 
 " Oh, Papa ! Papa will be ' angry at first ; but he is so kind, 
 that when I put my arms round his neck and give him a- kiss, it 
 will be forgiven and forgotten." 
 
 Why did I not give Arethusa the beads then and there, and 
 treat her in the same way as she promised to treat her father ? 
 You are trying to find out what I did. Have I not told you that 
 you are not to know everything ? All I say is, that whatever 
 I did, I did nothing more than I had done under the Passion- 
 flower and that I did not give Arethusa the beads because it is. 
 only possible to do one thing at a time, and because I was so 
 happy that I forgot the verses and the beads altogether. 
 
 You see you can get nothing out of me either by direct ques- 
 tions- or suggestions. I am too wary. Love secrets are always 
 secrets. Even the interval of a quarter of a century is no excuse 
 for betraying them. 
 
252 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Soon after the Count and Major Plunger came back. I forgot 
 to say that Colonel Chichester and Mr. Twentyman were playing 
 billiards all the afternoon. They had a very successful day at 
 the fair; and though the Major would go on growling about the 
 price of horseflesh and foreign buyers, it was plain that he, too, 
 had made some good bargains for the Colonel of his regiment. 
 
 " Famous chesnut mare that your Adjutant bought," I over- 
 heard the Count say ; " such a galloper ! I daresay she would 
 go well across country." 
 
 " Like your brown horse better,'' was Major Plunger's reply. 
 " But what a price you gave for him ; seventy guineas for a 
 troop-horse in a country-fair ! What a regiment it must be if 
 all your troopers are mounted like that ! " 
 
 " We want to get up a regiment that could ride down Wall- 
 moden's Heavy Dragoons," was the Count's reply. 
 
 "Who is Wallmoden?'' asked Major Plunger, with that serene 
 ignorance of military history which then distinguished, and, for 
 aught I know, still distinguishes, the British officer. 
 
 " Too long a stoiy to tell," said the Count; "but Wallmoden's 
 Heavy Dragoons are a heavy Austrian cavalry regiment, who are 
 said to be able to ride over everything. We Prussians want to 
 see if we can't some day or other ride over them." 
 
 " Wish you luck,'' said Major Plunger. 
 
 How long ago this was I don't care to remember ; but you 
 will all see, — that is to say, if any of you are not as distinguished 
 for your ignorance of military history as Major Plunger, — that 
 the luck which he wished Count Manteuffel came to the Prussian 
 cavalry in the year 1866. 
 
 This was not very lively conversation, but we were none of us 
 lively that evening. The three conspirators were reserving 
 their strength for their midnight campaign, and if we could have 
 done so with any decency, we would all have availed ourselves 
 of that glorious privilege of youth, I mean that of going to sleep 
 at all hours. As that could not be, we remained in a state of 
 torpor in our easy chairs, like bears, or dormice, or squirrels, just 
 before their fit of winter sleep seizes them. But I laughed to 
 myself, and laughed loud in one of my lucid intervals, to see 
 Arethusa as still as a mouse and Mary Harbury blinking with 
 half-shut eyes, biding the weird hour when she was to trip across 
 the hall as the White Lady. 
 
 The Count, as usual, talked to Aunt Mandeville, getting more 
 and more the length of her foot, to use the vulgar phrase of 
 Major Plunger. I really believe she began to regard him as 
 one of the true Mandeville stock, which she was ever ready to 
 praise, except when it was pitted against the Halfacres. Then 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 253 
 
 the struggle between Saxon and Norman was revived, and 
 she hated Mandeville when she remembered she was a Halfacre. 
 Mere upstarts, those Normans, coming into a country where 
 they were aliens and seizing other people's land. What was 
 Doomsday Book to the Halfacre Charter centuries before the 
 battle of Hastings % But putting her own family out of the 
 question, she was quite ready to admit that the Mandevilles 
 were of gentle blood, and that they had done more in English 
 History than the Halfacres, who, though I say it, seem to me 
 to have merely vegetated in Warwickshire ever since the days 
 of Alfred. 
 
 But as the Count knew nothing of the Halfacres, and only 
 claimed kin with the Mandevilles, Auntie was ready to talk to 
 him on family history by the hour. 
 
 Colonel Chichester, Major Plunger, and Mr. Twentyman, were 
 as silent and attentive as usual. How true it is that many 
 people are sent into the world merely as stuffing and packing 
 for the few that have brains, to keep them warm and safe, and, 
 above all things, to prevent great wits from coming too close 
 to each other, lest they should clash and do one another harm ! 
 
 " Candles, Edward," said Aunt Mandeville, at last. " You 
 are all sleepy, saying and doing nothing. If one is to be idle, 
 better be idle in bed." 
 
 This denunciation of sloth sent us all off. Those were not 
 the days of smoking-rooms, except in taps and .taverns. Of 
 course, now-a-days, the gentlemen would have retired to brandy 
 and soda-water and smoke ; they would have thrown off their 
 dress coats and put on capes and wrappers ; they would have 
 drawled and drivelled till two or three o'clock in the morning. 
 Major Plunger would have been as somnolent, except that he 
 would have had a cigar in his mouth ; Mr. Twentyman as taci- 
 turn, with the same difference ; Colonel Chichester would have 
 occasionally uttered " Very true ; " Count Manteuffel for him 
 have said very little ; I should have listened, and when we had 
 been thoroughly smoked out we should all have crept lazily up 
 to bed. 
 
 No man now gets his beauty sleep, and that's what makes 
 them all look so wan and washed out next morning. In the 
 year 183- we went to bed betimes, only smoked out of doors, or 
 on coaches, or in inn-parlours, if we were ever so unfortunate as 
 to enter one, and in my humble opinion we were much the 
 better for it, and much better company next morning. 
 
 The gentlemen, therefore, on that ■ memorable September 
 night, went to bed soon after the ladies. It was barely eleven ; 
 but as I saw the moonlight streaming through the painted 
 
254 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 glass of the hall-windows, and staining the stone pavement with, 
 the ruddy lozenges of the Mandevilles, I felt that this was the 
 night above all nights in the year for the White Lady — the night 
 of all others ; the full moon in September that she was bound 
 to appear if she ever meant to show herself. 
 
 Yes, there she looked down on us as we parted from the 
 Count and the Heavies, — they turning short up their staircase, 
 which, as you know, was the nearest to the drawing-room, and 
 we going the whole length of the hall to ours. 
 
 As I passed the picture a strange sort of Don Juan-like feel- 
 ing came over me, and I made her a low bow. By rights the 
 picture ought to have winked, or smiled, or made some sign ; 
 but it made none. It only gazed on with its set face of unut- 
 terable woe. It said as plainly as any face could say : " Life is 
 but vanity and vexation of spirit. I was once as gay and glad- 
 some as you, but see what it all comes to — grief, and misery, 
 and woe." 
 
 " I never pass that picture that it doesn't give me a turn," 
 said the Colonel. " If it were mine I'd sell it, or part with it 
 or something.'' 
 
 " My Aunt would not part with it for anything. She keeps 
 it there, she says, to remind us that life is not all play and 
 pastime." 
 
 " I don't understand such feelings," said the Colonel. " Dear 
 me, how sleepy I am ; but how bright the moon is : one sees 
 it better here where there is no stained glass. Good night, 
 Halfacre." 
 
 " Good night, Colonel," and we parted. 
 
 There I sat in my room, waiting for twelve to strike. I tried 
 to read, but I might as well have tried hieroglyphics, the Ko- 
 setta Stone, or the Luxor at Paris, or Cleopatra's Needle, which 
 we English have never taken the trouble to bring over. It was 
 all no use, there were the words and letters, but I could not 
 understand them. 
 
 All at once I thought of my verses, — where were they ? All 
 safe in my coat-pocket. It is safest to carry one's secrets 
 always about one, as Indian princes carry their precious stones, 
 so when I dressed for dinner, I put the packet into my coat- 
 pocket, and when I went to bed, it lay under my pillow, and 
 when I got up, it went into the breast-pocket of my morning 
 coat. Yes! there it was all safe, and I swore one of those 
 empty lover's oaths that I would, — yes, I would— give the 
 packet to Arethusa that very night while we were standing out- 
 side Count Manteuffel's room ready to rush in in case of need, 
 and rescue Mary Harbury. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 255 
 
 At last twelve struck, one, two, three, four, five, and so on. 
 
 We were not to go too soon. That had been arranged. 
 " Hurry no man's ghosts," is a good maxim. It would have 
 shown an indecent haste in the White Lady to begin to walk as 
 soon as ever the clock struck. Just like Colonial people asked 
 to a London crush, who will not wait till eleven has struck, but 
 come at ten, before the ladies have left the dinner-table. No ! 
 ghosts have manners as well as the rest of us. The world of 
 shadows has its social rules. One spirit says to another, when 
 it invites it to a ball in a churchyard : " Any time before day- 
 light," and unless it is expressly stated, " Dancing Early," 
 no ghost of good family would show its skeleton face before 
 one a.m. 
 
 We gave the White Lady law, therefore, and hoped the 
 longer we waited the better chance there would be of frighten- 
 ing our victim. 
 
 At one o'clock I stole out, and as I opened my door true to 
 the minute, Arethusa and Mary Harbury came out of hers ; 
 only two doors off. Auntie slept quite at the end of the 
 gallery, next to her was her maid, and next to the maid Colonel 
 Chichester. Then came Arethusa's and Mary Harbury's maids 
 together in one room, — that, you know, was before the days 
 when every lady's maid on a visit expected to have a room to 
 herself. Fortunately our rooms were nearest to the staircase, 
 and except the snoring of one of the maids nothing was to be 
 heard. 
 
 The moonbeams shone brightly into the gallery, and had we 
 been sure that the Count's windows were free to let them 
 stream in, there would have been no need of Mary Harbury's 
 taper. She held it in her hand, however, and, I must say, looked 
 the ghost to perfection, except that she had not put on her woe- 
 begone face. 
 
 " That will come, dear," whispered Arethusa to Mary; ''you'll 
 be frightened when you are playing the ghost, and will look 
 doleful enough. Mind you don't laugh. Come along." 
 
 Downstairs we all crept, gliding softly, — as though we were 
 ghosts indeed, — along the hall safely. But just as we were 
 about to climb the opposite staircase, there came a gust of 
 wind from behind the arras, and Mary Harbury's taper went 
 out. There was moonlight enough, but for the reasons given 
 the taper was a necessity. 
 
 •'Stay here," said Arethusa; "I'll run back and light it 
 again," and her lissom form passed like a snake along the pave- 
 ment, patched and stained with moonbeams shining red and 
 white till we saw it glided up the staircase. 
 
256 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 It so happened that the taper went out just under the 
 picture, of which Mary was a travesty, and as we dared not 
 stir, we had to wait face to face with that ghostlike face, till 
 Arethusa's return. 
 
 " I am so frightened, Mr. Halfacre," said Mary. " How long 
 Arethusa is in coming ! " 
 
 It really was not long at all. But in such a position minutes 
 seem years. 
 
 It was a great relief to both of us to see Arethusa, slowly 
 coming down the staircase, taper in hand, carefully guarding it 
 with the other. 
 
 " I'm so glad you are come," said Mary; " I'm so afraid." 
 
 " Follow me," said Arethusa, who knew this was no time for 
 talk, and up the staircase she stole as softly as a mouse. 
 
 . The White Lady's room, was nearly the last in the other 
 gallery, and between us and it were Major Plunger's and Mr. 
 Twentyman's rooms. 
 
 As we passed the Major's we heard an unearthly noise. 
 What was it ? Only the Major answering by a deep hollow 
 snore the challenge of the maid opposite. We all smiled and 
 felt ashamed of being afraid, for if there be anything of this 
 earth earthy, it is a good sound snore. 
 
 On we passed, and just before we reached the Count's door, 
 we halted to give Mary the taper, and to prepare for the last act 
 — that of invading the Count's rest. 
 
 But we had reckoned without our host, or, rather, without 
 our Count. Just as we were all ready and Mary Harbury had 
 put on her most doleful face, looking as though the tears were 
 streaming down her cheeks, the Count's door was thrown wide 
 open, and out rushed the Count in proprid persond, in a state 
 of attire rather hastily improvised. 
 
 Need I say that we all — ghost with the rueful countenance 
 and all — turned and fled along the gallery ? But the Count, 
 or, as Arethusa called him, " the old man of thirty," was as 
 nimble as a hare, and overtook Mary Harbury, who was last in 
 the flight. 
 
 " I will teach you to play tricks upon strangers," said the 
 Count, as he seized her. " Shameful ! " as he recognised her ; 
 "shameful, Miss Harbury, to,disguise yourself so." 
 
 By this time, seeing that Mary was caught, both Arethusa 
 and I stopped, only to see the stolid face of Mr. Twentymau 
 shining out of his half-opened door like the full moon which lit 
 it up. ■> 
 
 "What's all this row about 1 " he said. 
 
 " Nothing," I replied ; " we were going to play Count Man- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 257 
 
 teuffel a trick, but he was too sharp for us and found us 
 out." 
 
 As soon as Mary saw Arethusa returning, she fled to her ; 
 and then the two, hand in hand, ran away down the gallery like 
 roe-deer, and were soon in their own rooms. 
 
 And there I was left alone with the Count, who seemed 
 strangely agitated, seeing that he had completely turned tables 
 on us. 
 
 " Now they are gone," he said, " I must confess you fairly 
 frightened me out of my wits ; but the least said soonest 
 mended." And as he said that he went back into his room and 
 locked the door. 
 
 " Very odd," I thought, " but I suppose I may as well go to 
 bed too ; " and with that I picked up Mary Harbury's taper, 
 which she had let fall in her fright, and went back leisurely to' 
 bed. 
 
 I had sat up so late, and been so weary with expectation and 
 excitement, that I slept till late next morning, and only came 
 down to find prayers over and Aunt Mandeville by herself in the 
 breakfast-room. 
 
 " What was all that noise in the house, I wonder, late last 
 night 1 — a sound as of people scampering about, a rustling of 
 gowns, a tripping up and down of feet along the galleries. I do 
 wonder what it all was." 
 
 I thought it best to make a clean breast of it at once, and told 
 my Aunt the whole story from beginning to end. 
 
 " Very wrong and very silly, I must say ; I've really no 
 patience with any of you. And Mary Harbury, too, who would 
 have thought she could be so bold as to think of dressing herself 
 up, and to be on the very point of going into a gentleman's bed- 
 room 1 I never heard of anything so shocking. What will Mrs. 
 Harbury say 1 " 
 
 " I should think she would say nothing, if she were not told. 
 After all, Auntie, you know it did not happen. We were only 
 going to frighten Count Manteuffel, but he came out and fright- 
 ened us." 
 
 " The impropriety is in the intention, Edward, and not in the 
 act. The guilt is the same, so far as you are concerned, as if 
 Mary had actually entered the Count's room. It really was a 
 mercy, though, that the Count came out when he did. It was 
 very clever of him." 
 
 Just as Aunt Mandeville had got so far in her denunciation 
 of our folly, down came the Count and Major Plunger and Mr. 
 Twentyman by one staircase, and Colonel Chichester and the two 
 young ladies by the other. 
 
258 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 I must say that Mary Harbury looked much more like a ghost 
 by daylight than she did by night. I never saw any one so worn 
 and wan in the time. It was plain that, whoever had slept that 
 night, she had not. As for Arethusa, she looked as well as usual, 
 and evidently not at all ashamed. 
 
 Strang* to say, Count Manteuffel, who ought to have been 
 wildly triumphant at having defeated the machinations of the 
 enemy, looked almost as careworn as Mary Harbury. He, too, 
 had passed a sleepless night. 
 
 As for Colonel Chichester and Major Plunger, they evidently 
 knew nothing at all about what had happened. 
 
 We sat down to breakfast, we three conspirators waiting for 
 the Count to begin ; but, to our surprise, he said nothing. 
 "Very gentlemanlike of him, I'm sure," I said to myself; "he's 
 going to take no notice of it. It's all no use, though, for Aunt 
 Mandeville knows it all." 
 
 At last Aunt Mandeville felt it time to speak. She thought 
 some apology was due to her guest for the hoax that was to have 
 been played upon him. 
 
 " It gives me great pain, Count Manteuffel," she said, " to 
 think that you were nearly the victim of a silly hoax or trick, 
 played upon you by these young people, who seem to have more 
 cleverness than sense. Permit me to congratulate you on the 
 determined way in which you met the enemy and to apologise, 
 in their name, for their misbehaviour. I am sure they will all join 
 with me in making it." " Yes," " Yes," " Yes," we three con- 
 spirators said, and then I added : " It was a silly thing to think 
 of, except among ourselves, and very glad I am that our scheme 
 utterly failed." 
 
 This I thought very handsome, and so my Aunt thought it, 
 for she smiled most graciously on me. Of course we all thought 
 that the Count would have been satisfied that all would be for- 
 gotten, or, if not forgotten, that the joke would have been against 
 us, the conspirators. 
 
 To our great surprise, therefore, Count Manteuffel drew him- 
 self up with his Prussian stiffness, and speaking slightly between 
 his teeth — his way when ho was put out — said : 
 
 " I should be most happy to receive your apology, Mr. Half- 
 acre, at once, and be most ready to say nothing about the 
 matter, if the case were as you say. Then I should have had 
 no right to say anything, with the laugh on my side ; but how 
 can I do this when I must oonfess that, for ten minutes at least, 
 Miss Harbury played her part so well that she almost scared me 
 out of my wits, and, in fact, so frightened me that I feel still 
 quite shattered." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 259 
 
 The Count's speech seemed so ridiculous that I looked hard 
 at him to see if he were sane. 
 
 " You really must forgive me if I say that I do not understand 
 ■what you mean. So far from Miss Harbury frightening you for 
 ten minutes, I am sure we were not half-a-minute before your 
 door, making up our minds to enter, when you rushed out and 
 put us all to flight. It seems to me, if an apology is due to any 
 one for being frightened, it is to these young ladies, and particu- 
 larly to Miss Harbury, whose arm you clutched when you caught 
 her, and who certainly was very much frightened." 
 
 " Making up your minds to enter my room ! " cried the Count 
 in indignation ; " why, Miss Harbury had entered it, and stayed 
 in it, for ten minutes at least, and it was only when she left the 
 room that I rushed out of bed, threw something round me, and 
 followed her.'' 
 
 "Dear me," said Aunt Mandeville ; "this is really dreadful." 
 And then she turned quite white, as she always did when she 
 was angry. In a moment she turned fiercely to me and said, 
 " Edward, is this true, and have you told me an untruth 1 " 
 
 " Indeed, Auntie, I have told you the whole story, from first 
 to last, just as it happened. I thought it best to tell you before 
 you heard of our silliness from any one else." 
 
 " Now did we," I added, turning to Arethusa and Mary, — 
 " did we — did you, Miss Harbury — did any of us ever enter 
 Count Manteuffel' s room ? " 
 
 " Of course not," they both exclaimed ; " we were just going 
 to turn the handle of the door when Count Manteuffel rushed 
 out and we all ran away." 
 
 " Very strange — most strange," said Aunt Mandeville, with a 
 sigh. " Perhaps, Count Manteuffel, as you say Miss Harbury 
 entered your room last night, you will be good enough to tell us 
 what happened after you went to bed 1 " 
 
 " Most willingly," said the Count; " I shall be only too happy 
 to help in explaining this mystery if I can. This is my story : 
 I went to bed, as you all know, last night, and as I passed through 
 the hall I was struck, — I believe as we all were,— with the 
 brightness of the full moon. It was so lovely that when I went 
 to bed I unclosed the. shutters, drew up the blind, and looked 
 out at the old oaks in the park. I did not even close the shut- 
 ters or draw down the blind when I went to bed, and the moon- 
 beams still streamed in. 
 
 " I was tired with my day's work at the fair and fell asleep at 
 once, and how long I had been asleep I cannot say, but to j udge 
 by what happened afterwards, I should say about an hour, when 
 I woke up with a start, and that vague sort of feeling that comes 
 
 s 2 
 
260 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 over one in bed, when there is some one in the room, and we 
 know it, though we have not yet set eyes on them. 
 
 " Well, you all of you know the portrait of the White Lady. 
 Too well I knew her. At first I could only see by the moonlight 
 that there was some one moving about the room in the shadow, 
 but in a moment it passed into the stream of moonlight, and 
 there I saw the White Lady as plain as I see you. I lay still as 
 death, and she came so close to the bedside that I could have 
 touched her with my hand ; but I could not see her face of woe 
 so well then, because she was again in shadow. 
 
 " There she stood wringing her hands for, I suppose, a minute ; 
 then she slowly moved away towards the dressing-room door and 
 disappeared. I lay there, entranced as it were, making up my 
 mind that it was necessary to do something, and yet not knowing 
 what to do. It might be a hoax, then it was my duty to be 
 still and do nothing ; or it might be a sleep-walker, and then it 
 was my duty to follow her gently and see that she took no harm. 
 As I lay in doubt, and I must say alarm, she appeared again, 
 again stepped to my bedside, again wrung her hands, and again 
 glided away through the moonbeams into the shadow, and 
 towards the door. 
 
 " Then it was that I summoned up resolution to follow her, 
 and then it was that in that state of undress for which I am 
 bound to apologise, I rushed out, chased you all down the gal- 
 lery, and clutched Miss Harbury's arm. I am sorry that I hurt 
 you so, Miss Harbury, but you must remember that until I 
 overtook you I did not in the least know who you were. 
 
 " That is my story, and how it agrees with yours when you 
 say that you never entered my room, it passes my comprehension 
 to understand." 
 
 " Mary Harbury never was in your room last night," said 
 Arethusa, in a voice that was awful from its seriousness and 
 solemnity. " Indeed I am not at all sure that we should ever 
 have got her to go in ; she was so frightened at last." 
 
 " Dear me ! " said Mary ; " and how frightened I was when 
 Count Manteuffel gave me this mark!" and with that she bared 
 her arm and showed, just below the elbow, the black score of 
 four fingers and a thumb. 
 
 " Something like a grip," said Major Plunger. " How odd now 
 that I should have slept though all this uproar, and never heard 
 the least of it ! " 
 
 " Who shall decide when authorities differ 1 " said Aunt Man- 
 deville. " I believe you both, that will be the best way. May 
 I ask the Count whether your White Lady looked like Miss 
 Harbury?" 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 261 
 
 " Not at all, except at a distance. When I got out and saw 
 the three I knew that I had heen hoaxed, and so I gave chase ; 
 but I am bound to say that when I overtook Miss Harbury she 
 was not at all like the White Lady, except that she was as pale 
 as death and clad all in white." 
 
 " Very strange," said my Aunt. And so say I, and so you 
 will say, reader ; and if any of you can explain why Mr. Blogg, 
 the judge of bristles, and Count Manteuffel, the polished gen- 
 tleman and judge of horseflesh, both saw the same apparition 
 after an interval of years at Mandeville Hall, I shall be very 
 glad if you will do so. As for me, my duty is only to tell you 
 facts which have come under my own knowledge. 
 
 All this time I dare say you have forgotten the silver beads, 
 and those most unhappy verses. Where were they 1 I thought 
 in my pocket, of course. I told you I always carried them 
 about with me, and had it not been for the Count's absurd and 
 unfeeling behaviour in rushing out on us, I certainly would, 
 according to my oath, have presented them to Arethusa as soon 
 as Mary Harbury had gone into his room. 
 
 Again, I say, where were they t Alas ! in the safe keeping 
 of Brooks. 
 
 Just as the talk about the ghost had dwindled down into 
 the " uncanny " feeling that there was something in it which no 
 one could explain, Brooks entered the room and said : 
 
 "Something for you, missis, which Mary Jane ftrand in the 
 north gallery this morning." 
 
 As ill-luck would have it I was not aware of what the old 
 wretch was doing, or I would have jumped up and said : " That 
 belongs to me, it fell out of my pocket last night," as was the 
 very truth. But I was too late. Aunt Mandeville had already 
 broken open the packet addressed " To my Mistress." Out fell 
 the sheet of paper on which the verses were scrawled, and down 
 on the table rolled the silver beads which I had destined for 
 Arethusa. 
 
 "What's all this 1 " said my Aunt. 
 
 " Why, these are the beads you bought at Warwick, Half- 
 acre," said the Major, wakeful out of season, and sharp-sighted 
 as a cormorant. 
 
 " Very pretty, Edward," said my Aunt. " Is this a present 
 for me ? and with some verses too, ' To my Mistress, with twelve 
 silver leads.'' I can't be your mistress, though I am mistress in 
 this house." 
 
 I know I ought to have demanded the verses and put them 
 into my pocket. Until they were read they were nothing. 
 
 Had I said, " Only some silly stuff, Auntie, which fell out of 
 
262 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 my pocket in the ghost-hunt last night, not worthy of your 
 notice," all would have been right ; but like Count Manteuffel, 
 who confessed himself shattered, fascinated, paralysed, call it 
 what you will, as he lay in his bed in the awful presence of the 
 White Lady, so I sat there never saying a word till all the harm 
 was done, till Aunt Mandeville had read the verses twico 
 through, with a flush of passion on her face, growing deeper as 
 she read. " Most improper," was what she said ; " quite \mlike 
 the poetry of Cowper. What an insult to the object of your 
 affections, — ' your mistress,' as you call her ! Pray, Ed- 
 ward ! and who is your mistress ? " 
 
 Could I have only answered as the man answered about his 
 neighbour, "She that showed pity on me," it 'would have been 
 a good answer, but even that would not have appeased Aunt 
 Mandeville, who, what between the White Lady and the warm 
 verses, was quite upset. 
 
 " I never heard of such things, Edward. Are these your 
 Oxford manners ? First, to go and persuade two young ladies, 
 who while in this house are under my protection, to go and 
 dress themselves up to frighten a guest in his bedroom, and then 
 to pen such really shocking verses to some one who, I hope, 
 for her sake as well as yours, is imaginary." 
 
 Now, observe the delicacy of my position, and my stupidity 
 in not having given the verses at once to Arethusa. She 
 might think the verses which Auntie called shocking intended 
 for herself, and until she saw them she might, if she chose, 
 think herself insulted. But even this was the least painful 
 supposition. If she saw the verses, and, for the sake of what 
 had passed between us, excused them on account of their 
 beauty, all would be right. But suppose she chose to fancy 
 that she was not the mistress for whom they were intended ; 
 that they were meant for Mary Harbury, for instance ; and that 
 while making love to her I was carrying on an intrigue with 
 Mary Harbury, I knew not what would happen to me. In 
 short, I was driven to distraction. 
 
 All I could do was to leave the room, and say, as I ought to 
 have done at first, " They are very silly stuff, I daresay, meant 
 for no one, and with no meaning in them. Pray throw them 
 into the fire." 
 
 " And what am I to do with the beads ? " cried out Aunt 
 Mandeville. " They were meant for some one, I suppose. Am 
 I to throw them into the fire as well ? " 
 
 To this I made no answer. I ran away into the open air, 
 and was glad to go out shooting with the taciturn Twentyman. 
 
 " Tell you what, Halfacre," he said, after knocking over his 
 
ANNALS ,0F AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 263 
 
 twentieth bird, " you'll get into a fine row about those verses if 
 you don't take care." 
 
 I slunk back to luncheon and ate it moodily, scarcely daring 
 to look any of the ladies in the face. It was some comfort to 
 think that no one had yet seen the verses but Aunt Mandeville, 
 who had not thrown them into the fire, but retained them as a 
 " material guarantee." I know this is a piece of political slang 
 of' after years, an anachronism from the Crimean war; but if 
 you ever write a book and don't make as bad, or worse ones, 
 think yourself lucky, most captious reader. 
 
 After luncheon Auntie wanted to have a word with me, and 
 I went off with her to her own room, like a little boy going to 
 the dentist with his mother. 
 
 To my utter surprise Aunt Mandeville's wrath had almost 
 entirely disappeared^ but she only roused me up to dash me 
 down again into the very depths of despair. 
 
 " These verses, Edward, though very warm and improper, are 
 very pretty. Of course they could only be excused by being 
 addressed to a young lady to whom you were fondly attached, 
 and who was fondly attached to you. In fact, they ought 
 never to have been seen save by four eyes, — yours and hers. I 
 am sorry, therefore, that Brooks, the blunderer, fancying that I 
 must be the mistress meant, brought them to me. Sorry, too, 
 that I gave way to curiosity and read them before I well knew 
 what I was about. I know now they were meant for Mary 
 Harbury ; and though I repeat I think them very wrong, and 
 would not for the world that Mrs. Harbury saw them, still I 
 am pleased that your passion for Mary Harbury has gone so 
 far. You know what my wishes are, and all I say is, consider- 
 ing how you have led her into this most mysterious scrape about 
 the White Lady and these verses, and the way in which you 
 have been thrown together, and your names coupled since you 
 have been here, Mary ought not to leave the house before you 
 have made to her an explicit declaration of your intentions. 
 Now go, I am sure that you will do what is right and proper. 
 My great desire, — in fact, my sole desire in life now is to sea 
 you married to Mary Harbury. Now go, I must be busy with 
 my accounts." 
 
264 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 HOW I WAS TORMENTED BY MART HABBURY. 
 
 Now, was I not the most unfortunate of men ? To have my 
 very verses turned against me and given to the wrong woman. It 
 was all owing to Auntie's perversity in making up her mind that 
 Mary Harbury, and Mary Harbury alone, was to be the object 
 of my affections. This blinded her so, that when I made love 
 to Arethusa she thought it meant for Mary. Yes ! it was all 
 that wretched ring-fence and a desire to add house to house, so 
 eloquently denounced by the old prophets. 
 
 I went out of Aunt Mandeville's room in no very desirable 
 frame of mind. It is all very well to say, " Let dogs delight to 
 bark and bite," but my main wish at that moment was to 
 murder that blunderer Brooks who had brought me into this 
 fresh strait. Luckily for him he did not cross my path. He 
 was refreshihgf'himself, no doubt, in his pantry, pretending to 
 clean the plate or some of the many things butlers are supposed 
 to do, and do not. My " little hands " — they were little — Were 
 not destined to be imbrued in the blood of a butler. 
 
 As I walked about in a wild sort of way, I met Arethusa and 
 Mary Harbury, now sworn sisters in arms, going out for a 
 walk. 
 
 " Come with us, Mr. Halfacre, we want to know all about 
 those verses," said Arethusa. 
 
 I should have told you that, as soon as a scene between me and 
 Aunt Mandeville seemed imminent, the whole party at the break- 
 fast-table melted away like snow in June, leaving us alone. No ! 
 not one single curious person stayed to hear it out. No one 
 then staying at Mandeville Hall would have had such bad 
 taste. 
 
 All that was known, therefore, was that the packet contained 
 some beads and some verses which I had written, but for whom 
 they were meant, and whether they were amatory or satirical, 
 no one knew. There was just enough to awaken curiosity. 
 
 " Yes, I should so like to know all about them," said Mary 
 Harbury, little suspecting what Aunt Mandeville thought about 
 them. 
 
 " Oh ! " I said, "they are only some silly verses to an imagi- 
 nary object of my affections. Things that young men some- 
 times write to see if they can express themselves with feeling — 
 rehearsals, attempts, essays, tasks, — call them what you will. 
 Such things, Miss Harbury, are only worth notice when they 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 265 
 
 are addressed to some real person ; then they crystallise round 
 an object, and the result is actual love." 
 
 " And have your affections ever crystallised round such an 
 object 1 " asked Mary, with a simplicity which made the home 
 thrust she gave me more telling. 
 
 " No lessons out of school, if you please, Miss Harbury. I 
 am not going to confess anything, or to deny anything. As for 
 these verses, I was merely speaking of such effusions philo- 
 sophically, and with no reference to myself." 
 
 " But they were your verses," said Arethusa. " I suppose, 
 when you wrote them you had an object." 
 
 " Yes," I said, quietly, "I had an object ; but let us talk of 
 something else. What did you think of Count Manteuffel's ex- 
 planation about the White Lady 1 " 
 
 " Mr. Halfacre will not be drawn," said Mary Harbury. " He 
 has gone to ground, as the fox-hunters say, and won't be un- 
 earthed. Arethusa, dear, we had better talk about the 
 ghost." 
 
 " Well," I said, " and what do you think of the story ? " 
 
 "If you ask me," said Arethusa, "I think that it was a 
 dream. I mean that the Count, who had heard about the 
 White Lady, and who, as we all saw, was attracted by her 
 portrait, went to bed, fell asleep, dreamt all that he fancies he 
 saw awake, got out of bed as he woke with a start after the 
 dream, rushed out, and, by what I must admit to be one of the 
 strangest chances possible, met us in the very act of doing what 
 he had just dreamt as already done. His conception of the 
 ghost was much more sudden and sustained than ours. We 
 had been about it two days, — he, probably, not two minutes ; 
 but the ghost had only possessed his mind as it possessed ours ; 
 both he and we were taken up with the subject. The only 
 difference being that he was passive and we active, and that we 
 were a long time under the influence of the White Lady, 
 while with him she crossed his mind for a moment in his 
 sleep." 
 
 " Most philosophical ! " I exclaimed. 
 
 "And what do you think yourself, Mr. Halfacre 1 " said Mary 
 Harbury. 
 
 " Perhaps it may be as Miss Chichester explains it. She 
 seems to have paid more attention to dreams than any of us. 
 No doubt, what with those ghost stories, and the impression 
 always made on visitors by the portrait of the White Lady, we 
 have been all, more or less — I except, of course, Major Plunger 
 and Mr. Twentyman — under the influence of the supernatural. 
 When the difference of condition is sleeping and waking, and 
 
266 ANNALS bF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 when several persons are thinking of the same thing, that thing 
 will show itself in different ways. We were the active embodi- 
 ment of the White Lady, — the very ghost itself, — though we 
 only thought we were making believe, as the children say. On 
 the other hand, the Count's mind was the mere passive reci- 
 pient, and so the White Lady seemed to visit him in a dream." 
 
 " All this is beyond me," said Mary Harbury, with a puzzled 
 face. " I would much sooner believe that the White Lady did 
 really appear to the Count. It would cost me less — I mean I 
 should grasp that with less effort than these active and passive 
 states, and conditions of thought. But you and Arethusa are 
 so clever. Is there no other way out of the difficulty ? " 
 
 " Yes ! two ; and you may take your choice, Miss Harbury. 
 The first is, that the Count had by some means found out our 
 plan, and was waiting to rush out on us just as we had been 
 sitting up to frighten him. The second is, that he invented 
 the whole story, and saw the White Lady neither in a dream 
 nor awake." 
 
 " But why did he rush out then ? I suppose even in Ger- 
 many Counts don't rush out in that wild way into galleries at 
 dead of night for nothing," said Mary. 
 
 " It comes at last to this," I said, " though it is only what 
 Aunt Mandeville said at first : ' It is a very strange story : a 
 very strange story.' " 
 
 " I am convinced your Aunt firmly believes in the White 
 Lady," said Arethusa. 
 
 " Perhaps she does," I said. " Perhaps she has more reason 
 to believe in her than any one else. As for myself, so long as 
 the White Lady only appears on her own side of the house, and 
 only at the September full moon, I do not at all grudge her 
 her one night in the year." 
 
 So we went on discussing the preternatural, I with the two 
 girls on either side, till it was time to turn back. Before we 
 reached home we all agreed that we would watch the Count, 
 and see if he showed any reluctance to go to bed. That would 
 be some guide. No one is so ready to sleep in a room two 
 nights running when he has seen a ghost in it the first of the 
 two. Of course, on the doctrine of chances one ought to do 
 so most willingly, because though it is true that what has happened 
 once may happen again, it is no less true that what has happened 
 once is less likely to happen for some time afterwards. But 
 then, ghosts may be exempt from the doctrine of chances. 
 
 All that evening, then, we watched the Count. He had gone 
 out shooting with Colonel Chichester in the afternoon, and we 
 had seen little of him ; but I am bound to say that, when we 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 267 
 
 did see him, nothing could have been more cool and collected. 
 He was as pleasant and lively as ever, had apparently quite for- 
 given our attempt on his rest of the night before, inquired most 
 tenderly after Mary Harbury's arm, hoping it would soon be 
 well, and even touched on that very delicate subject, my verses, 
 but only to say that it was very natural to write love verses ; 
 when he was young he had done it, and no harm had come of 
 it. It was a sort of safety-valve to let off feeling that would 
 otherwise' burst the boiler — he meant the heart — the only thing 
 was that no one else should read them, and that they ought to be 
 burnt as soon as possible. 
 
 " Oh ! " said Aunt Mandeville, " Edward and I quite under- 
 stand each other about the verses ; so let us hear no more of 
 them. The only mistake in the matter was made by Brooks, who 
 fancied they must be meant for me." 
 
 As she said this, Aunt Mandeville gave a sort of indescribable 
 wink, though it was not a wink at all ; it was rather an indica- 
 tion by the eyes, which said plainly, " Edward, mind and take 
 Mary Harbury in to dinner, and mind you make yourself agree- 
 able to her." 
 
 Need I add that Arethusa was again thrown away on that 
 dolt Twentyman 1 
 
 Did I make myself agreeable to Mary Harbury 1 Of course 
 I did. You know I rather liked her. Provided I was not to 
 make love to her, I was quite ready to sit by her and amuse 
 her ; but it was plain from Aunt Mandeville's manner that she 
 would be satisfied with nothing short of a proposal and accept- 
 ance. There was a sort of marriage-or-your-life air about' her 
 which had the effect of making her what the Soots call "fey." 
 In that state of mind people become transparent, as it were ; 
 they are so carried away, that they take little pains to conceal 
 their thoughts and feelings, so that they stand bare to the rest 
 of the world, which is apt to make the same kind remarks on 
 their mental condition, as it would if it saw them walking up 
 and down, clad after the fashion of the South Sea Islanders, 
 that is, with nothing on at all. 
 
 I am sure Aunt Mandeville was not at all aware of it her- 
 self ; but the way in which she seemed to have taken the bit 
 between her teeth, as to my marriage with Mary Harbury, was 
 ridiculously evident, and to me most disgusting. 
 
 " When is it to be, my boy 1 " said Colonel Chichester, after 
 dinner. 
 
 " Wish you luck, Halfacre," said Major Plunger. " What 
 good shooting you will have when the two estates are rounded 
 off!" 
 
268 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Hope it will be in our time,' 7 said the idiotic Twentyman, 
 who had sat next to Arethusa, saying nothing for an hour and 
 a half. 
 
 He meant by "our time," before the 105th Heavy Dragoons 
 were ordered off to Ireland or Norwich. 
 
 " Miss Harbury is a delightful girl," said Count Manteuffel ; 
 " and as it is now no secret, if we were in Germany we should 
 drink good luck to the happy pair.'' 
 
 "Why not?" said Major Plunger. " Health-drinking has 
 gone out in England ; but it is a good old custom, which I 
 should be glad to see revived." 
 
 The brute ! he was only too glad to have an opportunity of 
 pouring more wine down his gullet. 
 
 There was no help for it. The toast was drunk, and I 
 returned thanks in a very diplomatic speech, saying, "that 
 though at that moment I had not the least intention of marry- 
 ing any one, I hoped that whenever I did marry I should be 
 happy with my future wife. At any rate it should not be my 
 fault if she were not a happy woman." 
 
 " All very pretty," said the Major. " I'll bet you're married 
 before Christmas." 
 
 There was no good protesting. Aunt Mandeville had set 
 the fashion, and all my remonstrances were set down to 
 modesty. And all this time, mind you, I had never said oDe 
 word that could be taken for the faintest approach to love- 
 making to Mary Harbury. 
 
 As for the Count, I was beginning to hate him ; and I 
 thought him and his horrid German fashion of drinking toasts 
 and healths to " happy pairs," before they are even engaged or 
 thinking of it, a downright impertinence. He was paying me 
 off handsomely for playing the ghost on him. But it all came 
 to the same in the end. It was all Aunt Mandeville's fault, 
 who would make me marry Mary Harbury. The mote she 
 wished it, and mistook my feelings, the more resolved I was to 
 have my own way, and to marry no one but Arethusa. 
 
 " Do give lis some music, Mary ; one of Beethoven's so- 
 natas," said my Aunt, when we joined the ladies. 
 
 Now, you must know that Mary Harbury had no real taste 
 for music ; she played fairly, and that was all. Arethusa 
 played very well ; she had a very good ear, and great genius and 
 execution ; she transposed at sight, and played all sorts of 
 tricks with her pieces just as she pleased. When she ceased, 
 every one said, " Do play us something more ; " but when Mary 
 Harbury played, no one said anything except what they were 
 btpnd to say — " How very pretty ! " 
 #*■ 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 269 
 
 Here, again, was a proof of my Aunt's infatuation. She was 
 playing the part of the step-mother in the fairy tale, and making 
 a Cinderella of the true princess, while the ugly and stupid 
 daughter was promoted and pushed forward. 
 
 " Go, Edward, and stand by Miss Harbury, and turn over the 
 leaves for her ; it will make her less nervous." 
 
 So there I had to stand, listening to a very indifferent execu- 
 tion of one of Beethoven's grand pieces, while the girl who could 
 have really played it was neglected. Yes ! I had to stand there 
 on false pretences before a house full of friends, — a victim 
 decked for sacrifice to the great principle of doing the best for 
 the estate, and in order that the Mandeville Hall and Harbury 
 properties might be rounded off in a ring-fence. 
 
 It was too disgusting. 
 
 But wasn't it all my own fault ? It would be, though it 
 wasn't just yet. If, I allowed this state of things to go on I 
 should be bound to marry Mary Harbury ; and so, as I stood 
 there, I resolved to tell my Aunt the state of my feelings, and 
 that, if I married any one, it must be Arethusa Chichester. 
 
 All that evening Arethusa behaved like an angel. She praised 
 Mary Harbury's playing ; the piece was very difficult, and she 
 had got through it admirably. Perhaps the instrument was a 
 little flat, and a string or two jarred — anything rather than lay 
 the blame on her rival. The fact was that Arethusa felt herself 
 quite safe, and there is nothing that makes girls so amiable as 
 that sort of success. She could afford to praise Mary Harbury, 
 and she praised her. Besides, have I not told you it was quite 
 possible to like Mary Harbury 1 She had many good qualities, 
 and was eminently fitted to make any man who loved her happy; 
 but then, unfortunately, I did not love her. 
 
 Why did Auntie take me to Ilfracombe ? Why did I not go 
 elsewhere on a reading party ? Why did I ever see Arethusa ? 
 Why did she not go on as she had begun — laughing at me and 
 mocking me 1 Why was I born to be so unfortunate as to gain 
 the affections of such a girl, and yet to be forced to marry some 
 one else 1 These were the questions I put to myself over and 
 over again that night. The only relief I saw was that things 
 could not go on as they were ; that there must soon be an 
 explosion. Anything was better than living in such a false 
 position. 
 
 Mary Harbury's playing had such a soporific effect — the 
 Major, I need not say, was the first to feel it — that we were all- 
 half asleep when it was over ; and, let me tell you, one of 
 Beethoven's sonatas is no joke to sit through, especially when it 
 is murdered. Why don't I say " executed ? " Well, executfjj, 
 
2*70 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 if it pleases you bettev. Of the two I had sooner be " mur- 
 dered '' thau " executed ; " but tastes differ. When it was over, 
 I say, we all felt it high time to go to bed. The excitement of 
 the night before, 1 daresay, had something to do with it, but 
 the music had more. We all crawled off, therefore, like flies 
 on a fine autumn day, when a warm sun has restored their 
 suspended life ; lazily and leisurely we crawled up to bed, scarce 
 able to put one foot before the other. How glad I was to get 
 to my own room, to stir the fire savagely ! Yes, though it was 
 only September, we had fires all through the month at Mande- 
 ville Hall. It was Aunt Mandevdle's order. She said it aired 
 the rooms, and those who did not like them might let them 
 out, but lighted they must be ! The consequence was that no 
 one ever caught his death of cold from damp rooms at Mande- 
 ville Hall. 
 
 Having wreaked my vengeance on the coals, and heaped 
 fresh fuel on them in a most anti-Christian spirit, I threw my- 
 self into an easy chair and began to storm. 
 
 No ! I would not be so treated, even by Aunt Mandeville. I 
 would not be sold, nor rounded off, nor ring-fenced. I would do 
 this, and I would do that. I would run away, I would enlist, I 
 would take orders — anything rather than marry Mary Harbury. 
 I would marry Arethusa in spite of every one. Of course, I now 
 see that the person against whom my wrath ought to have been 
 vented was myself. I ought not to have fallen in love with 
 Arethusa, and when I had fallen in love with her I ought at 
 once to have informed Aunt Mandeville of the state of my 
 affections. But forty sees so very plainly what twenty-two is 
 stone-blind to. Let forty change places with twenty-two, and 
 he will do pretty much as twenty-two does, and always will do. 
 As though love did not steal over us at that age so sweetly and 
 so softly that we are fast bound before we know it. Talk of the 
 Old Man of the Mountain ! the young boy with the bow and 
 arrows is twice as hard to shake off, and if you do succeed in 
 throwing him off your shoulders, on he is again in a trice, as fast 
 seated as ever. It is so natural to love at that age, that all the 
 arguments of all the old sages and philosophers will never con- 
 vince one really youthful heart of the folly of falling in love. 
 As for Arethusa, I am quite sure that Diogenes himself would 
 not have been proof against her grace and beauty ; the nasty - 
 old fellow would have crawled out of his tub and followed her 
 all over the world, like a dog as he was. 
 
 I was just getting over my rage, for though you will none of 
 you believe it — that is, you who only know so much of me as I 
 choose to tell you in this book, where you see me under the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 271 
 
 greatest difficulties — I am naturally very sweet tempered. Rage 
 was just taking the hue of resolution, and I had again resolved 
 to have it out to-morrow with Auntie — yes ! to-morrow, directly 
 after breakfast — and to tell her point blank that she was quite 
 mistaken about the reason, — that the verses were meant for 
 Arethusa, and for no one else, and that nothing could induce me 
 
 to have anything to do with Mary Harbury, when the door 
 
 slowly opened, and in walked — Mary Harbury ! 
 
 I really thought I must have fainted of vexation, though I 
 saw at once how it was. The poor thing was walking in her 
 sleep, and was repeating in her dreams her part of the night 
 before. She wore the dress improvised for the White Lady, and 
 carried a lighted taper in her hand. She walked up to me a 
 step or two, then turned and beckoned me to follow her. 
 
 Now see, another misfortune — see how Fate was determined 
 to mix me up with this young lady, who, sleeping or waking, 
 was ever doomed to haunt me and embitter my existence. 
 Follow her I must. I could not seize hold of her other arm 
 and give her a good clutch, as the Count had done the night 
 before. Such behaviour, besides being rude, would have roused 
 her with a shock, which might have had serious consequences. 
 I could not call out and alarm the house for the same reason ; 
 I had no time to seek some one else to go with me ; no, there 
 was but one way, and that was to follow her, and try to prevent 
 her from coming to harm. 
 
 So I followed her along the gallery, down the staircase, 
 through the hall, and up the other staircase. It was now 
 getting past a joke. She was plainly bent on going to the 
 Count's room, and into that room, if she went, I had to follow 
 her. It was wonderful to see how quickly she went, without a 
 moment's hesitation, shading her taper with one hand, just as 
 Arethusa had done, while it seemed to have a charmed light, 
 and never to be in the least danger of going out. I tried to get 
 before her and turn her, but she was too nimble, my place was 
 to follow, not to lead, and all the while there was a wild sort of 
 joy upon her face, as though she gloried in what she was about. 
 
 And now she reaches the Count's door. Will she enter? 
 She turns the handle. Thank God it is locked ! The Count 
 was a wise man, far wiser than I had been ; remembering the 
 night before, he had turned the key, and so ought I to have 
 turned mine, and then Mary Harbury would never have been able 
 to get in. 
 
 It was curious to see her when she felt herself foiled. At 
 first she tried the door again, and then all at once the light of 
 inspiration seemed_Jx> fade from her face. She ceased to be 
 
272 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 transfigured, and became again mere Mary Harbury ; and as 
 the brightness passed away, she seemed to be loosed from sleep, 
 and in a moment or so she shuddered and said : " Where am I, 
 and where is Arethusa 1 Is that you, Mr. Halfacre 1 " 
 
 "Yes," I said; "let me lead you back.'' And without 
 another word I led her back to her own room, and, opening the 
 door, said : " Good night, Miss Harbury." 
 
 " Good night," she murmured, mechanically; " I am so tired;" 
 and then she closed the door. 
 
 I must say that I threw myself on my bed that night in fear 
 and great perplexity at my cruel fate. My last words were : 
 "What a fool I was not to bolt my door like that wary fox, 
 Count Manteuffel ! " though what right I had to expect such a 
 strange visitant, — while the Count, on the contrary, might well 
 have expected her — I am sure I can hardly tell. Since then I 
 never go to bed without bolting the door ; but what is that but 
 locking the stable after the steed has been stolen ? 
 
 It was not to be expected that the Count would be silent if 
 he had heard the door tried. It was not in human nature. 
 
 I was quite prepared, therefore, to hear him say, as soon as 
 he came down to breakfast, — it so happened we were all down 
 before him : — 
 
 " So you were at it again last night, Mr. Halfacre ! But I 
 was too wary for you. You ought to have taken the bolt off 
 my door, and hampered the lock, so that it might not shut. 
 ' Fast bind, fast fiud,' is a German as well as an English proverb. 
 You found me fast, though not fast asleep." 
 
 " What is all this 1 " asked Aunt Mandeville, looking first at 
 Arethusa, who sat there as guiltless as a lamb. 
 
 "I am sure I cannot tell,'' said Arethusa. "If anything 
 happened last night, all I can say is, I had nothing to do with it. 
 I fell asleep as soon as I went to bed, and never stirred till day- 
 light. How did you sleep, Mary 1 " 
 
 " I hardly know what happened," said Mary Harbury, blush- 
 ing a blush like all the roses in the world at once ; " but Mr. 
 Halfacre knows all about it ; perhaps he can tell. All I re- 
 member is that Mr. Halfacre put me into my own room, and 
 wished me ' good night ; ' but before that it seemed as though 
 I had been walking half over the house with him." 
 
 At this Aunt Mandeville put on her severest face. She could 
 be very severe — far more so than Madam Harbury— when she 
 chose. She mused for a moment, and then said, very seriously : 
 " As you -told us what happened the night before, Count Man- 
 teuffel, perhaps you can tell us what happened last night to 
 disturb your rest." 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFITL LIFE. 275 
 
 her manner, that I should soon be under a Passion-flower of a 
 very different kind from that under which we sat three or four 
 days back. 
 
 " Upon my word, Halfacre," said Colonel Chichester, as we 
 men walked on the terrace after breakfast, " you are a lucky 
 man. Night and day is all the same to you ; you are always 
 equal to the occasion, whether in the water or out of it ; now 
 saving ladies' lives in rivers, and now escorting them about the 
 house at dead of night, like a Paladin of ancient times, careful 
 to see that they come to no harm." 
 
 " I really could not help acting as I did in either case ; but I 
 repeat what I said before, that I have no intention of marrying 
 Miss Harbury. Circumstances over which I have no control 
 have thrown us oddly together ; that is all." 
 
 " Come ! — come ! " said Major Plunger, who, of course, had 
 slept through it all without turning, "come — come! You 
 don't mean to say you have no such intentions. Miss Harbury 
 seems to have intentions on you then, else why did she come 
 walking in her sleep into your room 1 It's clear her thoughts 
 must run after you by day, or she would not be walking after you 
 in her sleep. Think what an honour it is, my boy, and accept 
 your luck. Then the estate '' 
 
 I am sorry to say — but all true lovers, male and female, will 
 •forgive me, I am sure — that I cut the Major short by an exple- 
 tive not at all compatible with the coolness of the estate in a 
 future state. I do verily believe that as the Ked Indians ex- 
 pect to rise again with their horses, dogs, and bows, so some of 
 our landowners think that their estates will rise with them — 
 not against them — at the last day, and that it will still be Dun- 
 derhead of Dunderhead Hall in the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 I really must beg pardon for being so furious against land 
 and landed estates. If you wait till this story is finished and 
 rounded off — and till you have heard the last of the ring-fence 
 — you will see that I have good reason. 
 
 " Well — well ; don't be angry," said the Major, who really 
 was a good-hearted man ; " I only meant to say that it isn't 
 every one who has such a pretty girl and such a fine property 
 waiting to fall into his mouth. I only meant it for your own 
 good." 
 
 " It isn't for my own good, and I won't have it. Why don't 
 you, Twentyman — why don't you speak up for yourself, and 
 marry Miss Harbury and her ring-fence 1 " 
 
 " Why,, you see," said Twentyman, slowly and solemnly ; 
 " first of all, I am not as clever as you. You no sooner sit down 
 by a girl than she begins to smile, and then to laugh. So they 
 
 t 2 
 
276 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 sometimes do when I sit by them ; but then it's never with me, 
 but always at me. In fact, they think me a fool ; and I am not 
 sure they ain't quite right. Next " — here this gallant six feet 
 three of pipe-clay drew a deep breath — " next, I am not heir, or 
 as good as heir, to Mandeville Hall, and so I couldn't round oft 
 the two estates ; and last, I'm not a Halfacre. I know birth 
 don't go for much with men now-a-days, except they're snobs ; 
 but it goes for a good deal with women ; and depend on it, as a 
 mere matter of speculation, it pays better to be born a Mande- 
 ville, or, as your Aunt prefers Saxon blood, a Halfacre than a 
 Twentyman." 
 
 Having uttered this oration, which, besides its own length, 
 was, it must be admitted, full of common sense, the gigantic 
 heavy dragoon lighted a cigar, and vanished in a cloud of his 
 own smoke. 
 
 After this had happened on the terrace, I was alone, but 
 sorely afraid to enter the house, lest I should meet Arethusa's 
 angry eye. As I lingered, Aunt Mandeville leaned out of the 
 window of her room, and said : 
 
 " You see you can't help it, Edward ; what must be, must be. 
 Better make short work of it, and do it this very day." 
 
 "Do what, Auntie?" 
 
 " Do what I wish ; propose to Mary Harbury, and make both 
 her and me happy." Then she drew in her head and dis- 
 appeared. 
 
 " Yes ! I will do it. I'll go indoors first and have it out with 
 Arethusa, and in the afternoon I'll tell the truth to Aunt 
 Mandeville." 
 
 So I spoke to myself, and had just reached the garden door 
 from the drawing-room, when out came Arethusa herself ! 
 
 " Whither away, Arethusa?" I said. 
 
 " Yes ! whither away ; you are quite right to say whither 
 away, when you win my affections one day only to crush them 
 the next. That Passion-Flower — how I hate it ! — and the 
 false words you uttered under it. ' Whither away,' — I wish it 
 were withered away, root and branch." 
 
 " Very unkind to the Passion-Flower, Arethusa darling ! 
 Believe me, my passion-flower has never withered. But why 
 be so unkind to me, too, when I have done nothing to de- 
 serve it?" 
 
 "Done nothing — why, you are always doing something. 
 You never can be still like other people. I say nothing of your 
 saving Mary's life ; she is welcome to it, and to you, too, if you 
 choose. You couldn't help it. But why you should write Mary 
 Harbury verses, which your Aunt tells me are filled with pas- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 277 
 
 sion, and only not beautiful because they are so warm, I can't 
 ftnagine. Then, too, waiting and sitting up at night, instead of 
 going to bed like any one else. I must say that sleep-walking 
 story is a very strange one ; and if Mary Harbury were not 
 such a goose, I should almost think " 
 
 Here she stopped for very rage, just as little children, when 
 they are having a good roar, hold their breath for a moment, 
 and then burst out again. 
 
 " Well !— and what should you think 1" 
 
 " Why that it was arranged between you, and that she is a 
 sly, nasty thing ;" and here Arethusa, — I am grieved to say it, 
 — burst out crying, which made me very happy. 
 
 " Very happy ! " you will say ; you ought to be ashamed of 
 yourself for making a young lady cry ; but let me tell you, 
 reader, that woman's tears — if they are real, and not mere cro- 
 codile — are a sure proof of affeotion ; and so Arethusa's tears — 
 nay, her rage itself, — all were a great comfort to me, because 
 they assured me of her passion. 
 
 I took her hand and said, as tenderly as I could : " You were 
 just going for a little turn in the park ; let me go with you, and 
 explain it all." 
 
 " I don't want to walk with you," she said, just as a sulky child 
 refuses a present ; but she walked on for all that, and I walked 
 with her. For some time, some seconds rather, her tears fell, 
 one by one, and then she turned rather fiercely still on me and, 
 said : 
 
 " How about those verses and those beads, which your Aunt 
 showed me last night ; — the beads I mean, she would not show 
 me the verses, — and said they were both meant for Mary 
 Harbury." 
 
 " That is all my Aunt's mistake, Arethusa ; of course you can 
 always say they were not meant for you, as I never gave them 
 to you. The truth is I was afraid to give them to you, lest you 
 should think them wrong, so I put off giving them from day to 
 day, and carried them about with me, waiting to gain courage. 
 As ill luck would have it, they were lost in the rush from the 
 Count's door, and I never missed them till I saw the packet in 
 the hand of Brooks, who, as you know, mistook the fanciful 
 address, ' To my Mistress,' for the only ' mistress ' he had 
 ever heard of, — my Aunt Mandeville." 
 
 " I wish I could think they were not meant for Mary. How 
 did your Aunt come to think they were meant for her ?" 
 
 " Because Aunt Mandeville has so made up her mind that I 
 must marry Mary Harbury, that she won't hear of any one or 
 any thing else. She was very angry, as you know, when she 
 
278 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 first saw the verses, because she thought they might have been 
 for you, and she was quite right; but, on second thoughts, 
 which are not always the best, — though the proverb says so — 
 she returned to her fixed idea, that I must marry Mary Harbury, 
 — that I could make love to no one but Mary, — and that the 
 verses and the beads must be meant for her. She told me so in 
 the afternoon, just as she told you at night ; and she forgave the 
 verses for the sake of the evidence which she thought they gave 
 of the state of my feelings." 
 
 " And do you mean to marry Mary, Edward 1" asked Are- 
 thusa faintly, and looking imploringly in my face. 
 
 " Never, never ! Arethusa. I will marry you, and you alone, 
 if you will only have me." 
 
 "I feel much better in my mind," said Arethusa: "not 
 nearly so wretched." 
 
 How much further this sweet conversation might have gone, 
 as we wandered away from the house, I cannot tell ; for Brooks 
 came on the scene at a most inopportune moment as usual, 
 shouting out from the brow of the hill down which we had 
 walked, 
 
 " Master Edward ! Master Edward ! — Missis wants you 
 directly." 
 
 We had to go back only to find Madam Harbury, who had 
 come over to pay a morning visit. 
 
 " What a bore! " was my remark. 
 
 " But you will not marry Mary ?" said Arethusa ; " and as 
 for those verses, I should like to see them." 
 
 " No, darling ! Auntie may show them to you if she chooses ; 
 I am sure, though, that she never will. For myself, I am quite 
 ashamed of them. You shall have another set all to yourself ; 
 of those I hope I shan't be ashamed." 
 
 " But I should like those," said Arethusa, with a little 
 stamp. 
 
 By this time we had reached the house. 
 
 " I don't care to see Mrs. Harbury," said Arethusa, as she 
 turned short off in the hall and went upstairs. 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 279 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 HOW I WAS FURTHER TORMENTED, AND HOW WE TOLD MORE 
 
 STORIES. 
 
 "When I got to Aunt Mandeville's room I found her with 
 Madam Harbury and Mary, deep in a version of our sleep- 
 walking adventure. Eeaders who are great sticklers for truth, 
 those most rigid and cast-iron souls who never told a lie, black 
 or white, in their lives ; people who will never utter a conven- 
 tional falsehood, who will not allow their servants to say " not 
 at home," but " engaged," thereby insulting half their acquaint- 
 ance, — such people will be shocked to hear that Aunt Mande- 
 ville's version of what had passed was as remarkable for its 
 omissions as for its truthfulness in other respects. The main 
 fact "that Mary Harbury had walked in her sleep was there, and 
 that I had followed and protected her was left standing, but all 
 the first part of the story about me and my bedroom had 
 vanished. According to that account they were as good as 
 though they had never existed, and I can only say that, if 
 history is written in Aunt Mandeville's manner, the world 
 knows as little of its greatest events as we are assured it does of 
 its greatest men. 
 
 Was Aunt Mandeville right 1 Of course she was. There are 
 some people who cannot bear the truth, just as there are some 
 people who cannot drink milk or live in Paris ; the truth, aud 
 the milk, and the air are too strong for them. Mrs. Harbury, — 
 or Madam Harbury, as I delight to call her, — was one of those 
 
 people who would shriek at the naked truth as loudly as 
 
 they would at a man in the same state. Aunt Mandeville was 
 not fond of shrieking; she knew her woman, and gave her a 
 poetic version of that night's adventure. 
 
 I am not so sure that she said anything about the White 
 Lady. You know she was never very fond of mentioning her, 
 and she was glad to escape it ; the more so as she knew that 
 Madam Harbury would " disapprove entirely of it." Yes ! that 
 is the right phrase of such " ridiculous disguises." You see, 
 therefore, all of you, how little chance such a woman as Madam 
 Harbury has of ever hearing the truth about anything. People 
 had with her to be careful of what they said. " How will 
 Madam Harbury like this?" they said to themselves. "Her 
 views are so peculiar." You had to do a sum in morality as 
 soon as you saw her. Yes ! she was like those unhappy people 
 
280 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 who can't eat pork, and are condemned to live in Tahiti where 
 it is the standing dish. Such people are too good for this 
 wicked worlds which lives in an atmosphere of white lies in 
 indifferent matters, and yet loves truth in essentials quite as 
 dearly as all the Madam Harburys in the universe. 
 
 Aunt Mandeville was quite right then, and after she had 
 made the most of the shreds of the story with which she had to 
 piece together her narrative, and, I must say, had given me 
 much more praise than I deserved, she ended by asking if Mary 
 had ever before walked in her sleep. 
 
 " No," said Madam Harbury ; " but then you know we are 
 such quiet people, we never have anything to excite us at Har- 
 bury." 
 
 " One thing though, I should like to know," she went on ; 
 " your narrative, which is very interesting in a psychological 
 point of view, is wanting in one fact. How was it that Mr. 
 Halfacre knew that Mary was walking in her sleep ? for, as I 
 understand you, it was late at night. How was it, Mary ? " 
 
 " Why, mamma," Mary began, but she was not allowed to 
 proceed. Aunt Mandeville having drawn a deep breath after 
 the word "psychological" — a famous word, by the way, for that 
 dictation which for the future is to be the sole test of the British 
 officer's knowledge of English — Aunt Mandeville was afraid of 
 the episode of the bedroom coming out, and, like most people 
 who tell white lies, and have to follow them up with grey or 
 black ones, as the case may be, she snatched the words out of 
 the blushing Mary's mouth, and said : 
 
 " Edward was sitting up reading. Young men will sit up 
 studying, you know. You may bring them to bed, but you 
 can't make them enter it. He was sitting up, and hearing a 
 noise in the gallery, he looked out, saw Mary walking along it, 
 and followed her. You know the rest." 
 
 " Dear me ! how fortunate ! " said Mrs. Harbury. " I wonder 
 what would have become of Mary if Mr. Halfacre had not 
 followed her." 
 
 Here I came to my Aunt's assistance. 
 
 " I believe Miss Harbury would have done as other sleep- 
 walkers have done many thousand times before. It is very 
 seldom, indeed, that they come to any harm. If left to them- 
 selves, they wander about the house,- or even out of it ; and 
 then, as the impulse seems to leave them, they come to them- 
 selves, to find that they are in all kinds of strange, out-of-the-way 
 places ; but as often as not the fit lasts till they return whence 
 they came, and they get into their own beds, never knowing that 
 they have left them for a moment. The great danger they run 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 281 
 
 is in being suddenly awakened by injudicious persons. This was 
 really all the service I rendered to Miss Harbury, by taking care 
 that she came to no harm, either from her own act or from other 
 persons' stupidity." 
 
 This, I daresay, you will all think a very boring speech. I 
 should call it- — and I have Madam Harbury's authority for 
 doing so — '« very interesting and very philosophical." Heaven 
 help a woman when she gets into the " ologies " or " sophys," 
 into that vast region of platitudes which lies stretched between 
 theology and philosophy. There she wanders, maundering 
 about in the most helpless and hopeless way. Do we men 
 never maunder and wander about in that dreary region 1 Very 
 often ; but then, at any rate, we sometimes know the meaning 
 of the words we use, though not always, and so carry off our 
 ignorance better, by seeming to know something of what we are 
 talking about. 
 
 " Well ! " said Madam Harbury, " I must be gone. We have 
 our Harbury Anti-Papal Demonstration to-day, and a Prize 
 Essay by Mr. Knagger on ' The Mark of the Beast ' is to be 
 read to the school children, and they are to show their work. 
 By the way, Mary, have you done' that sampler which you were 
 to work as a pattern 1 " 
 
 " No, Mamma, I am sorry to say I have not. It got rather 
 spoiled, too, when I fell into the river, and all the colours in the 
 silk ran. Here it is. . Do you think it worth finishing 1 " 
 
 Here Mary Harbury, in the most innocent way in the world, 
 pulled out of her pocket — I believe it was tied round her waist 
 ■with a tape — that famous work of art. I must say it looked in 
 a deplorable condition, and if it were a pattern of anything, it 
 must have been of untidiness. For that it would certainly have 
 carried off the first prize. I believe it had lain in that pocket, 
 crumpled up, ever since it had been in the river. Poor Mary's 
 head had been so full of White Ladies and midnight walks, that 
 she had never done a stroke of work on the sampler since the 
 first evening of her stay. 
 
 And this was the bread-and-butterish sort of woman for whom 
 I was to give up Arethusa ! 
 
 But, to proceed. Aunt Mandeville said, as she saw Madam 
 Harbury's face growing even more like a vinegar-cruet than 
 usual, and worse, a vinegar-cruet in the act of pouring out its 
 contents : 
 
 " You must not be too hard upon Mary. She really has had 
 no time to work at the sampler since she was here ; all that day 
 of the accident she could not work, and really she has better 
 things to do ; she is too old for samplers. She has given us 
 
282 ANNALS. OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 some beautiful music since she has been here, and indeed we are 
 all charmed with her." 
 
 " That sampler," said the vinegar-cruet, " was expressly re- 
 quested by Mr. Knagger. He said it was a pity that young 
 ladies never worked samplers now with some good Scripture- 
 text on them, — ' Set your affections on things above ;' or ' It is 
 more blessed to give than to receive,' for instance. He will be 
 very disappointed to hear that the sampler is not done, and so 
 am I, Mary." 
 
 " I could not help it, mamma ; I really could not ! " said 
 Mary, her eyes full to the brim, and full, not of vinegar, but of 
 tenderness. 
 
 " That is the excuse the idle and the vicious always make, 
 Mary. Any sin they regard as venial merely by saying I could 
 not help it." 
 
 " What Mary says is quite true," said Aunt Mandeville. " She 
 really could not help it, for she has tried." 
 
 " That is just what I complain of in young people of the 
 present day," said Mrs. Harbury, returning to the charge with 
 a perseverance worthy of a better cause ; " they rush into the 
 vortex of frivolity and dissipation, forgetting their immortal 
 souls, and look on life as a playground rather than as a school 
 to bring us to a better state. So it is that they forget their 
 duties, and become neglectful of their parents, and wanting in 
 respect to their spiritual pastors and masters. So it is with 
 the children of this world, and so it will be, I am sadly afraid, 
 with Mary." 
 
 Here was the vinegar out and all over us ; as for poor Mary 
 she dissolved then and there into a flood of tears. 
 
 Even then the hard-hearted mother was not softened. 
 
 " Tears, Mary," she said, " are of no avail, unless they are 
 tears of real repentance. Dry them, and work me another 
 sampler by the next school-meeting." 
 
 And with that Madam Harbury stalked off, confident, in her 
 own mind, that she had acted in the most Christian manner, 
 when, by her uncompromising denunciation of the world and its 
 pleasures, she had nearly broken her daughter's heart, and quite 
 disgusted Aunt Mandeville and myself. 
 
 " Dear me ! " said Aunt Mandeville, when the mother and 
 daughter had left the room, Mary trying still to be forgiven, and 
 Mrs. Harbury holding sternly out. " Dear me, what a dreadful 
 temper for a true Christian, as I really believe Mrs. Harbury is. 
 You will have much to bear from your future mother-in-law, 
 Edward ; but at any rate, you will have your consolation and 
 comfort in the affection of your wife. Mary's heart is in the 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 285 
 
 and taper, and yet so plump. They were softer than anything 
 you ever felt, and it was impossible to compare them to anything 
 in creation. You might compare one of her hands with the 
 other, and say both were equally beautiful, but there all com- 
 parison stopped. Those hands were like no other hands in the 
 world, and when you shook hands with her for the first time, it 
 was to know a new sensation. 
 
 What her eyes were like I never knew. For the life of me I 
 could not say what their colour was, but I know they were 
 beautiful, and flashed and sparkled as much — yes, as much as 
 Arethusa's j eyes of which I did know the colour, because I had 
 looked into them much oftener. Like Arethusa, she was tall, 
 but so perfectly made that she looked shorter than she really 
 was. 
 
 This lovely frame was the home of a mind as beautiful. Lady 
 Meredith was the kindest-hearted woman that ever lived, so 
 tender and sympathetic. In a word, she so entered at once into 
 all your wants and wishes, all your joys and sorrows, that as 
 soon as you knew her, and she had taken to you, you were at 
 home with her for ever, and felt, wherever you might be, that 
 where Lady Meredith was, there you had a faithful friend. 
 
 Was not this a cruse of oil sent to console us for the vinegar 
 with which Madam Harbury had sprinkled us in the morning ? 
 For myself I felt as battered as if I had fallen among thieves, 
 and looked on Lady Meredith as the good Samaritan come to 
 bind up my wounds. 
 
 Perhaps, too, I was not sorry that she came in the very nick 
 of time between me and my explanation with Aunt Mandeville. 
 
 " Good morning, Lady Meredith," said Aunt Mandeville ; 
 " where have you been ? We have not set eyes on you for an 
 age. You left town before us ; where have you been since ? " 
 
 " We were engaged to go to Scotland for grouse-shooting on 
 the 12th of August," said Lady Meredith, "and there we have 
 been for the last three weeks, and more. I am so glad to 
 get back, but Meredith never misses the 12th in Scotland. 
 Before the 12th we made a sort of progress northwards, inflicting 
 visitations on our friends, until we got to Perthshire on the 10th. 
 But what have you been doing 1 " 
 
 " Staying quietly at home," said my Aunt Mandeville ; 
 "Edward is thinking of settling himself for life, and I am 
 helping him to do it." 
 
 " Of course with that lovely girl Miss Chichester " — let me 
 hasten to say neither Arethusa nor Mary was present, — " with 
 whom I saw Mr. Halfacre waltzing so well at Lady Onechicken's 
 ball. I thought her daughter, the great heiress, looked rather 
 
286 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 •» 
 
 wistfully at the pair as they whirled round, as much as to say, 
 ' I would not mind being in Miss Chichester's place.' If that is 
 the young lady, I wish you joy with all my heart, Mr. Halfacre." 
 
 I could have fallen down and worshipped Lady Meredith on 
 the spot ; but I made no answer. Aunt Mandeville made it 
 for me. 
 
 " Oh dear, no ! It is not Miss Chichester on whom Edward 
 has fixed his heart. It is all very well waltzing with a nice girl, 
 and I don't mean to say that Edward does not waltz very well, 
 but waltzing is not marriage. There are other things to be 
 thought of, and Edward, I am glad to say, has fixed his affections 
 on a near neighbour of ours. Can't you guess, Lady Meredith, 
 who it is?" 
 
 " I'll try," said Lady Meredith. " Let me see. It can't be 
 Martha Grubb. The Grubbs are in the country, but not of it, 
 as Mrs. Harbury says of the saints in the world ; and it can't be 
 the Stewponys, there's madness in the family. Besides, fancy 
 marrying a girl named Stewpony ! How Mr. Stewpony got a 
 wife I can't imagine. Let me see ! Perhaps it's Mary Harbury. 
 Oh, I see by your face I am right. I am sure I congratulate 
 you, Mr. Halfacre, with all my heart ; only I should have thought 
 Mary Harbury rather young to marry." 
 
 " So she is, Lady Meredith," I was beginning to say, but Aunt 
 Mandeville was too quick for me. 
 
 " So she is, Lady Meredith ; but when I say settled I only 
 mean that Edward has made up his mind, and that his suit has 
 my best wishes ; the marriage need not take place for some time 
 yet. They are both very young." 
 
 " So we are," said I, catching at any respite. " Besides, what 
 is the use of talking about settled when we know neither Mary 
 Harbury's nor her mother's mind on the matter ! " 
 
 " Then I advise you to do so as soon as possible," said Lady 
 Meredith. " These things ought never to be talked of till they 
 are settled." 
 
 " Well, perhaps I was a little too hasty in announcing it to 
 you," said Aunt Mandeville ; " but you are such an old friend, 
 and have always been so kind and good to Edward, that I 
 thought you would like to know that there was every prospect 
 of his being settled for life, and that by a marriage which not 
 only brings him a charming wife, but also rounds off both pro- 
 perties, and brings the Mandeville and Harbury estates into a 
 ring-fence." 
 
 " I think," said Lady Meredith, " people- sometimes think too 
 much of rounding off their properties' by a ring-fence, and too 
 little of the feelings of those whom their children or relations 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 287 
 0' 
 
 marry. After all, what is the good of land but to make us 
 happy 1 Why should we make ourselves unhappy for the good 
 of the land ? " She said this in such a sweet aud serious voice 
 that it was impossible for Aunt Mandeville to take offence, and 
 then she added : " Yes, Mary Harbury is a nice, sweet-tempered 
 girl, and I daresay they may be happy. I wonder, Mr. Halfacre, 
 if you will like your mother-in-law, always supposing that this 
 marriage comes about." 
 
 I now stood on a bit of common ground. No one far and 
 near thought Madam Harbury agreeable, so I answered : 
 
 " It may be very wrong to say so, but since you ask me, Lady 
 Meredith, I say at once that I don't like Mrs. Harbury at all. 
 But we are not married yet." 
 
 " Quite right, Edward,'' said Aunt Mandeville ; " but you soon 
 will be, and then I hope you will find your mother-in-law better 
 than you hope. At any rate, you need not be troubled with her 
 eccentricities more than you choose ; because, of course, your 
 home will be Mandeville Hall." 
 
 "How we go on counting our chickens," said Lady Meredith. 
 " I can't tell why I say so, but I feel as if this marriage were a 
 long way off. How do you know that Mrs. Harbury has not 
 got some other son-in-law in view 1 — some shining light out of 
 the Promised Land of Dissent 1 And how do you know that 
 Mary Harbury herself has not already made up her mine}/ in 
 another direction 1 " 
 
 "Oh dear, no!" said Aunt Mandeville, bridling -up a little. 
 " There can be no question of that. Mrs. Harbury will never 
 refuse her daughter to a Halfacre with Mandeville Hall behind 
 him ; and as for Mary, I am sure her heart is free. It would 
 be most ungrateful of her to refuse Edward just after he has 
 saved her life." 
 
 " Saved her life ! " said Lady Meredith, with a face of wonder. 
 " When did that happen 1 I never heard, a word about it." 
 
 So Aunt Mandeville had to tell the whole story of my fishing 
 Mary Harbury up out of the river, and how grateful Mary was, 
 and then she told her own particular version of the sleep-walking 
 adventure, and ended by saying, " And Edward has presented 
 her with a beautiful set of silver beads, and written her some 
 charming verses ; and if all these things are not steps towards a 
 declaration and a proposal, the world is quite changed from what 
 it used to be." 
 
 " I quite agree with you," said Lady Meredith, " that things 
 get rather serious when a young gentleman falls to writing love- 
 verses aud making presents to a young lady. .1 don't then see 
 how he is to withdraw, if he wishes it. She is then, you know, 
 
288 ANNALS OF .AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ' compromised ' " — Lady Meredith uttered this word as though 
 it were of the most awful import — " and he has no right to draw 
 back. A good deal, though, would depend upon the verses, as 
 no formal declaration had been made. I am only throwing these 
 things out, dear Mrs. Mandeville, to show what may be said on 
 the other side." 
 
 "Then read the verses, and judge for yourself," said Aunt 
 Mandeville ; and, in spite of my protestations, she took them out 
 of her cabinet, and gave them to Lady Meredith. 
 
 " Oh, Auntie ! you said you would, burn them. Why have 
 you not done so 1 " 
 
 Lady Meredith read my unhappy verses right through without 
 saying a word. Then she folded them up, and returned them to 
 Aunt Mandeville, still without a word. 
 
 " What do you say now 1 " said my Aunt. 
 
 " That the man who wrote those verses is bound in honour to 
 marry the young lady to whom they were addressed." 
 
 "But they were only addressed 'To my Mistress,' in old 
 English fashion," I protested, faintly. 
 
 " Then in old English fashion you are bound to marry the 
 girl whom you had in your heart when you sent them ; and, if 
 you did not do so, were I brother or kinsman of the young lady, 
 I would call you out and shoot you," said Lady Meredith, 
 fiercely. 
 
 "There, Edward! you see what Lady Meredith says. It 
 matters nothing that by a mistake they were lost, and not pre- 
 sented to Miss Harbury. The real question is the state of your 
 mind towards her, and for a man to write such verses to a girl, 
 and not to marry her, is an unpardonable insult." 
 
 " Well," said Lady Meredith, " you asked my opinion, and I 
 have given it freely. I don't mean to say the verses are not 
 very beautiful. They are ; but they are so warm and passionate 
 that no man of any right feeling can address them to a young 
 lady without following them up by a proposal of marriage. But 
 I must go home. I am glad to have seen you, and heard this 
 real piece of news." 
 
 " But you will keep it secret for the present, till I give you 
 leave," said Aunt Mandeville. 
 
 " Of course ; you may rely on me." And off the charming 
 creature went, radiant with life and beauty. 
 
 " There, Edward," said my Aunt again, " you hear what Lady 
 Meredith said. She is almost the only person in the world to 
 whom I would have shown those verses, and I knew you would 
 listen to her opinion with respect. It is clear that you have no 
 right as a man of honour to cherish such feelings in your mind 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 289 
 
 towards Mary Harbury without making a declaration of them 
 to her, and such a declaration I expect you to make at once." 
 " But, Auntie — " Tap, tap ! came a knock at the door. 
 " May I come in ? " said the cheerful voice of Mr. St. Faith. 
 " Certainly," said my Aunt, always glad to see the Rector. 
 He came in, and I left them together, while I rushed wildly 
 about the park, cursing my ill fortune which even enlisted my 
 best friends into a band of conspirators whose object was to force 
 me to marry Mary Harbury. 
 
 Coming back, I met the whole party — Colonel Chichester, the 
 Count, the Major, Twentyman, and the two young ladies. 
 
 " We knew you were engrossed by that charming Lady Mere- 
 dith," said Colonel Chichester, " so Toosy proposed we should 
 all go out for a walk, and here we are, coming back. What a 
 park this is, and what a pity the river makes that great bend 
 down below yonder, and gives such a lovely meadow, which 
 ought to be yours, to Miss Harbury." 
 
 "It doesn't matter," said the Major; "it won't be long, we 
 all know, before the properties are united." 
 
 " How can that be ? " said Mary Harbury. " I don't see how 
 they should be united ; do you, Mr. Halfacre ? " 
 
 " No ! I assure you I don't. I really don't know what Major 
 Plunger is talking about. Perhaps he is talking and walking in 
 his sleep. We all know he is a good sleeper, and perhaps sleep- 
 walking is infectious at Mandeville Hall." 
 
 At the same time the Count patted me on the back, and that 
 lout Twentyman kicked me on the ankle, just on the joint out- 
 side, as much as to say, " All very fine, my dear fellow, but we 
 know all about it." 
 
 The Count, who saw I was hurt, changed the conversation, 
 and said, " We have had a very happy time, chiefly owing to the 
 young ladies, and, though I say it, in spite of the ghost ; but 
 the happiest time must end, and our end comes the day after 
 to-morrow. That is the end of our week." 
 
 " But must you really go 1 " I said, rather clinging to them, 
 and afraid of "having too" much of Mary Harbury, if the Heavies 
 left us. " Must you really go ? I am sure my Aunt will be 
 delighted if you prolong your visit." 
 
 " You're very good," said the Count ; " but in a day or two 
 I must leave Warwickshire to go to one of the northern fairs. 
 My head-quarters will be Leamington all the winter. But 
 necessity and business leave me no choice ; I must go the day 
 after to-morrow." 
 
 " And so must I," said the Major. 
 
 " And so must I," said the laconic Twentyman. 
 
 u 
 
290 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Sorry for it,'' said the Colonel ; "we shall all be sorry for it, 
 except the birds ; they'll be very glad when you are gone, 
 Twentyman ; you have punished them worst of all of us. I 
 really don't think you have missed half-a-dozen shots." 
 
 " The shooting is very good," was all that this complimentary 
 speech got out of Twentyman, and yet I knew, even from that 
 single speech of his when I wanted him to try his luok with 
 Mary Harbury, that he was no fool, and could express himself 
 well enough when he chose. The fact was, he was lazy, and 
 would never speak even a little, lest he should be forced to speak 
 more. 
 
 " Is it over 1 " whispered Aretbusa. 
 
 " No ; Lady Meredith was there a long time, and then Mr. 
 St. Faith came." 
 
 "It will never be over,'' she murmured in reply; "and you 
 will get more and more into the mire with Mary until you will 
 not be able to draw back; then you will be swallowed up, and I 
 shall lose you. But it will be some comfort to every one except 
 myself— I daresay even to you — that the properties will be in a 
 ring-fence, that the river will no longer eat into your land, and 
 that both the properties will be rounded off and united, in spite 
 of all Mary Harbury's innocence and pretended ignorance, by 
 your marriage. I daresay it's all as good as settled, and that's 
 what my maid says is the talk of the servants' hall, where Mr. 
 Brooks dilates daily on -the absolute necessity of an immediate 
 marriage. No, Edward ; you will never recover that midnight 
 march about the house with Mary Harbury, of which Susan and 
 Mary Jane were eye-witnesses." 
 
 Now, here, to add to my woes, was Arethusa getting as jea- 
 lous as a peacock. I use the expression advisedly. I> am told 
 by my gardener that peacocks are " the jealousest birds as is," 
 and as a proof, the old peacock has just pecked one of his faithful 
 old peahens to death, merely for looking at a rising young pea- 
 cock. Yes, Arethusa was as jealous as a peacock, and twice as 
 beautiful. It was a great aggravation to my sorrow to find her 
 in that state ; nor was it very easy to pacify her, for she and 
 Mary Harbury now went about together like the London police- 
 men, who, ever since the Fenian scare, walk about two-and-two 
 by night. I believe Arethusa did it at last to watch Mary Har- 
 bury; and as to the absurdity of her being jealous of such a 
 girl, there is nothing that a woman won't be jealous of, if she 
 once takes the fit into her head. 
 
 " I don't trouble myself much," I said, " about what Brooks 
 says in the servants' hall. He has been an ass all his life, and 
 an ass, I suppose, he will remain to the end of the chapter. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 29l 
 
 Don't you know what Goethe says — ' That no man is a hero to 
 his -valet % ' And for a very good reason — ' not because the 
 hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.' Mueh the 
 same thing is meant when we say that no man is a prophet in his 
 own country. It means not that there are no prophets, but that 
 it is hard to make people who are of inferior minds, and who 
 see the prophets behaving in ordinary matters much as other 
 folk, believe in that prophetic gift which distinguishes the seer 
 from the mass of men.'' 
 
 " All very fine and very philosophic, I daresay ; but I wish 
 they would not talk in the servants' hall of your marriage with 
 Mary as a settled thing. Mark what I said this morning. The 
 wheat is already garnered for your wedding-cake." 
 
 " Then it shall be for my wedding with you, darling." And 
 I drew her under the Passion-flower again, and we had a recon- 
 ciliation which, if Brooks had seen it, he would have ordered the 
 church-bells to be rung, at least, and posted up to town himself 
 to fetch a special licence from Doctors' Commons. 
 
 But Brooks did not see us, and so the bells were not rung. 
 
 " When will you settle with Aunt Mandeville ? " again Are- 
 thusa demanded. 
 
 " To-morrow ; to-morrow." 
 
 * We all know what that means ; it means that it will never 
 be. Besides, to-morrow is Sunday." 
 
 " Then I swear it shall be on Monday without fail." 
 
 " Be it so, then. By this time on Monday there shall be no 
 more mystification between you and Mary Harbury, or — " 
 
 "Or what?" 
 
 " Or I will give you up," said Arethusa. " I was not born to 
 be trifled with!" 
 
 I pass over the dinner of that day. We lived by bread 
 alone. We all seemed thinking, and had we been all Twenty- 
 mans we could not have been more silent. Even after the 
 ladies left us, the men swallowed their wine as though we were 
 all drinking it to the solemn memory of our week's holiday, 
 now alas ! coming to an end. Nor were we any better off when 
 we joined the ladies. My Aunt was watching Arethusa, and Are- 
 thusa was watching Mary Harbury, who with exemplary patience 
 had got out a fresh piece of canvas, and was hard at work again 
 on her sampler. 
 
 My Aunt tried to get Mary Harbury to play, but she said 
 she would not unless Arethusa played too ; and Arethusa said 
 she wouldn't, and so there was, no music. Altogether the 
 week's holiday was likely to come to an end as dull as ditch- 
 water. 
 
 TJ 2 
 
292 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 At last I said in despair : 
 
 " I say, Twentyman, you never told us a story the other 
 night. Have you none to tell ? " 
 
 "No!" said Twentyman; "nothing ever happens to me. 
 You won't believe it, I dare say, but I never had a dream in my 
 life." 
 
 " But have you never heard a story that you can tell ? I 
 don't mean Sinbad the Sailor, but something that happened to- 
 some one that you have known." 
 
 " I had an old nurse," said Twentyman, " who used to tell me 
 stories by the score ; I don't mean lies, but stories like those 
 you told the other night." 
 
 " Can't you remember one % " for I was resolved not to let the 
 giant off. 
 
 "Yes, I can,'' said Twentyman, "and here it is; but mind 
 you I don't vouch for it. 
 
 "You must know my nurse was a Scotchwoman, and a 
 staunch Presbyterian, and very fond of going to the Kirk. 
 "When I was young my father lived in Scotland, and that was 
 how I had a Scotch nurse. This old nurse told me what I am 
 going to tell you, but it happened to her grandmother, not to 
 herself. In Scotland you know they are great people for pray- 
 ing, and towards the new year, — they don't keep Christmas, — 
 they are praying almost all day long. Well, this old grand- 
 mother of my nurse was very religious, — I suppose it ran in the 
 family, as my nurse was religious, too, — and one year she thought 
 she would go to an early service which the minister was going to 
 have in the Kirk. So she went to bed betimes, that she might 
 be up early, and she got up in the dark, and away she went 
 with her plaid about her down the street to the Kirk at the 
 town end — I think the town was the town of Pittenweem — 
 trudging through the snow in the bitter cold. Well, she got to 
 the Kirk all right, though it was quite dark, and glad she was 
 when she saw the lights in the chilly winter's morning. When 
 she got to the Kirk she walked straight to her place, and sat 
 down and looked round, and then she said she felt so scared, for 
 though it seemed that she knew many of the congregation, she 
 could scarce remember when or where she had seen them last. 
 Some she had never seen before, and could not tell whence they 
 came, though she knew every one in the town. Then the 
 Minister got into the pulpit and gave out a psalm, and all the 
 congregation sang it to a wild, old-fashioned tune. The Minis- 
 ter then got up and prayed, and after he had prayed he read a 
 chapter of the Bible and expounded it, and she said she had 
 never heard better doctrine. After that he prayed again, then 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 293 
 
 they sang another psalm, and last of all came the sermon, which 
 was very good. All the while she wondered where she had seen 
 the Minister before, for his face was not at all strange, only 
 it was so pale and wan, and the man himself was so thin and 
 haggard, it was a marvel his clothes clung to his body. Well, 
 while she was wondering, she felt some one pull her plaid behind, 
 and then a voice came, like a voice from a tomb, from a woman 
 that was sitting behind her : ' Elsie ! Elsie ! ' — that was my old 
 nurse's grandmother's name, you know, — ' gang your gate at once. 
 This is our service, and we are all the dead, who have our ser- 
 vices just as the living have theirs. Dinna look round, but gang 
 your way straight out of the Kirk, without looking left or right, 
 else you may be torn to pieces, for good and bad come to Death's 
 Kirk just as they do to the Kirk o' God ! ' 
 
 " ' You may fancy,' said my nurse, ' my grandmother was not 
 slow to take the warning, and yet she did not run till she got 
 out at the Kirk door, and. then she ran up the street, and all 
 the while she swore a pack of the dead ran after her and tried to 
 tear her plaid off her back, but she got home safe ; and I have 
 seen that plaid many a time, it was a Royal Stuart tartan ; and 
 when it was worn out as a plaid my father had it for a waistcoat. 
 When my grandmother got home she looked at the clock, and 
 saw it was not three o'clock, and that she must have got up and 
 gone to that service of the dead between one and two.' 
 
 " That was my old nurse's story, and she used to tell it in a 
 way that would make your flesh creep. She said her grand- 
 mother recollected the Minister, and that he had been dead 
 more than fifty years when she went to that service." 
 
 " A very ghastly, grisly story," said Aunt Mandeville. " I am 
 sure, Mr. Twentyman, that is not the only story your old nurse 
 told you." 
 
 " Oh, no,'' said the giant. " She used to tell me many more, 
 only I never thought you would care to hear them.'' 
 
 It seemed that story-telling was infectious, for the Count now 
 offered to tell us one. Yes ! we were all ready to hear it. 
 
 " This story," he began, " comes from the coast of East 
 Prussia, on the Baltic, and it's all about seals. I don't know if 
 you do know that all along that coast there are numbers of seals. 
 Now the seal is an animal which is supposed to be ' uncanny.' 
 It is supposed to be a beast, and something more. The fisher- 
 men fancy they are men when they please, and seals when they 
 please ; that they can take either shape at pleasure. You have 
 all heard of were-wolves, I daresay. Well ! these seals up the 
 Baltic are were-seals, for, as you all know, ' were ' only means 
 'man.'" 
 
294 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Here Major Plunger nodded his head, though whether it were 
 from an attack of sleep, or to show his approbation of what the 
 Count was saying, was not evident. 
 
 "Along that coast, too,'' the Count proceeded, "there are 
 numberless islands — the land is fringed with an archipelago, as 
 it were — most of them uninhabited, on which the fishers land 
 to dry their nets. Well ! one day a young fisherman of one of 
 the villages on the Frische Haf — that's the name of a great 
 lagoon up there — was rowing home by moonlight, when he saw 
 a lot of people dancing on an islet, and as he knew there were 
 no people living on it he pulled in to see what it was all about. 
 As his boat grated on the sandy shore down ran all the dancers 
 to the sea, and then he saw that they were all women. Some 
 old and some young, some ugly and some pretty. He saw, too, 
 that, as each of them reached the shore she caught up a sealskin 
 that was lying there, threw it across her shoulders, became a 
 seal on the spot, and waddled away into the water. 
 
 " He was a bold fellow, our fisherman, and knew what to do. 
 He just threw himself into the way of the youngest and prettiest 
 of the party, seized her sealskin, and kept it out of her sight, 
 and so she could not take her seal-shape, but was forced to re- 
 main a woman. 
 
 . " Well, she cried, and bewailed, and begged so prettily to have 
 her sealskin back, but it was no good. The lad was unmarried 
 and in want of a wife, so he put her into his boat and rowed 
 home with her. You may fancy how amazed his father and 
 mother were to see the-lading which their son had brought back 
 with him. At first the lassie was very sulky, and would hardly take 
 to them at all, though she could speak what they call German' in 
 those parts, quite as well or better than any of them. For some 
 time they wished to have her baptized, but she said she had 
 been baptized before by her own parson in the Baltic, so they had 
 her confirmed instead, and I daresay that did quite as well. 
 . " After that she got quite happy, and seemed to forget the 
 sea altogether, and they grew very fond of her. I told you the 
 young man was in want of a wife, and so, as his father and 
 mother were willing, he was married to the seal-wife, who had 
 no nasty cow's tail to drop off when the blessing was given, like 
 the lassie of whom I told you the other night. 
 
 " In due time they had children — one, two, three, — in fact, I 
 can't tell how many : and there was not a happier or handsomer 
 pair all round the Frische Haf than Eric and Asmunda. 
 
 " I must tell you that along that coast all the farmsteads are 
 down close to the sea, and that our fishermen are farmers also. 
 One day, when the barley was ripe, and Eric was busy reaping 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 295 
 
 it, his wife was sitting in-doors, and the children were playing 
 about in the byre. It so happened that one of them went to an 
 old chest that stood in the barn, and threw up the lid and 
 peeped into it. There he saw an old moth-eaten piece of 
 fur — an old sealskin, in fact — the very sealskin which Eric had 
 tossed away into the chest the night he came home with 
 Asmunda. 
 
 " Away ran the child with the sealskin to its mother. 
 " ' See here, mother, what I have found in the barn.' 
 " ' Give it to me,' said the mother ; ' this is what I have been 
 waiting for ever since I came here.' 
 
 " And without another word she threw it across her 
 shoulders, and waddled away down to the water in her 
 old seal-shape. 
 
 " Eric saw that there was some stir in the house, and, besides, 
 he heard the children screaming, for they were frightened out of 
 their wits, as you may fancy. He ran back to the house, and 
 down to the water's edge, only just in time to see Asmunda 
 swim off. He called out to her, and asked her how she could 
 have the heart to leave him and her children there on land, and 
 go off t<3 sea ; but she told him that she had been married to a 
 seal-husband before she had been wedded to him, that her seal- 
 husband and his children were waiting for her just outside the 
 surf, and with those words she dived into the water and disap- 
 peared." 
 
 " Well," said I, " there is nothing new under the sun. Scat- 
 terbrains told me he had heard that very same story in Shetland, 
 and I would have told it you myself, only I thought it too won- 
 derful." 
 
 " Have seals souls 1 " asked Arethusa. 
 
 " Who can tell 1 " answered the Count. " It is clear they can 
 be constant and faithful, for here this seal-wife went on loving 
 her old husband in the sea, and lost not a moment in rejoining 
 him as soon as she got back her seal-skin." 
 
 " What I want to know," said Colonel Chiehester, " is whether 
 that would be looked on as bigamy amongst the seals. As they 
 have their parsons and their marriages, I daresay they have their 
 courts, civil and ecclesiastical. It would be a nice question for 
 some of their lawyers, whether it was a crime for her to have 
 married Eric.'' 
 
 " There can be no crime in doing anything under duresse," 
 said I, and I looked hard at Arethusa, as much as to say : 
 "Never fear, I am not going to marry Mary Harbury against my 
 will." 
 
 "Now, I think, young ladies," said Aunt Mandeville, "we 
 
296 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 may as well depart before we hear any more of these wild tales, 
 or we shall have both of you walking in your sleep. Good night, 
 Edward. Don't forget to follow Count Manteuffel's wise example, 
 and bolt your door before going to bed.'' 
 
 Yes ! I did bolt it, as soon as I went upstairs ; but I did not 
 go to bed for hours, thinking how I might best have it out with 
 Aunt Mandeville on Monday. One thing, however, I beg you 
 all to believe, I dearly loved my Aunt, and in anything else I 
 would have given up my life for her ; but I looked on her deter- 
 mination to marry me to Mary as something altogether abhor- 
 rent to human nature, as a sort of slave-trade, and worse than 
 slave-trade, inasmuch as it dealt with souls instead of bodies. 
 " No," I said to myself, for at least the thousandth time, " I 
 will not marry Mary Harbury, and I will marry Arethusa 
 Chichester." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 SUNDAY AT MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 Next day was Sunday. How sweet was that day of rest ! 
 How happy I was not to have to go out shooting ! And what 
 a Sunday of Sundays it was ! 
 
 ' ' Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 
 The bridal of the earth and sky." 
 
 It was all that old George Herbert says. What a pity we must 
 take him along with us, and add : 
 
 " The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, 
 For thou must die." 
 
 I woke early ; for I was vexed at all that happened, and with 
 every one except Arethusa. I could not sleep. I threw open 
 the window, and saw all the park bathed in the clear, fresh 
 morning light. There was scarcely a breath of air stirring, 
 and all around me spoke "peace.'' 
 
 I remembered the text, " There is no peace for the wicked." 
 Had I been wicked ? — was it wickedness to bo constant to the 
 woman I loved, and who returned my love 1 No ! I could not 
 think it. Strong in that conviction, I dressed and went down. 
 There was Aunt Mandeville, looking as calm and peaceful as 
 the day itself. A thorough Sunday Auntie. There were 
 all the guests, except Major Plunger, — he always overslept 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 297 
 
 himself. Then Aunt Mandeville read those short prayers in her 
 sweet, low voice, which seemed to find you out, in whatever 
 corner of the hall you might be kneeling, and to speak to you, 
 and reason with you, and you alone. She was a model of 
 serious and yet cheerful piety ; quite unlike Madam Harbury, 
 whose prayers were twice as long, twice as severe, and only half 
 as effectual. 
 
 We all got up the better ; even Brooks was better. Then we 
 had breakfast, at which Aunt Mandeville would allow no light 
 or worldly talk. She said we ought to be preparing ourselves for 
 church, — not by reading 'The Whole Duty of Man, — that hideous 
 black book which Madam Harbury always had in her hand — 
 but by doing the whole duty of man, by thought and reflection, 
 and repentance for any sins we might have committed. She 
 was never much of a catechiser or crucifier. No ! Aunt Man- 
 deville thought that, as sin came from within, so repentance 
 should begin there. " You might as well blister a stone," she 
 said, " as lecture people whose own hearts do not tell them what 
 sinners they have been." Perhaps this was only another way of 
 saying, that " as the tree falls, so it must lie," and that " every 
 man must bear his own cross ; '' but, at any rate, it was a 
 pleasant way of saying it. 
 
 After breakfast we walked about a little on the terrace, or 
 loitered about the park, on the way to the old church, which, as 
 I told you, we had restored long before. Aunt Mandeville was 
 never late for church. It was a thing she could not bear. " If 
 it is a great breach of good breeding to be late for dinner," she 
 used to say, " what is it to be late in coming to the House of 
 God, to which all, high and low, rich and poor, are specially 
 invited?" 
 
 But she was never too early. He was never later in taking 
 her seat in that green baize pew — which had so offended the 
 Mercian archaeologists — than five minutes before eleven ; but I 
 do not think there was any one in the parish who could remem- 
 ber to have seen her there ten minutes before that hour. That 
 she called waste of time. 
 
 "It is possible to waste time on Sundays, just as much as on 
 other days," she used to say. 
 
 And now we are all at the church-door — I between Arethusa 
 and Mary Harbury, the Count with my Aunt, and the insepar- 
 ables — the Major and Twentyman — keeping close together. 
 Aunt Mandeville goes in first, as it were to marshal us and lead 
 the way. There is room for us all in the green baize pew, and 
 five minutes after we are seated the simple service begins with 
 the morning hymn. It was the good old-fashioned Church of 
 
298 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 England service. The psalms — much as it may horrify some of 
 the rising generation — were read, not intoned or chanted. Only 
 the versicles at the end of each psalm were sung by the school- 
 children. In short, there was very little singing throughout the 
 service, except at the regular times, and then more psalms were 
 sung than hymns, and very often the Old Version instead of the 
 New. We used to sing the Venite exultemus, but we never sung 
 the Te Beum or the Jubilate. There was an organ and an organist, 
 and the children sang well; for both Auntie and Mr. St. Faith 
 had good ears, and insisted that whatever was sung should be 
 sung well. 
 
 I do not think I ever heard any one read the Liturgy better 
 than Mr. St. Faith. He read it in a good, honest English 
 voice ; not in that half apologetic Oxford voice, that seems to 
 say : " I am ashamed of the Church of England and her Liturgy. 
 Forgive me, for I am only here for a little while — a bird of 
 passage on its way to Rome.'' 
 
 He read fast, too, but he did not gabble. His reading of the 
 Lessons was perfect; not at all that monotonous sing-song which 
 our Ritualists call reading. 
 
 What about his preaching? That is an unkind question. 
 Have I not already told you Mr. St. Faith was a bad preacher ? 
 When he came to utter his own conceptions, his natural modesty 
 seemed to overpower him, and he champed and chewed his words 
 till he made a sad hash of them. It was not that the sermons 
 were bad. If they had been written down and printed they 
 would have been thought good, as when he preached an ordina- 
 tion sermon, and the Bishop asked him to have it printed. Then 
 every one said, " What a good sermon ! Do you think Mr. St. 
 Faith wrote it himself?" In this, he was like Dr. Howley — 
 some time Archbishop of Canterbury — whose speeches were a 
 fearful infliction, because of his fastidiousness in choosing his 
 words ; but when you saw them printed, they were excellent, for 
 though he was long in finding a word, he did at last find the 
 right one. So it was with Mr. St. Faith ; it was his delivery — 
 and not his matter — that was contemptible.- 
 
 What did he preach on that day 1 I recollect it well. When 
 the sermon came I remember looking out through the open 
 church-door, away into the park beyond, and wishing I were 
 with Arethusa under a broad-spreading oak that stood there. 
 The freshness of the early morning had passed away into the 
 mid-day heat of September, and we had every window and door 
 in the church open. 
 
 Ah ! you do not remember the text, or you would not try to 
 take us with you across the park under that oak. I do remem- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 299 
 
 ber it, and here it is : " And Nathan said to David, Thou art the 
 man ! " You will say that it was hard to preach a had sermon on 
 such a text ; but it was not a good sermon. Mr. St. Faith, it 
 seemed to me, was trying all the time to find an excuse for 
 David. He wanted to shield the man after God's own heart, 
 when he had done the foulest and most cruel crime ; but he did 
 not make much of it. He was like an advocate who has no case 
 and abuses the opposite attorney. In this case Mr. St. Faith 
 attacked the devil, who had been permitted to tempt David till 
 he had fallen, and he made such an onslaught on him and so 
 entirely threw the blame on him, that one would have thought 
 David had been as much a mere tool in the hands of the father 
 of lies, as I had been — according to Madam Harbury — in saving 
 her daughter's life. 
 
 Perhaps I was more inclined to criticise the sermon, because 
 in no sense could I feel that " I was the man.'' I could have said 
 with as much sincerity as Samuel : " Whose pet lamb have I 
 stolen 1" I beg you all to believe that I had never thought of 
 any such wickedness. That's what you can all say, you say. 
 Well ! I am heartily glad to hear it. In these days, I suppose, 
 pet Iambs " that lie in a man's bosom " are never stolen ; the 
 royal race of Davids has died out. Again I say, I am glad to 
 hear it. Then, I cared little about it. It never occurred to 
 me that I could steal any one's lamb, still less that any one 
 would steal my pet lamb, my own Arethusa, away from me. 
 That they would have " no pity," as David himself put it so 
 touchingly. Perhaps I felt so strong, and sure, and safe. Per- 
 haps I trusted so thoroughly in myself, that I thought I — I 
 alone would be able to avenge any such injury, and visit the 
 offenders with worse vengeance than overtook David. 
 . Whatever it was, I did not like the sermon, and was glad 
 when the munched and masticated discourse was over. 
 
 Then we had a psalm, the Old Hundredth, and Morning Ser- 
 vice at Mandeville church was over. 
 
 I think it shocking in a young person of either sex not to feel 
 better and happier after going to church. I know some of your 
 old sinners will say that young and old alike are only glad be- 
 cause the service is over. That is quite a mistake. The satis- 
 faction young minds feel is at having done a duty. It is no 
 pleasure to you. You have either done it or not done it so often 
 that you are hardened and callous ; but the case is quite other- 
 wise with young blood. I say again, all young people feel happy 
 after church. How the old feel I do not care to know; nor does, 
 it much matter. The tree leans the way it will lie even before it 
 falls. Who cares how such warped and twisted hearts feel ? 
 
300 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 But there is one feeling which both young and old share after 
 church. If they are in good health, they are always hungry. 
 We were always hungry, famishing, after church at Mande- 
 ville Hall. What luncheons we used to eat, and how Brooks 
 gloried all the while ! It was so respectable ; all for the good 
 of the house. 
 
 When luncheon was over, Aunt Mandeville, between the 
 churches— yes ! if you did not like going to church twice on 
 Sunday ; if you grudged God three hours out of the holy 
 twenty-four once a week, you had better not come to Mandeville 
 Hall — between the churches, I say, Auntie used to go down to 
 the school and see the children, after they had eaten their 
 dinner. She always gave them a dinner, roast beef and plum- 
 pudding on Sunday ! " Poor little things," she used to say, " I 
 can't bear to have them catechised before morning service. It 
 is all very well for us, who have had a good breakfast, to go and 
 make them repeat the Lord's Prayer and pray for their daily 
 bread, when some of them have not had perhaps a morsel to eat. 
 No! they tell us it's ill jesting with a hungry man. I say it's ill 
 catechising a hungry child. Let us put some life into them first 
 with their dinner, and then let us see what their religion is 
 like." 
 
 Was not all this downright shocking of Aunt Mandeville? 
 In Ireland they would call it " meal-tub religion ; " but those 
 days were not these days, and Mandeville parish was not Ire- 
 land, and never likely to be, I hope. But whether you think 
 Aunt Mandeville's ways shocking or not, they were her ways, 
 and she had persuaded all the children in the parish to follow 
 them. 
 
 " Give me the children," said some one — or if some one has not 
 said it, some one ought to have said it — " give me the children, 
 and I don't care who has the parents." Aunt Mandeville cer- 
 tainly had all the children. I don't suppose there was a child 
 in the parish who did not bless her. 
 
 Then, when she asked them questions, she put them so fairly 
 and so tenderly. She was not always trying to catch and trip 
 up Betty Briggs, " our '' naughty little girl who never could un- 
 derstand the difference between " an outward and visible sign " 
 and "an inward and spiritual grace." Betty's parents had 
 migrated from Harbury into Mandeville parish, and Betty had 
 not been two weeks at school before she said, " Lawk ! what a 
 differ there be atween Madam Harbury and Mrs. Mandeville ! 
 I never can learn them answers in the Catechism ; but when 
 Mrs. Mandeville tells me how naughty I am, it makes me cry ; 
 whereas, when Madam Harbury did scold me, I used to laugh." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 301 
 
 Yes ! Aunt Mandeville understood children, and knew how 
 to manage them. 
 
 From the school we went to church — not to hear another 
 sermon ; there was only one sermon on Sunday at Mandeville 
 Church, morning and evening, turn and turn about. This I 
 know is enough to make some of us moderns die of disgust ; 
 but there had never been more than one sermon in that church 
 on Sunday in the memory of man, and there is not more than 
 one now. Was the parish any the worse for it 1 I trow not ; 
 and of one thing I am sure, Mr. St. Faith's one sermon was a 
 deal better than his two would have been. 
 
 After the prayers, the children were catechised in a plain, 
 straightforward way, and church was over in Mandeville parish 
 till that day week. 
 
 " What ! " says Mr. Eabid Eubrick, " were the saints' days 
 never kept 1 " No, they were not ; an awful state of things, 
 certainly. I have known a saint's day in London on which a 
 sermon, was preached by a clergyman who was a widower to two 
 widows, they being the whole congregation, — about Euth's 
 story, — that is, about two widows. I am not quite sure that 
 the time of the widower and the two widows was not wasted on 
 that saint's day, but perhaps they liked to waste their time. 
 
 No ; in Mandeville Church the great feasts and fasts of the 
 Church were kept, and religiously kept, and the days of the 
 apostles; but the days of St. Etheldreda, and St. Machutus, and 
 St. Swithin, and Edward King and Martyr, and St. Dunstan, 
 and St. Thomas of Canterbury, were not kept, though some 
 people would now be very glad to keep them. 
 
 Then, after evening church, you will, some of you, be sur- 
 prised to hear that we felt happier and better for the second 
 service. Between that and dinner we took, all of us together, a 
 Sabbath-day's stroll about the park, walking slowly and lazily 
 in a body, and cheering ourselves with rational talk. One great 
 sign of those times was that there was so much wheat in conver- 
 sation, and so little chaif, Modern conversation is very like the 
 burlesques which have invaded the stage, and seem to consist in 
 uttering one hundred bad puns and jokes in a minute ; as if one 
 good joke was not worth a hundred bad ones, or one true orient 
 pearl was not worth a thousand base French imitations. 
 
 Yes, on that Sunday we all went along the river bank. Are- 
 thusa would show them all the pool where we had been fishing 
 when Mary Harbury fell in, just below the pool, at a spot where 
 the river bed fell rapidly, gathering strength before the mill-race. 
 
 "Here it was,'' she said; "look, there are the marks of 
 Mary's feet as she slipped down the steep bank ; and there is 
 
S02 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the foot-bridge a little lower down, over which I crossed. How 
 frightened I was ! " 
 
 " Yes," said Aunt Mandeville, " it was a lucky escape — a pro- 
 vidential escape, I ought to say, for at all times and in all places 
 we are in God's hand." 
 
 Then she went up to Mary, and kissed her ; and Arethusa 
 kissed her, too, and called her "dear Mary." 
 
 As we men could not kiss each other, we stood idly by. I do 
 not know what we should have done had not Twentyman seen a 
 fat trout basking, and thrown a big stone at him. It made such 
 a splash that we were all frightened. Then we all laughed, and 
 turned, and went slowly back to the Hall. 
 
 The dinner ? Yes, the dinner was a cheerful meal. Still 
 there was no light talk, no stories of birds bagged, or hares 
 slain ; but genial, happy, pleasant conversation. We all seemed 
 to feel in love and charity with all men. Mr. St. Faith dined 
 with us. Whenever he was at the Rectory, and we were at the 
 Hall, he dined with us every Sunday. It was as much a matter 
 of course as either the morning or evening service. He always 
 sat by Aunt Mandeville's side, and he never failed to tell her of 
 any good work to be done in the parish. Ah ! you will say, " a 
 regular begging impostor." Mr. St. Faith was nothing of the 
 kind ; but he thought that Charity began at home, that 
 Aunt Mandeville's duty was to the poor about her, on whom, 
 as the money was spent under her own eyes, she could be 
 sure it was really spent on the objects for which her bounty 
 was intended. No ! Mr. St. Faith never begged beyond his 
 parish. Madam Harbury used to say indeed that his luke- 
 warmness in doing the Lord's work was shameful. " Why, Mr. 
 Knagger had sent out a thousand Bibles to the benighted 
 Circassians, not to mention his efforts for the conversion of the 
 Jews. She would be glad to know what Mr. St. Faith had done 
 in the same way." 
 
 Poor Madam Harbury ! She little knew, what I have since 
 known, that the benighted Circassians only valued the Bibles 
 because the calfskin binding of the Bible Society made such 
 good cartouche-boxes. The inside they converted into cartridges 
 to use against the Russians. 
 
 On that Sunday, while Mr. St. Faith was busy telling Auntie 
 that old Tom Thornycroft's cottage was a disgrace to the village, 
 and that if something were not soon done to it, it must tumble 
 about his ears, that the school wanted a new playground for the 
 boys, and the whole premises thorough draining — to all of which 
 Aunt Mandeville assented, as she always assented, to everything 
 of that sort that the rector suggested — while they were deter- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 303 
 
 mining good works to be done in the village, Count Manteuffel, 
 who was on Auntie's other side, had to talk to some one, and he 
 talked to Arethusa. Did I grudge him his conversation 1 Not 
 in the least. As Arethusa allowed me to talk to Mary Harbury, 
 and even took her to her bosom as soon as she was no longer 
 afraid of her, so the. Count was quite welcome to talk too with 
 Arethusa, for I had no fear of him. He wanted her to talk of 
 the White Lady, but this Arethusa most decidedly negatived. 
 
 " No ! I do not wish to speak of her. Besides, Mrs. Mande- 
 ville does not like it. It is Sunday too." 
 
 What he said after that rebuff I cannot tell. Colonel Chi- 
 chester had got into a theological dispute with Major Plunger. 
 They had been talking of the sermon, and the Major said, how 
 well Nathan put the punishment that was to fall on David on 
 the ground that he had " no pity." 
 
 "I beg your pardon," said the Colonel. " It was not Nathan, 
 but David, who used those words." Then when the Major said 
 he could not see how David could have used them, Colonel 
 Chichester called across the table to me : 
 
 " Is it not so, Halfacre ? Is it not David, and not Nathan, 
 who uses the words because ' he had no pity.' You are fresh 
 from Oxford and can tell us. Mr. St. Faith is too much occu- 
 pied with Mrs. Mandeville." 
 
 Yes ! I knew the text. I have told you already that I know 
 the Bible almost by heart. It was no trouble for me therefore 
 to say : 
 
 " And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man ; 
 and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth the man that hath 
 done this shall surely die. And he shall restore the lamb four- 
 fold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity." 
 
 " Quite like a book," said Twentyman. " What a memory 
 you have got, Halfacre ! " 
 
 Yes ! a memory ! After that I began to muse, and wondered 
 what good it would be, when a man's own pet lamb was stolen 
 from him, to give him four other lambs instead of it. As if 
 fifty lambs would be at all the same to him as that one pet lamb 
 which lay " in his bosom and was unto him as a daughter." 
 
 And so between musing and wonder on that particular kind 
 of sheep-stealing the dinner came to an end. The ladies retired, 
 and we soon joined them. Then we had some sacred music. 
 Aunt Mandeville was very fond of Handel. I- remember that 
 both Arethusa and Mary Harbury played some pieces of his 
 composition. " Angels ever bright and fair " was what Arethusa 
 played, and that air out of Judas, "Wise men flattering may 
 deceive you." Yes, it was all very peaceful and happy. That 
 
304 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 still Sunday had come like oil upon the troubled waters. But it 
 was bed-time. The day of rest was over, and we all went to 
 sleep with renewed strength for the troubles of the week to 
 come. 
 
 Observe ! Not one word of love had I spoken to Arethusa 
 all that day. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 HOW I HAD IT OUT WITH AUNT MANDEVILLE. 
 
 You will not believe me, for I see you look upon me as a weak, 
 vacillating nature, but next day, on Monday, after breakfast, I 
 did really have it out with Aunt Mandeville. It was the most 
 memorable moment of my life, and I dwell upon it certainly not 
 without pleasure at my own resolution, though with remorse, 
 even after this distance of time, at having been the cause of so 
 much pain to one of the best of women. 
 
 I remember she was seated at her davenport table, looking 
 over her letters, when I knocked at the door and went in. 
 
 It was about eleven o'clock, and it added to my pain to see 
 that Aunt Mandeville thought I was coming to tell her that I had 
 proposed to Mary Harbury and been accepted. 
 
 " Well, Edward," she said, looking up with one of her sweetest 
 smiles, "you have done what I wished, and spoken to Mary 
 Harbury, and now all will go well." 
 
 " No, indeed, Aunt, I have not yet spoken to Miss Har- 
 bury ; nor do I like to speak to her till I have asked you one 
 question." 
 
 " Ask it, my dear boy. I am sure any question that I can 
 answer, or anything that I can do for you and Mary, will be a 
 real pleasure to me." 
 
 The dear thing thought, I believe, that I was come to ask her 
 to make some further allowance, and that it was a question of 
 settlements, or some other of those horrid lawyers' devices, to 
 render marriage as odious and quarrelsome a matter as possible, 
 instead of being, as it ought to be, the smoothest and softest step 
 in the world. 
 
 " It is not anything I want you to do, Auntie ; you have 
 done too much for me already, and I have been very undutiful 
 and very ungrateful to you. It is only one question which I 
 want you to answer." 
 
 " Ask it then, child," said Aunt Mandeville, getting alarmed 
 at my serious face. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 305 
 
 " Do you agree with Lady Meredith in thinking that I am 
 bound in honour to marry the girl for whom I meant those 
 verses ? " 
 
 " Certainly I do. Lady Meredith only expressed my feelings, 
 though, as I must say she always does, in much better words." 
 
 " Then, Auntie, I am sorry to say I cannot marry Mary Har- 
 bury, for those verses were written and meant for Arethusa 
 Chichester." 
 
 Now, perhaps, you will think that when she heard this decla- 
 ration, which must have taken her as much by surprise as a 
 stray bullet finding its billet in a soldier's heart, Aunt Mande- 
 ville burst out into a fury, and so far justified that description 
 of her by my old nurse, with which this truthful stoiy began. 
 Whatever she might have been on the day I was born, whether 
 she really had been neither " to hand nor to bind," I cannot say, 
 but she had never been demonstrative in her anger all the time 
 I was with her. Though it was plain she felt deeply on this 
 occasion, when her dearest hopes were rudely dashed to the 
 ground, she showed no temper ; all she said was : 
 
 " Leave me now, Edward ; we will talk of this another time ; " 
 and she said it so softly that it might have been the answer to 
 a most 'indifferent question. But for all that I knew she only 
 felt it the more. 
 
 I must say, too, I was disappointed in my turn. I meant to 
 have had it out, and to have settled the matter then and there ; 
 to have declared to my Aunt that I not only would not marry 
 Mary Harbury, but that I would marry Arethusa Chichester. 
 I meant, in short, to have known my fate, and to have drawn 
 some declaration of her intentions from my Aunt in return. 
 But now everything was still in abeyance, except that I had un- 
 deceived Aunt Mandeville as to her delusion about the verses. 
 All that was positive was that the verses were Arethusa's, and 
 not Mary's, and that I had, by a Socratic process, extracted a 
 positive declaration from her that a young man who could 
 write such verses to a young lady was bound in honour to 
 marry her. 
 
 Observe here the inconsequence of the female mind. So long 
 as Aunt Mandeville thought the verses and the passion they 
 expressed were excited by the charms of Mary Harbury, she was 
 ready to forgive them and me, because she had set her heart on 
 my marrying Mary ; but as soon as ever she knew that it was 
 Arethusa's influence over me that had drawn them forth, she 
 thought them infamous and horrid, and wondered how I could 
 have sunk so low as to write them. 
 
 But, consequent or inconsequent, she wished me to leave her, 
 
306 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and I left her to herself, while I went to look for Arethusa. As 
 good luck would have it Mary Harbury was writing a letter to 
 her mother, no doubt describing the great progress she had 
 made with the new sampler ; the gentlemen were packing up 
 their things, or playing billiards ; but Arethusa was in the con- 
 servatory, under the Passion Flower. 
 
 " I have been waiting here for you to know my fate, Edward, 
 and I read it in your eyes. I see you have had it out with 
 Aunt Mandeville, and that she knows all. I see, too, that she 
 will not hear of our marriage." 
 
 " Don't jump to conclusions, dearest ; all my Aunt knows at 
 present is that you are the object of my affections, and that 
 those unhappy verses were meant for you, and not for Mary 
 Harbury. I could not tell her anything more, because she 
 desired me to leave her alone, and so I left her alone, and have 
 come to you." 
 
 " All that she knows is that I am the object of your affections ; 
 quite enough for her to know. I mean quite enough to destroy 
 any hopes of our union. I tell you, Edward ! " — and here 
 Arethusa turned on me as fiercely as if it were all my fault — 
 " Mrs. Mandeville will never give her -consent ; she will never 
 forgive me for having been the innocent cause of overthrowing 
 her plans. With me as your wife the Harbury and Mandeville 
 lands will never be united. She will never see them in a ring- 
 fence with me as her daughter-in-law." 
 
 " And what does it signify if she does not 1 Am I bound to 
 the soil like a middle-age serf 1 Am I not free to choose whom 
 I will for my wife ? Am I to be tied to Aunt Mandeville's 
 apron-string all my life 1 Can I not love you — ay, and work for 
 you 1 Say that you will have me, Arethusa, without Mandeville 
 Hall — only for my own self — and I will let the dead bury then- 
 dead ? Aunt Mandeville shall never make me marry any other 
 woman than you, and she may leave Mandeville Hall to Mary 
 Harbury or Major Plunger, if she pleases." 
 
 " Spoken like a man, Edward," said Arethusa ; "like the man 
 who jumped into the Avon to save the woman whom he did Dot 
 love, merely because it was his duty to do so. If you really 
 mean what you say, we may defy fortune and be happy ; " and 
 then, as she went on, she drew just a little closer to me, and 
 said : " But can I really trust you 1 And when will you show 
 me those verses which, according to your Aunt and Lady 
 Meredith, contain the whole gospel of love, and yet are so good 
 when meant for Mary Harbury, and so wicked when meant for 
 me." 
 
 " You can trust me, dearest ; I will promise you that." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 307 
 
 Then after a little pause, which you may all fill up as you please : 
 " Another thing I will promise you, and that is, you shall never 
 see those verses, of which I am heartily ashamed, till we are 
 married." 
 
 " How provoking ! " said Arethusa. " I believe, after all, they 
 were meant for Mary Harbury, and that's why you will not show 
 them to me." 
 
 " Tell me another thing," I interposed ; " has the Passion 
 Flower withered away, or is it bright and green, and blooming 1" 
 
 " It is as bright as ever. I hope it may never wither," was 
 the sweet reply, just murmured through rosy lips. 
 
 So there we sat in great love and joy under the Passion 
 Flower, oaring for nothing under the sun but our two selves, 
 and utterly indifferent as to what Aunt Mandeville thought, or 
 of what became of Mandeville Hall, so we two might love one 
 another. 
 
 The afternoon came, and the Count and the Heavies de- 
 parted. No one could have guessed for a moment, to look at 
 Aunt Mandeville, that anything had happened to ruffle her 
 temper. She was as graceful and courteous as ever, remarkably 
 so to Colonel Chichester and Arethusa, and when the gentlemen 
 departed she said to Count Manteuifel, with a most winning 
 smile, that she should be most happy to welcome him as an 
 offshoot of the old Mandevilles whenever he chose to pay her a 
 visit. 
 
 " That I certainly will not fail to do," said the Count, " as I 
 shall be in hunting-quarters at Leamington all the winter." 
 
 When they were all gone — the Chichesters, you know, and 
 Mary Harbury were to stay longer, — Arethusa said she wanted 
 to speak to her father about a letter to Aunt Buller, Mary 
 Harbury disappeared, and I was left alone with Aunt Mande- 
 ville. 
 
 " I have something to say to you, Edward," said my Aunt, 
 with a low but firm voice. 
 
 "What is it, Auntie?" 
 
 " I have been thinking over what you said this morning ; " 
 then, with a little trembling of her voice, she went on : "I need 
 not say how grieved I am to find myself so mistaken, I might 
 say deceived, — for you know when I asked you in town whether 
 there was anything 'between' you and Miss Chichester, you 
 said no : it seems you have been making love to her ever so long 
 behind my back." 
 
 She paused, and gave me time to put in a word. 
 
 " Not ever so long, Auntie. I indeed have felt drawn toward* 
 Miss Chichester for many months, — ever since we were at Ilfra- 
 
 x 2 
 
308 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 combe in fact, but when you asked me that question in town I 
 answered truly that there was nothing ' between us,' for up to 
 that time I was ignorant of the state of Miss Chichester's feel- 
 ings, and I had no reason to suppose till she came here that my 
 love was returned." 
 
 " See what harm may be done in a week," said my Aunt, 
 forgetting that the fire which had been smouldering for months 
 had only broken out when it found air. 
 
 Then she went on : " And are all my plans for your welfare 
 and the good of the estate to be thwarted because one pretty 
 girl takes your fancy instead of another 1 What fault have you 
 to find with Mary Harbury ? '' 
 
 " None ; but I do not care for her well enough to marry her. 
 I do not care one bit for her." 
 
 " Very ungrateful, after saving her life." 
 
 " That was my misfortune, not my fault. I don't wish that 
 Miss Harbury had been drowned, but I do wish that the miller 
 or Colonel Chichester — any one rather than myself — had dragged 
 her out." 
 
 " Well ! " said my Aunt, not at all relenting — in fact behaving 
 very unkindly, as I thought — " it is a bad business. Circum- 
 stances, every circumstance indeed, since you have been here 
 have so thrown Mary Harbury and you together, that I thought 
 Providence was bringing about in a wonderful way what I will 
 confess has been the darling scheme of my life. It was a 
 pleasure — a pleasure none can know who has not been alone and 
 childless like myself — to see you and Mary growing up together 
 side by side, and to say, ' One day they shall be man and wife ;' 
 and it is a pang to feel that the only obstacle to the fulfilment 
 of my purpose comes from you, from whom, if from any one in 
 the world, I have the right to expect a dutiful submission to my 
 desires. Were I disposed to be a tyrant, I might say marry 
 Mary Harbury, or cease to be heir to Mandeville Hall ; but I 
 am not so hard-hearted, though I will never give my consent to 
 your marriage with Arethusa Chichester. I will leave you time 
 to reflect and change your mind. When the Chichesters leave, 
 the baneful influence to which you are subjected will grow 
 weaker, and you will then see that the step which I desire you 
 to take is for your own good. Edward, I say, let bygones be 
 bygones. Forget Arethusa, as I am willing to forget your deceit 
 in making advances to her without my knowledge, and let us 
 ever be the dear friends we were a short year ago, and which 
 we should still have been were it not for this unfortunate 
 acquaintance." 
 
 After delivering this oration — for it was a downright oration 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 309 
 
 for Aunt Mandeville to utter — I suppose I made some impatient 
 gesture of dissent to the proposition for giving up Arethusa, and 
 as I was going to speak, Aunt Mandeville stopped me : 
 
 " I think you had better say nothing more about it now ; I 
 know your mind, and you know mine. In three months from 
 this date I expect you to be of another mind. If you are not, 
 it will be time enough then to discuss the matter further." 
 
 But it was not in human nature not to protest. I was better 
 than a worm. Why should I not have a worm's right, — the 
 right to turn ? 
 
 " Auntie," I said, " after three months, or thirty years, you 
 will find me just the same. I love Arethusa Chichester, and I 
 loathe Mary Harbury." 
 
 " The same thing has been said some million times, my dear 
 Edward, since love first came into the world ; but after all how 
 few, ever marry their first love, and what misery would it often 
 be to them if they did ! " 
 
 There was no use saying any more. Aunt Mandeville evi- 
 dently did not believe in my constancy, or in the sincerity of my 
 affections. She thought it a mere boyish passion. The only 
 way to convince her was not by talking, but by deeds. Time, 
 dear old Time, who is so much better to us than we deserve, who 
 is so just as well as so generous, would show. I resolved to 
 leave the matter in his hauds, little doubting that he would con- 
 vince my Aunt. 
 
 I left her then, and paced up and down the hall, in a vacant 
 mood. By-and-by Arethusa tripped along with a letter in her 
 hand. I never, no, I never saw her looking half so lovely. 
 
 " Do you know what this letter is written for 1 " 
 
 "How should I?" 
 
 " I'll tell you then. It is written to Aunt Buller to say that 
 we are going to start the day after to-morrow to pay her another, 
 visit. Of course I think, and Papa thinks too, that we oughtn't 
 to stay here any longer after what has passed. I always told 
 you he would do whatever I liked. You needn't be afraid, of 
 him, Edward. So by his desire, and with my own will " — she 
 said this resolutely — " I have written to beg Aunt Buller to find 
 some excuse for our going to her. Dear good creature, she is 
 sure to find one." Then in a far tenderer voice : " We shall' 
 have to part, Edward, you know, but perhaps it won't be for 
 long. Papa is really coming back to Leamington to hunt this 
 winter ; and though I am sure your Aunt will never care to see 
 me in this house again, it will be hard if I am so near, and we 
 don't meet sometimes, Edward." 
 
 " Going away, Arethusa ! Why, you were to stay a month !" 
 
310 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " You silly fellow ! I know we were ; but don't you see we 
 can't stay here any longer when your Aunt dislikes me so, and 
 when you have confessed your love for me, and she will not hear 
 of it?" 
 
 " And will you really go, Arethusa ? " 
 
 "We have no other course. Don't be afraid ; we shall go as 
 quietly as we came, and your Aunt will part with us seemingly 
 as good friends as when we came ; but don't deceive yourself, 
 this is the last time I shall ever set my feet in Mandeville Hall 
 so long as your Aunt lives : and may she live many years ! " 
 
 " And what am I to do, Arethusa ? What are we to do 1 " 
 
 " We are to be good and love one another, and hope to see 
 one another, and pray that your Aunt's heart may turn, though 
 I fear we shall find it as hard as Pharaoh's ; alas ! the days of 
 miracles are past. We must think of one another very often, 
 and be constant. Above all things, you are to trust me with 
 all your heart, as I trust you with mine. There, don't come so 
 close to me, or I shall burst out crying." 
 
 I am afraid this is a very doleful, heart-breaking chapter, and 
 no doubt any mother who has an undutiful daughter, will make 
 her read it out aloud over and over again, in order that she 
 may see the misery of any young person having a will of her 
 own ; and how sinful it is to have a feeling heart, and how 
 sin is always followed by sorrow. I am afraid, though, for all 
 that, young hearts will go on loving much the same as they have 
 always loved, till Doomsday ; and as for the dolefulness of this 
 chapter, I don't see how it can be anything else. 
 
 If you have ever loved, fancy what it is for two young and 
 loving hearts — knowing no law but their own — to be suddenly 
 torn asunder, just as they have grown together, and made to 
 bleed, because one of them will not grow towards another heart 
 in the opposite direction ; and all for what — that two estates 
 may be brought within a ring-fence. Oh, Aunt Mandeville ! 
 Aunt Mandeville ! good, and kind, and gentle as you were in 
 everything else, what misery you caused by your predestinating 
 me, as though you were my Creator, to many Mary Harbury ! 
 
 Pray observe, too, dear reader — you have followed me now so 
 long that I will call you " dear" — that all this while Mary Harbury 
 has made no more sign of love or affection for me than if she 
 had been a fish — could any of you have married a fish ? — I mean 
 a mammal fish, a whale, or a porpoise ; fancy the cold, clammy, 
 slimy fins of the bride or bridegroom ; — who would be a fish's, 
 bridesmaid, or his best man 1 who would perform the ceremony, 
 assisted or unassisted, with full choral service or without ? No ! 
 no parson, priest, or rabbi would do such a thing ; and yet, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 311 
 
 Mary Harbury's nature was that of fish, fishy. The only time 
 when I saw a spark of genius in her was when she was walking 
 in her sleep. What an awful condition for a husband to have a 
 wife, — a great genius when she was asleep ; how fitted she 
 would have been to sit at the head of his table, or to go out 
 with him to dinner. No ! my advice to every one is, never 
 marry a fish, not if you find a purse of sovereigns under her 
 pillow every morning. 
 
 I say again that Mary Harbury was a fish — a fish in taking 
 to the water — a fish in thanking me so coldly — a fish in being 
 afraid to go into the Count's room ; for fishes have no courage ; 
 a fish for walking in her sleep, and twice a fish for coming into 
 my bedroom in that swimming way ; a fish for walking about in 
 the cold and damp, — do not eels glide about at night, much in 
 the same " uncanny " way : are not eels fish ? Take my word 
 for it, when eels walk at night, they are walking like Mary 
 Harbury, in their sleep ; ergo, Mary Harbury was a fish. She 
 was a fish when she played — nay, worse than a fish ; for 
 dolphins are most musical, and saved the life of Arion ; but 
 Mary Harbury was not musical, and would have saved no man's 
 life. No — she was altogether flat ; flat as a flounder ; cold as a 
 cod-fish, and not at all unlike one about the eyes. I could 
 never have married such a creature as a fish, and so I could 
 never have married Mary Harbury. 
 
 I know it's a great shame to abuse her so, when she never did 
 me any harm ; but what will a lover not do when he is irritated, 
 and when another girl steps between him and his love, and tries 
 to take him away in spite of himself? At first, I was simply 
 indifferent to her, the more so because Aunt Mandeville wanted 
 to cram her down my throat ; but when I saw that she was, 
 innocently or not, the cause of Arethusa's — my own darling 
 Arethusa's — leaving the house, I looked upon her' as an 
 open enemy ; and so I have carried the war into her quarters, 
 and abused her accordingly. Why she was ever born, I can't 
 imagine, except to vegetate at home and vex me in particular. 
 
 There, I have abused her enough,^at least, for the present ; 
 and as I see Arethusa and her coming down the staircase, we 
 must be on our good behaviour, and very civil to her. 
 
 How that evening passed, I cannot tell. I know that Mr. and 
 Mrs. Grubb, and Mr. St. Faith came to dinner, and that old 
 Grubb was as vulgar as ever, and made some vile jokes, inter- 
 mingled with allusions, singularly out of place, to the gossip that 
 was going about the county as to my marriage with Mary 
 Harbury. Thank Heaven ! he got no encouragement from Aunt 
 Mandeville. Mary blushed, Arethusa frowned, and Mr. St. Faith 
 
312 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and Colonel Chichester fell to talking about local taxation, or 
 some other lively subject. 
 
 I sat next to Mrs. Grubb, between her and Mary Harbury, I 
 remember, and she did once say : 
 
 " La ! Mr. Halfacre ; and when is it to be 1 " 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " Why, your wedding with Miss H." 
 
 "All the world seems to know about it, except myself. I 
 advise you to ask the world when it is to be, and you may tell 
 them that the two persons most concerned know nothing what- 
 ever of the matter." 
 
 " La ! " said Mrs. Grubb, apologetically : " why, it's the talk 
 of all Warwick and Leamington. I thought, from what Mrs. 
 Mandeville said the other day, it was all a settled thing, and the 
 day as good as fixed ! I am sure I beg your pardon, Mr. 
 Halfacre." 
 
 " Freely granted, Mrs. Grubb; but do, there's a good soul; 
 pray don't say anything more about it. There is not a word of 
 truth in it." 
 
 In the course of the evening Colonel Chichester told my Aunt, 
 with infinite politeness and much circumlocution, that from 
 something he had heard — in this respect imitating the police- 
 men who, when they are describing the arrest of a thief, always 
 plunge in medias res, with that phrase — from something he had 
 heard, he should not be surprised if Arethusa and he were 
 obliged to cut short their visit to Mandeville Hall, which had 
 given them more pleasure than he could describe. Aunt Buller, 
 in her last letter to Arethusa, had mentioned something which 
 he was not at liberty to repeat, from which he had gathered 
 that it might be necessary for them to return at once to Devon- 
 shire. Mrs. Mandeville must not take it unkindly if they were 
 forced to hurry away at a moment's warning. It all depended 
 on the letters they might get by post. 
 
 To this most diplomatic speech Aunt Mandeville returned 
 another quite as diplomatic, and almost as long as the oration 
 which she had delivered to me in the morning. It had given 
 her the greatest possible pleasure to welcome Colonel Chiches- 
 ter and Miss Chichester to Mandeville Hall. Their presence 
 there had been a source of unmingled pleasure to her, and by 
 them, what she feared would have been a very dull party, had 
 been converted into a round of continual entertainment. No 
 one would regret the departure of Miss Chichester more than 
 Miss Harbury, who had found a companion delightfully suited 
 to her years and character. She trusted that a lasting friend- 
 ship might spring up between them, and that the two might 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 313, 
 
 often meet when Colonel and Miss Chichester were in that 
 neighbourhood. In conclusion, she hoped that the anticipated 
 summons from Aunt Buller would not be caused by any unplea- 
 sant occurrence. 
 
 " There," whispered Arethusa, who was sitting close to me — 
 I was not going to sit next Mrs. Grubb and Mary Harbury all 
 the evening, and that when the hours of Arethusa's stay were 
 all numbered — " There, just as I said — not a word about sorrow 
 at my departure, not a word of hope as to our return to Mande- 
 ville Hall." 
 
 When this remarkable conversation was over, in which it was 
 hard to say which of the two had told most white lies, Colonel 
 Chichester or Aunt Mandeville, the whole sounding very much 
 like those ministerial explanations called a " cross " in modern 
 parliamentary tactics, when the whole programme has been 
 arranged before between the parties, and one on each side is put 
 up merely to serve as a mouthpiece — when this was over, I say, 
 there was a spasmodic attempt at general conversation, in which 
 the unhappy Grubb, always destined to lead the forlorn hope, 
 greatly distinguished himself. To be sure, his fate was very 
 much that of forlorn hopes in general. He was beaten back 
 shamefully ; his scaling-ladders hurled down on his head as he 
 lay sprawling in the ditch, the object of universal derision. 
 
 " What's all this 1 " he said, with the rashness of a man who 
 feels his enterprise desperate — "what's all this I hear about the 
 White Lady ? The people down in the village say that she has 
 appeared twice at Mandeville Hall in one week. You know that 
 when she appears three times it betokens a death in the 
 family." 
 
 In vain Mrs. Grubb tried to stop him. " Dear John, do hold 
 your tongue." 
 
 " No, I won't ! " said Mr. Grubb, showing a stupid obstinacy, 
 suggestive of too much port, which indeed might have been 
 guessed from his rubicund face — " No, I wont ! I want to hear 
 all about it. - I appeal to you, Mr. Halfacre, for information. 
 As a magistrate, I say the village ought not to be frightened by 
 idle stories."- 
 
 "Just what I say, Mr. Grubb," said Aunt Mandeville. "I 
 am no magistrate, but I quite agree with you that the village 
 ought not to be frightened by idle stories, and I shall be obliged 
 to you if you will not spread them by taking any notice of 
 them." 
 
 " But they say," went on the indomitable Grubb, who cer- 
 tainly deserved the Victoria Cross for gossip shown in the 
 face of the enemy — " they say the White Lady was seen by 
 
314 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Mr. Halfacre, by Miss Harbury, and half-a-dozen of the 
 servants ; that she was seen carrying a lighted taper along 
 the hall, and that they all gave chase, but she took refuge in 
 the room in which Count Man — no, that's not it — Count Toif — 
 no, that's not it either, but Count something — that tall, yellow- 
 haired gentleman who was here the other night. Yes, in the 
 very room in which he was sleeping — it being her own room in 
 fact, and that when Mr. Halfacre and Miss Harbury, and all the 
 servants rushed in, all they found was the taper on the floor 
 smoking, and the Count himself sound asleep in bed snoring. 
 That's what the village says, and if it's not true, it ought to be 
 contradicted in the ' Coventry Standard.' Now, Mr. Halfacre, 
 I want to know how much of that story is true, as you were 
 present." 
 
 " There's not a word of it true. Neither I nor Miss Harbury, 
 nor any of the servants, saw the White Lady, as you call her. 
 So far from the Count's room being entered, the door was 
 locked. I assure you there's no truth in what the village says, 
 and it all arose out of a stupid mistake of two of the women- 
 servants, who were coming home late from Stoneleigh Feast, 
 and in their fright fancied they saw a great deal which never 
 happened." 
 
 "Dear me !" ejaculated Mrs. Grubb; "what stories servants 
 will tell. Why, we heard that all the servants at the Hall, Mr. 
 Brooks and Mrs. Jellybag included, had given warning on 
 account of the ghost. Dear Mrs. Mandeville, I really shouldn't 
 like to have a White Lady in the family." 
 
 " Make your mind easy, dear Mrs. Grubb," said Aunt Mande- 
 ville, with an aristocratic politeness which would have cut any- 
 body less obtuse than Mrs. Grubb into halves — "make your 
 mind easy. You are never likely to have a White Lady in your 
 family.'' 
 
 "I hope not,'' said the now utterly reckless and incorrigible 
 Grubb, " if all I have heard of the lady's conduct is true. 
 Why, it's the talk of the village that she killed her own child, 
 threw it ont of the window into the court-yard, and then went 
 and drowned herself in the moat. It would be no honour to 
 have such an ancestor." 
 
 Before he could do any more harm with his tongue, — and let 
 me tell you so much had never been said about or against the 
 White Lady at Mandeville Hall within the memory of man — 
 Mi\ Grubb was hushed up by his wife, and surrounded by me 
 and Mr. St. Faith, who, under pretence of showing him a new 
 flower, carried him off to the conservatory, and there explained 
 to his besotted comprehension, that of all things Mrs. Mandeville 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 315 
 
 hated, it was to hear any observations made about the White 
 Lady. 
 
 " It is not that she believes in the story, Mr. Grubb," said 
 Mr. St. Faith ; " but she does not like it. Least of all does she 
 like any village gossip about it." 
 
 " Oh, I see ! " said Mr. Grubb. " I'll never say anything 
 more about it ; but I thought Mrs. Mandeville might like to 
 know what all the parish is saying.'' 
 
 After that, we brought him back in a penitent state, and in a 
 little while he and Mrs. Grubb departed. 
 
 Mr. St. Faith followed, and then we all went to bed. 
 
 " Only one day more ! " Arethusa whispered to me, as she 
 bade me good night. 
 
 Only one day more ! And Arethusa had only been with us 
 ten days. This was what Aunt Mandeville's month had come 
 to, — and it was all Mary Harbury's fault. 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. 
 
 HOW I PARTED FROM ARETHUSA, AND HOW MART HARBURY 
 LEFT US. 
 
 I had little sleep that night, and in the morning I was up even 
 before the lark. You must remember that even larks don't rise so 
 very early in the middle of September. It was hours before the rest 
 of them came down. I express myself very badly. Imeanlwasup 
 hours before the rest came down ; I wandered about the park ; I 
 sauntered up and down the terrace ; I looked up at Arethusa's 
 window, as, I have told you, I stared at her bedroom window in 
 South Street ; I plucked a rose for her, and pulled it to pieces ; 
 another, and it shared the same fate ; they were the last roses of 
 summer, — not one of them good enough for her ; I went into 
 the conservatory, and gathered a nosegay of rare flowers. I am 
 afraid some of Aunt Mandeville's pets fared badly, as I plucked 
 bloom after bloom at random. I saw Susan and Mary Jane busy 
 at their work as housemaids, — I need not say they had thought 
 better of their notice to quit, and preferred to keep a good place ; 
 I saw Brooks emerge from his den, and look with fishy eyes — as 
 fishy as those which my fancy most unfairly gave to Mary Har- 
 bury — round the Hall, to see that no one had run away with 
 anything in the night ; I saw the footmen laying the cloth for 
 breakfast, — in fact, I saw everything that happened in a domestic 
 way that morning in the Hall ; and if any young gentleman is 
 
316 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 troubled with the habit of oversleeping himself in the morning^ 
 all I can say is, let him fall in love with a pretty girl, and be 
 just about to be parted from her for an indefinite time, and he 
 will be as wakeful and restless as Argus with his hundred eyes. 
 
 At last they came down, Aunt Mandeville as placid as usual. 
 I never saw her ruffled in the morning. Colonel Chichester, the 
 very pink of neatness and politeness. Arethusa struck me as not 
 looking careworn enough, seeing that our separation was so near. 
 See what an exacting thing love is, ye fancy-free young ladies 
 and gentlemen, and don't let the little tyrant into your heart. 
 If he is sulky or sleepless, or worn or weary, he expects all his 
 victims to be in the same plight, or he flies off at once into a 
 passion of jealousy. I even caught myself saying : "Why, she 
 looks as fresh as though she had slept twelve hours at least ; 
 and now I remember it, her -window-blinds were close drawn 
 down at eight o'clock." 
 
 But our separation was nearer even than I had expected. 
 Among the letters on the table was one from Aunt Buller to 
 Colonel Chichester. It could not have been an answer to Are- 
 thusa's letter, because you know that was only written the day 
 before. Colonel Chichester was a man of the world ; and, I am 
 sorry to say that such men sometimes tell fibs when it suits their 
 purpose. They are like what the Papists are said to be, — I dare- 
 say quite unjustly. They think the end justifies the means. Far 
 be it from me to accuse Arethusa's father of anything ; but it 
 certainly was odd, particularly after he had made that very 
 diplomatic speech the evening before, to hear him say to Aunt 
 Mandeville: "Just as I thought, my dear Madam'' — he only 
 called Auntie Madam on great occasions. He used it as sparingly 
 as the Lord Mayor's gilt coach — " Just as I thought, my dear 
 Madam. Here is that letter which I told you I was expecting 
 from Aunt Buller. She says she is in great trouble, and wants 
 us to go back to Devonshire at once.'' 
 
 " Dear me ! I am so sorry !" said Aunt Mandeville. Crocodile 
 I called her in my heart, to say such words, when I knew she 
 wished my darling had never entered the house. 
 
 " Dear me ! I am so sorry ! " said Mary Harbury, with a voice 
 of genuine sorrow. " How dull it will be to go back to Harbury 
 without you, dear Arethusa ! " ' 
 
 How charming is the ease with which young ladies fall in love 
 with each other on a week's acquaintance, and how fortunate is 
 the speed with which such affections are effaced ! 
 
 Arethusa to her credit, did not reply in such a gushing strain; 
 but she said something nice to Mary Harbury. 
 
 For myself I said nothing. Had I been free at all, I should 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 317 
 
 have wondered at the dexterity with which the Chiohesters were 
 making their retreat from an untenable position, and at the 
 courtesy with which Aunt Mandeville furthered their wishes. 
 
 "What a pity it is," said the Colouel, " that those railways of 
 which we hear so much, and see so little done, are nowhere ex- 
 cept on paper ! If they were in existence, and if one might 
 believe all those long prospectuses which the directors issue as a 
 bait to catch unwary shareholders, one might get into a carriage 
 at Birmingham and be carried right away into Devonshire. 
 They even have the face to say that they could run a train from 
 London to South Molton in eight hours, — what do you think of 
 that, Mrs. Mandeville 1" ' 
 
 " I shall think nothing of it until I see it. But forgive me 
 for saying, if you really mean to go to-day, and as railways do 
 not exist as yet in this part of England at least, that you ought 
 to take some steps for your journey. I shall be most happy to 
 send you as far as Warwick." 
 
 " That will do very nicely," said the Colonel, whose only 
 object was to leave Mandeville Hall as quickly as he could ; 
 " when we reach Warwick we will try and get to Oxford to- 
 night, and so post on, as we came, by Bath." 
 
 " After luncheon, then," said Aunt Mandeville, " the carriage 
 shall be at your service. I wish it had been possible for you and 
 Miss Chichester to have paid us a longer visit." 
 
 Aunt Mandeville spoke " possible," as I have written it, in 
 italics. Arethusa and her father and myself understood very 
 well what she meant, and so did Mary Harbury. She was not 
 the goose which Arethusa declared her to be. 
 
 So they were going, and going at once, in four hours and a 
 half. Fancy my feelings when I found that Colonel Chichester, 
 by his diplomatic storytelling had robbed me of ever so many 
 hours out of the twenty-four which when I got up that morning 
 I expected them still to stay. Yes, four hours and a half only ; 
 it was then ten, and at half-past two Brooks was told to order 
 the carriage to take Colonel and Miss Chichester to Warwick. 
 
 " Could Miss Chichester ever be ready in time 1 " 
 
 " Oh, yes ! Parkins was a famous packer." 
 
 How I wished that Parkins, — that was the name of Arethusa's 
 maid, — had never been born. What right had she to aid and 
 abet in carrying Arethusa away from me 1 Much in the same 
 way a convicted felon about to be executed complains of the 
 turnkey who brings him his breakfast — of which, be it remem- 
 bered, it is always recorded that " the wretched criminal partook 
 with avidity" — that he is shortening his life and hastening the 
 approaching end. 
 
318 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 In fact, I was -wild and dangerous with grief, and even silly in 
 my wrath. I felt very much like a child who runs and hides 
 himself under a bed when any visitor comes, and only reappears 
 to find the visitor gone and dinner over. Once or twice I thought 
 I would order my horse and ride over to Lady Meredith's, and so 
 escape the pangs of parting. But on third thoughts I resolved 
 to stay ; Arethusa would think me a coward, if I did not brave 
 it out, and that I could not bear. 
 
 I was rewarded by a last tete-a-tete with Arethusa, a very short 
 one, only for two minutes, when she shot like a sunbeam through 
 the hall into the conservatory in an interval of packing. She 
 had forgotten a pair of gloves, but I was enchanted to find she 
 had not forgotten me. Who can tell what we said and did in 
 those two minutes, when at every second of them Aunt Mande- 
 ville might have come upon us, thinking of nothing on earth 
 but ourselves, and in all the insolent security of parting lovers ? 
 Yes ! in such cases love is blind indeed, and being blind will post 
 no sentinels. Our words were as lovers' words always are in such 
 cases, repetitions — vain repetitions to all the rest of the world — 
 interjections, ejaculations, sobs and sighs. Shoulder to shoulder 
 and hand in hand we sat. No ; I will not tell you any more ; 
 the very recollection maddens me. But I remember, as one of 
 the things which I may tell you, that Arethusa said again, I 
 " need be under no alarm as to Papa. He would always do what 
 she wished, and he really wished to stay at Mandeville Hall, as 
 much — no ! not quite so much as I wished to stay ; only you 
 see there is no help for it ; 'no possibility,' as your Aunt so well 
 put it." 
 
 Then we swore always to love one another, and to be ever 
 faithful and constant. 
 
 Arethusa's last words still ring in my ears. 
 
 " Now my dearest Edward, if you hear any stories about me, 
 don't believe them, and rely on my not believing any about you. 
 There, go." 
 
 And then she shot upstairs again, and I saw her no 
 more. 
 
 After those two minutes all was the merest routine — the mere 
 mechanism of parting. Down she came dressed, looking as 
 though she were going to fresh conquests. Brooks was busy 
 speeding the parting guests, and the packer Parkins appeared 
 with a great nosegay which the gardener had given her, and 
 before she got up into the rumble she kissed her hand to Mrs. 
 Jellybag, who surveyed the scene from one of the upper 
 windows. 
 
 I was looking out of the window in a distracted state, hiding 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 319 
 
 my face from the rest of them, and pretending to see that their 
 luggage was all right. 
 
 After they had bolted their luncheon, the fatal moment had 
 arrived, a procession was formed from the condemned cell — the 
 dining-room, — to the scene of execution — the Hall-door. The 
 two criminals, the polite old Colonel and Arethusa, shook hands 
 warmly with all of us. To Aunt Mandeville Arethusa said : 
 " Good-bye, dear Mrs. Mandeville," and to Mary Harbury, 
 sampler in hand, she gave a kiss. To me she simply said: " Re- 
 member." Then she tripped down the steps to the scaffold — I 
 beg pardon, the family carriage — which looked to me as gloomy 
 as a hearse. Brooks, who played the part of Mr. Calcraft, 
 slammed to the door and turned the handle — and they were 
 gone. 
 
 " Now, Mary," said Aunt Mandeville, " come and take a walk, 
 with me. I want to go and see old Betty Blink, and after that 
 we can go round by the Rectory, and you can show Mr. St. 
 Faith your pretty sampler. Edward, I believe, is going out for 
 a ride." 
 
 How Aunt Mandeville arrived at that belief I am sure I can't 
 tell ; but, that it might prove true, I ordered that horse on 
 which I had been so anxious to ride over to Lady Meredith's in 
 the. morning, and rode him to Warwick to try to see some of the 
 Heavies. 
 
 Now it was a strange thing, but not the less true, that no one 
 was ever known to go to Warwick without meeting Major 
 Plunger. He was either at the barracks, or in the Castle 
 grounds, or at the curiosity-shop, or in the Beauchanip Chapel, 
 or in the High Street, or at the " Dun Cow," or at the " Bear 
 and Ragged Staff." Somewhere in the town he was sure to be, 
 and always walking about. In the hunting-season he went out 
 with the hounds, and when the regiment was exercised and 
 paraded he appeared on his charger ; but at other times he was 
 always walking. Nine times out of ten, too, Twentyman was 
 with him. 'And as the Major was five feet six and the Cornet 
 six feet five, endless were the jokes cut on them by their friends, 
 and even by strangers. I need not say that they were great 
 friends, or the Major would never have chosen the gigantic 
 Cornet to be his companion on the visit to Mandeville Hall. 
 
 As I rode over the bridge, I saw " Long and Short," as they 
 were often called, standing close together and looking down into 
 the water. 
 
 I do not know, though I had come to see some of the Heavies, 
 that I should not have passed this pair, as I was afraid they 
 might laugh at me about Mary Harbury'; but I think Major 
 
320 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Plunger must have had eyes in his head, for he turned short 
 round as I rode up, and said : 
 
 " Ah, Halfacre, how are you 1 " 
 
 " Pretty well. I am just taking a ride. The Hall is empty 
 again ; all our guests are gone except Miss Harbury." 
 
 " Why, I thought you said the Chichesters were going to stay 
 a month 1 " said the stolid Twentyman. 
 
 " So they were ; but urgent private business, — a phrase which 
 I believe you soldiers well understand, — called them suddenly 
 away this morning." 
 
 " And where are they gone to ? " asked the Major. 
 
 " To Devonshire, to see an aunt of Miss Chichester's." 
 
 " Tell you who'll be deuced sorry to hear that," drawled out 
 Twentyman, each word following the other far more slowly than 
 if it were extracted by a dentist. 
 
 " Who 1 " 
 
 "Well, 'Toif,' as the Major calls him. He did nothing but 
 rave about Miss Chichester all the way here ; only yester- 
 day " 
 
 This really was too good a joke, and I burst out laughing. 
 
 " What are you laughing at 1 " said the giant, bristling up. 
 I really believe he thought I was laughing at him. 
 
 " Oh, at nothing. At something which I was thinking about 
 before I saw you, and which came back on me just then, and 
 made me laugh. It was very rude, but I really couldn't help it. 
 And so Count Manteuffel raved about Miss Chichester. Pray 
 what did he say, and how did he show his raving ? " 
 
 " He said he thought you were a very silly fellow to fall in 
 love with Miss Harbury while Miss Chichester was in the 
 house, and if he were lord of Mandeville Hall — that was 
 his fine way of putting it — he would marry Miss Chichester 
 on the spot, and never think of Mary Harbury and her ring 
 fence." 
 
 " And that you call raving, — I call it common sense. Miss 
 Harbury is not to be compared, in my opinion, to Miss 
 Chichester." 
 
 " Ah ! but you sly dog," said Major Plunger, " you forget the 
 ring fence." 
 
 " Confound the ring fence ! " I burst out in a rage. " Let 
 me tell you, Major, that I don't care for the ring fence : nor do 
 I care in the least for Miss Harbury. I have told you so at 
 least twenty times, and yet you always cast Miss Harbury and 
 her ring fence in my teeth." 
 
 " Sorry for it ; sorry for you, for Miss Harbury, and for the 
 two estates,'' said Twentyman ; " that's what I call throwing 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE! 321 
 
 away an opportunity. Very like not purchasing a step when 
 you have the money lodged at your banker's." 
 
 "Just what I say," said the Major; "you'll go further and 
 fare worse. Besides, who's to marry Miss Harbury, after all 
 that happened last week, if you don't 1 " 
 
 " Nothing happened but what was accidental, and a man is 
 not bound to marry a girl by accident. I don't care who marries 
 Miss Harbury. She is a good, nice girl, I daresay, for some 
 other man, but not for me." 
 
 " Well, but it's all over the county," said the Major. 
 
 " I don't care. If you hear the rumour again, please contra- 
 dict it. But you were talking of Count MauteufFel. He is not 
 going to leave Warwickshire, is he ? " 
 
 " Oh, no ; not he," said Twentyman, with an odious grin ; 
 " he's too much smitten for that ; hit here ; " and he touched 
 his heart. 
 
 " Smitten with whom ? " 
 
 " With Miss Chichester, to be sure ; didn't I tell you he raves 
 about her ? Only this morning he said he must ride over to 
 Maudeville Hall to thank Mrs. Mandeville over again. Don't 
 believe him if he comes ; it is only to see Miss Chichester." 
 
 " Very silly," was all I said. 
 
 "Yes; but the wisest men are sometimes silly, and foreign 
 counts, it seems, are no exception. He reckons, too, on seeing 
 Miss Chichester very soon again. He will be hunting at Leam- 
 ington all the winter, and Colonel Chichester is bent upon doing 
 the same. So they are sure to meet." 
 
 " I don't think he has much chance with Miss Chichester," I 
 said, dryly. " The Count had better turn his eyes to Harbury, 
 if he is so anxious for an English alliance." 
 
 " Yes ; but you see, he, like you, prefers beauty to broad acres." 
 
 " By the way," said the Major, " I don't think this Toif worth 
 talking about. No English girl would marry a foreigner. I hate 
 foreigners ; but that's not what I wanted to say. I've got some 
 leave." He spoke of leave in such a matter-of-fact way one 
 would have thought the Horse Guards sold it by the pound. 
 " I've got some leave, and I'm going to spend it abroad — in 
 Corfu — with my brother, who's in the Artillery. You don't know 
 any fellow who wants a pleasant travelling companion 1 If so 
 I'm ready to join him. You can give me the best character. I'm 
 the sweetest temper in the world, and I never quarrel with any 
 one if they will only let me have my own way, and sleep, eat, 
 drink, and smoke as much as I please. In these respects my 
 habits are most regular ; and in the evening I sometimes feel so 
 happy that a child might gambol with me." 
 
322 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " A very poetical description of a very selfish fellow,'' said 
 Twentyman, out of whose mouth, as out of those of babes and 
 sucklings, wisdom often comes quite unawares. 
 
 "Well! Major," I said, "if ever I find anyone willing to 
 travel with you on those terms I'll certainly let you know ; I 
 suppose by 'happy' you mean the state in which British 
 officers are described after dinner in Irish novels. It's all gone 
 by now, I know. But that's what you mean by ' happy ' ? " 
 
 And with that I rode off, the Major shaking his fist at me as I 
 went, and calling out, " Remember me to Miss Harbury." 
 
 As I rode home I caught myself vaguely repeating several 
 times, " Raving about Miss Chichester," and then I thought, it 
 is simply ridiculous. He never made the slightest approach to 
 Miss Chichester, and, had he done so, I am sure she would never 
 have given him the least encouragement. He is very nice and 
 gentlemanlike, and an agreeable talker, and has seen the world, 
 but it seemed to me the only person who cared to talk to him, 
 and to whom he cared to talk, was Aunt Mandeville. I really 
 thought, as Major Plunger coarsely expressed it, he had taken 
 the length of her foot. But Arethusa ! it is too absurd. 
 
 It was late before I got back, and it was a relief to find that 
 for that night, Mary Harbury's last night, we were to have the 
 company of Mr. St. Faith. 
 
 He came, and was as pleasant as ever. Aunt Mandeville was 
 very grave, and Mary Harbury seemed very dull, with the dul- 
 ness of a bird that has lost its cage-mate and won't be comforted 
 for a season, — I don't mean a London season, but for a short 
 time. She was pining for Arethusa Chichester, into whose 
 arms she used to throw herself in that silly wild sort of way 
 which some young ladies affect, and which, I believe, means very 
 little. 
 
 I, of course, pined much for my Arethusa, and felt her loss all 
 the more, that I had not, like Mary Harbury, been always rush- 
 ing into her arms like a stage lover. 
 
 " How stupid Mr. Grubb was last night ! " said my Aunt Man- 
 ville. " If there is anything that I hate it is low village gossip. 
 If what the parish says of its betters is no better than those 
 fictions which Mr. Grubb brought with him and poured out so 
 heedlessly, the less we hear of parish opinion the better." 
 
 " It was very stupid of him, no doubt," said Mr. St. Faith, 
 who really in the kindness of his nature would have found an 
 excuse for Judas Iscariot; "but then you see, my dear Mrs. 
 Mandeville, we gentlemen had sat a little too long after dinner, 
 and on such occasions Mr. Grubb is sometimes not very tract- 
 able. He gets dogmatic and dictatorial, and is apt to lay down 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 323 
 
 the law. It is the old story, ' When the wine is in the wit is 
 out,' and we mustn't be too hard upon Mr. Grubb. I'm sure I 
 don't know how I should get on without him on the bench. 
 Mr. Edward is not yet a magistrate, and Lord Meredith is little 
 at home. There is, practically speaking, no man either at Har- 
 bury or Mandeville Halls ; so Mr. Grubb and Mr. Pursey and 
 myself have to do a deal of work at Petty Sessions, and I assure 
 you that, were it not that I and Mr. Grubb go hand in hand, we 
 should never get through our business, for, as is well known, dear 
 Mr. Pursey is not fit for much." 
 
 So he went on, throwing his shield over the social delinquen- 
 cies of Mr. Grubb, and finding a good word for him too, as he 
 had found for Betty Blink. 
 
 How grateful I was to him for helping us through that 
 evening I can never say ! When he was gone and the evening 
 was over I said to myself : " My first evening without Are- 
 thusa, and, thank heaven, my last with Mary Harbury." 
 
 Next morning Mary Harbury went away too. I believe she, 
 too, had urgent private reasons, but I never stopped to inquire 
 what they were. She thanked me again rather prettily for 
 saving her life, to which I am afraid I gave rather a rude 
 answer, that I " would have done the same for any one in the 
 world." I am not quite sure that I did not say that I would 
 have done it for any animal. Had I been the Count, of course 
 I should have said I would not have done it for any one else 
 except herself ; but then I was not the Count. 
 
 " Well ! I'm just as grateful to you all the same," said Mary 
 Harbury as she stepped into the carriage. 
 
 Did she take her sampler with her 1 I believe she did ; at 
 any rate we never saw it any more at Mandeville Hall. No doubt 
 any one who chose to take the trouble to test this most truth- 
 ful story, and to come, say all the way from Inverness, by 
 express train to Harbury, would find that precious sampler 
 framed and glazed in a black ebony frame in the village school, 
 as a> pattern to countless school children, past and to come. 
 Would, he find Mary Harbury still there ! I am not going to 
 tell you, but after so many years I daresay Mary Harbury's 
 sampler has worn much better than Mary Harbury herself. 
 
 What did Aunt Mandeville do or say while Mary Harbury 
 was going 1 Not very much of either. She was not very de- 
 monstrative. She knew, too, it was no use, after my declaration 
 of two days before, trying to make me like Mary Harbury just 
 then. She felt baffled and thwarted ; but she was like the 
 modern Greeks, nothing will ever induce them to give up their 
 "grand idea" of kicking the Turks out of Europe, and out of 
 
 t 2 
 
324 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Asia Minor too, and they go on nursing their project all the 
 more because it seems so hopeless. So it was with Aunt Man- 
 deville. 1 am as certain as I, Edward Halfacre, am of my own 
 identity, that, as Mary Harbury drove off under a volley of 
 kisses from her hostess, Aunt Mandeville said in her heart : " I 
 shall live to see them man and wife, and Harbury and Mande- 
 ville united in a ring-fence." 
 
 " Poor Aunt Mandeville." 
 
 " And what will you do, Edward 1 " she said as she turned 
 from the door. 
 
 " I was thinking of riding over to Meredith Hall and seeing 
 Lady Meredith, she is always so good and kind to me." 
 
 " A very good idea ; go by all means. It is a long ride, but 
 you will have a fine day. I wish though you would think, 
 Edward, that there is no one who wishes to be better or kinder 
 to you than I. But then," — and here came a bitter end like 
 the moral of a fable, — " you must not thwart my wishes." 
 
 With these words that most amiable female tyrant turned 
 away and left me to myself. In half-an-hour I was trotting 
 across the park to Meredith Hall. 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 HOW LADY MEREDITH GAVE ME GOOD ADVICE, AND I 
 TOOK IT. 
 
 You don't know where Meredith Hall is 1 You can't find it 
 on any map of Warwickshire, nor in any County History. 
 Well ! it is in my edition of Dugdale, if it isn't in yours. But 
 then my edition of that most excellent County History differs 
 from all others in being enriched with my own notes and addi-, 
 tions. When I bring it out you will have little trouble in finding 
 Meredith Hall. 
 
 Can't I tell you what it is like ? Oh, yes ! Meredith Hall 
 wasn't such a very old house. Nothing to be compared with 
 Halfacre or Mandeville Halls. It was only as old as the time 
 of Queen Anne, in whose days it had been built by Sir John 
 Meredith, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer — a good berth, 
 very much better in those days than it is now. It was an ex- 
 cellent house, rising up story after story, a great square, solid 
 mass, long, and deep, and broad. A thorough John Bull of a 
 house. A house a Bishop of the Established Church of those 
 clays, or any other man of mark and weight, might have been 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 325 
 
 glad to live in. It was rather heavy in style, and had a Van- 
 burgh look about it, though it was not built by him. Inside it 
 was most thoroughly comfortable ; the outside walls were thick 
 and solid, and so were the inside walls and partitions. You 
 might have been murdered in your dressing-room by a burglar, 
 and your wife in the adjoining bedroom would never have heard 
 your groans and cries. All secrets were safe in that house, — so 
 far as stone, and brick, and timber, and mortar, could keep them. 
 There were no draughts — hear this, ye modern builders !' — and 
 as for a smoky chimney, you might as well have expected to see 
 the whole Bench of Bishops smoking in wigs and lawn sleeves in 
 the House of Lords as to hear that a chimney had ever smoked 
 at Meredith Hall. Nay, I should say that it was more likely 
 that what I have said should come over the Bench of Bishops. 
 Their wigs and their lawn sleeves are almost gone. Some of 
 them smoke. What one does all may do. Smoking is the great 
 innovator of the day — the most intrusive element in modern 
 civilisation. You smell smoke, if you do not see it everywhere. 
 Ladies smoke, and the odour is sometimes detected in their 
 boudoirs. Yes ! I should say it was much more likely to see 
 the Bishops smoking in the House of Lords, than that there 
 should be a smoky chimney at Meredith Hall. Oh ! that I were 
 a Turk and a Pasha, or a Sultan, and that my Pashalic were 
 beyond Aleppo, where there are no newspapers, or that I were 
 the Sultan of Bournoo or Ghadames ; that I were a Sheikh, head 
 of all the Touarick Bedouins, and that I had an architect who 
 built me a house in which the chimneys smoked. He would 
 come before me, crawling on his belly, and when asked why they 
 smoked, he would say, as his brother architects say here, " It was 
 the wind, most illustrious Sultan." 
 
 To which I would return the following most gracious speech : 
 "Chok," — which is the Touarick for " enough," and more than 
 enough. " Where were the winds, and what were they doing, 
 when all the houses in the world which do not smoke were built ? 
 Did not God give winds at all times ! Was there ever a time 
 when there was no wind ? No ! But there have been houses 
 built which did not smoke. How, then, doth this smoke % " 
 Then, while the wretch lay grovelling on the ground, and calling 
 out " Aman ! Aman ! " which does not mean Amen, so be it, but 
 " Mercy ! Mercy ! " I should wave my hand to my chief execu- 
 tioner, — to my own pet Calcraft of Ghadames, — and say, "Mercy 
 to them that show mercy. What mercy has this fellow shown 
 to me, smoking me and my court out of our house at every change 
 of the wind, to the great inconvenience of the State ; making our 
 skin black and our eyes blind. For such wretches there is no- 
 
326 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 mercy. Away with him. Hang him up for thirty days in a 
 smoky chimney, on bread and water. Then, if he is cured of his 
 fault, let him build a trial house ; and if that smokes, let him 
 be hewn into quarters, and let the quarters be set up at the four 
 gates of Ghadames, to the four winds, North, South, East, and 
 West, which this idolater evidently worships, and to which he 
 offers, at my expense, this sacrifice of smoke." 
 
 That is what I would do to some of our English architects, if 
 I had them at Ghadames, and if I were Sultan there ; but 
 •being, as I am, only Edward Halfacre, I can but say that it is 
 shameful in an architect to build a house for a man, and then to 
 smother him with smoke. He will say it is the builder. What 
 is that' to me 1 Does not the architect stand between me and 
 the builder to protect my interest? Do I pay him five, or seven 
 and a half, or ten per cent, to cure me like a flitch of bacon up 
 a chimney ? Not to speak of all the laughter from one's kind 
 friends, who, when they call, say with a most malignant air, 
 " Oh ! I see your new house smokes ; " and the scenes you have 
 with your wife, who lays all the blame upon you, as being the 
 beast of burden nearest to her. 
 
 Well ! I am out of breath with architects. All I meant to say 
 was, that at Meredith Hall, as a proof of its great comfort, the 
 chimneys never smoked. Then all the rooms were so convenient, 
 so well lighted, and so warm ; the staircases were so easy, and 
 there were so many cupboards and recesses in the bedrooms and 
 on the landings for women to put away their " things," — cup- 
 boards and recesses, mind you, that did not stare you in the face 
 till they grew to be eye-sores, but modest, retiring cupboards, 
 that seemed to say : "Here I am, if you want to put anything 
 away." Not "Here I am, and you must use me.'' Bold, bad 
 cupboards those. 
 
 The servants' rooms, too, were so well planned and arranged. 
 No servant ever gave warning at Meredith Hall. Some of the 
 men sometimes died from beef-and-beer on the brain ; but, as a 
 rule, they lived on from generation to generation, and there were 
 instances of grandfather, father, and grandson being all indoor 
 servants, and all grown men. 
 
 Round the Hall there were trim yew hedges, and quaintly-cut 
 evergreens, and great avenues of limes, and, above all things, 
 clumps of those gigantic cedars for which Warwickshire is so 
 famous, — huge fellows, nigh two hundred years old, planted 
 perhaps from seed brought by Pbcock from the Lebanon, and 
 reared by Tradescant in his Physick Garden at Chelsea, in the 
 bad days of King Charles II. 
 
 This was the house in which Lady Meredith lived. 
 
Annals of an eventful life. 327 
 
 Lord Meredith was out shooting, but "my lady" would be 
 very glad to see me. 
 
 I put up my horse, and went into my lady's own room, all 
 hung with old silk and with looking-glasses of Vauxhall plate, in 
 queer, crinckly, Chinese gilt frames. Over the chimney-piece was 
 a picture by Kneller of Sir John Meredith, K.G., and Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer in the reign of Queen Anne. 
 
 " Very glad to see you, Mr. Halfacre. I hope you will stay 
 to luncheon. Have you come to tell me anything 1 " 
 
 " No, Lady Meredith, I have nothing to tell you. That is to 
 say, I have a good deal to tell you, only I scarce know where to 
 begin." 
 
 "Shall I begin for you V 
 
 " Yes," I said, really not knowing what to say, but feeling very 
 miserable. 
 
 " You are come, of course, to tell me about this marriage of 
 yours with Mary Harbury. I must say I thought you could 
 have done better ; at any rate, you might have waited longer. 
 You know I am one of those people who don't think so much of 
 ' rounding off ' estates. Land makes many of us miserable/' 
 
 " Of course I might have done better — I know that well 
 enough !" 
 
 " Why, then, did you make advances to Miss Harbury ; and, 
 above all things, why on earth did you write her those verses 1 " 
 
 " I never wrote her any verses." 
 
 " Not write her any verses ? then for whom were those verses 
 that I read, very warm and very beautiful, intended 1 Or were 
 .they mere imaginary, addressed, I mean, to an imaginary 
 object?" 
 
 " They were not imaginary ; they were meant for Miss 
 Chichester." 
 
 " I was right, then, after all. I thought I could not be mis- 
 taken after what I saw at Lady Onechicken's ball. But how 
 could your Aunt, who is one of the most sensible women 1 
 know, fall into such a delusion ? How do you explain that 1 " 
 
 " Aunt Mandeville," I said, " has so set her heart on this 
 match, that she twists and turns everything her own way, and 
 makes it fit into her scheme. I must own circumstances have 
 been much against me, but I beg you to believe me, on my word 
 of honour, dear Lady Meredith, that I have never said a word 
 to Mary Harbury that passed the bounds of the merest civility. 
 Let me tell you all about it ; it will ease my mind." 
 
 " Pray do ; I am ready to hear it." 
 
 So I had to tell her the whole story ; how I had loved Are- 
 thusa ever so long ; bow she had held me off ; how Aunt Man- 
 
328 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 deville had cherished in her own heart the wish to marry me to 
 Mary Harbury, but had never said anything about it to me ; 
 how, in the blindest way, she had asked Arethusa to Mandeville 
 Hall, never for an instant supposing that Arethusa could thwart 
 her plans ; how that happened which was likely to happen ; how 
 Mary Harbury came, and fell into the river ; how I had, as a 
 mere act of duty, to pull her out ; how my Aunt saw in this an 
 omen of success, how Arethusa and I, feeling safe for ourselves, 
 had taken to Mary Harbury, and got up the hoax about the 
 White Lady ; how we had been foiled by the Count ; how we 
 had run away, and I had lost my beads, and the verses addressed 
 "To my Mistress;" how the beast Brooks had found them, and 
 brought them to Aunt Mandeville ; how Aunt Mandeville had 
 jumped to the conclusion that they must have been meant for 
 Mary Harbury — more because she wished me to marry her than 
 for any other good reason ; how forgiving she had been to me ; how- 
 good in excusing the verses ; how that provoking Mary had lost 
 her head, and walked into my room in her sleep ; in a word, I 
 told her the whole story up to the time of her visit, and then I 
 took breath, waiting for her to say something. 
 
 " Well, all I can say, it's the strangest chapter of accidents I 
 ever heard of : but we well know, or at least we ought to know, 
 all of us, that the chapter of accidents is the bible of the fool. 
 No one is bound to bow down before accidents, or to give way 
 to them, but rather to withstand and defy them. Still, many 
 a man would have married Mary Harbury, if he had been half 
 so much thrown in her way as you have been ; and that yoii 
 have not been touched by her is the best proof that she is, as I 
 have always said, a very insipid, unattractive girl. She will 
 make some one a very good everyday wife, but she will never 
 satisfy a noble nature. I suppose your Aunt was rather in a 
 way when you told her that the verses were meant for Miss 
 Chichester 1 " 
 
 " I know she felt it very much, poor dear Auntie ; but she 
 showed it very little. But I am quite convinced that now 
 Arethusa Chichester is gone she thinks I shall forget her, and 
 that then she will make me marry Mary Harbury. I know her 
 heart is as set as ever it was on the match. At the end of three 
 months she will expect me to say ' yes ; ' and if I do not, I am 
 sure I don't know what Auntie will do." 
 
 "Poor fellow ! " said Lady Meredith ; " and tell me, now, are 
 you really so very, very fond of Arethusa Chichester 1 " 
 
 " If I am fond of her ! ' Fond ' is not the word ; I adore 
 her." 
 
 " That I call being an idolater ; what a life you would lead— 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE, 329 
 
 a man of your warm, wild feelings — with Madam Harbury. 
 You are well out of that marriage ; that is, if you are out of it. 
 Now, do you think your Aunt will ever consent to your marriage 
 with Miss Chichester ? " 
 
 " Arethusa thinks not. As for me, I know not what to think ; 
 ' never,' you know, Lady Meredith, is a long day." 
 
 " Yes, but it is heart-breaking to have to wait that long day 
 out before the desire of one's heart is fulfilled. Very much as 
 old Lord Alderbury said when he succeeded to his title at four- 
 score : ' Had it come when I had a feeling at my heart, an idea 
 in my brain, and a tooth in my head, fifty thousand a-year 
 would have been worth something; as it is, how can I enjoy it?' 
 And so it often is with these long engagements." 
 
 " Do you advise me to give up Arethusa VI said in such a 
 doleful voice that the tears started to Lady Meredith's eyes. 
 No, spiteful critic ! she did not have a main of tears always laid 
 on in a high service to her head. Lady Meredith very seldom 
 shed tears ; it was the hardship of my case that had moved her 
 heart, as it would yours, if you had any feeling. 
 
 " No," said Lady Meredith. " Besides, how can you give her 
 up 1 You must do anything rather than that ; but I warn you, 
 you will have much to give up — though I know not what on 
 earth one ought not to give up, ay, cheerfully and manfully, for 
 the sake of a true and faithful woman's heart. What do you 
 think of doing these three months, at the end of which we are 
 to see which has the stronger will — you or your Aunt ? It's no 
 use your stopping here, hovering about Leamington, in hopes of 
 catching a glimpse of Arethusa." Then, seeiDg I looked rather 
 downcast, " I assure you I speak as a friend ; you will find that 
 a wretched, shivering existence. -If the girl is fond of you, she'll 
 be more fond of you at the end of three months than she is now. 
 You must go away ; by so doing, you will not irritate your Aunt 
 any more ; she is very fond of you, and will long to have you 
 back ; and you will also escape her, whom you term, ' that odious- 
 Mary Harbury,' whom you will have often and often to see, if" 
 you stay at Mandeville Hall." 
 
 Lost in love as I was, and ready to give up years of life for 
 one little five minutes with Arethusa, I was not so lost that I 
 did not see the force of what Lady Meredith said. 
 
 " And if I go, whither am I to go 2 I have scarcely a friend 
 in the world out of Warwickshire." 
 
 " High time, then, for you, the friendless knight, to go out into 
 the world and make friends for yourself. I hate home-keeping- 
 youths. Better go out in the world in quest of adventures, like 
 the paladins of old. It is a great mistake to suppose that the 
 
330 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 days of chivalry are over. There is plenty of chivalry — I mean 
 plenty of adventure ; but, alas ! there are no knights. Now-a- 
 days a man comes home with eyes glowing with victory. What 
 in the world has he done, I should like to know 1 Killed a fox, 
 •or it may be an otter ; or he stalks about a hill all day, and kills 
 a stag, or fifty brace of grouse, or as many partridges, or a hun- 
 dred pheasants and two hundred rabbits. That's what our 
 knights have sunk to. As if there weren't wrongs to be redressed 
 and tyrants to be tamed all over the world, — nay, under our very 
 eyes, only we can't see them ; at least, our men — our landed 
 gentry, I mean, — can't. Keep a game-book, indeed ! I would 
 just as soon keep a diary ; the one is just as demoralising as the 
 other. But I am running away, or rather, my subject is running 
 ■away with me, which is worse. Where were we 1 Yes, Edward 
 Halfacre, you mustn't stay at home ; you must be off, and the 
 sooner the better. Why not travel abroad till Christmas ? " 
 
 Yes ! I thought that good advice. If I were to go away at 
 nil, and it seemed settled that I must not stay in Warwickshire, 
 I had better be abroad. All I bargained for was that I was not 
 to be expected to start alone. Man is a gregarious animal ! 
 
 " Now," said Lady Meredith, " I should have thought that 
 just what a despairing lover like you wanted was to be alone. 
 Let me see, who is there who could go with you ? There was 
 that stupid Major Plunger over here the other day, full of trouble 
 sit the thought of having promised to go" to Corfu to see his 
 brother in the Artillery, who is stationed out there. He is rather 
 a bore, and if you go with him you will have to take care of him, 
 for he confesses that he does not know one word of any modern 
 language. Is not that disgraceful 1 But he is a gentleman, and 
 ti good fellow. Why not go with him 1 " 
 
 " Why, that was the very proposition he made to me yester- 
 day, except that I had as little thought yesterday of going with 
 him as he had that I would go if I were asked." 
 
 " See what your Aunt says about it, and tell her I say, under 
 •all the circumstances — you may tell her that I know them all, 
 or not, as you choose — you had better travel. I have no doubt 
 ■she will see the matter in the same light as I see it. There ; so 
 that is settled. Let us talk of something else. How do you like 
 Count Manteuffel 1" 
 
 " Very well indeed ; he is very polished, and has so much to 
 say for himself. He is a little ironical, and even now I can't 
 make out whether his story about the White Lady was all an 
 invention, or whether he really did fancy he had seen her.. Sup- 
 posing him to have been awake and watching, nothing would 
 have been easier for him to have heard us outside, and then 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 331 
 
 rushed and chased us ; only, to turn the game against us ; and 
 then to excuse his pinching Mary Harbury's arm till it was black 
 and blue, to trump up his account of the apparition. Now, 
 don't you think, considering that he did do Mary Harbury's arm 
 so much mischief, that it is he, and not I, that ought to be made 
 to marry Mary Harbury 1 " 
 
 " Ah," said Lady Meredith, " but if he does that, what will 
 become of your Aunt's darling plan of rounding off the properties 
 in a ring fence 1 " 
 
 " He is not bound to consider that. And now I think of it, I 
 do wish he would marry Mary Harbury." 
 
 " Perhaps he may ; stranger things have happened in this 
 match-making world. Time will show. I have never quite liked 
 him ; he seems so sly, and so fond of pretending to know nothing, 
 when he is well informed about everything. How do we know, 
 too, that he has not, as foreigners and sailors often have, an- 
 other wife in his own ' fatherland 1 ' But here comes Meredith. 
 Now we must eat our luncheon in peace and charity with all 
 men and women, and forego scandal and gossip, which are to 
 him as shepherds to the ancient Egyptians." 
 
 Lord Meredith came in from the chase lamenting his bad sport. 
 In the days of Henry V., he would, like Hotspur, have lamented 
 the badness of his bag of Scots ; or had he gone to Agincourt, 
 he would have killed, on that St. Crispin's Day, as many French- 
 men as he had shot French partridges. If Lord Meredith lived 
 for anything, it was for sport. For sport he refused to sit for 
 the shire in the first reformed Parliament. He was au Irish 
 peer ; that's why he could sit in the House of Commons. If I 
 had anytime to spare from my own love and wrongs, I could tell 
 you some very amusing things of that election. For sport, he 
 always rushed off to Norway in June ; for sport, he rushed from 
 Norway to Scotland on the 12th of August; for sport, he bought 
 a deer-forest — the deer-forest of Ben Mac something — and, turn- 
 ing out men, who went away to Canada, he brought in red deer; 
 for sport, he quarrelled with his tenants ; for sport he preserved 
 pheasants and prosecuted poachers ; for sport, he allowed the 
 irrepressible rabbit to lay waste one of the finest parks in Eng- 
 land, and make their burrows under his ancestral oaks ; for sport, 
 in a word, he lived, and moved, and had his being. Nothing 
 pleased him so much as to get an unwary guest to go out with 
 him when the north-east wind was blowing, in January or Feb- 
 ruary, to take up trimmers for pike in an India-rubber boat on 
 the lake. Once his attorney came down — a man who always 
 wore a thick comforter, and who had never been known to sit in 
 a carriage with both windows down, for fear of the draught. 
 
332 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Well, the cruel Meredith decoyed this wretched man into the 
 India-rubher boat, and made him sit down in the stern. "Mind, 
 don't stir, else it will upset. Keep quite still, and I will row. 
 As we come to the trimmers, take them up one by one, very 
 carefully." Trimmer after trimmer did that poor solicitor take 
 lip for three mortal hours, his hands stiff with cold, his eyes and 
 nose watering, the hooks getting into his flesh, and each pike, as 
 it was drawn up, griuning and gaping at him. " What fun ! " 
 said Meredith : " this is something like sport. Take care of that 
 hook, or it will be into your thigh ; mind that big fellow at the 
 bottom of the boat, or he'll make his teeth meet in your calf." 
 By this time the bottom of the boat was filled with gasping pike, 
 all staring and flapping about between the attorney's legs. When 
 they came to land, Lord Meredith said he had never had a bet- 
 ter day with the trimmers. Cold ! He was as warm as a toast, 
 and so he well might be, as he had been rowing all the time ; 
 but his legal adviser, who couldn't row, and who had to sit there 
 shivering, he did not think it either such fun or so warm. Next 
 day he went back to Lincoln's Inn Fields ; and if he ever went 
 down to Meredith Hall again, I feel sure it must have been in 
 the summer. 
 
 Such was Lord Meredith, one of those idle apprentices whom 
 Providence sends into the world to show how needless it is for 
 some people to do any work at all. He had fine natural parts, 
 and would have been a much better Prime Minister than some 
 I have known ; but he was too idle. Of him one might parody 
 the words of the poet, and talk of him as one 
 
 " Who to sporting gave up what was meant for mankind." 
 
 For the rest he was the most generous, hospitable man in the 
 world, and except for this craze of sport would have lived in 
 peace and charity with all men. 
 
 " Glad to see you, Mr. Halfacre. Not seen you a long while. 
 How have your birds been this year ? As for my pheasants I 
 don't believe we shall have two hundred. My man isn't at all 
 lucky in raising them." 
 
 " We have had plenty of partridges ; but ours, you know, is 
 some of the best partridge land in the country. As for phea- 
 sants there seem to be lots of them, but we shan't be able to tell 
 till the 1st of October." 
 
 " Ah, by that time the poachers from Coventry will have got 
 into the coverts and cleared them out. I'm sure I don't know 
 what's to be done with the poachers. The law is strong enough, 
 but the magistrates won't enforce it. If 1 were in Parliament, 
 I'd bring in a Bill to make them do their duty." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 333 
 
 So he went on, dilating on the wrongs that game-preservers 
 suffered at the hands of poachers, quite forgetting that he made 
 poachers every year by the same process that his housekeeper 
 made jam — by preserving. Now let none of you suppose I am 
 one of those silly people who talk of " God's game," and of the 
 inherent right — the divine right they might as well say — of every 
 man to kill his neighbour's game. I do not agree with the War- 
 wickshire Anti-Game Law Association as to the game question 
 in general, nor with Mr. Muntz in particular as to rabbits. I 
 hold it, on the contrary, that a man's game, his pheasants before 
 all game, are as much his own to kill as his cocks and hens. 
 That is what I call an inherent right of property, the right divine 
 that all of us have to do what we like with our own, so long as 
 we do not break the law. I think there is no harm, but rather 
 good, in a man preserving game in moderation. It is over 
 preserving, sacrificing everything to game, keeping it in such 
 quantities that it eats up whole fields of grass or grain,— that is 
 what I object to ; and I think that a landlord who does so is 
 guilty of the sin of cutting off two blades of grass or wheat where 
 four grew before, and of throwing such temptation to his poor 
 neighbour as turns every hedge-stake into a bludgeon, and sends 
 many an honest lad to prison for egg-stealing or night-poaching, 
 only to come out a thorough reprobate — a recruit to the great 
 army of the dangerous classes. Here, too, the sin lies in excess. 
 No one but a sour demagogue can object either to shooting or 
 hunting in moderation. 
 
 Luncheon came to an end, I ordered my horse, thanked Lady 
 Meredith for her good advice, and rode back to Mandeville Hall. 
 
 " What did Lady Meredith say ? " asked Aunt Mandeville. 
 "I suppose you told her everything, as she knew so much 
 before 1" 
 
 " Yes, I did. She says she thinks I am not at all bound to 
 marry Mary Harbury, though we were thrown so much together 
 accidentally, that she does not wonder at your mistake as to my 
 affections. She thinks that no man is bound to marry a girl by 
 accident. She thinks change will do me good, and advises me 
 to travel for a month or two." 
 
 " Very good advice," said Aunt Mandeville. " Just like her. 
 She always takes a right view of things. That's why she has no 
 enemies. She is so just to both sides." 
 
 The fact was that Auntie saw at once that it was the safest 
 thing for me to do from her point of view. It would keep me 
 out of Arethusa's way, and, to her, Arethusa's way was harm's 
 way. 
 
 " And when and whither, Edward, do you think of going ? " 
 
334 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE, 
 
 "-That I'm sure, Auntie, I can't tell. I am not in such a 
 hurry to go at all." 
 
 " Ah, but you must go ! " she said, eagerly ; " you must take 
 Lady Meredith's advice. Such good counsel is too precious to 
 be -wasted.'' 
 
 " The only tour I have thought of, or ever heard of, would be 
 to go to the Ionian Islands with Major Plunger, who is going on 
 leave to Corfu to see his brother. What do you think of that 
 plan 1 " 
 
 " Well, I daresay he would be a good traveller. He sleeps 
 well, if he does nothing else ; and if you like your own thoughts, 
 he will not trouble you with much conversation." 
 
 " I must have some one as a companion : I can't go alone. 
 As to conversation he won't be so dumb as a dog, and yet some 
 people think dogs better company than men." 
 
 " A good dog is far better company than a bad man, Edward ; 
 but I don't think the Major'is a bad man. He will, at any rate, 
 be as good company as a dog, except that you can't beat him if 
 he misbehaves." 
 
 " What says the proverb, Auntie — ' None but a bad master 
 beats his dog.' " 
 
 "Very true, no doubt it is all the master's fault. Do you 
 think you would have been a better nephew to me now, Ed- 
 ward, if I had beaten you when you were a child 1 " 
 
 " I can't tell. But am I so bad now, Auntie ? '' 
 
 "Yes," said Aunt Mandeville, bitterly; "when you don't 
 and won't do what I wish." 
 
 We talked no more of my foreign travel that day. All that 
 evening we were like two beasts in the same pitfall, very much, 
 afraid of one another. My only consolation was that Mary 
 Harbury was not there with her sampler. No ! she. was safe at 
 home, eating bread-and-butter with her most virtuous and most 
 angular mother. Madam Harbury was so square that there 
 was not a round hole on earth that she would fit. No ! her 
 place was somewhere else. Perhaps even in heaven she has 
 found, or may find, that there is no place that she can fill. 
 Square here and square there ; round here and round there ; so 
 it will be, I suppose. I don't think I can say anything worse 
 of the Harbury establishment than to tell you they dined regu- 
 larly in the middle of the day ; that is only another way of say- 
 ing that they never had any dinner at all, only tea. Fancy life 
 without dinner, and your inner man incessantly deluged with 
 hot water, mingled with the juice of a plant which at once 
 attacks your nerves and your liver. I don't deny the virtue of 
 a cup of tea in season, but to dine on tea ! If you ask me to 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 335 
 
 agree to that; I say savagely, much in the same spirit as the 
 man made his famous declaration against church-going, that 
 more lives are ruined and more nerves shattered by tea than 
 by ardent spirits. 
 
 As you are a constant church-goer, you ask eagerly who the 
 man was who declared against church-going, and what it was he 
 said. The man was a wise man, but if 1 told you his name you 
 would pursue and persecute him, all you churchgoers. He 
 shall be, therefore, anonymous ; but you may call him John 
 Smith or Thomas Brown, and then abuse him as much as ever 
 you like. What he said was this : " More lives are lost than 
 souls saved by going to church." An awful fact, if true ; but 
 then it could be true only of a very damp church, as Mandeville 
 Church was before we restored it. After that both it and Mr. 
 St. Faith's sermons were dry enough. 
 
 But to return, Mary Harbury was safe at Harbury, and 
 Auntie and I were at Mandeville Hall. I really believe that the 
 only things Aunt Mandeville had much at heart were my mar- 
 riage with the Harbury estate and the White Lady; both 
 equally impossible subjects ; both incapable of solution. As 
 Mary Harbury was now a forbidden subject, Aunt Mandeville 
 turned to the other. She did so very much want to know the 
 truth of the matter about the Count's midnight visitor. Was 
 it all a dream, or a coincidence, or was it all an invention of 
 the Count's 1 
 
 "So odd," she said, after we had twisted and turned the 
 question upside down, and fairly worn it threadbare by discus- 
 sion. " So odd that it should have appeared, if it did appear, 
 to one of the family." 
 
 " I don't think, Auntie, so far as we can make out, that the 
 White Lady, who really gives us, or rather you, more trouble than 
 she is worth, and who, I must say, is behaving infamously to 
 you, seeing you saved her picture from the garret, and so res- 
 cued, her from oolivion — I don't think it is plain that she feels 
 bound to appear only to members of the family, I suppose Mr. 
 Blogg does not claim kin to the Mandevilles, and she showed 
 herself to him. Do you call Count Manteuffel one of the 
 family?" 
 
 " Certainly I do, my dear. You heard what he said as soon 
 as ever he entered the house. Manteuffel is only Mandeville 
 misspelt, and he has the same arms. Yes," she added, as though 
 thinking aloud, " I do certainly consider him a Mandeville." 
 
 " Perhaps, Auntie, if he invented the story of the White 
 Lady, he also invented the story of his relationship. Who can 
 tell 1 But I really do not think it much matters." There we 
 
S3G ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 stopped ; but I went to bed, feeling sure that Aunt Mandeville, 
 at least, believed the Count's story, and both his stories, and 
 that she felt the one — that of the White Lady's apparition — 
 was a proof of the other. She thought it was the White Lady's 
 way of acknowledging the connexion — a way that ghosts have 
 in their uncomfortable customs of showing that blood is stronger 
 than water, even in the gloomy regions beyond the grave. 
 
 " Shall I go with Major Plunger 1 " that was the question I 
 put to myself after dismissing the Count's claim as ridiculous. 
 Shall I go to the Ionian Islands with that worthy imitator of 
 the Seven Sleepers ? I made up my mind to go ; but for the 
 silliest reason in the world ; for the most absurd romance ; for 
 the same feeling which led myriads, and tens of myriads, to 
 perish in the Crusades ; for an idea. I really believe that I 
 went to the Ionian Islands, because somewhere in those parts 
 were those Acroceraunian Mountains, down which the poets tell 
 us the Fountain of Arethusa dashes so delightfully. There ! if 
 that is not the romance of love, and if going all the way to the 
 Ionian Islands for the sake of an imaginary fountain on the Al- 
 banian coast, be not a sacrifice of self for the mere name of the 
 beloved object, — if that be not only very silly, but very like a 
 lover, I am sure your hearts must be hard as the nether mill- 
 stone, and that you are one and all incapable of true sympathy. 
 Love is like the sun, I tell you. It takes up the meanest object, 
 clothes it in glory, till it dazzles all beholders — a bit of broken 
 glass, a grain of sand, a pool of stagnant water, and when love 
 is deceived, when the sun sinks, the true heart and the glowing 
 luminary are surprised to find that the source of all this radi- 
 ance, of this brilliancy surpassing gems of purest water, was in 
 itself ; that what it saw in those mean things and in the loved 
 object, was but a reflection of itself. So it was with me and the 
 Fountain of Arethusa. It was a name, and nothing more. But 
 it decided me which way to turn in my travels ; for was I not 
 full of faith in my own Arethusa 1 
 
 When I came down the next morning I told Aunt Mandeville 
 I was quite ready to go with Major Plunger. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 337 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 HOW I PAKTKD FROM AUNT MANDEVILLE. 
 
 I was to have gone over that afternoon to Warwick to tell 
 the Major that I had found a fellow-traveller for him in myself 
 if he would have me ; but he saved me the trouble, for he came 
 over himself to pay a formal visit of thanks to Aunt Mandeville 
 for her hospitality, and with him, much to my surprise, came 
 Count Manteuffel. 
 
 " Why, Count," said my Aunt, " I thought you had been 
 hundreds of miles away in Yorkshire. Did you not say you 
 must go in that direction ?" 
 
 " Very true," said the lemon-haired claimant to Mandeville 
 kinship. It was only in one or two words, and by a very slight 
 accent, that you could detect him, and "very,'' which he pro- 
 nounced "veray," was one of them. "Very true; but man 
 proposes and diplomatists dispose, and instead of going to York- 
 shire, I had to run up to town for a day to see my chief at the 
 Prussian Legation. Now I am back again, and going to York- 
 shire to-morrow. I thought I could not do better than come 
 over with the Major, and pay yoii a visit of thanks." 
 
 " Very happy to see you at all times," said my Aunt. " Our 
 party is quite broken up, and I shall soon be left here all alone. 
 Edward is thinking of going away." 
 
 " Going away ! " said the Count, with just a little start; "and 
 where is he going to ? " 
 
 "Abroad. To tell the truth, Major Plunger, we think of 
 asking you to take him with you to Corfu." 
 
 "Just the very thing I should like," said the Major. "I 
 asked Twentyman to go with me. He always goes with me 
 wherever I go; but I should much prefer Mr. Halfacre. He 
 knows foreign languages, while Twentyman hardly knows his 
 own, to judge by the extreme difficulty of getting him to 
 speak it." 
 
 "Well," said Aunt Mandeville, with -something like pride, 
 " Edward does know French and Italian pretty well. So if you 
 take him he will be some help to you." 
 
 " Nothing would give him greater pleasure." These words 
 were as much a stock phrase with Major Plunger as with 
 Colonel Chichester, and so the end of it was that in two minutes 
 it was settled that I was to go abroad with that gallant officer. 
 
 "You must be ready to start at once," said the Major. 
 
338 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Leave is like wine : it runs away when it is tapped, unless 
 you drink it." 
 
 " As soon as you please." Idiot that I was ! my heart was 
 set on seeing those Acroceraunian Mountains. 
 
 While all this was going on, the Count sat there, and said 
 nothing. Perhaps he was thinking all the more. When it was 
 all settled, even to the start for town the day after to-morrow, 
 he took up his parable, and said : 
 
 " Corfu is a garden of delight. I know it well. I know all 
 the Ionian Islands. My sister is married to a Greek, who is 
 Prussian consul for the Septinsular Republic. They live in 
 Corfu. What would I not give to revisit those gardens — that 
 Elysium of the old Phaeacians ? " Here Major Plunger gave me 
 a look which meant : " I'm quite out of my depth. Are you ? " 
 If Twentyman had been there he would have asked who were 
 the Phseacians 1 but as he wasn't, we all looked as wise as the 
 owls of Minerva, and the Count went on : " Those Islands of 
 the Blessed, with their groves of olive, orange, cypress, and 
 myrtle, always remind me of our own Goethe's — 
 
 ' ' Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bliihn ? " 
 
 or of your Byron's — 
 
 " Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle 
 Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime ?" 
 
 "Yes, if there was ever a land 'where the flowers ever 
 blossom, the beams ever shine,' it is Greece, and, above all parts 
 of Greece, the Ionian Islands." 
 
 Here we ought to have interrupted him, and said : " The 
 Ionian Islands were not then, at least, parts of Greece Proper." 
 He might have retorted that they were parts of Greece Im- 
 proper, which would have been the truth, but no one interrupted 
 him, and he went on : " How lucky are you, Major Plunger, 
 how still more lucky is Mr. Halfacre, with all his fresh feelings 
 and aspirations, in being able for the first time to visit a 
 Paradise which I, alas ! shall never re-visit." 
 
 Major Plunger had now swallowed as much of this gushing 
 rhapsody as . he could manage. He thought it time to stop it, 
 and did so by recalling the Count to earth, and asking him : 
 
 "As you know some one out there among the natives, 
 you might give us some letters of introduction." 
 
 " With all my heart," said the Count, who was now the 
 military agent he professed to be. " For Mr. Halfacre, in par- 
 ticular, I shall be able to find some ' veray ' nice letters of 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 339 
 
 introduction. When he does present them, he will forget even 
 the charms of Miss Harbury." 
 
 This was treading on dangerous ground ; Auntie looked a 
 little black, and the Count recovered himself by saying : " I 
 only meant I would give him a letter to a very charming Greek 
 family. As for the Major, he will need no introductions. Is he 
 not a British officer, and are there not seven British regiments 
 in the Ionian Islands 1 " 
 
 When the Count and Major Plunger took their leave, and 
 they did not take it till it had been finally arranged that we 
 were to start to London the next day but one, Aunt Mandeville 
 took a turn or two up and dowa the hall, and then she said : 
 
 " How poetical the Count was about Greece and the Idnian 
 Islands ! Something must have happened to him there. I 
 wonder what it was ? He must have travelied a great deal." 
 
 " Perhaps he was in love out there, Auntie, and been jilted, 
 or something of the sort. But then he would have said some- 
 thing about ' the loves of the turtle,' which Byron brings into 
 that introduction to ' The Bride of Abydos,' who was no bride, 
 by the way, but only about to be one." 
 
 " Who can tell ? " said Aunt Mandeville ; "there is something 
 very odd, and I must say very taking about him. He seems to 
 know everything, and to have been everywhere. Don't you 
 think him very clever 1 " 
 
 " Very, Auntie," and then I fell into a brown study, and 
 thought how very clever he would be if he thought himself able 
 to win my Arethusa away from me, and how impertinent it was 
 of him to " rave " about her to the Heavies. 
 
 My Aunt roused me up by saying : " You'll have to make 
 haste with your packing, Edward ; luckily you don't take so 
 much time about it as women. I wonder if you will want any 
 warm clothing 1 Do they wear flannel waistcoats in Greece 1 " 
 
 No one in the house could solve this knotty question, so a 
 compromise was made, and my portmanteau was filled with a 
 mixture of clothes for January and June, — I would have said 
 May, which has generally been supposed to be the opposite of 
 January, from the days of Chaucer downwards ; but I am not 
 going to pay the worst month in the year for weather the com- 
 pliment of calling it, even by implication, the best. No ! of all 
 the months in the year for frosts by night and fiukleness by day, 
 commend me to the merry month of May. If the poets had 
 done nothing more to merit the epithet of " liars,'' with which 
 that great father St. Crosspatch branded them, than call May a 
 merry mouth, and a month of flowers and sunshine, the appel- 
 lation would have been richly deserved. No ! so far as my 
 
 z 2 
 
34<0 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 experience goes, May clothing is winter clothing — there is no 
 difference between them. 
 
 That very evening all my packing was over. How Brooks 
 puffed as he tried to lock the portmanteau ! and how cleverly 
 he contrived to mislay the key, which was not found till the 
 next day. 
 
 All that night I dreamt of Arethusa and her fountain. Me- 
 thought I had scaled the precipices of the Acroceraunian Moun- 
 tains, and was just on the very edge of the rock basin out of 
 which the fountain sprang, when lo ! I slid down again, down, 
 down, down, to the very bottom of the hill. Then all my labour 
 was lost, and I had to toil up the precipices again, and to reach 
 the edge of the basin only to slide down again to the bottom. 
 So it went on all through the night, and I woke as weary as 
 though I had really scaled the Matterhorn. 
 
 Next morning I rode over to Warwick to look up the Major, 
 and of course I met him and Twentyman in the street. 
 
 " Twentyman's coming," was all that the Major said. " He 
 has got some leave, too." 
 
 So we were all three to go, and indeed they were both so full 
 of the cares of packing, and so very silent, that this fact was all 
 that I carried back for my pains in riding over. " Twentyman 
 is going too " was all the information I was able to give Aunt 
 Mandeville. 
 
 " Well ! I'm glad of it," said Auntie. " He is big enough and 
 strong enough to put to the rout a whole army of foreigners. 
 But you will have a deal of trouble in talking for them, Edward. 
 However, it will amuse you, and divert your attention from un- 
 pleasant thoughts." 
 
 How did I spend that afternoon ? 1 knew Aunt Mandeville 
 would have given a good deal had I offered to go over to Har- 
 bury. But I had had more than enough of riding over to Har- 
 bury. Auntie had not the heart to propose it, and it was not in 
 human nature that I should offer to do so. Thank heaven I 
 should soon be far away, never to hear for three months of the 
 ring-fence. I quite resolved that if the Major or Twentyman 
 dared to say anything about it, all the time I was with them, I 
 would run away and leave them in the lurch to speak for them- 
 selves. If they starved it would be entirely their own fault. 
 Who was it that used to say when he gave a dinner, and made 
 a point of introducing each guest as he came to all those who 
 had already arrived : " And now, gentlemen, if any one's grand- 
 father has been hanged, and any one else talks about it, his talk 
 be on his own head V So I say if Major Plunger or Twenty- 
 man misbehaved, as I have said, their starvation must rest on 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 341 
 
 their own heads. They had been warned over and over again 
 that I would have nothing to do with Mary Harbury. 
 
 But how did I spend that afternoon 1 First, I wandered all 
 over the house and tried to stand just where she had stood, and 
 I recalled all that she had said when I showed her over the 
 house. Every inch on which her feet had rested was holy 
 ground, and I fell down and worshipped at it. " Very silly ! " 
 Yes, very silly, but so natural. If you have ever been in love, 
 you will know what I mean. Then I went out into the park ; 
 down to the river, to the pool where we were fishing when 
 Arethusa and Mary came down, and Mary fell in. Did I wor- 
 ship in Mary's footsteps 1 Did I track her down to the brink 
 of the bank where she tumbled in % Not at all. Those foot- 
 steps to me were not holy, not more holy than those slips and 
 slides which the kine had made with their unwieldy hoofs as 
 they floundered down the bank to drink. No ! But where Are- 
 thusa had stood, like Diana, laughing at Mary, as she tried to 
 jump, and then across the wooden bridge over which she flew 
 like Atalanta, until she reached the mill-dam breathless, just as 
 I had brought Mary Harbury out. Yes, I knew the very spot 
 on which she had stood, and I recalled her words — ■" Well done, 
 and bravely done ! " What a comfort' it was to have pulled 
 Mary out, only that Arethusa might say those glorious words. 
 It was a sort of Legion of Honour of love granted for distin- 
 guished service in the face of the enemy. Dear me ! it was all so 
 sad, and yet so very delightful. And so it was all over the park, 
 ' — under yonder great oak, beneath that gnarled and twisted 
 Spanish chestnut, along that tall avenue of limes, and then I 
 remembered some verses which I had made and repeated to her. 
 Of course they were about' love, and love was speaking : 
 
 " In summer when the hay is mown, 
 I stand beneath the linden shade, 
 When thick the golden dust drops down, 
 And side by side lie man and maid ; 
 The bees are busy up above, 
 "While they lie idle lost in love." 
 
 Then as the shadows grew long I went back to the house. 
 What to do ? Can you ask ? Of course to sit under the Pas- 
 sion Flower. That Passion Flower in the centre ; there to sit 
 and recall all the sweet things, and words, and looks which had 
 passed between us two under that Holiest of Holies to our 
 young hearts. Ah, dear me ! how long it is ago, and how old 
 our hearts are now ! But then it was not so. I daresay the 
 Passion Flower flourishes brighter than ever. No hand can 
 
342 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 have been so profane as to hew it down. But what has become 
 of our passion and of our hearts ? 
 
 But I will not be down-hearted. I was not down-hearted 
 then. It was sad, but it was sweet to think that Arethusa was 
 gone, but that we were to be true to each other. Did I doubt 
 her 1 First love never doubts, it is as brave as a raw recruit in 
 his first action. Only old soldiers and heurtseared lovers know 
 the risks of their position. Doubt her 1 my faith in her was 
 such that it would have removed mountains, yes, the whole 
 snowy peaks of her own Acroceraunian Mountains, and hurled 
 them into the sea — into the Pacific, if need were. Doubt her ? 
 The heart that can ask such a question has never known what 
 love is, and deserves to be cast into outer darkness. No, I be- 
 lieved in her and trusted her to the uttermost. It was grief not 
 to see her, not to be with her, not to touch her, but it was a joy 
 and delight, a comfort to think of her and all the sweet things 
 she had said, and to know and feel that at all moments, and at 
 that very moment, she was hoping, trusting, and believing in 
 me. Yes, we were one in heart and thought, and I loved her, 
 as the Catechism says, " with all my heart, and soul, and 
 strength." There ! be satisfied ; I have told you all that I did 
 that last day. When the evening came I was alone with Aunt 
 Mandeville. 
 
 This is a very dull chapter. But you must remember that 
 life is made up of smiles and tears, of grins and groans — here a 
 joy and there a pang. So it has been, and so it shall be. 
 Happy he whose bread of life has the least sour leaven in it. 
 
 Yes ! that evening I was alone with Aunt Mandeville. The 
 dear, good Auntie, she had wished to ask Mr. St. Faith to come 
 and dine and cheer us up. But as I had spent the afternoon 
 alone with Arethusa, I wished to spend my last evening alone 
 with Aunt Mandeville. Had she not been everything to me 
 all these years 1 If I were her property, had she not put me 
 to good use? Had she laid me like the talent in a napkin, 
 hugging me all to herself ? Had she not taken the tenderest 
 care of me — sent me to school and to Oxford — been everything 
 to me, and gone everywhere with me 1 Had she not devoted 
 her life to me, and, in spite of this great idea of the ring fence, 
 was she not still dearer to me than anything in life — except 
 Arethusa ? Ah ! except Arethusa ! Perhaps you fancy I felt 
 remorse at behaving, as you call it, so " undutifully " to Auntie t 
 No, I did not. I felt nothing of the kind. I looked on my 
 heart as my own — as my birthright. My love had made me 
 free. I would not become a slave — no, not even for Auntie. I 
 felt sorry, — grieved at hurting her feelings and thwarting her 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 343 
 
 plans. I felt as much for her as any one could feel for any 
 other human being. But as no human being is exactly like 
 another human being ; and as I was not Eleanor Mandeville, 
 but Edward Halfacre, I was bound for the very sake of my own 
 identity to thwart her wishes on a matter of such vital import- 
 ance, that not to have my own will and way about it was death. 
 I applied Descartes' rule to myself with a slight alteration 
 suited to the need of the case. "' Amo, ergo sum," was what I 
 said to myself, or rather what my heart said to me ; and from 
 that hour I was not only a thinking but a loving being, and I 
 am sure I shall have every woman who reads this book with me 
 when I say that one loving being is worth ten thinking beings. 
 What a pitch of perfection must it be, therefore, when you 
 have the good luck to meet with both thought and love toge- 
 ther, and to marry, if you are inclined to push matters so far, 
 both a thinking and a loving being at once ! 
 
 You see, I begin to talk about Aunt Mandeville, and I glide 
 off after a few sentences into the old, old story — Love. It is 
 late. We will send the boy to bed, and return to Aunt Man- 
 deville. 
 
 There she sits in her easy chair, looking into the fire after 
 dinner. 
 
 After musing awhile, she said : 
 
 " Well, Edward, we are going to part." 
 
 " Yes, Auntie, but not for long ! Three months will soon be 
 over. I shall be back by Christmas. We will have a real, old- 
 fashioned Christmas this year. A Merry Christmas, such as 
 there used to be in olden times ! " 
 
 " Have you never had a Merry Christmas here before, 
 Edward ? " 
 
 "Yes, Auntie — more than I can count. In fact, all our 
 Christmases have been merry, except that one when I had the 
 whooping-cough. That was anything but a merry Christmas !" 
 
 " It is strange," Aunt Mandeville went on, in her musing way, 
 half talking to me and half to herself ; " it is strange, but I feel 
 as though I should never have another Merry Christmas ! " 
 
 " Oh ! Auntie — you are dull at parting, that is all. We shall 
 spend many more happy hours together ! " 
 
 " It may be, Edward, — it may be." Then she went on in her 
 musing way : " But when one has cherished a thing for years 
 and years, kept a thought deep planted in one's heart, — seen it 
 grow and thrive for a while ; it gives one a shock to see it cut 
 off and its roots torn out by the very hands one hoped would 
 tend and protect it till it grew to be a tree. I do not say it is 
 your fault, Edward ; perhaps it is my own fault ; but I did not 
 
344 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 think that it was you — you, my own foster-child — who would 
 have been the obstacle to your marriage with Mary Harbury. 
 Her mother might have refused to sanction the match ', well 
 and good. From such a woman as Mrs. Harbury anything was 
 to be expected likely to irritate and thwart. But that the blow 
 should come from you gives it tenfold force." 
 
 " Dear Auntie, what can I do 1 " 
 
 " That is just it, Edward. I do not see what you can do 
 now, but at first you might have done a good deal. You might 
 have told me sooner, instead of deceiving me when I asked you 
 the question outright. Now, you see, I am committed to one 
 love, and you to another. Do you think in three months you 
 will have forgotten Arethusa Chichester ? " 
 
 " No, Auntie, not iu a thousand years ! " 
 
 " Say you will forget her ! " said Aunt Mandeville, with an 
 imploring voice, much more touching than if she had stormed 
 and scolded. 
 
 " Never, Auntie, never ! It cannot be." 
 
 " She may be false — she may forget you. Women are fickle." 
 
 " I will never believe it. I am sure she will never forget me ; 
 and if women are fickle, though I don't know it, Arethusa will 
 be the bright exception that proves the rule ! " 
 
 I suppose Auntie saw it was no use trying to shake my faith, 
 for she ceased to torment me, and we talked of money, of divi- 
 dends, bankers' books, balances, circular notes, and crossed 
 cheques, till my head reeled with business. Though Auntie had 
 been so put out, and was still so bent on having her own way, 
 she was very good about money. The transfer of her ,£20,000 
 Consols had been made, and I was now a Fundholder with that 
 amount standing to the credit of Edward Halfacre of Mandeville 
 Hall, Warwickshire, in the books of the Bank of England. Did 
 it make me any happier ? Not a bit. In those days I knew 
 nothing of the value of money. I had always more than I could 
 spend, and that was enough for me. Yes, Aunt Mandeville was 
 very liberal. 
 
 When we had done what she called " brought over," in other 
 words, accounts and business, she looked at me wistfully for a 
 little while. Then she said : 
 
 " God bless you, Edward ! In all but one thing you have 
 been very good and dutiful to me. May God turn and not 
 harden your heart against me ! Good night, I shall be up in 
 the morning to see you go." 
 
 I threw my arms round her and embraced her, and she gave 
 me a kiss. We were not at all a kissing family on either side. 
 It was only on very great and solemn occasions that we made 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 345 
 
 up our mouths and minds to give any one that token of affec- 
 tion. We were not like some fathers and mothers of families, 
 always quarrelling and always rushing into one another's arms to 
 make it up. We never quarrelled at Mandeville Hall except 
 when there was something worth a quarrel — this marriage with 
 Mary Harbury, for instance ; and we never kissed except on 
 great occasions like this departure of mine. Above all things, 
 we never kissed in public before strangers. In this respect, at 
 least, we were a bright example to this gushing generation, who 
 kiss and quarrel, quarrel and kiss, in public and private, in 
 season and out of season, at all hours, and on the most absurd 
 and ridiculous grounds. 
 
 Before I went to bed that night I wrote the following letter 
 to Colonel Chichester : 
 
 "Mandeville Hall, 
 
 "September, 183 — . 
 "Dear Colonel Chichester, 
 
 " As you said you would be glad to hear from me, I 
 write to say that I have made up my mind to go abroad for 
 three months. My Aunt thinks it will be the best thing for 
 me to do between this and Christmas, and I quite agree with 
 her. While I am abroad at any rate no one can say that I am 
 always at Harbury, and I shall escape being perpetually re- 
 minded of the ' ring fence.' As I hear you are coming to hunt 
 this winter at Leamington, I hope to find you and Miss Chi- 
 chester there when I come back. Pray give my best regards to 
 Miss Chichester, and believe me, 
 
 " Very truly yours, 
 
 "Edward Haleaore." 
 
 It was not long, but it was to the purpose, and it would keep 
 Arethusa informed of my movements. It was not true, though, 
 that he had said he would be glad to hear from me ; but, 
 from what Arethusa had said, I knew I might write to him as 
 I did. After that I went to bed and slept soundly. 
 
 Next morning at seven o'clock I was to start ; to be driven 
 over to Warwick to catch the Highflyer for London. It was a 
 raw cold morning, but Aunt Mandeville was up to see me off. 
 She was as good as her word. She made the tea, she put sugar 
 and cream into it ; she handed me toast — everything. She 
 would not let the servants do anything for me. It was not 
 Brooks, he only showed his face just as I got into the carriage. 
 It was too early for him. No ! she had risen to see the last of 
 me. I saw she felt my going very much, dear old Auntie ! 
 
346 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Yet she was not so very old. Quite young I should say now if 
 you asked me her age. She said little or nothing, but looked 
 hard at me for a little, and then at the clock. " The time is 
 come, Edward," she said at last, " the bitter hour of parting." 
 Again she said " God bless you ! " again we embraced. I thrust 
 my hat over my face, and ran down the steps. " Good-bye, 
 Master Edward," said Brooks, as he limped to the door. He 
 was old, if you like, and the strong Mandeville ale was beginning 
 to come out at his joints. 
 
 " Good-bye, Brooks, take care of your mistress." 
 One fond look more at Auntie as I drove off, and we had 
 parted. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 HOW I SET OFF ON MY TRAVELS WITH MAJOR PLUNGER AND MR. 
 TWENTTMAN. 
 
 Before the " Bear and Ragged Staff" at Warwick I met the 
 Major and Twentyman. 
 
 " In capital time,'' said the first. " What a stepper that horse 
 is, and how he went along the street ! He'd make a famous 
 charger." 
 
 " We're on leave," said Twentyman dryly. " Don't let's hear 
 any more of chargers till we come back. Chargers are the curse 
 of my life. I no sooner get one to suit me than he breaks 
 down." 
 
 Just as the Highflyer was coming out of the yard, and we had 
 not more than two minutes more before starting, I saw the long 
 legs of the Count striding down the street. He was bent on 
 catching the coach, and he caught it. 
 
 " What is it ? " said the incorrigible Plunger. " Can I do 
 anything about horses for you in London or abroad 1 " 
 
 " No ! thank you," said the Count. " I have only brought 
 Mr. Halfacre the letter of introduction to my friends in Corfu, 
 that I promised him. I had nearly forgotten it, but here it is;" 
 and as he said that he drew out a thick letter sealed with a large 
 red seal. 
 
 " Oh, thank you so much. How very kind ! " 
 
 I did not then know what a curse letters of introduction may 
 be, and how much better it is to have none at all, or I should 
 not have thanked him so warmly for that letter. 
 
 " Good-bye, Major." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 34*7 
 
 " Good-bye, Count," from the box seat, which. Major Plunger 
 had secured by giving the boots a shilling. 
 
 " Sit fast," said the coachman. " All right,'' said the guard, 
 and away rattled the Highflyer through the streets of Warwick; 
 the guard rousing the echoes and the lazy housemaids with his 
 horn, and the coachman just flicking the leaders with his whip. 
 
 A drive on a coach is a pleasant thing enough, for ten or 
 twenty miles ; but when you have to go a hundred or more, it 
 is apt to get dull. I do not remember much of that journey, 
 except that the Major and Twentyman smoked, as it seemed to 
 me, incessantly. The coachman smoked, too ; and the guard 
 smoked. They both smoked the Major's cigars. In those days, 
 to smoke outside a coach was almost the only outside smoking 
 in which gentlemen indulged. How different from these reformed 
 days, when the difficulty is to say where a man will not smoke. 
 " Upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber," — are places 
 in which the smell of smoke is found lingering^ In those days, 
 smokers were like prophets of the Lord in the days of Ahab and 
 Jezabel. They smoked in caves, and in holes and corners of the 
 earth ; in backyards, in stables, in lofts, though there was danger 
 of burning down the offices ; in kitchens and servants' halls. 
 They wandered about in pea-coats and dressing-gowns ; they 
 were persecuted, laughed at, derided. What are they now ? 
 They are like the prophets in the days of the good kings of 
 Judah ; like the Christians in the Eoman Empire, after the days 
 of Constantine and Helena. They worship in splendid smoking- 
 rooms, and not content with that, they propagate their faith, by 
 an incense of its own, all over the house, so that there is not a 
 nook or a corner of it in which the odour of their peculiar sanctity 
 is not plainly perceptible. True, they have had temporary per- 
 secutions just as the early Church had. Smoking has had its 
 Julians, just as the first Christians had theirs. They have been 
 expelled from clubs for a time, only to return under a cloud, — 
 no, not under a cloud — under a fog of smoke. Stern fathers and 
 mothers have forbidden their sons to smoke. But the daughters 
 have always sided with the sons ; they have converted the fathers ; 
 and the fathers, in some cases, though not very many, have con- 
 verted the mothers. In many houses, before smokeless — where 
 the practice was denounced as " nasty," " filthy," " abominable,'' 
 and where, like all new faiths, it was practised stealthily, — it is 
 now triumphant, and in a little while every man will have a 
 smoking-room, — a temple to the great Goddess Nicotina; whose 
 orgies are as those of I sis, and whose mysteries surpass those of 
 Samothrace, where her votaries may perform their rites in peace. 
 But to return to our journey. We dined somewhere. I am 
 
348 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 sure I forget where, — and in this respect, the old coaches were 
 better than your modem railway refreshment-rooms, which are 
 often so bad, that everything in them is stale and uneatable, — 
 where the only thing hot is the water, which you drink out of a 
 slimy bottle. You say no railway- traveller has a right to drink 
 water. Well ! but if he is a teetotaller ? You reply, teetotallers 
 ought not to travel. I quite agree with you ; but still even that 
 unhappy class must travel sometimes ; they can't remain always 
 on a water-party of their own, cut off from the rest of the human 
 race. But, if you like it, I will give up the water, and say the 
 soup in such refreshment-rooms is always cold. You say it isn't ; — 
 that it is always boiling hot. Well ! — and isn't that the worst 
 fault that soup can have, — to have a minute to drink it, and find 
 you can't swallow it without losing the skin off the roof of your 
 mouth. No ! I return to what I said : the old coach dinners, 
 and suppers and breakfasts at the real old country inns, when 
 provisions were eheap, and it was not the practice, as now, to 
 seize every egg in England as soon as it was laid, and send it up 
 to London by railway, — I say they were worth all the railway 
 refreshment-rooms in the country. If these refreshment-rooms 
 are bad, it is not worth going into them. If they are good, you 
 have *no time to eat anything, therefore a wise man will not go 
 into them at all. I believe, in fact, they are only good for the 
 idlers of the town in which they are built ; for officers, if there's 
 a regiment in the place. A great comfort it is to have a place 
 besides the canteen, — where you can have what they call a B 
 and S, and flirt with a pretty girl into the bargain ; but for a 
 real bond fide traveller, as they call him in Scotland, they are a 
 mockery, a delusion, and a snare. 
 
 But we must get on, or we shall never reach London, much 
 less across the Channel, at this rate. We reached town in ten 
 hours — very good going. We stopped at the " White Horse 
 Cellar.'' We had dinner. What, two dinners on one day 1 For- 
 give us, the first was only lunch. Twentyman said so, and if 
 any one knew the difference between lunch and dinner, it was 
 Twentyman. Then we went to the theatre ; to what was then 
 called a new theatre, " The Lyceum.'' It had just been rebuilt, 
 after being burnt, I believe. In this theatres are like the 
 Phoenix ; after a certain time they die by fire, only to rise more 
 glorious, with their wings as silver and their feathers as gold, 
 out of their ashes. The first piece ever played in the New 
 Lyceum was "The Mountain Sylph." I remember Phillips 
 singing the bass part of the demon in it capitally, but that was 
 before the Major, and I, and Twentyman went to it. That 
 night a French play was the performance. Let me tell you 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 349 
 
 French plays were not so common then in London as they are 
 now — common in every sense of the word. We had no Grand 
 Duchesses in those days, and no Schneiders to make them 
 attractive. The play was " L' Auberge des Adrets," and Lemaitre 
 played Eobert Macaire. Tt was the first thieves' drama that 
 Londoners saw, and at first we were obliged to see foreign thieves 
 represented. When we had got accustomed to them, the Lord 
 Chamberlain allowed us to bring our own scoundrels on the 
 stage, and we had Jack Sheppard and all that scum of theatricals. 
 I remember thinking whether it was good for Major Plunger 
 and Twentyman to go and see Lemaitre play the clever thief, 
 and I solved the difficulty by saying to myself : " As they can't 
 understand a word 'of French it will do them no harm ; and if 
 they do \inderstand it, it will do their French good. So we 
 went, and were all intensely amused. I understood the lan- 
 guage and could follow the actors, and even make out some of 
 the jokes. I remember the police-officer, who is taking Kobert's 
 " signalement," and the mistake he made between nez aquilin 
 and " n6 ct Quilan." But though they were beyond all such 
 niceties, both Major and Twentyman roared with laughter. The 
 very sight of Lemaitre's costume was enough to make you laugh 
 all night without stopping. 
 
 When I asked them what they thought of it : " Never was so 
 amused in my life," said the Major ; " so different from our 
 English acting. Tell you what, when we get abroad we must 
 go to the play every night." 
 
 The taciturn Twentyman assented with his "Just what I was 
 thinking,'' and we walked home along the Strand, up Waterloo 
 Place and Piccadilly. 
 
 We had made a long'day of it, and were not sorry to get to bed. 
 
 You must remember again — in fact, you must ever keep it 
 in your mind — that those days were not as our days. It 
 wasn't so easy to make up your mind to travel then as it is 
 now. You could not say, " I will go to Paris to-day," when 
 you got up in the morning, and go. Not at all. You had 
 to get a passport ; and even now, if you are wise enough 
 to go to Borne, or silly enough to go to St. Petersburg, you 
 must get a passport. For St. Petersburg, you must go to 
 a Consulate or a Legation ; and a man with a grave face and 
 eyes that look through you, — a sort of Diplomatic Inspector 
 Bucket, — comes out of his den and looks at you, and asks you 
 impertinent questions as to your journey, and how old you are, 
 and what your name is. I don't know that he doesn't ask you 
 your father's and your mother's name, and whether you have 
 been baptized and confirmed ; but I am not as sure on those 
 
350 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 points as I am on all the rest. Then he writes it all down in a 
 great black book — a sort of Russian Doomsday. That's your 
 description. Then he copies it all out on a sheet of paper, — by 
 the bye, I forgot to say he won't do it at all unless you can 
 produce a Foreign-office passport vouching for your respec- 
 tability, — and gives you the sheet of paper, and you pay ever 
 so many shillings for it, and he tells you to go to another 
 place. If it's at the Legation they send you to the Consulate ; 
 and if it's at the Consulate, they send .you to the Legation. 
 That's to have it vised, and there you have to pay more fees ; 
 and when you have paid them, you are free to go to Russia. 
 Only there is a fate that hangs over that sheet of paper, and it 
 is this : you are doomed whenever you pass through a town on 
 your way to Russia — for, thank Heaven ! one can't go to Russia 
 all at once, just as a man can"t go to a certain place that shall 
 be nameless, all at once, but by a gradual course of sin to fit 
 him for it— yes, on your way to Russia, in your slow progress 
 from freedom to despotism, you must show it to every Russian 
 minister you come across ; and if you don't do that, they will 
 stop you at the frontier, and send you back to all the places to 
 have it done. It's the law, and it's your own fault that you 
 have neglected to fulfil the law. The officials are very sorry, 
 but it can't be helped. 
 
 You will say, If these things be so, why go to Russia? 
 That's just what I say. Why go to Russia when you can go any- 
 where else ? Just as you may ask, Why go to the other place 
 when you can go to heaven % It's all a matter of taste. For 
 my part, I would never go to Russia. 
 
 Well, in the days that I speak of, the whole Continent was as 
 Russia as to passports. I remember, some years after this 
 expedition of mine with the Major, being stopped for a whole 
 day at that beggarly port of Cuxhaven by a Hanoverian official, 
 merely because the Hamburg steamer had been forced in there 
 by the ice, all because I had no Hanoverian passport. I was 
 very nearly sent back again to England, for asking leave to go 
 up that bank of the Elbe by land. As it was I was sent igno- 
 miniously up to Hamburg in charge of the police and delivered 
 over to the British agent there. It added insult to the injury to 
 be told on the way that I was taken for His Serene Highness the 
 Duke of Brunswick, with whom, I beg leave to say, I have not 
 either morally or physically the slightest resemblance. 
 
 So we had to get our passports. French passports, and Pied- 
 montese passports, and passports for Parma, Modena, and the 
 Papal States, all of which we had to pass through on our way to 
 Corfu. It would have taken us more than two days to get all 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 351 
 
 those passports and to have them duly vised in London. So we 
 only got the French and Piedmontese passports, and put off 
 getting the others till we got to Paris You should have seen 
 us all, and the faces the Major and Twentyman made when our 
 signalements were being taken at the French Embassy, which was 
 then in Portland Place. How astonished the puny Legation 
 clerk was at Twentyman's huge size ! I believe he thought 
 he was a giant about to be exported for an exhibition, 
 and that the Major was the proprietor, and I the showman of 
 the giant. The Major, I must tell you, was rather touchy 
 about his hair, which was beginning to go. He did know one 
 word of French, and that was " chauve." When he saw it on 
 his passport he was in a fearful way, and wanted to have it 
 altered. 
 
 " I am not chauve," he bawled out to the clerk, who, in the 
 blandest way, said : " Mais que voulez-vous ? Monsieur est 
 chauve certainement." The Major's nose I remember was de- 
 scribed as " moderate," and his figure as inclining to " embon- 
 point" He certainly was not satisfied with his picture on 
 paper. I do not know — except the mistake made about the 
 rank of Twentyman, who when he gave himself out as " Cap- 
 tain '' was put down as " giant " — that either the Cornet or I 
 had any reason to be dissatisfied with our pictures. 
 
 After we had got our passports we walked about London. 
 London ! it makes me laugh when I think of the London of 
 those times compared with the London of these latter days. 
 If that London were to arise from its dust and mud it would 
 hardly know itself in the present much-improved and more- 
 abused city. We all know London as it is, but you, rising 
 generation, or risen generation, who were not born or thought 
 of at the time of which I speak, try to realise, try to raise up 
 before your mind's eve the London of 183-. In the first place, 
 there were no Houses of Parliament, no Palace of Westminster. 
 The old Houses had been burnt, and out of the ruins a tempo- 
 rary makeshift for them had been erected. Just about that 
 time, too, though I think it was a little after, Gresham's Ex- 
 change in the City had been burnt down, and Westminster 
 Abbey, a little before the Houses of Parliament, had nearly 
 shared the same fate. There was no South Kensington Mu- 
 seum, no Crystal Palace, no National Gallery, no Nelson Co- 
 lumn — even that pillar which commemorates the Duke of 
 York's debts did not yet stand in Carlton Terrace. Buckingham 
 Palace was unfinished. Half the Clubs, ay, and more than half 
 of them, did not exist. Crockford's Hell blazed fiercely every 
 night at the top of St. James' Street, and the Guards' Club — a 
 
352 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 modest little building, as slim as the waists of the ensigns in 
 those distinguished regiments — stood next to that sink of 
 iniquity. Brooks's and White's were just the same then as 
 now ; the same professed politicians at the one, and the same 
 empty faces looking out at the bow-window of the other. The 
 streets are often dusty and dirty now, and they will be, I 
 suppose, till we can change London clay, and gravel, and smoke, 
 for Paris gypsum and wood-fires — not to speak of their brighter 
 sun and sky and our damp fogs. But the streets were far 
 dirtier then, far less frequently swept and watered. The police 
 were not as efficient as they are now, and some specimens of 
 the old Charley still lingered about, haunting the streets at 
 night in the shape of private watchmen. I always thought, 
 when I saw a bank guarded by such a keeper, fast asleep, and 
 snoring in his box, how safe the partners must have felt, and 
 how secure the streets must have been when burglars were 
 scared by a snoring watchman. The gentlemen were better 
 dressed then than now, and the women worse. In nothing is 
 the change in the London streets more remarkable than in the 
 utter extinction of the dandy, and in the creation of at least 
 fifty well-dressed women for one that there used to be in old 
 times. Are they ladies ? You had better ask them. I'm sure 
 I can't tell, because I am shy, and never speak to ladies in the 
 street or out of it ; but I have no doubt you will, as a rule, get 
 a far more civil answer from any man or woman in the streets 
 in 1870 than you would have got in any of the thirties from 
 1830 down. Yes, the women of this generation are far better 
 dressed, setting aside a few extravagances of costume, than 
 their sisters forty years ago. As for the atoms of the city, the 
 houses and the shops, they are so changed for the better, that 
 we should not know them to be parts of the same town. The 
 old shops and houses in the best streets, if restored, would look 
 by the side of the new ones much as the tramps and beggars, 
 who stream up from the provinces, look beside the hardworking 
 London artizan. As for the parks and public gardens, they 
 were the dark, undrained haunts of roughs and ruffians. Some 
 people drove round them, and on Sunday there was a throng of 
 carriages, filled with ladies, and mixed with gentlemen on horse- 
 back, between Apsley House and Oxford Street. Let me add 
 that the Marble Arch, which I daresay some of you think has 
 stood where it now stands ever since it was built, then stood in 
 front of Buckingham Palace, just where the new front is now 
 built, the Palace then consisting of three sides of a quadrangle. 
 In those days no cabs drove through St. James's Park ; any one 
 who wanted to go in a public conveyance from Pimlico to Pall 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 353 
 
 Mall had to go round by Grosvenor Place and Piccadilly, or 
 down the Birdcage Walk to Westminster, and so round. 
 
 Let no one, therefore, complain of this modern city, in which, 
 no doubt, many more improvements might and will be made 
 under the aesthetic rule of Mr. Acton Smee Ayrton ; if he does, 
 let him think of the London of 1830, and thank his stars. On 
 the river there were no steamboats ; if you wanted to go on the 
 Thames, you hired a wherry rowed by a waterman, who, though 
 generally "jolly," was not the young waterman of Blackfriars 
 Bridge, and who, so far from feathering his oars with " skill and 
 dexterity," very often put you in risk of your life by getting 
 foul of the starlings of Old London Bridge, when trying to shoot 
 it on the ebb. 
 
 I thought I had ended this comparison, but the word bridge 
 drives me on. I can remember the building of all the bridges 
 across the Thames, except Waterloo Bridge. Many's the time I've 
 shot old London Bridge, and a very nasty shoot it was, sheer 
 down several feet. At the ebb in spring-tides it was a perfect 
 cataract. I well remember old William the Fourth and Queen 
 Adelaide going to open the New Bridge in state with all the 
 ministers, in August, 183 — . That was something like an 
 opening ; it lasted hours. It was not merely a drive through 
 the city and back. It is a great mistake to suppose that 
 Londoners do not like to see their sovereign. I think the 
 feeling is that, as they pay a great deal to support the dignity 
 ■of the crown, they feel they ought to have the right of a good 
 stare at it sometimes. I don't mean at the regalia in the 
 Tower, but at the head that wears it ; and I am sure that the 
 days are coming, — perhaps they are even at the door, — when 
 that head would be all the more easy if its eyes had rested 
 oftener on the people. Say ten times in the year. Ten days 
 ■out of three hundred and sixty-five. Then I remember old 
 Westminster Bridge ; and a very nasty bridge it was, mounting 
 up into the air as though the builder, who was a Frenchman, 
 had first thought of carrying it to the moon and been thwarted 
 in his scheme. It had no real foundations and was built on 
 " caissons," as I believe they are called. Great crates and 
 bundles of faggots thrown into the water, and courses of 
 masonry built on them. Of course when the river, as all tidal 
 rivers have a trick of doing, deepened its bed, which it did far 
 more rapidly after the demolition of Old London Bridge, the 
 caissons were washed away, the piers stood in air, hanging on 
 only by the side arches, the masonry began to crack, and down 
 would have come the bridge. Much the same happened with 
 Old Blackfriars' Bridge, except that that was not built on cais- 
 
 A A 
 
354 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 sons. Yes ! I remember all the Bridges except Waterloo. All 
 the railway bridges and foot bridges. As for engineering, think 
 what English engineering is now, with its railways above and 
 underground, and its colossal stations and hotels*, its public 
 offices and buildings of all kinds,. and. then remember.' that our 
 great engineering effort in those days was the Thames Tunnel, 
 which cost mints of money and took years to make ; and yet a 
 like tunnel has been made within the past year with ridiculous 
 ease and little cost. Remember, too, that at the time I speak 
 of there were only two little bits of railway out of London — 
 specimens of the Great Western and London and North Western. 
 One of them went positively as far as Slough, and the other 
 actually to Box Moor. They bore about the same relation' to 
 those great lines as they now exist, as the bits of the Atlantic 
 cable which you carry at your watch-chain bear to the cable 
 itself stretching across the vast Atlantic. 
 
 Think of all those things, wretched grumbler against the 
 present time, and confess that you might have lived in a worse 
 decade of the century than that in which you had the honour 
 to be born. 
 
 Were we unhappy at our own time, — disgusted, discontented* 
 No, I don't think we grumbled so much then. Englishmen, I 
 suspect, have always grumbled, and ever willi But not so 
 much then as now. No one expected so much. Tastes were 
 simpler. People did not ruin themselves with giving bad 
 dinners to their friends, because the friends looked for less. 
 Money, certainly, went twice as far. It was harder to make, 
 and clutched more closely. Altogether, I think we were happier 
 — at least, I was. 
 
 But enough of this. Of this I am sure, that we three intend- 
 ing travellers were very happy walking about that dusty old 
 London at its very dullest season. It was the' second week in 
 September, recollect. We dined together; and- went to bed 
 early, for we had to be up betimes in the morning: 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 355 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 HOW WE THREE SET OPE FOR- C0EEU. 
 
 We were to start by a Dover coach next morning, and. as the 
 road was hilly we wereto think ourselves lucky if we got down 
 to that famous port much before dinner. Then it would be too 
 late to cross. We must sleep at the " Ship," and cross in; the 
 morning. 
 
 This programme we faithfully carried out. The Major and 
 Twentyman were very sorry to leave London. Indeed, could 
 they have done it with any decency, they would have thrown 
 up their foreign trip altogether and stayed in town. But such 
 treachery was not to be thought of. To Corfu we were going, 
 and to Corfu we would go. But their state of mind made them 
 duller than usuaL They had talked themselves out too. They 
 said little till we were going down that tremendous hill leading 
 into Dover and could see the Channel close enough to detect 
 that it was really very rough. We might have known it by the 
 wind, but who ever thinks of. the windtill the time for crossing 
 comes ? It may lull, then why fret about it 1 This is one of 
 the imaginaiy evils which cause so much care in life. They ar& 
 all like the wind. Never mind them. They will blow over. 
 That is true philosophy. 
 
 But the Major was no true philosopher. He philosophised 1 in. 
 part, and he feared in part, and fear soon got the lion ? s share 
 and swallowed up poor philosophy, 
 
 " I can see it' will be very rough to-morrow. Wish I had 
 never come. Nothing so nasty as sea-sickness^" 
 
 Twentyman was much better. He was biblical. " Who 
 can tell what a night may bring forth? It may be calhr to- 
 morrow.'' 
 
 Besides, the giant. 1 was hungry. He was thinking more of his 
 dinner than of anything else. Dinner and tea and breakfast 
 first. That was his triple line of defence. After that let sea- 
 sickness do its worst. 
 
 " Why, we shan't go on board for eighteen hours at the least. 
 ' Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' " 
 
 "All very fine," said the Major. "You seem very self- 
 sufficieatj Twentyman! Suppose it gets much worse in i the 
 morning, what then?" 
 
 What the famished Twentyman would have answered to: this 
 question no one can say. By this time we were at our journey's 
 
 A A 2 
 
356 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 end, so far as the coach was concerned. We got down, claimed 
 our luggage, paid the coachman and guard their fees, had our 
 things taken up to our bedrooms, and ordered dinner. 
 
 Of course we did not escape the inevitable beef-steak. What 
 Englishman ever did in those days ? and I am Englishman 
 enough to assert that a real old-fashioned tender steak cut off 
 the rump, — no ! I won't hear of any of your French fangles 
 of the filet, or under-cut of the sirloin, — I say such a steak, 
 preceded by soup and fish, and followed by, say a grouse or 
 woodcocks, and a plum-pudding and custards, washed down 
 with a bottle of champagne at dinner, and a good one of claret 
 afterwards, — I say after such a steak a man ought to go to bed 
 in charity with every man. 
 
 We had not such a good dinner as that at the old " Ship," — 
 dear me ! only last summer I saw it staring at me with bills in 
 all its windows, — but we had as good a one as we could. 
 
 " There is nothing like being well fortified before you proceed 
 on an expedition of this kind," said the Major. " I'll bet a 
 penny that this,'' — here he swallowed it, — " This is the last bit 
 of good beef that we shall have till we come back, — if we ever 
 come back. I say, Twentyman, what a bore leave is ! I wish 
 the Horse Guards had refused me mine." 
 
 " No good thinking of that. We must go on," said the 
 giant. 
 
 " What time does the boat sail ? " 
 
 " At ten precisely." 
 
 " How long shall we be getting over 1 " 
 
 " That depends, of course, on wind and tide. In four or five 
 hours, perhaps, with this wind." 
 
 This part of the conversation was mine. Twentyman was 
 never good for three answers running unless he was very much 
 excited. 
 
 " Why don't they make the steamers quicker, or the passage 
 shorter ? " drivelled on the Major. 
 
 " They have made them quicker, and so they have made the 
 passage shorter. Perhaps some day they'll make them quicker 
 still." 
 
 " Wish they'd done it already. I wish, too, that Count Toif 
 were here to be sea-sick with us. I feel sure we shall all be as 
 sick as cats." 
 
 So we went maundering on till bedtime came. 
 
 Next morning Twentyman was up early. Long before the 
 Major, who never neglected his rest, and whose trump was still 
 sounding along the passage when I came down at eight 
 o'clock. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 357 
 
 " How's the sea 1 " was my first question. 
 
 " I've seen the Captain, and he says it's blowing very hard 
 on the other side, but it's off shore here, so we shan't feel it at 
 first." 
 
 " I'm afraid the Major won't like it. But you must go and 
 stir him up, or he will never be ready in time." 
 
 While Twehtyman went up on this pious "mission, I got break- 
 fast ready. Soon after, — that is to say, in twenty minutes or 
 so, — I heard the giant striding back. 
 
 " He won't be long now, but I never knew a fellow sleep so 
 hard. The sleep seems to sink into him like a frost into the 
 ground. He is asleep far below his skin." 
 
 Shortly after the Major appeared, dressed in what seemed to 
 be a diving-apparatus. He had a rough macintosh suit on. 
 They had just come in, and were not yet smooth. They had a 
 rough, sergy look outside, and were much heavier. 
 
 " The weather is sure to be rough. Just what I said, my 
 luck all over. Wish I never had got that leave ! What is 
 there for breakfast ? Broiled whiting, ham and eggs, muffins, 
 cold partridge. Thank you, Twentyman ; some of that cold 
 partridge." 
 
 With that the Major sat down and completed his forti- 
 fications by eating a hearty breakfast, made up of everything 
 on the table. 
 
 We all did very well in this respect, and having been much, 
 as you know, on the sea, I had no fears for myself. 
 
 By ten we were on board with our things. You who have 
 only lived in these latter days, — you little innocents of some 
 twenty or thirty summers — you have no notion how comfortably 
 one went on board then, and how much easier it was for the 
 luggage. There was none of that dashingly destructive work 
 which crumples up young ladies' boxes and baskets as though 
 they were brown paper ; none of that reckless hauling them 
 up by a crane, merely to toss them over down an inclined 
 plane one after the other, where those who have only carpet- 
 bags, — gentlemen, I mean ; who ever saw a young lady with 
 all her things in a carpet-bag ? — can stand by and make merry 
 at other people's luggage, as it leaps down, jumps up, cuts 
 capers, rolls over on one side merely to turn up on the other, 
 and performs diverse absurd antics in the sight of heaven, 
 merely for the fun of those cruel people who go down to the 
 pier to laugh at the sufferings of others. No ! in our time 
 everything was done decently and in order. There were, 
 perhaps twenty passengers besides ourselves. 
 
 Punctual to the hour — to the very minute, in short, — the 
 
358 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 hawsers were loosed, and the Queen Adelaide was under steam 
 for France. 
 
 Some men are born to make fools of themselves. There are 
 things to do and not say, and there are things to say and not do. 
 If you know that a man is a very great bore, gives bad dinners, 
 has a vinegar-cruet of a wife, and rude children, you may say, if 
 he asks you to come, that you will go and stay with him at some 
 time or other. That is a thing to say and not to do. A thing 
 to do and not to say or talk about was going across to France 
 that day. Why we all went I'm sure I can't tell, except that 
 we said we woujd go. Just as we started one of the passengers, 
 whose wits must have been muddled, went up to the Captain, 
 and said, " A very fine day, Captain. Do you think we shall 
 have a smooth passage ? " 
 
 " No, I do not, Sir," said the Captain. " I call it anything 
 but a fine day ; and as for a smooth passage, you may think 
 yourself lucky if we have any passage at all. I go because I 
 must. It's my business ; but why you all go I can't think." 
 
 So that passenger retired looking rather sheepish. It was one 
 of those bright days when the wind seems to blow all the harder 
 because it is bright ; it seems as though the wind can't bear to 
 see the sun having it all its own way, and bursts out into a 
 passion. I scarce ever saw a brighter sun or fiercer wind. At 
 first, under the shelter of the English shore, we felt it little ; 
 but as we got nearer and nearer to Calais, it seemed to blow 
 harder and harder, and the whole surface of the sea was covered 
 with little rainbows as the sun shone through the white crests 
 of the waves, which the wind cut off into spsay as soon as they 
 broke. 
 
 Dear me ! long before that how sick the Major was ! He 
 turned yellow, green, and blue ; he fell flat on his baek ; he 
 called out " Steward ! " but no steward came. The sailors came 
 instead, and trampled on him. They could not help it, for they 
 had to get in the boat, which was in danger of being blown ofi" 
 the davits. There the Major lay groaning, and yet no one could 
 give him help. All the animals that he had eaten, all the birds 
 that he had shot, were more than avenged by the tribute which 
 he was forced to render to the fishes. He did manage to roll 
 out of the way, though, when a gun broke loose — one of the 
 two five-pounders which they kept on board for signals — and 
 came lurching over to his side of the deck ; then the Major was 
 as shifty as an eel, and.it ran by without hurting him. 
 
 Twentyman was far less ill. He got a good seat under the 
 bridge amidships, and there he sat, looking the picture of misery 
 all through the voyage. Once only was he disturbed, and 
 
ANJNALS OF .AN -KVENTFUX LIFE. 359 
 
 utterly discomfited, when a fat Frenchman rose up in a wild 
 way, intending to follow the Major's example in paying tribute, 
 but after a few faltering steps he tottered, turned round, and 
 embraced the gallant giant, at the same time rendering to him 
 what he had meant for the fish. 
 
 Do ? what eould Twentyman do but grin and bear it 1 He 
 could not throw the Frenchman overboard ; that would have 
 been murder on the high seas, and- Twentyman would have been 
 guillotined. No ; he grinned and bore it, and got a towel and 
 wiped himself all over. 
 
 After a dreary time we reached Calais. Then there were no 
 facilities. You were called on for your passport as soon as you 
 landed. It was taken away from you, only to be returned when 
 you left the fortress. After that you were driven into a pen, 
 and kept there while the douaniers examined the luggage, an 
 affair of some hours. What was all this for 1 A very good 
 reason : that you should pass the night at one or other of those 
 excellent inns — the. glory of Calais and the shame of Dover — 
 Dessein's or Quillac'fi. It really did not much matter which 
 you went to ; Dessein's had most diplomats, perhaps ; but at 
 either of them you could get, . at a short notice, all that we tried 
 to get at long notice the night before at Dover, and could not. 
 At Dover we had none of that imaginary Barmecides' feast I 
 mentioned a little while ago, except the beef-steak. At Calais 
 we had everything I have imagined at Dover except the beef- 
 steak. 
 
 We went to Dessein's, and at Dessein's we slept. Next morn- 
 ing we were to go on by the malle poste. You should have seen 
 Major Plunger doing justice to French fare with his teeth, and 
 injustice to it with his lips and tongue. 
 
 " As for him," — and the wretch said this with his mouth full 
 of a potage d, la Bisque — " he hated these rich soups. Give me a 
 little gravy-soupor mutton-broth." It was the same with the 
 fish entrees so good at Calais, and with the poulet and the 
 perdrix, with the beignets de peche, and the omelette aux fines 
 herbes, which followed. He much preferred a good rump-steak, 
 a roast fowl, and some apple-fritters ; but it was remarked that, 
 however much he abused French cookery, he ate everything 
 that was offered him like an otter. 
 
 Here, too, Twentyman was much better. He was in high 
 spirits at having been ill only by deputy or vicariously, and as 
 he had taken the precaution to have a warm bath, he looked the 
 pink of neatness. 
 
 " I must say I like French cookery," was his sage remark ; 
 " but it doesn't follow that. I don't like English cookery too." 
 
360 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Having got this worthy pair abroad, I am not going to- bore 
 you to death with them ; the more so as I must get on. We 
 started next morning early, and I had to be paymaster and 
 spokesman. We got three places in the coupi, and were on our 
 road to Paris across French Flanders before seven a.m. 
 
 On all our escapades and stupidities on the journey I decline 
 to dwell. Of course, we had them. ; perhaps more than our 
 share. But when we got into any mess I consoled myself with 
 thinking of Arethusa, and saying, " Well, this is another day off 
 the period of separation. I wonder if Auntie will give in at 
 last, and not force me to be ' rounded off 1 ' " 
 
 At Paris — it was Paris of the days of Louis Philippe, recol- 
 lect, — we went to Meurice's. I thought the two would be 
 better off at an English house than in a French hotel, and so 
 they were. I think they were very happy. We only stayed in 
 Paris two days, and in those two days we saw everything ; at 
 least, we walked over everything. You don't remember old 
 Paris, with its quaint streets, and tourelles on so many of the 
 houses. The quaint streets are, I think, all gone. What has 
 become of the Rues de la Vannerie and Tissanderie, of the Rue 
 de l'Arbre Sec, and a host of others, as quaint 1 Gone, Sir ! all 
 gone ; made straight, widened, lengthened, asphalted, and mac&- 
 damised into new boulevards and avenues. I dare say it is all 
 very much improved, especially for strategical purposes ; but I 
 miss old Paris, and I mourn over it. 
 
 AVe had trouble in Paris, too. In the Champs Elysles we 
 nearly came to grief. Did I tell you that Major Plunger had a 
 dog — a Skye terrier — delighting in the name of "Mop 1" WeH, 
 Mop went with us along the Champs Elysees, and we had got so- 
 far as the fountain, near the middle. I am not at all sure this 
 .fountain, too, has not vanished before the spade of M. Hauss- 
 mann ; but it was there in those days, and it was called the 
 Fountain of the Bond Point. 
 
 " Jove, what a fine place to give Mop a swim ! He hasn't 
 been in the water since we left Warwickshire." So said 
 the Major ; and when the Major said, anything he tried 
 to do it. " Hi, in, Mop ! hi, in, Mop ! " he cried ; and in went 
 Mop. 
 
 This brought the sentinel down on us in a moment. Whea 
 I say the sentinel, you know that in this the Paris of the present 
 is like the Paris of the past, that in both there are and wen? 
 sentinels posted here, there, and everywhere. What they guard 
 is not always clear, but in this case I suppose the sentinel was 
 guarding the fountain. 
 
 He came up to us and said, not so much severely as seriously: 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 361 
 
 " Savez-vous, Messieurs, que c'est defendu de baigner les hmledogues 
 id." 
 
 It was no use saying that Mop was no bulldog. He turned 
 to some carte, and showed us the words : " Bouledogues ou autres 
 chiens." And so we had to give in, and call Moppy out. 
 
 As we were going away, I asked him, jestingly, " And if we 
 had not called him out, what then ? " " Alors," was the reply, 
 " ce chien-la serait bientdt parmi les blesses." 
 
 How unlike that sentry in Windsor Park, who, seeing a little 
 spaniel running about on forbidden ground, not only spoke to 
 it, but tried to shoot it several times. But those were before 
 the days of musketry instruction ; and so, after several rounds 
 of ball-cartridge had been expended, he desisted. 
 
 Of course we went to the theatre ; only one night, though. 
 The play I took them to see was at the Palais- Eoyal ; but it was 
 not one of those disgusting nudities so common in the present 
 Paris. No ; it was to see Michel Perrin, followed by the Gamin 
 de Paris, with BoufiS in both pieces. Dear me ! when before 
 did I ever see such an actor as BoufF6? And, what is more to- 
 the purpose, when shall I ever see such a one again ? 
 
 I do not mean to say that the Major and Twentyman could 
 understand either piece — certainly not Michel Perrin. But 
 they were very good ; they laughed when I laughed ; and as in 
 the Gamin de Paris it was nearly all through the piece, they 
 laughed a good deal. 
 
 That was the first night. The next we were to start for 
 Macon in another malle poste, and so to go by Chamb6ry and 
 Aix les Bains, along the Valley of Savoy and over the Cenis to- 
 Turin. This was, I believe, the shortest way ; and as all ways, 
 were the same to me, and the Major wished to see something of 
 Turin, I took them that way. 
 
 I will say nothing of that journey, till we got across the- 
 French frontier into Savoy. Now it is all French, and there is 
 a railway to §t. Michel ; then it was all Piedmontese, and there 
 were only diligences. But I don't think I ever had such a lovely 
 journey as on that September day, through the Valley of Savoy, 
 The weather was most delightful, so warm and yet so fresh j 
 except the cretins, with their hideous goitres, all was bright and 
 cheerful. 
 
 " I wouldn't have missed this for a good deal," Twentymaa 
 kept on saying at least twenty times a-day ; and he said it as if 
 he meant it. Perhaps there was a great poet stowed away in 
 that gigantic frame ; who can tell 1 The Major was more prac- 
 tical ; he still went on eating as much as ever he could, and 
 availing himself, at the same time, of the Briton's right to grumble. 
 
362 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 We stopped a night atChanibery to sleep, and then we made 
 a long day, and got to Lanslebourg, at the foot of the Cenis, 
 about six in the evening. 
 
 I had only seen the West Indian mountains and the Peak of 
 Teneriffe when I was a child, and since then the Scotch moun- 
 tains, so that the Alps were a wonder to me. But if I thought 
 them astonishing, how much more so must they have been to 
 the Major and Twentyman, who had never seen anything 
 higher than Snowdon ? I don't mean to say Snowdon is not a 
 mountain. Let no hot-headed Welshman fall foul of me on 
 that score. Snowdon is a mountain, just as a short woman is a 
 woman, though she be only four feet four. As a woman of that 
 stature is amongst women, so is Snowdon amongst mountains. 
 After this declaration, don't let any one go about saying that I 
 say Snowdon is not a mountain. 
 
 I daresay all of you know the way the road goes up over the 
 Cenis in zig-zags, and down the other side in the same fashion. 
 We three, after dining at Lanslebourg, where, for the first time 
 since leaving England, we had a bad dinner — as bad, say, as one 
 that you would get at a first-rate English hotel. At Lansle- 
 bourg, we started to walk up the mountain, while the diligences, 
 drawn by mules, went up the zig-zags. Here the giant's long 
 legs stood him in good stead, and he was first by a long way at 
 the top. I- came next, and then the Major, puffing horribly, 
 and much distressed by persisting to wear his macintosh, as he 
 thought it might "be cold up there ! " " There" being the top 
 of the mountain which we were about to climb. 
 
 We had not long to wait for the diligences, which came toiling 
 up the zig-zags ; and when we got in, down we went at such a 
 rate that I was fairly aghast, lest we should topple over the pre- 
 cipice. One lady, I believe, somewhere in the diligences, — for 
 there were three, — did go into hysterics, and one mule fell 
 ■down, and was dragged along by the seven others. There were 
 ■eight to each diligence ; but at the end — at the bottom of the 
 hill — both the lady and the mule were quite well ; and really, 
 in looks and temper, there was little to choose between them. 
 Late that night we reached Susa, or, rather, early next morning, 
 and I remember what a thrill ran through me as I felt the warm 
 breath of Italy rushing up, as it were, from the valleys to meet 
 me ; and how I longed for Arethusa to be there. She would never 
 have gone into hysterics, I am sure. 
 
 Next morning we were up early, and I engaged a vetturino to 
 take us to Turin. At Turin we accordingly arrived, very hot and 
 tired, and very dusty, and very hungry, and very thirsty, but, 
 considering all things, in wonderfully good spirits. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EYENTFUL 1IFE. 363 
 
 Major Plunger did, though, just hint that he would be in a 
 certain " warm " place if we ever caught him taking his "leave" 
 out of England again. 
 
 " As for me, I like it very much indeed," said the taciturn 
 Twentyman. 
 
 We put up at Turin at the " Hotel Feder," a well-known inn, 
 where we were excellently treated. Here the Major recovered 
 his temper and spirits. I think he slept eighteen hours without 
 stopping out of the first twenty-four we spent there. 
 
 "Not up," said Twentyman, whom I sent to look after him ; 
 "but the snoring has never ceased since he went to bed." 
 
 " Does your .party mean to stay here some days 1 '' asked the 
 polite landlord. 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 " Then I'll go and get rid of the next-door neighbour to your 
 friend^ — one of our Italian counts, — who says, if that snorer 
 stays here he must leave." 
 
 So the poor Italian was fairly snored out of ■ his hotel by the 
 grunting Major. 
 
 I believe the landlord thought he was one of the Seven 
 Sleepers. When twelve o'clock came, and no Major, the 
 waiters were for breaking in the door, but we, knowing the 
 habits of our friend, would not suffer it. 
 
 "Let him sleep his sleep out; he is very tired ; he'll be down 
 in an hour or -two." 
 
 And so he was, all the better for his slumbers, and with a 
 most voracious appetite. 
 
 We stayed at Turin four or five days, and saw all the lions. 
 The best thing by far in Turin is the distant view of the Alps. 
 Monte Rosa, which we had seen so well on the Cenis, towering 
 above all the rest. What with Gima de This and Gima di That, 
 the mind gets fairly bewildered when a guide attempts to point 
 out and identify all the peaks. But Monte Rosa is the queen of all. 
 
 We saw the palace, and the old ruin in the midst of the town, 
 and the arcades, so well adapted against heat in summer and 
 cold in winter. Soldiers, too, we saw, not in such numbers as I 
 have often seen them since, under Carlo Alberto and Victor 
 Emmanuel, but still in great numbers. That was a very dull 
 time in politics. The Austrian heel was still hard pressed on 
 Italy and Piedmont ; or, rather, Piedmont's king was wavering 
 between despotism and freedom. Out of Piedmont, the white 
 coats of the Austrians were everywhere, except at Ancona, where 
 there was a French garrison, — the first of those fingers in the 
 Italian pie which France has had ever since the Revolution of the 
 Three Glorious.Days in July. 
 
364 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 After we had seen all that was to be seen at Turin, I tried to 
 get my friends to go to Milan, but they would not. Major 
 Plunger hated cathedrals, and had now got a notion that he 
 must get on to Corfu, or his leave would all run out. Twenty- 
 man would only do what the Major did, and so they lost seeing 
 the Lombard capital. 
 
 I thought it best to have a vetturino to take us down to 
 Ancona, where one of the Austrian Lloyd's steamers, then a 
 young concern, was to pick us up. And so we went lazily 
 along, making easy stages, and passing by Parma, Piacenza, 
 Modena, and Bologna. We had to show our passports perpetu- 
 ally, but we had got them all properly vised in Paris, and the 
 only trouble we had was that, whenever the officers looked at 
 the Major, they said " chauve," " calvo," and " grosso," words of 
 which he soon got to know the meaning, and which always 
 threw him into a passion. " Non calvo, but hairy," • he was 
 once heard saying, which only drew down on him a " Si signor," 
 from the remonstrant douanier. 
 
 After a day or two at Bologna, to my mind by far the finest 
 city on that side of Italy, we went slowly on, turning aside to 
 see Eavenua, and its pine-forests, and its churches and tombs, 
 much to the Major's disgust. " All time thrown away : very 
 poor place." Then we went to Eimini, hard by the sea-shore, 
 and I tried in vain to interest them with the story of Francesca. 
 No ! they had never heard of her, and didn't care who she was, 
 or when she lived. 
 
 I rather think the sight of the Adriatic made the Major 
 melancholy, for he was very silent and morose as we neared 
 Ancona. We had a day or two, and I tried to get them to 
 Loretto to see the Santa Casa ; but is was all no good. " A 
 pack of Popish idols and mummeries, fit for no Englishman to 
 see. All very well for monks and nuns, but not for British 
 officers." So we did not go to Loretto just as we had not gone 
 to Milan. 
 
 During our stay at Ancona we had ample opportunity of 
 seeing the smartness of the French infantry, who thronged the 
 place. They showed all their usual orderly intelligence, though 
 the Major declared their drill wretched. "Can't march a 
 bit," he said. "Talk of comparing them with any of our 
 regiments of the line ! It's all nonsense. Our fellows would 
 outwalk them, as well as outeat and outdrink them. Never 
 saw such a slovenly, shuffling quick step." 
 
 We saw, too, the famous harbour, and the mole, and the arch, 
 and the statue, and we saw hosts of those monks and friars of 
 whom the Major had such dread, and we saw the fine peasantry 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 365 
 
 of the March of Anoona working one day in three in the fields, 
 and playing at Mora in the sun on the other two. Truly it 
 seemed a land of soldiers and priests, of great fertility, and 
 extreme idleness and ignorance. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. 
 
 HOW WE WENT ON TO CORFU. 
 
 At last the steamer came. We saw her smoke miles off from 
 the end of the mole, and were ready to embark long before she 
 entered the harbour. The Major was tired of travelling. His 
 wish now was to get on, to have his leave out, and return to 
 Warwick. Why he came, I never could exactly tell, except that 
 he said he wanted to see his brother. But now we are on 
 board ship, the Ferdinando, one of His Imperial and Apostolic 
 Majesty's steamers. Not a war steamer, — I don't mean that, — 
 but a merchant steamer, carrying the Austrian flag. 
 
 What a splendid afternoon it was, and how the moon shone that 
 night, as we ran along the shore — for the Ferdinando, you must 
 know, was to touch at Manfredonia, Tremiti, Bari, Brindisi, and 
 other places — how grand the spurs of the Apennines looked, and 
 the. Gran Sasso d'ltalia, the backbone of Italy, which cuts off 
 the north-east from the south-west coast. We were of all 
 nationalities — Turks, Germans, Greeks, besides English and 
 Italians, the last, of course, outnumbering the rest. All along 
 the land journey the Major had declared that he would have a 
 cabin to himself. I thought as this was doubtful it would be 
 better to secure Twentyman as my berth-fellow, and I did so. 
 How the giant was to screw his six feet odd into the crib called a 
 sleeping-place, was his concern, not mine. 
 
 The Major, I must tell you, was a very clean man, greatly 
 given to comfort and washing, things very good in their way 
 when you can get them, but very hard to get on land in Italy, 
 and on board any ship. How the Major used to storm at the 
 shallow pie-dishes called basins, and the little caraffes of water 
 called jugs. " Fancy calling this water enough to wash in ! 
 Why, my sponge would suck it all up in a moment, and yet feel 
 dry as a bone." 
 
 This sponge, you must know, he carried about with him in an 
 oilskin bag. No ! it was not macintosh. Macintosh bags 
 were not yet invented. It was oilskin, and a very nasty, sticky 
 
366 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 bag it was, always clinging together when the sponge was out 
 of it. 
 
 As soon as we got on board I made friends with the steward, 
 and in my best Italian— very bad was the best, I am afraid — I 
 got a cabin with two berths for Twentyman and myself, and a 
 cabin also with two berths for the Major. The steward, whom 
 we only caught after many " subitos " and " adessos," said the fat 
 gentleman could have the cabin all to himself if the steamer 
 were not full ; and as it was not full up to the time he spoke, 
 and we had left Ancona, we made up our minds, and the Major 
 made up his, that it was all right. He got his portmanteau up 
 out of the hold ; he opened his dressing case ; he got out his 
 sponge — his sacred sponge — and had a preliminary wash. Then 
 he came on deck only to go down to tea or supper, or whatever 
 the meal was ; and after that was over, when, as usual, he ate 
 everything, and abused everything, he went up on deck, and 
 smoked cigars in charity with all men. 
 
 How beautiful that night was, and how I thought of Are- 
 thusa ! The recollection of her followed me about like a 
 guardian angel, and seemed to keep me safe. I daresay you 
 think I have forgotten her all this while that I have been telling 
 you about the absurdities of my fellow-travellers. They were a 
 great comfort to me. I looked on them as children confided; to 
 my care. I was their nurse. They were so helpless ; they were 
 something to think of. But as soon as I was left alone, in my 
 bed, on deck, on shore, Arethusa was ever there, and I said over 
 and over again, "When shall I see those Acroceraunian 
 Mountains 1 " 
 
 " High time to turn in," said the Major, about eleven o'clock. 
 All this time the sea was as smooth as glasSj and sea-sickness 
 had been scouted by every one on board. 
 
 " Yes," yawned Twentyman, " high time ; " and so they dived 
 down the companion. 
 
 I stayed up an hour or two longer, lost in my sweet thoughts, 
 among which ever arose the feeling that the three months would 
 soon be over, and then that Mary Harbury would be finally 
 disposed of by my refusal to have anything to do with her or her 
 ring fence. 
 
 But even lovers get' tired sometimes. I, ardent as I was, so 
 lost in lingering recollections^ began to think it time to follow 
 my friends. 
 
 " Don't go to bed yet," said the steward. "We are just going 
 to stop," — at some place, I forget the name he mentioned, — 
 " and there will be such a noise of letting off steam and unload* 
 ing freight, that it will not be possible to sleep." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 367 
 
 I defied all these influences, and went to my berth. There in 
 the lower berth lay Twentyman, with his gigantic limbs curled 
 up in the air, fast asleep and breathing hard. 
 
 But if he was breathing hard, what was the Major doing ? — 
 snoring away like a snorer, droning like a bagpipe, grunting like 
 a pig, and sometimes squeaking. It was a most fearful concert. 
 One must have been very tired to stand such music ; but I was 
 proof to it. In a few moments I was fast asleep, and asleep I 
 continued. I never heard anything about the stopping of the 
 steamer ; no ! nor one of the Major's unearthly notes all that 
 night. 
 
 But in the morning I was awakened by a din in my berth that 
 no one could have withstood. It was a mixture of oaths and 
 shrieks all blended together, and was really awful. 
 
 " I say, what's all this row about 1" said Twentyman. 
 
 " Yes, what is it all about ?'" I responded: Eubbing the 
 sleep out of our eyes, we saw at the open door of the cabin 
 Major Plunger in a state of fury, holding the steward by the 
 throat. Besides being in a state of fury, he was in another 
 state as to his attire, which I shall not attempt to describe. I 
 say little about it, because it was little. 
 
 "What's he done, Major?" said Twentyman, uncoiling one of 
 his legs and setting it on the floor. 
 
 "Done?" said the Major ; "gone and put a leper into- my 
 berth, who has washed with my sponge." 
 
 This was alarming ; and as it threatened to be very serious- 
 for the steward if I did not get up, I followed Twentyman's 
 example, who had already rescued the steward from the Major's 
 grasp. 
 
 As I was afraid the irascible Italian might stiletto ■ his: 
 antagonist, I pacified him by saying that, as the Major was 
 "molto iracundo," he must excuse him, and asked him how it 
 was that he, the steward, had allowed any one to use the Major's 
 sponge. 
 
 The steward's story was short. When the steamer stopped 
 the night before she took in some passengers, and amongst 
 others one gentleman who was put into the Major's cahin, 
 simplybecause that was the last berth left*. He certainly was 
 very scorbutic-looking, but the steward did not think he was a 
 leper. 
 
 This was enough, so far as it went, and now I turned to the 
 Major, whom we had taken into our cabin, to hear what he had 
 to say; Twentyman lay on his berth, and I lay on mine, 
 holding, as it were, a bed of justice, while the Major, in the 
 scantiest" attire, stated his case. 
 
S68 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 "You know, both of you," he said, " that I was to have that 
 cabin to myself. That was the bargain. I went to sleep, and 
 slept as I always sleep,— well. When I woke up, I said to 
 myself, Now for a good wash. All my things were laid out 
 ready beforehand. There was even a pail of water— I can't 
 call it a tub. "Well, when I looked at my sponge I had a sort 
 of feeling that some one had touched it. I had left, I must tell 
 you, a little dirty water overnight, that I got rid of out of the 
 porthole, and then I just had a good wash. I felt as clean as 
 though I were at Warwick. Such a shave, too !" rubbing his 
 chin. " When it was all over, I heard a sort of grunt behind 
 me. I turned, and what do you think I saw in the lower berth, 
 or the one below mine 1 By Jove ! a leper asleep, as white as 
 snow. That scoundrel the steward must have put him in over- 
 night ; and as I feel sure that my sponge had. been touched, 
 that leper must have thought it was put out for the good of 
 the whole cabin, — a common sponge ! — my sponge a common 
 sponge !— and sponged his filthy carcase with it. There he is, 
 sound asleep now. Peep into the cabin, and you can see." 
 
 It certainly was as ugly a story as it was nasty. To make it 
 all right, we did peep in, and we did see what certainly was a 
 most loathsome-looking fellow, — a man like Vesuvius of late, 
 in a violent state of eruption, — fast asleep below the Major's 
 berth. 
 
 Now we turned again to the steward, whose fright and anger 
 had departed, and he was again the pliant body a steward — and 
 above all an Italian steward — always is. 
 
 Up to the present time the steward had not understood the 
 great charge against him. He thought he had been collared for 
 putting another passenger into the Major's berth ; but when 
 told he was accused because that passenger had washed with the 
 sacred sponge, he burst out into roars of laughter at the ab- 
 surdity of such a supposition. 
 
 " I assure you," he said, " in all these years I have never 
 known an Italian passenger wash so soon after he came on 
 board. If they wash at all, it is just before leaving the vessel 
 to go on land. No, no ! that gentleman never washed with the 
 sponge. He may have touched it, and looked at it as a curiosity; 
 but wash with it, he certainly did not." 
 
 When all this was made plain to the Major, he was a little 
 mollified. 
 
 " But who," he said, " will guarantee me against catching that 
 fellow's leprosy, for he may have given it to me by merely 
 touching my sponge 1 " 
 
 " No one, of course," said Twentyman ; '< no one. It's a bore, 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 363 
 
 but it can't be helped. All we can hope is, Major, that it won't 
 break out all over you." 
 
 " Gracious goodness !" saidtheMajor ; "fancy returning from 
 leave a confirmed leper like Gehazi." 
 
 " Awful bore," said the consolatory Twentyman. " How- 
 nasty it would look in the medical report : ' Invalided for 
 leprosy*!** They'd hardly believe it at the Horse Guards !" 
 
 There was no help for it. The Major had to return to his 
 berth to make a hasty toilet, to rush on deck and wait for his 
 breakfast. He thought he had escaped the leper. Not at all. 
 He and the leper had consecutive numbers. He was No. 90, 
 and the leper No. 91. They were bound to sit next to each 
 other. I was 88, Twentyman '89, so we all sat at breakfast in a 
 row. I first, then Twentyman, then the Major, and then — the 
 leper ! The worst was that the leper was late in coming, and 
 his arrival when breakfast was half over nearly made Major 
 Plunger ill. The leper, too, as many loathsome people do, 
 thought himself very charming, and would offer his unhappy 
 neighbour little civilities and attentions all through the rest of 
 the meal. 
 
 "Confound that fellow!" said the Major, when he appeared 
 on deck with a cigar in his mouth ; " he'll be the death of me ! " 
 
 After breakfast I consulted with the steward, and was glad to 
 learn that Signor Scorbutico was only going as far as Man- 
 fredonia, and that we should get rid of him before nightfall. 
 That was such good news for Major Plunger that he was quite 
 excited, and said : 
 
 " If that fellow would only go, I should be quite happy ! " 
 
 Very beautiful was it to run by the shore, to touch at 
 Tremiti, then, I believe, as now, a place of exile for political 
 prisoners, for carbonari then, and for camorristi now ; to round 
 the great promontory of Gargano, and — to the great delight of 
 the Major — to land the leper. 
 
 He had still to undergo dinner with him, and the leper's 
 attentions were as marked at that meal as they had been at 
 breakfast. It was rather a joke for us, — I mean for Twentyman 
 and myself; but it was anything but a joke to Major Plunger. 
 One of his eyes got inflamed — I believe entirely from exposure 
 to the night air and smoking. It was but a little redness after 
 all, but nothing would satisfy him but that he had got the 
 leprosy in his eye. He was certain that was the way in which 
 it began, and he was always bathing and sponging it. 
 
 Very glad, therefore, was he, and were we, when, after 
 doubling the great headland of Gargano, the butt-end of the 
 Sasso d' Italia, we ran in for the Eoads of Manfredonia. 
 
370 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 How strange and yet how beautiful are those Norman towns 
 all along that coast ; girt by a line of walls and towers, within 
 which, as in some of our own Cinque Ports, the modern town 
 has shrunk ! 
 
 They may have outgrown their walls and barriers since I was 
 there in 18 3-, and have spread out over field and valley, but 
 then there was a shrinking inwards, a shrivelling of the popula- 
 tion. Straight up the hill from the shore went the line of wall, 
 enclosing a castle and a cathedral, both far too big for the walls. 
 Then, after running up for some hundred yards, the fortifications 
 took a turn to the left, ran along a sufficient distance to complete 
 the square or parallelogram, and then turned back to the shore. 
 That was the town or city of Manfredonia, as seen from the sea, 
 and such, I daresay, it still is. 
 
 Even in those days there were brigands. We had a company 
 or two of Papal soldiers going to meet a famous chief. The 
 officers had made conquests of all the women on board, chiefly 
 Venetian ladies, who spoke the choicest Venetian, and were 
 much interested in the future campaign. 
 
 Boatload after boatload of the brave defenders of Gregory XVI. 
 departed for the shore, and as each boat pushed off, their female 
 sympathisers waved their kerchiefs and called out : " Guardate 
 vida incidere ai mani dei brigandi." " Take care not to fall into 
 the hands of the brigands." 
 
 I must say I thought the soldiers, and more than all the 
 officers, looked as though they would much rather fall into 
 the arms of the ladies they left, and no wonder if the horrors one 
 heard of were likely to befall them. 
 
 As it was, we were glad to lose them, as they crowded the 
 boat and were not good company. But our great rejoicing was 
 when the leper left. It had been kept dark which port he was 
 likely to patronise for his disembarkation ; and when the 
 steward came up bearing a very small bag, which contained all 
 the leper's worldly goods, the Major's joy knew no bounds. 
 
 " I say, Twentyman, he's going. Just look at my eye, there's 
 a good fellow, and tell me how it looks." 
 
 " Better, much better ; it will be all right to-morrow," said 
 the giant. " I suppose you can see well enough to look at him 
 as he goes over the side." 
 
 " Of course," said the Major. " Here he comes." 
 
 A leper is not a pleasant thing to look on ; nor do I believe 
 that our friend was one. I very much doubt whether the 
 ancient Israelites would have excluded him from the congrega- 
 tion ; and yet he was so ill-favoured that I don't wonder the 
 Major disliked sitting by him, particularly after his suspicions 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 371 
 
 as to the sponge. I am not going to disgust you with his 
 appearance, but only to say how we lost sight of him. Confess 
 that in this I have been very good. I have not shocked you by 
 details. 
 
 Well, up the companion he came, and if he looked bad below, 
 he looked much worse in the broad light of day. Yes ! he was 
 loathsome ; there was no denying it. 
 
 I don't know if you are aware that landing on that coast is no 
 easy matter. It is not that the sea is rough : it may be ; but 
 when we were at Manfredonia, it was quite calm. The danger 
 of landing is not so much from the sea as from the boatmen who 
 put off from the shore, and fight- for the passengers who are to 
 disembark. How many passengers did we land at Manfredonia ? 
 About ten; and for these at least a hundred boats fought. 
 Talk of the cities that contended for the birth-place of Homer. 
 It was nothing to the contest to land at Manfredonia. 
 
 Down the gangway our leper stepped. His luggage had been 
 handed down before him, and been safely lodged in one boat. 
 But when he appeared himself, it seemed as though the object 
 of all the other boatmen was not to suffer him to enter that 
 particular craft. He and his luggage seemed never destined to 
 meet. He was dragged here and pushed there. Beat and 
 buffeted, hauled and mauled, till at last, when he had rashly 
 set one foot on one boat and the other in another, the boats 
 parted, and he, after striding on each boat as far as he was able, 
 could stride no longer, and fell into the sea. 
 
 We were just going off; for the captain of the Ferdinando 
 was anxious to get on, and would not tarry ; but before we were 
 well under way, we saw the leper fished out by a boat-hook, and 
 safely seated in the boat with his luggage. He looked sleek and 
 shiny as a seal ; but like a very leprous one. 
 
 " Glad he is all safe," said the Major ; " but I hope this will 
 be a lesson to him not to use another man's sponge. Twenty- 
 man, how is my eye 1 " 
 
 "Much the same," said the giant. "If anything, a little 
 redder. It will be all right to-morrow." 
 
 That night the Major slept in peace. He had his cabin all 
 to himself. Indeed, had any passengers come on board, I don't 
 think, after the steward's experience of Major Plunger's clutch, 
 that he would have ventured to put them into that cabin. 
 
 Next morning we came to Bari, which, I remember, was a 
 large town, almost a city in our estimation, — and I daresay 
 quite so in' its own. It had — and I suppose has — a cathedral 
 and a bishop, and it looked as shrunk within its Norman walls 
 as a nut two years old. There we had to disembark a lot of 
 
 b b 2 
 
372 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 copper money, in cases ; and as the boatmen — who were as 
 brown as berries, and as naked as Adam before the fall — were 
 fighting for the right of taking them on shore, one case was 
 lost overboard, and sank to the bottom. I have often thought 
 of that case of Papal pence, and wondered if it has ever been 
 fished up. 
 
 Last of all we came to Brindisi, where we landed. Every one 
 lands at Brindisi to see the house that Virgil is believed to have 
 stayed at when on his travels. Being an outspoken man, I 
 shocked the captain of the port of Brindisi very much by point- 
 ing out to him that the house was certainly not Eoman, but 
 mediaeval, — a twelfth-century house perhaps. All he said was, 
 that it was not safe to trifle with popular traditions, — that the 
 house not only was, but was believed to be, that in which Virgil 
 stayed, and that it was as much as a man's life was worth, down 
 there in the hot south, to run contrary to received beliefs. In 
 fact, Brindisi at that time was very like an American city in the 
 South in the old times, when the opinion of the citizens was a 
 law unto themselves. 
 
 At Brindisi we had not so far to go to Corfu, and at Brindisi we 
 picked up several Greeks. The most interesting of these were a 
 father, mother, and daughter. The father was one of those 
 small, well-made men who are really much stronger than they 
 look — a man built on the model of the old Greeks, whose pro- 
 portions it was extremely unjust to put into modern clothes. In 
 the palmy days of Athens you would have met him in the gym- 
 nasium stripped, and then you would have met a frame like the 
 best of the Elgin marbles. The mother was rather of the 
 Italian type, — a very severe face, with regular features. She 
 must have been a very handsome woman when young ; but, 
 alas ! women in Greece so soon get worn and shrivelled, — if 
 they don't get coarse and fat, which is worse. The daughter, 
 Sappho ; yes ! the daughter. 
 
 All this time I have never told you the name of the family. 
 Well !you know one sees people first, and learns their name 
 afterwards ; but I may as well say that it was a fine high- 
 sounding name — " Maurocordato ;" and mind you pronounce it 
 — if you try to pronounce it at all — " Mavrocordato ; "for it's 
 in Greek are usually v's. 
 
 But to come back to the daughter. When I saw Sappho 
 Maurocordato sitting in a boat with her respected father and 
 mother, as they were being pulled towards the Ferdinando by a 
 brace of sunburnt boatmen — burnt almost as red as Dutch 
 bricks — I remember saying, "Well! here is a pretty foreign 
 girl at last!" 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 373 
 
 Twentyman, whose favourite position was staring over the 
 eide, said, lazily : 
 
 "What a stunner!" 
 
 Major Plunger seemed moved, and about to say something ; 
 but he said nothing. 
 
 Yes ! let me describe Sappho. She was not dark; with the 
 darkness of Greek beauty. She was fair, with light brown hair; 
 she had blue eyes — not dark blue eyes like Arethusa's, or 
 greenish-blue like Mary Harbury's — but blue, azure blue. Her 
 features were regular, and she had a higher forehead than 
 Greeks, and indeed than women in general. In figure she was 
 as perfect for a woman as her father was for a man ; and, I 
 must sayi she had not inherited any of her mother's severity of 
 expression. 
 
 Signora Maurocordato looked as though she had suffered 
 much. Like Dante, she bore her wrongs and sorrows on her 
 face ; and it was easy to see from her features that she had a 
 story. 
 
 Their boat touched the side, the red bricks held on with their 
 old-fashioned boat-hooks, just such, I verily believe, as were used 
 at the siege of Troy. After the usual strife and gesticulating 
 about the fare, — when fury enough to win a pitched battle is 
 expended on the difference of twopence sterling — the three new 
 passengers mounted the side. Signor Maurocordato, with great 
 activity and energy, the Signora more sternly, but with decided 
 determination in her step, and the Signorina with a burst of 
 laughter, — magnetic laughter, — and a tripping gait. 
 
 I said magnetic laughter, because there are many kinds of 
 laughter. There is the horse-laugh, a loud, muscular burst, 
 — which is not worth much, — but which is hearty all the 
 same. Then there is the mere skin-deep smile, which seems 
 as though the face of the smiler were painted, and he or she 
 were afraid to crack the enamel. There is the laugh, the laugh 
 of commerce, the sign so often hanging out of an empty shop, 
 anything but hearty or exhilarating. And last of all, there is 
 what I call magnetic laughter — which is catching and infectious, 
 which spreads from face to face of a company, as the streamers 
 of the northern lights flash and spread ; laughter which mag- 
 netizes you, in short, till you feel, however much you may 
 resist the feeling, that you must laugh too, and on the right 
 side of your mouth. I dismiss, of course, laughing on the 
 wrong side of your mouth, as no laughter at all — as much a 
 mockery as a Jerusalem artichoke is compared with a real arti- 
 choke. 
 
 Well ! that magnetic laughter was Sappho MaurOcordato's ; 
 
374 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 when she laughed or smiled it was as when Venus put on her 
 cestus, she won every one about her to the same mirth. It was 
 not a chattering laughter, but a real merry burst from the 
 heart. 
 
 She said nothing. She only laughed, and we all laughed 
 with her. The Major laughed and laughed again. Twenty- 
 man, whose risible muscles were stiff and more rheumatic, 
 laughed once. As for me, the better laugher of the two, I 
 laughed all the while Sappho laughed, and when she stopped I 
 stopped. 
 
 She followed her parents along the deck, and when they sat 
 down together side by side, she would not sit with them, but 
 plumped herself down opposite to them, nest to me. 
 
 I daresay you will say this was all playing a part. I dare- 
 say. Women play many parts in life, and some people, though 
 I do not, think they are always acting. Was Sappho Mauro- 
 cordato acting on board the Ferdinando ? Who can tell ? 
 
 It so happened that we three, the Major, Twentyman, and I, 
 were all of a row on a bench, like sparrows on a wall. And not 
 at all unlike sparrows, too, in other things. The two clung to 
 me, so that when I rose they rose, and you might as well ex- 
 pect to see two sparrows still sitting after one had taken wing, 
 as to see the Major and Twentyman seated when I had risen. 
 
 As soon as Sappho was seated next to me, she turned round 
 and looked at each of vis full in the face. It was both a general 
 and a particular look, aimed at us all together, and yet with a 
 quick separate glance for each. When we compared notes 
 afterwards, the Major said : " That girl's eyes went right through 
 me." 
 
 " My eyes seemed to melt away before hers," said Twenty- 
 man, very prettily and poetically. " They were lost in hers." 
 
 After that speech I had some hope of my giant. His heart, 
 as I have said before, I believe, was in its right place. 
 
 As for me, I decline to speculate on the effect those eyes 
 produced on me, but I can tell you that I said at once to my- 
 self, " No ! they are not half such nice eyes as Arethusa's." 
 And then I began to muse on the Acroceraunian Mountains and 
 my own pet fountain. 
 
 Her mother said something to her in Greek, which, of course, 
 I could not understand. Even if it had been like the ancient 
 language, which it is not — not at least in ordinary conversation 
 — the pronunciation is so unlike an Englishman's notion of the 
 way in which Pericles spoke, that Pericles himself, with all his 
 sharpness, would not understand one word in ten of what we 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 375 
 
 Then they went on in Italian, — in that bastard Venetian 
 dialect which I know now, but of which I knew nothing then. 
 
 I do not know if you feel as I do, but it is very provoking to 
 sit near people talking, and not to know what they say. At 
 last I mustered up courage, and in my best Italian I said it was 
 a very fine day, and that I hoped we should have a smooth sea 
 all the way across to Corfu. 
 
 My neighbour, the Signorina, smiled, — this time it was not a 
 laugh, — and said in much better English than my Italian : 
 
 " I do hope it will be fine, for I hate the sickness of the 
 sea." 
 
 How glad I was, and how still more glad were the Major and 
 Twentyman, to hear a lady talking their own dear BngEsh 
 tongue ! 
 
 Nor was that all. Signor Maurocordato also spoke very good 
 English, and the only one of the three who was disinclined to 
 do so was the Signora, whose excuse was the Englishman's, — 
 that she was " afraid of being laughed at." 
 
 Dear me ! how many sins, both of omission and commission, 
 has not that " afraid of being laughed at " served to conceal ! 
 
 It was amusing to see how very polite both the Major and 
 Twentyman instantly became. They were gentlemen, and as 
 soon as they shook off their mortal fear of being attacked by 
 any one in a foreign tongue, there was no little civility that 
 they were not ready to offer. It was all done in the rough, 
 genuine English way, and was all the more welcome. 
 
 Major Plunger was sure it would be damp sitting on deck, 
 though the air was balmy beyond the balminess of any English 
 day. The moon, too, was waxing fast, and I, even I, full of the 
 last full moon at Mandeville Hall, and with the White Lady 
 still running in my head, was forced to confess that at Brindisi 
 half a moon is brighter than an English full moon. 
 
 But while I hawe been moonrgazing, the Major and Twenty- 
 man had both dived down the companion, and soon reappeared 
 with all the wraps they could lay hold of. 
 
 As soon as they had been disposed of, we all began to talk. 
 
 The Signor could see that we were English officers, going to 
 Corfu, — it was so easy to tell English officers. " There was an 
 unmistakable something about them," and so on. 
 
 As I listened I could not help thinking the Greeks of the 
 nineteenth century are just as much given to flattery as those 
 of the Lower Empire. 
 
 " Yes," said Major Plunger, in a magnificent way ; " we are 
 English officers, — that is to say, Mr. Twentyman and I are ; 
 Mr. Halfacre, this gentleman, is not. We are going to see 
 
376 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 some brother officers at Corfu, and Mr. Halfacre has come with 
 us to speak for us, and show us the way." 
 
 "Ah," said the Signor, "capisco. Mr. Halfacre is what you 
 English call a T. G., a travelling gent. You, of course, will be 
 lodged with your friends in the citadel ? Where are you going 
 to stay, Mr. Halfacre 1 " 
 
 While I was wondering how he could have got my name so 
 pat, the Signorina said : 
 
 " We have heard of Mr. Halfacre before. Have we not, papa 1 '.' 
 
 " When and where ? " I asked. 
 
 " That you must guess," was the reply. " I daresay you will 
 know all about it when you get to Corfu." 
 
 It was no use trying to get their secret from them as to how 
 and where they had heard my name, which is not so common as 
 Smith. Had my name been " Smith," it would not have been 
 wonderful. Every one has heard before of the Smiths, but 
 Halfacre, it was past belief that they should ever have heard it. 
 
 However, heard it they had, for though it is not at all an easy 
 word for any foreigner to pronounce, they did not call it Sal/acre, 
 as was probable, but Half-acre, or Half dicer, as plain as possible. 
 
 I gave up guessing, however, and we went on with the con- 
 versation. 
 
 " Yes," said the Signor, "we have heard of Mr. Halfacre, and 
 I must say I am surprised that he has not heard of us. If he 
 • has a mystery, we have one too. Both will no doubt be cleared 
 up at Corfu. But what I wish to ask is : If Mr. Halfacre will 
 come and stay with us — some part of the time, at least, that he 
 is at Corfu ? " 
 
 " Why, really I have made no plans. I certainly am free 
 enough, for I know no one in Corfu, though it seems Corfu 
 knows me. The old story, I suppose : ' More people know Tom 
 Fool than Tom Fool knows V" 
 
 " If you are free," said Sappho, " you will come and stay 
 with us in such a lovely house among oranges, and myrtles, 
 and cypresses, up at the top of a hill overlooking the sea. Do 
 you like riding ? " 
 
 " Very much indeed ; I like nothing better." 
 
 " Then again you'll come to us, for there are lovely rides all 
 over the island through the olive-groves, and as one rides over 
 the myrtles the odour rises round one. Oh, it is delightful !" 
 
 "I have made no plans," I said, putting on some of Aunt 
 Mandeville's stiffness. I was not going to jump down the 
 throat of the first pretty girl I met. 
 
 " Oh, you'll come to us all the same, plans or no plans," said 
 Sappho ; " see if you don't." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 377 
 
 " I am quite ready to leave it there. I will see if I shall." 
 
 The Ferdinando was not a fast boat, not at all ; she was a 
 regular slug. Those were not the days of fast boats ; then any 
 boat — any steamboat, I mean, — was a fast boat. But it was 
 pleasant to sit there on deck, breathing the pure air, to feel the 
 fresh, crisp wind which blew off the Albanian coast, and, later 
 on, to catch sight of St. Salvador, as the highest mountain in 
 Corfu is called. 
 
 ' It was only very slowly that we made up our minds to go to 
 bed. 
 
 " Miss Harbury won't have much chance against Miss Sappho, 
 Halfacre," said Major Plunger. 
 
 As for Twentyman, he was deep in love — over head and ears 
 in love ; and that, when a man is six feet four, is very deep in 
 love, indeed. 
 
 But his way of showing his feelings was peculiar. " I wish 
 Miss Sappho were not a foreigner ; then I'd try to marry her." 
 
 With which qualified expression of admiration the giant 
 turned into bed. 
 
 We had none of us much rest. At eight o'clock next morn- 
 ing we were running up the North Channel, leaving Butrinto, 
 on the Albanian coast, on our left. 
 
 The Greeks are early risers, and I found Miss Sappho on deck. 
 
 " I thought you were never coming," she said ; " but you are 
 better than the rest of them. What's the name of that tall 
 man, who spoke so little ?" 
 
 "Twentyman." 
 
 " Twentyman ! what a good name ! Twenty of him would 
 make forty ordinary men." 
 
 "Tell me which are the Acroceraunian Mountains?" 
 
 " Let me see. There they are," pointing, as she spoke, to 
 the great mountain range of Albania, which show in such 
 majesty from Corfu. 
 
 " And where is the fountain of Arethusa ? '' 
 
 " Arethusa ! I neverTteard^f her. She is no friend of mine. 
 Does she live in Corfu 1 " 
 
 Against ignorance, as well as against stupidity, the gods are 
 powerless. What was the good of prolonging a conversation 
 with a girl who neither knew my modern divinity nor the 
 ancient nymph 1 
 
 And now we neared the harbour. There was the citadel ; 
 there the semicircular town ; there fort this and fort that ; 
 there Vido, the island, in front, on which England expended so 
 many hundred thousand pounds in "fortifications merely to have 
 the pleasure of blowing them up. Soon we saw the British 
 
378 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 men-of-war at anchor ; still the wooden walls of old England, and 
 not yet the modern matchboxes. There they lay so trim and 
 tidy, with their yards so well squared and their rigging all so 
 taut. Soon we saw the red-coated sentries, and heard the 
 everlasting drums and fifes. 
 
 The Signor and the Signora had now come up. Major 
 Plunger and Twentyman followed. The drums and fifes would 
 rouse any officer from his rest in any foreign land. In a few 
 minutes more the Ferdinando had taken up her moorings, and 
 our voyage to Corfu was over. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVII. 
 
 HOW I LANDED IN CORFU. 
 
 " Theee's Bill ! " said Major Plunger to Twentyman, point- 
 ing to a stout artillery officer, who was looking up at the ship 
 from a boat among the many that swarmed round her. " How 
 are you, Bill?" 
 
 Bill, thus challenged, responded, "Pretty well. How are 
 you, Dick 1 " 
 
 " All right," was the answer, and so the two brothers, Bill 
 and Dick Plunger, met. They had not seen each other for 
 fifteen years. 
 
 " I say," said Twentyman, " we had better all go ashore 
 together. By Jove ! there goes one boat over. I hope there 
 are no sharks in these waters." 
 
 "Sharks!" said Sappho; " there are hundreds of them. A 
 sentry was snapped in two by one a few weeks ago." 
 
 " I shan't bathe here," said Twentyman emphatically, as if 
 there were any shark spawned that could have cut him in two. 
 
 " Good-bye," said Sappho ; " we're sure to meet again ; and 
 see if you don't come and stay with us in the country, Mr. 
 Halfacre." 
 
 " Good-bye ; good-bye ; good-bye ! " And we three wanderers 
 went over the side. Fortunately, there was no fight for our 
 bodies, because the Major's brother had already secured a boat. 
 
 We landed at the stairs between the citadel and the palace- — 
 that palace, the glory of Engineer architecture ; a most elegant 
 and commodious building, the work of that distinguished corps 
 in the days of King Tom. 
 
 At the stairs the Major went off into the citadel along the 
 esplanade. Twentyman was also quartered somewhere else in 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 379 
 
 the fortress. With the selfishness of soldiers, they left me to 
 myself, and two burly Maltese porters carried my luggage to 
 the H6tel d'Angleterre, across the esplanade. 
 
 Yes ; there I was, all alone in Corfu in an hotel. I had 
 come away so hastily that I had no time to get letters of intro- 
 duction. I had Coutts' circular notes, that was all. 
 
 Would you believe it, that all this time I had never once 
 remembered, never so much as looked at, Count Manteuffel's. 
 letter of introduction 1 The time had not come for me to want 
 it till I landed. The first thing I did was to get out the letter, 
 and then I saw on it, written, not, I am thankful to say, in the 
 German fly-crawling character, but in a good round Italian 
 hand: 
 
 " Al Illustrissimo Signor, 
 
 Signor Spiridion Maurocordato, 
 Corfu." 
 
 And now the murder was out. The Count had sent them a 
 private letter, warning them that I was coming to Corfu the 
 bearer of a letter of introduction, and that was how they were 
 all so ready with my name. They had been practising -the pro- 
 nunciation of Halfacre for days before my arrival. I must tell 
 you that they had only gone from Corfu to Brindisi for a few 
 days on business, so that they had plenty of time to get the 
 Count's letter. 
 
 How odd it was that I should have fallen in on the way with 
 the only family to whom I had a letter of introduction ! 
 
 Should I present it ? Was Sappho Maurocordato any rival to 
 Arethusa ? I scouted the notion. She was a pretty, merry 
 girl, and that was all. Her forward foreign manners made her 
 more demonstrative than English young ladies, but one excused 
 that in her because she was a foreigner. There could be no 
 harm in presenting the letter ; and so, having had a bath quite 
 free from fear of lepers, I made myself smart, and set off to find 
 the Maurocordatos' house. 
 
 It was not far off. It was the last house in Condi Terrace on 
 the left as you turned up from the esplanade. Condi Terrace, 
 which was — and, for all I know, still is, — the Belgravia of 
 Corfu, was built on one of the old bastions of the dismantled 
 town. When I say " dismantled," I believe the fortifications 
 were only masked by the houses, not dismantled ; and that, if 
 the city of Corfu were ever besieged, — as it has been, over and 
 over again, in Venetian, Bussian, and French times, — all the 
 houses of Condi Terrace would disappear in a puff of smoke, 
 and be razed from the face of the earth before the strategical 
 necessities of the besieged. In such a case, it will be hard to 
 
380 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 say which would be the worst enemies of Condi Terrace, — the 
 friends within or the foes without ! Let us hope, for the sake of 
 Condi Terrace, if for nothing else, that war may not show its 
 horrid face to the town of Corfu. 
 
 Perched up on a height, the terrace commanded a wide view 
 over the country in front, the mountain of Santa Decca filling 
 up the foreground, and it had a side view of the sea and the 
 Albanian coast and mountains on the left. Yes ! there was a 
 lovely view from those houses. 
 
 It was rather soon to call, but I was idle, and idleness is the 
 root of all calling, as well as of all evil. The Maurocordatos 
 had a very nice apartment ; and in the saloon I saw seated, as 
 demurely as though she had never done anything more than sit 
 there all her life, the Signorina Sappho. 
 
 " Well, you have come ! " she cried, rather triumphantly. 
 " I told you you would. Have you found out the mystery 1 " 
 
 "Yes," I replied. "The fact was, I threw Count Man- 
 teuffel's letter into my portmanteau without looking at the 
 address ; and I am not sorry that I did so, as it gave me, at 
 least, an opportunity of making your acquaintance as an utter 
 stranger. Letters of introduction are always unpleasant things 
 to present, and in this case we meet as acquaintances when I 
 present it." 
 
 "As friends, too, I hope !" said Sappho. 
 
 Here the Signora entered, and brought a difficulty with her. 
 How could this same Italian beauty, or past beauty, be the 
 lemon-haired Count's sister, for, you know, he said his sister 
 was married to a Greek, and this Greek was evidently Signor 
 Maurocordato. 
 
 I think the Signorina must have guessed what was passing in 
 my mind, for she said : 
 
 "Mamma is Count Manteuffel's half-sister. Grandmamma 
 was married first to a Greek and then to a Prussian General, 
 and that's why mamma is so dark and her half-brother so fair." 
 
 " I was wondering," I said, " at the utter want of likeness, 
 but you have made it quite clear." 
 
 Now the Signor entered. Besides being Prussian Consul, he 
 was hereditary Grand Standard Bearer to Santo Spiro, the 
 patron saint of Corfu, an office of immense dignity and useful- 
 ness, the onerous duties of which were to walk before the shrine 
 of the saint on the day of his translation, holding his banner. 
 
 But in spite of his office, he was a lively, pleasant man, who 
 seemed disposed to do everything for me that he could. 
 
 " It is so strange to find an Englishman who knows no one in 
 Corfu, but that, of course, will soon be mended. You will call 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 381 
 
 on the Lord High Commissioner, and on the General who com- 
 mands in chief, and then they will both ask you to dinner, and 
 you will get into society, and " 
 
 " Forget us Greeks," put in Sappho, very cleverly. " That's 
 always the way with you English, when the Greeks are kind to 
 you. You are a rude, uncourteous set." And then she burst 
 out into a peal of laughter. 
 
 " No, I shall not," I said. " I am not so fond of generals 
 and dinners. I can have enough of them at home. While I 
 am here I would sooner see the country and the people, 
 especially if they are so charming as I have already found 
 them." 
 
 " If you really mean that," said the Signorina, " we will take 
 you at your word. After having done what politeness requires 
 to your countrymen, after playing a little at cards with them — 
 I don't mean what you call gambling, but only leaving cards on 
 them, — give up your countrymen, and come and stay with us at 
 Gastouri a few miles out of the town, and there we will make 
 you as happy as we can." 
 
 " Agreed," said I. And so it was settled that I should go in 
 a few days with them to their country place ; meantime I was 
 to stay at the hotel. 
 
 That afternoon I went to see Major Plunger and Twenty- 
 man, whom I found very fairly lodged in the casemates at the 
 citadel. 
 
 Every one who has been at Corfu knows the citadel — that 
 huge bifurcated rock that rises at one corner of the esplanade to 
 a height of some hundred feet above the sea, cut off by a ditch 
 from the mainland, with the English church, and the officers' 
 quarters, and the barracks, and the batteries clustered round 
 its feet. 
 
 Now, all these fortifications are useless, and that is why, when 
 our exodus came, which at one blow destroyed the pleasantest 
 station for soldiers out of England, and the most delightful 
 resort for T. G.'s fond of woodcock-shooting in the world, — 
 when we cleared out in order that the grand idea of the Greeks 
 might be fulfilled, we left them standing, and blew up the works 
 on the low island of Vido which were really useful in modern 
 warfare. But when I was there nothing could be more imposing 
 than the citadel, from the top of which the heavy guns there 
 mounted looked as though they could send their plunging fire 
 right down upon the decks of the line-of-battle ships moored 
 beneath. 
 
 I should think that Major Plunger stood quite an inch higher 
 when I saw him than when he had left the steamer with Bill. 
 
382 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " This is something like a fortress. No nonsense, no excuses. 
 At night drawbridge up, password set, and a ball through your 
 body if you can't give it." 
 
 " All very right, I daresay," said Twentyman, who was 
 stretched all his full length in an American rocking-chair 
 smoking a cheroot. " All very right and necessary ; but what's 
 a fellow to do if he forgets the password, and gets shot 1 I 
 suppose he ought never to stir out of the citadel after dark. 
 When a fellow comes home from dinner, what's he to do ? Then 
 he may forget 1 " 
 
 " I'm sure I can't tell yet," said the Major. " When I've 
 tried I'll tell you." 
 
 " Been to call on the Lord High ? " asked the irreverent 
 Twentyman. 
 
 " No, I'm going to-morrow. What's the General's name ? 
 I must call on him too." 
 
 " Quickstep," said the Major. " He's an awful martinet, they 
 say, and parades regiments in the noonday sun. Ever so many 
 men have fallen down this summer with sunstroke." 
 
 " I suppose," says Twentyman, " he thinks if an enemy 
 should come he might choose to land, not like a thief in the 
 night, but a grasshopper at noon ; and so he wants the men to 
 be ready for him." 
 
 " Very glad I'm on leave," said Major Plunger. " We should 
 have a good many empty helmets in a month's service out 
 here." 
 
 " So am I," re-echoed Twentyman. 
 
 " Come and dine at the artillery mess, Halfacre ? " said the 
 Major. " I have got my brother to put you down as an honorary 
 member. Seven sharp." 
 
 So at seven sharp I went, and was introduced to some twenty or 
 thirty artillery officers and engineers. It was a very fair dinner, 
 and a good deal of wine was drunk, and afterwards there was 
 some card-playing, and I lost some money in betting to " Bill." 
 
 Altogether I went home very much disgusted. 
 
 Next day I took a walk through the city, and out at the 
 Land Gate, and down towards the sea, and up by the Casino to 
 the One Gun Battery, — that famous One Guu Battery at the 
 entrance of the old port, where Palaeopolis, the old city of the 
 Phseacians, was situated. 
 
 At the end of September the sun at mid-day was still 
 scorching, but in the mornings and evenings the air was fresh 
 and cool. But what a charm of sea, and land, and air was shed 
 over the whole place ; and yet, wherever I went, — from the 
 citadel, from the Casino under the huge artocarpus tree at the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 383 
 
 door, under the clustered olive-trees at the One Gun Battery, 
 my heart ever turned towards Arethusa, and my eyes sought 
 the mountains amid the gorges of which her fountain was 
 hidden. 
 
 "Ah! Arethusa! Arethusa!" I said, half aloud, when a 
 merry laugh was heard behind me from a lady on horseback, 
 cantering up the road to the battery. It was Sappho Mauro- 
 cordato, riding out with her father and Yanni her Greek cousin. 
 
 " You Englishmen are just like sheep," she said. " You all of 
 you go on doing the same thing for ever, as if you were fated to 
 do it. I knew you would be here. I felt as sure of it as 
 that you would come to us at Gastouri, and here I find you ; 
 and, do you know, as we came along we saw such a sight. We 
 saw your two friends, the heavy cavalry detachment, plodding 
 along the road, and looking as though they had never walked a 
 mile in their lives." 
 
 " I have nearly had enough of Corfu, — I mean of the town," I 
 said. "When are you going into the country ? " 
 
 " To-morrow mamma and I go, and you may as well come 
 too. The day after papa will come. Besides, if you get as tired 
 of the country in as short a time as you are of the town, you 
 can always get back, for it isn't more than eight or nine 
 miles." 
 
 " I shall have done all my paste-boarding to-morrow, and then 
 I shall be free. I will come the day after with the Signor, if he 
 will allow me." 
 
 " Very good ; the day after to-morrow then." And as she 
 said that she turned her horse's head and rode him down the 
 steep pitch at full speed, through the gnarled olive trunks, and 
 over the myrtles and cyclamens. 
 
 " What a madcap, Pazza ! " said the Signor, in Italian. 
 " Come, Yanni, let us follow her ; " and then the two performed 
 a like fantasia down the brow of the hill. 
 
 I was still standing there, enjoying the view, when the Major- 
 and Twentyman came up, dusty and deliquescent as the curates' 
 wives immortalised by Sydney Smith. 
 
 " Holloa ! you here 1 " said the Major, wiping his forehead. 
 " Hotter work this than the Mandeville swedes. Twentyman, 
 like a good fellow, gave me his arm. Did you see Miss Sappho 
 what's her name ? She passed us riding." 
 
 " Oh yes, I saw her. I'm going to stay with them the day 
 after to-morrow in the country." 
 
 " Not before you have seen the Lord High and the General ? " 
 asked Twentyman. 
 
 " I am going to call to-day, and if they ask me to come to 
 
384 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 dinner, well and good, but they will have to send the invitation 
 after me." 
 
 I walked back with them, and wrote home all that morning a 
 long letter to Aunt Mandeville, and another to Colonel Chiches- 
 ter, telling them all about our journey. Did I dilate very much 
 on our meeting with Sappho Maurocordato 1 I am afraid not. 
 To the Colonel I said nothing ; but to my Aunt I said that the 
 Count's introduction had been the means of my making the 
 acquaintance of a very delightful family, relatives or connexions 
 of his. 
 
 I forgot to say that I found a letter from dear Auntie lying 
 at the post-office. It did not say much, except that she was 
 not very well, and felt very dull. Brooks had got a fit of gout, 
 and so had Mr. Grubb. She saw the Harburys sometimes, and 
 Maiy was very well. That was all, except that she prayed I 
 might have a safe return. 
 
 Then, in the afternoon, I went and left my card on King Tom, 
 Sir Thomas Maitland. An orderly ushered me into the hall of 
 the palace, and an aide-de-camp took my card and entered my 
 name in a big book. So that call was over. Then I went across 
 the parade or esplanade, I forget which, and called on General 
 Sir Harry Quickstep. That was not quite so awful, but it was 
 not pleasant for a shy man. There, too, my name was entered 
 into a book, and if the Lord High and the General returned 
 their cards or sent me an invitation to dinner, I might consider 
 myself received into Corfu society. 
 
 Afterwards I went across to Butrinto in a sailing boat. It 
 was a soldier's wind, fair both ways, and I thought myself 
 lucky to find Twentyman staring down at the sea, at the head 
 of the stairs, just as he used to stare over the bridge at 
 Warwick. 
 
 "Where's the Major?" I asked. 
 
 " Gone to look at a horse. He wants to buy a charger, I 
 believe, — a barb, and take him back to England to astonish the 
 ColoneL" 
 
 "Come along with me for a sail;" and so the giant slowly 
 descended the stairs, and we had a delightful expedition, which 
 had, however, a sad termination. 
 
 Just as were off the citadel, well across the channel from 
 Vido, we saw a party of soldiers bathing. 
 
 " I thought this was a bad place for sharks," I said to the 
 Maltese boatman. 
 
 " Yes, very." 
 
 The words were hardly out of his mouth when we saw a 
 scurry and a flutter among the bathers — a rush across the water 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 385 
 
 as when waterfowl are scared. Fortunately the men were not 
 very far from shore, and all succeeded in reaching it but one. 
 We were running down on them with all sail ; but we were too 
 late. The hindermost swimmer stopped short, he was half- 
 drawn under for a moment, and then his body sprung up again. 
 A boat which had put off from the shore was beforehand with 
 us, and lifted the poor fellow in. His thigh was gone, bitten 
 close off at the hip. He was taken into the moat on his way to 
 the hospital, only to die before reaching it, and the savage 
 monster that had slain him swam boldly round and round the 
 bloody patch in the water, to see if he could complete his 
 meal. 
 
 " What a brute ! " said Twentyman. " Why does not some 
 one shoot it 1 " 
 
 " Many have tried," said the Maltese, who had been crossing 
 himself all the time ; "but sharks have charmed lives — at least, 
 this one has, for no one seems able to hit him." 
 
 You may imagine with what appetite we landed. Twenty- 
 man walked off to tell Plunger all about it, and I walked on to 
 the Casino, and thought of Arethusa. 
 
 While I was there I quite made up my mind that Corfu was 
 a dull place — even for an accepted lover, who has to feed on the 
 recollection of past favours. How heartily I wished that the 
 three months were over, and how decidedly I determined to say 
 " No " to my Aunt's ultimatum. 
 
 All, that night I dreamt of sharks. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII. 
 
 HOW I WENT TO GASTOUBI. 
 
 Next day I was to start for Gastouri with Signor Maurocor- 
 dato. It was not far ; not more than a few miles. Out at the 
 Land Gate, through the suburb, past the soldiers' cemetery, 
 filled with the victims of low fever and liquor, a little further on 
 the race-course, and so on and on till the road began to mount. 
 
 On our way we encountered a portent in the shape of Major 
 Plunger, run away with by a half-broken barb which some wily 
 Greek had persuaded him to try. No one ever doubted the 
 Major's horsemanship. Out with the North Warwickshire he 
 went as well as any one ; not quite so straight as some, perhaps, 
 but still very well. But on that October morning — for we were 
 in October — he passed us more like John Gilpin than any one 
 
SS6 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 else. He had this against him, too— that he was utterly ignorant 
 of the country and the roads. In fact, he had never been out of 
 the gates of the fortress before, so that he was worse off than 
 the "trainband captain" and " the citizen of London town." 
 
 Just as he passed us he nearly rode over a burly Greek priest, 
 who was walking, as they always do, in the middle of the road. 
 We were driving ; and even had we been riding it would have 
 been useless to follow him at any pace. 
 
 " He sits him well," said the Signor ; "but there are few men 
 in Corfu who can ride ' Abdallah.' " 
 
 " You know the horse, then, and his name ? " I asked. 
 
 " Of course I do ; every one in Corfu knows Abdallah. He 
 has no vice ; but with most people, except his own master, he is 
 an irreclaimable runaway." 
 
 This was at the entrance of the suburb. We passed the 
 cemetery, and then we came to the beautiful race-course. I 
 wonder if the Modern Greeks keep it in order and have races 
 on it, or whether they are letting it go to rack and ruin like 
 King Tom's beautiful roads — for I must tell you that one most 
 admirable proof of King Tom's despotism was that he laid out, 
 and levelled, and metalled most excellent roads all over the 
 islands. When I was last there, there was still only one little 
 bit of road in all Greece — that from Athens to Megara. 
 
 Well, we reached the race-course, and there — half-way round 
 the three-miles course — we saw the Major and Abdallah, still 
 flying like the wind. There had been some heavy rain the night 
 before, and it was rather heavy going. 
 
 " We are in no hurry," said the Signor, " though Abdallah is. 
 He will have had enough of it by the time he comes round to 
 this spot. Let us wait here and speak to the Major." 
 
 So we waited, and in a little while horse and rider reached 
 us, still going very fast, but both distressed, the Major much 
 the worst of the two. 
 
 " What a brute ! what a brute ! " gasped out the Major, in a 
 state quite as bad as that of John Gilpin, except that he had not 
 the necks of the bottles at his belt. 
 
 " How did you come to get him 1 " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, the Maltese horsekeepor, to whom I went to look at a 
 charger — never saw such a beast in my life, by the way, and 
 told him so outright — that scoundrel said there was another 
 horse standing there as quiet as a lamb, and he knew his owner 
 would be glad if any British officer would do him the honour of 
 riding him. It seemed a good offer, and so I had him saddled ; 
 but as soon as ever I mounted him — it was fortunate the stable 
 was close to the Gate, and not in the crowded, narrow streets — 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 387 
 
 as soon as I got on he bolted, — downright bolted, and you know 
 the rest. I saw you pass just before I mounted, and thought I 
 should have a pleasant ride ; but now see what a state I'm in — 
 bathed in perspiration and bespattered with mud." 
 
 " Well," said the Signor, " you have sat him, and that is not 
 what every one can do. ' Many a British officer has fallen from 
 the saddle of the invincible Abdallah. I must say, though, 
 that horsekeeper told you a fine story. Abdallah's owner i's 
 the last person in the world to play tricks upon travellers. He 
 lends the horse when he is asked to lend him, but he always 
 warns those who ask that his horse is very ' fresh.' '' 
 
 " All the horsekeeper's fault, no doubt,'' said the Major ; 
 "but I will give him another trial;" and so we went on. It 
 was all very well when we walked the horses in our phaeton, 
 but as we too wished to get on, we began to trot, and then to 
 trot fast. Then Abdallah's spirit returned, the road was 
 smooth as a billiard-table, there was nothing to stop him, and, 
 in spite of the Major's tugging, off he went at full speed. 
 
 " It's no use," said the Signor ; " the Major is fated to ride 
 alone to-day. Abdallah will not stop now till he gets to his 
 own stable. He will turn sharp off to the right, and in two 
 miles more he will land the Major at his master's door." 
 
 " And who is his owner 1" 
 
 " My Cousin Yanni," said the Signor. "You saw him riding 
 Abdallah yesterday with Sappho and me, and then he went 
 quietly enough ; it is the old story — the wildest horse may be 
 ridden by those who know how to ride him." 
 
 On we went ; and soon beginning to climb, we went up and 
 up, and round and round, through olive and orange-groves, till 
 we reached Gastouri. The house was a strange, tumble-down 
 place, not looking very large, yet having plenty of room in it. 
 We entered at the back by a courtyard of great size, having 
 large barns and granaries for the produce of the estate ; for in 
 Corfu the rents are paid in kind. Beyond the courtyard was a 
 gateway, leading into a garden, and across the garden was the 
 dwelling-house, properly so-called, consisting of four or five 
 large rooms on the ground-floor, and bedrooms above. In the 
 wings were the offices, with more sleeping-rooms above. 
 
 In front of the house was a terrace and a verandah, round 
 which grapes clustered and fig-trees grew, though the season of 
 figs was almost over. All along the terrace were large orange- 
 trees ; yes, real trees, none of your orangerie abortions — dwarfs, 
 whose only beauty is their stunted age. Trees bearing fruit, 
 and flowers, and buds, and having thorns and spikes, too, as 
 anyone who climbs an orange-tree knows to his cost. If we 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 had toiled up the hill, we were repaid by the prospect. A lovelier 
 view human eye never saw than that which burst upon us from 
 that terrace. Thence far above all the surrounding country 
 we saw the fertile lowlands, all across to the crest of Condi 
 Terrace ; Corfu, with all its forts and batteries, lay before us, 
 and behind it rose the cleft peak of the citadel ; farther still, 
 miles and miles away, towered St. Salvador — the highest land 
 in the island, whence Otranto, in Italy, may be seen on a clear 
 day. On the right, or, if I am writing for Scots, I would say 
 on the north, lay the Corfu Channel ; the strait between the 
 island and the main, necked with the white sails of feluccas, 
 and crisp with a fresh breeze. The sea was of that intensely 
 dark blue which the ancient Greeks compared to wine — almost 
 purple in its tint. 
 
 All this we saw afterwards at our leisure. What we really 
 did see when we reached the terrace, were Sappho Maurocor- 
 dato and her mother, seated under the verandah. 
 
 " Well, Mr. Halfacre," said Sappho, with one of her bursts of 
 wild laughter, " what do you say about coming or not coming 
 to Gastouri ? Just four days ago you knew neither us nor our 
 place of abode — not even our names ; yet we knew all about 
 you, resolved to have you here, and we have got you." 
 
 " I say that no man can resist his fate ; what he is fated to 
 do he will do." 
 
 " Very wise ; for all the world like an old Turk with his 
 kismet, or an old Greek with his pepromenon." 
 
 Now don't be scared, any of you young or old ladies who 
 read this book, at that long word. It is quite fair in me to 
 make Miss Sappho use it, because she was a Greek, and, as you 
 know, the Greeks speak Greek ; but I am not going to let her 
 speak any more Greek or any more Turkish unless I can help it. 
 
 You may laugh at me as you please. I said, "Let those 
 laugh who win." I said I had had enough of the town of Corfu 
 yesterday, and to-day I like it still less ; and then I told them 
 the story of the shark. 
 
 " Very horrible, no doubt," said Sappho ; " but what I want 
 to know is, why men will go and bathe in water where they 
 know there are sharks 1 It's the sharks' nature to eat men, if 
 men give them a chance. Do you think, now, if sharks could 
 live out of the water, that you would ever see them walking 
 into a fishmonger's shop on land ?" 
 
 " Very well put," I said ; " but then the loss of shark life is 
 not so horrible as that of human life." 
 
 " I should like to hear what the sharks would say to that. 
 A shark priest, for instance, preaching to ground-sharks. I 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 389 
 
 daresay he would enlarge upon the shocking end of a young 
 shark who took to all sorts of wickedness, and would follow a 
 ship, till he was caught and killed. His agony and remorse 
 would be fearful while he was being hacked to pieces ; but then 
 it would be all too late." 
 
 " Yours is a strange nature," — and then I was going on ; but 
 she snapped me up more like a shark than anything else. 
 
 " Ah ! but I haven't half done. You say human life is more 
 precious than shark life. So it is in the abstract, I admit. 
 But take a special case. These ignorant fishermen of ours, sunk 
 in ignorance and superstition, as great idolaters as any Pagans, — 
 or even your British soldiers and sailors, whose sole desire seems 
 to be rum, or some ardent spirit, for which, and under the 
 influence of which, they will commit any crime. A little lower 
 than the angels indeed ! So he might be ; but what is he ? — 
 not far above a shark in his instincts, and worse than a shark in 
 that he might know how to do right, and does it not ! No ! 
 depend upon it, there is a good deal to be said for sharks." 
 
 I could not help saying, " Well ! Miss Sappho, I wish we had 
 you at home to discuss religion, and right and wrong with one 
 of our neighbours." 
 
 " Which of them 1 — perhaps, I know all about them, as well 
 as about you. Shall I guess ?" 
 
 " Guess by all means. What shall I bet with you that you 
 cannot tell me the person I was thinking of?" 
 
 If you think it wrong to bet, reader, I quite agree with you ; 
 but this is not a treatise on morals, but a true story. When I 
 was in Corfu, all the young ladies betted with the officers, 
 harmless little things, a pair of gloves, or a bottle of scent, ess 
 bouquet being the favourite ; I said, therefore, " Oh, anything 
 you like ; a bottle of ess bouquet." 
 
 "A big bottle ?" asked Sappho. 
 
 " Yes, as big a bottle as Mr. Taylor has in his shop." 
 
 You ignorant people who have never been in Corfu must 
 
 know that the British Government there could never have got 
 
 on without Mr. Taylor, who was banker, wine-merchant, and 
 
 everything to us. How the British army could have got on 
 
 ■ without him for a single day, I cannot tell. 
 
 " Done," said Sappho. " You'll give me three guesses, of 
 course?" 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 " Well," said Sappho, with a most graceful banter, " I will 
 make you a present of my first guess. I mean to throw it 
 away, not to frighten you by guessing right at once. My first 
 guess is, Mr. St. Faith." She pronounced it St. Fait ; for few 
 
390 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 foreigners, not even Greeks, are good at the final th. " It's not 
 Mr. St. Faith, because he is a good, easy man ; not given to 
 discuss right and wrong ; nor caring to inquire into the nature 
 of sharks. No ! I should have no discussion with him.'' 
 
 " Well ! you know one of our neighbours and friends ; but 
 you are right in thinking that I do not mean him." 
 
 " Yes ! I knew it," said Sappho. " That was only a. little 
 powder burnt to clear the barrels of the gun. My next guess 
 shall be, — who shall it be ?" she said, archly. " Now I think of 
 it, I won't guess right till the last guess. Now for guess No. 2 : 
 It is not Mary Harbury, with her no one could discuss anything. 
 She is too bornee ; she lives, you know, in a ring fence." 
 
 She said all this so coolly, that I was fairly puzzled, and 
 blurted out : 
 
 " No ! It is not Miss Harbury. How do you know she 
 lives in a ring fence ?" 
 
 " Oh, we know a great deal more of Warwickshire in Corfu 
 than you think. How do you know that I have not been there, 
 and seen Harbury and Mandeville Hall, and even the White 
 Lady?" 
 
 "You seem really to know everything. But now for your 
 third guess. Like the Princess in the Fairy Tale, — you must 
 guess right this time. It's your last chance." 
 
 "All I say," said Sappho, "is Madam Harbury, — Mind I 
 don't say Mrs. Harbury, but 'Madam' Harbury, — that you 
 may be quite sure that I know all about her. Have I won the 
 bottle?" 
 
 "Yes! fairly." 
 
 " Then take care it is a good big one." 
 
 And then she rose, and ran off into the house. 
 
 The Signora followed her. She had sat all the while in a 
 sort of duenna fashion, seemingly musing, and apparently 
 paying little attention to what her daughter said. Once or 
 twice I turned to look on that severe and serious face, but it 
 seemed lost in the depth of its own sorrows, and I did not gain 
 a single word. The Signor had disappeared. He was a busy 
 man. Busy in Corfu with his consular duties ; signing pass- 
 ports and invoices, and charter parties, and protests, and all 
 that mixture of maritime law and the main chance which make 
 up a foreign consulate. As he carried on business for himself, 
 in Corfu he was up to the eyes in oil, that being the staple of 
 the island. In Cephalonia and Zante his hands were stretched 
 out for currants. In Theaki — that dry-bone Ithaca — he got 
 quince marmalade ; and let me tell you, if you have not tasted 
 quince marmalade from the birthplace of Ulysses, you do not 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 391 
 
 know what quince marmalade is. Then he imported timber, 
 and iron, and coals and clothes, — in fact, he was a general mer- 
 chant in a good way of business. The Jews, of whom there 
 were thousands in Corfu in my time, — and very good, thrifty 
 people, too ; not a bit worse than the Christians, — used to say 
 there was no one they liked to deal with less than Spiro Mauro- 
 cordato. Spiro being the short for Spiridion. As for manners, 
 very many of our city men, who would be quite beneath doing 
 what they would call such a huckstering business as Signor 
 Spiro, had not half, — no, nor a tenth of his polished manners 
 and refinement. 
 
 But to return ; he had gone off to his barns and oil presses ; 
 the ladies had gone into the house ; and I was left alone on the 
 terrace. 
 
 Did I admire the view 1 If I did, you will all agree with me 
 that I must have been a fool. There are things in life beyond 
 views and prospects even the most beautiful. No ; I did not 
 admire the view. I walked about, up and down the terrace, 
 with my eyes open, but seeing nothing. I was blind for a 
 season, wondering how it was that Sappho Maurocordato knew 
 so much about me and my friends. Of course, they had heard 
 it all from their relation the Count ; but why did the Count 
 take so much trouble to write about me, and — excuse the par- 
 donable feeling of a lover — why did he not mention, Arethusa as 
 well as Mary Harbury ? 
 
 " I'll be bound," I said to myself, " they know all about 
 Mary Harbury's sampler." 
 
 Now I daresay some of you think that, having got you well 
 away into the Ionian Islands, an unknown land to so many of 
 you, I am going to carry you with me through all sorts of hair- 
 breadth escapes from Turks and brigands, that I am going to 
 take you up to Scutari, at least — look it out on the map, my 
 dear — to Yanina, or perhaps to Montenegro, where the blood- 
 feud exists in full perfection ; where a Turk kills a Montenegrin 
 if he catches him over the border, and then the Montenegrins 
 come down and kill two Turks. After that the feud goes on in 
 all the progressions, arithmetical as well as geometrical, till at 
 last there is no Turk in Bosnia, and no Montenegrin in the 
 Black Mountain that is not at feud with every Montenegrin or 
 Turk respectively, as the case may be. See how I throw away 
 my opportunities. I might make myself the captive of brigands 
 or Montenegrins, both much the same in your opinion, and, let 
 me add, in mine. We might go to the Bocce di Gattaro, to 
 Meek, even to Gettigne, the capital of the Montenegrins, or I 
 might be carried away up to the mountains of Acarnania, like my 
 
392 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 good friend Siguor Valsimaki, and spend my three months with 
 cut-throat Greeks, until Aunt Mandeville, under the guidance 
 of Sir Benjamin Bullion, sent out three thousand pounds ster- 
 ling to set me free. But I disdain all these devices, just as I re- 
 frained from letting that shark, who, according to Signorina 
 Sappho, had so much to say for himself, snap Twentyman in two 
 instead of that unhappy private in His Majesty's King's Own. 
 I could easily have done it by one stroke of the pen. Our boat 
 might have been capsized, as indeed it once or twice nearly was, 
 by a gust of wind off the land, and then both Twentyman and 
 myself would have been food for sharks. 
 
 But, no ! this, as I have always told you, is a truthful story, 
 with more Wahrheit and less Dichtung in it than Goethe's auto- 
 biography, and it is just this truthfulness which must make it so 
 taking to the general public, who desire nothing less than ideas 
 and imaginations, and nothing more than facts ; you will please, 
 therefore, to stay for a while with me at Gastouri. 
 
 I had just got so far in my brown study as wondering if they 
 knew anything of Mary Harbury's sampler, when the Signorina's 
 head appeared out of a window on the upper story, and she 
 said : 
 
 "Won't you come upstairs and wash your hands V 
 
 Now, could anything be more prosaic than that, and yet one 
 thorough good washing of hands, if they are very dirty, as mine 
 were, is worth a dozen imaginary conflicts with brigands 1 
 
 Perhaps you will say that a conflict with Signorina Sappho, 
 whom I have very badly described, if you do not see that she 
 was witty as well as beautiful, was more dangerous to an en- 
 gaged lover than any brigand — if that is your opinion, wait till 
 the end of this volume, and you shall see. 
 
 It was very prosaic, but, when a young gentleman is asked by 
 a young lady to come in and wash his hands, what is he to do 
 but to go 1 So I went. 
 
 The staircase at Gastouri was not a great architectural work. 
 I should think whoever designed or constructed it did so with a 
 determination that as few human beings as possible should ever 
 get up it. It was just such a staircase as I once met in a Scotch 
 inn, with a fellow-traveller who had been at the siege of Badajoz. 
 He tried it once, and he tried it again, and then he gave up the 
 attempt in despair. " I would sooner mount the breach of Ba- 
 dajoz than climb that staircase;" and he was as good as his 
 word, for he stayed downstairs all night and slept on the sofa. 
 It is quite true that he was old and rheumatic, but even old and 
 rheumatic people must go upstairs sometimes to bed, and stair- 
 cases should be made to suit them. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 393 
 
 Well, just such a staircase was that at Gastouri. It had all 
 the faults that a staircase ought not to have ; it was long, and 
 narrow, and steep ; it was dark and slippery ; it went round 
 and round and round, just like the road that led up to the 
 house. It was a staircase that a lame man might mount, but 
 which he would never descend. No, they were not famous for 
 staircases at Gastouri. 
 
 Slipping, sliding, groping, and— I am sorry to say — now and 
 then swearing, I got up that staircase. If you object to swear- 
 ing I cannot help it. There is a time to swear and a time to 
 forbear swearing ; but so long as staircases are built like that 
 at Gastouri there will be swearing, at least, the first time you 
 climb them. 
 
 At the top of the stairs I met a mouldy-looking sort of major- 
 domo, a Maltese Joseph, Guiseppe by name, who came fawning 
 and crawling up to me, hoping^hat I had nonfatto di male — not 
 done myself any mischief — coming up. " I heard the Signor 
 slipping," he' said, blandly ; " but every Signor slips the first 
 time he comes up that staircase." 
 
 "Very likely, and many times too ; but I am up, where is my 
 room?" 
 
 " Here," he said, " at your honour's service," and he threw 
 open a door into a room looking out on the front and command- 
 ing the same splendid view. 
 
 He wanted to do all sorts of things for me — to render me all 
 those useless services which valets render to their masters ; but 
 I bowed him out. 
 
 As the dinner-hour was four o'clock — so primitive were we in 
 Corfu in those days — there was no dressing, only a deal of 
 washing. " Water, water, and a bigger basin, no matter of what 
 crockery or earthenware, so it was big." I did not get it then, 
 at that moment, but the next morning I saw in my room an 
 immense pan, of a rude kind of majolica, which I think I heard 
 they made in Zante. And I had another, bigger still, for a 
 bath. Out of these two I washed and " tubbed " to my heart's 
 content all the while I was at Gastouri. I have heard men 
 boast of having been the first to throw a fly on this or that 
 Norwegian river, and I am inclined to think I was the first in an 
 humbler but more useful vocation. Yes, I believe I was the 
 first man who ever tubbed in a native house in Corfu. You 
 must recollect that all this happened more than thirty years 
 ago, in the reign of King Tom, and that since then tubs and 
 philanthropy have made the round of the world, like the French 
 Revolution. 
 
 Down that staircase perilous, I went again. They 
 
394 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE, 
 
 were waiting for me in the saloon, and then we went 
 to dinner. 
 
 When I say dinner you must remember the Greeks are not 
 great meat-eaters ; they are not now, and were still less then. 
 What had we ? Botargo and olives first, as a whet. You don't 
 know what botargo is 1 A sort of caviare made of fishes' roe, 
 only not so good, and certainly not botargo to the general in the 
 Levant, where it is largely eaten. Then we had a glass of 
 Santorin wine, very good I think, I daresay Mr. Denman will 
 let you have some at a reasonable price. Then we had soup, 
 rather meagre, with vermicelli in it. Then we had fish fried, — 
 oh, so good ! — sardines and cuttlefish. Yes, cuttlefish and sea 
 anemones, also very good. Then we had a chicken, rather 
 stringy, but stewed or fricasseed with olives. Then we had two 
 enipes — one for me and one for the Signor. After that we had 
 a cake and quince marmalade, and some oranges very green, and 
 the last figs of the season. Another kind of wine we had, a red 
 wine, tasting very nasty, with rosin in it. Very nasty it is for 
 a day or two till you get used to it ; but I was very thirsty, and 
 so I drank it and made no faces, much to Sappho's amusement, 
 who said : 
 
 " You're the first Englishman I ever saw who , drank our 
 rosined wine without making a face. I have hopes of you. 
 For your comfort, let me tell you, it is very wholesome." 
 
 That was all the dinner. After it was over we went out and 
 took a ride among the olives and myrtles,' — the Signor, Sappho, 
 and I. The Signora stayed at home ; indeed she never rode all 
 the time I was there. She seemed to have something on her 
 mind which she could not shake off. She would speak a few 
 sentences brightly and lively enough, and then she would fall 
 back into the slough of despond in which she lay wallowing all 
 her life. 
 
 That was a lovely southern evening ; we walked our horses, 
 we trotted or galloped, we stood still, agaze at all the glories 
 of the Albanian c<5ast. Early as it was in the season, there had 
 been snow-storms among the upper gorges of the hills, and 
 later on it was wonderful to be in the summer-heat of Corfu, — 
 I mean a heat equal to that of our summer, — and see great 
 snow-clouds gather and burst on the towering peaks. 
 
 On that evening I again ^returned, as we were slowly riding up 
 the as'cent to the house, to the charge about Arethusa and her 
 fountain. She was in her liveliest mood at the time, but 
 eeemed all at once turned to stone or 1 ice, and said : 
 
 " I tell you I have never heard of Arethusa or her foun- 
 tain." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 395 
 
 Then I recited to her long bits of Shelley's poems : 
 
 ' ' Arethusa arose 
 
 From her couch of snows, 
 In the Acroceraunian mountains — 
 
 From cloud and from crag 
 
 With many a jag, 
 Shepherding her bright fountains. '' 
 
 And I told her the story of — 
 
 " Alpheus bold 
 , On his glacier cold," 
 
 and how he pursued the nymph, and how he caught her. 
 
 " Do you mean to say you never heard all this, or anything 
 like it?" 
 
 " No," she said resolutely, " I have never heard anything 
 about Arethusa and her fountain, but then you must remember 
 that we modern Greeks don't know everything that happened 
 to our ancient people." 
 
 It was no use talking to a young lady who knew nothing of 
 the subject on which I wished her to enter. My own Arethusa, 
 — I could not talk of her without confessing, and so I preferred 
 to say nothing, and not to ask what I was dying to ask, whether 
 Count Manteuffel had ever mentioned Arethusa, — my Arethusa, 
 — in his letters ? 
 
 When we got home we had a light supper — botargo again, 
 and wine and bread, brown bread of the country, and cheese, — 
 yes, cheese. Sappho Maurocordato, that young lady of ancient 
 lineage — I believe the Maurocordatos were famous long before 
 the Norman Conquest — ate cheese, plain bread and cheese. Not 
 bread-and-butter, like Charlotte, in Weriher, and Mary Harbury, 
 in Warwickshire. 
 
 After that we all climbed up that staircase, which was the 
 most curious combination of the ladder and the corkscrew, and 
 went to bed. 
 
 In a few moments all was still, and I fell asleep, saying : 
 " How odd she should never have heard of Arethusa and her 
 fountain ! " 
 
396 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 HOW I LIVED AT GASTOURI. 
 
 We got up early. All the Greeks are early risers. They 
 like to get their work done before the sun gets up. I thought 
 I should have beaten the Signor, for I got up the very minute 
 the mouldy major-domo knocked at my door, but when I came 
 down I found he had been up and out ever so long. Perhaps 
 he did not pay so much attention to " tubbing." At any rate 
 he was out. 
 
 Soon after Sappho and her mother made their appearance, 
 and then the Signor was sent for from his vats and presses, and 
 we had breakfast. I remember we had neither tea nor coffee, 
 only that rosined wine. 
 
 " You'll have so much of it, you'll be forced to like it. We 
 never have tea or coffee for breakfast. Our doctor says they 
 are bad for the nerves." 
 
 We had fish, and some sort of bacon, and figs, and grapes, 
 and the berries of the arbutus. That, with the wine and brown 
 bread, was our breakfast. 
 
 We had hardly finished it — for we made a long, dawdling 
 meal of it, and the Signor, who had to go into town on business, 
 was just thinking of ordering the carriage — when horses' hoofs 
 were heard in the courtyard at the back, and in a little while 
 in walked Major Plunger and Mr. Twentyman, with the faces of 
 men who bad to draw lots to lead a forlorn hope. 
 
 In all my born days I never saw men so awfully afraid of 
 foreigners and foreign ladies. 
 
 " We have come, ladies," said Major Plunger,— looking 
 round to Twentyman, whose blank face held out no signs of 
 hope, save a very forlorn one, — " We have come to pay you a 
 visit ; " after which surprising announcement, he paused, while 
 the giant nodded, and said : " Yes ; just so." 
 
 " Indeed ! " said the Signora, returning for a moment to this 
 wicked world. " Indeed ! — we are very glad to see you." 
 
 " Would you like some breakfast ? " said the practical 
 Sappho ; for the mouldy major-domo had not cleared away 
 the fragments that remained. 
 
 " No ! thank you very much," said the Major. " If I might 
 have a glass of wine 1 — what do you say, Twentyman ? " 
 
 " Oh, certainly," said the Cornet. 
 
 The Major then clutched the bottle, poured out a glass for 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 397 
 
 himself, and one for Twentyman. The hot ride made them 
 both thirsty, and both glasses were drained at the same 
 moment. 
 
 " Faugh ! " said the Major. 
 
 " My ! " said Twentyman. 
 
 And then they both made the most distressing faces. 
 
 Sappho whispered : "Didn't I tell you so?" and went off 
 into one of her laughing fits. 
 
 " May I ask," said the Major, "what wine this is, which has 
 — if I may so express myself — a very physieky flavour 1 " 
 
 "Wine of the country," said Sappho ; " our own wine, made 
 with our own grapes. It won't keep unless we put rosin into it, 
 and that gives it the taste you call ' physieky ; ' but it is very 
 wholesome." 
 
 " Very glad to hear it," said Twentyman; "very glad to 
 know it's your own wine, and so wholesome. I was afraid we 
 had got the wrong bottle, and that instead of wine it was some- 
 thing else." 
 
 So long a speech from Twentyman, — almost as long as the 
 one in which he gave his reasons for not marrying Mary Har- 
 bury — was a phenomenon only to be explained by the effect 
 produced by the wine on his palate. 
 
 When the wine was over, the Signor appeared, only to take 
 leave of his visitors and to start for town. When he was gone, 
 we went out on the terrace, and then Major Plunger — while 
 Sappho was trying to draw out Twentyman — told me he had a 
 letter for me from " the Lord High's secretary." 
 
 "It is to ask you to dinner to-morrow; and I hope 
 you will be able to come ; Twentyman, and I, and Bill are 
 going." 
 
 " I don't think I have any choice. I suppose King Tom's 
 commands are absolute. Let us see what the ladies say." 
 
 So we asked the ladies — that is, we asked Sappho, and she 
 said I had no choice. Go I must. 
 
 "But all you dear, good creatures," she said, in a wheedling 
 way, bringing the bright battery of her eyes, — as Major Plunger 
 gallantly expressed it afterwards — to bear on us all at once — 
 "you dear good creatures, why don't you get him to give a 
 ball ? I don't care for his dinners ; perhaps, because he doesn't 
 ask me. But I do love a ball. I look best in blue." 
 
 "I should think you did," said Twentyman, with a gravity 
 which set us all off laughing, except the Signora. 
 
 I wrote my letter of acceptance for the dinner at the palace 
 the day after, and the pair of Heavies took it back with 
 them. 
 
398 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE, 
 
 " Too clever by half, that young lady," said the Major to me, 
 as we crossed the garden to get to the horses. " Good-bye ; 
 take care of yourself." 
 
 I am sure no schoolboys ever went home from school in 
 happier mood than those two British officers trotting down the 
 hill at Gastouri. 
 
 What did I do that day ? The ladies and I sat under the 
 vines on the terrace, all through the heat of the day doing no- 
 thing, in a most thorough dolce far niente. We counted the 
 pigeons as they flew past ; the sails on the sea ; we would have 
 counted the clouds, only there were none to count. 
 
 I read some more Shelley to Sappho when we were tired of 
 doing nothing. She said it suited the dreamy nature of the 
 day. Such poetry could only have been written in a sunny 
 land. But she did not like dreamy poetry ; she preferred what 
 she called active poetry, — Byron for instance. 
 
 In due time the major-domo told us that dinner would be 
 ready in half-an-hour, and again I scaled the staircase to wash 
 my hands. 
 
 Why dwell on food ? Our dinner was of just the same kind 
 as the one we had the day before, — and so they continued all 
 the time I was at Gastouri. No ! I am not a glutton. I don't 
 write down in my diary when I ate the first woodcock of the 
 season. 
 
 The Signor came back from Corfu in time for a ride ; and he 
 found a letter of invitation from the Lord High for the dinner 
 to-morrow, so that he and I could go together. 
 
 Then we went out for a ride in another direction, but through 
 much the same woods of olive, and myrtle, and cypress, as the 
 day before ; then back, home to supper, and to bed. 
 
 Yes, I thought more of Arethusa that day than I had done 
 the day before. She was part of my being ; how then shall I 
 not think of her 1 
 
 Next day I wrote letters home, and gave Aunt Mandeville a 
 full account of my movements. I suppose writing is catching, 
 for, as soon as I began to write, the melancholy Signora — the 
 sad prophetess of Gastouri — began to write, too. 
 
 " Mamma is writing to Uncle Manteuffel," said Sappho ; 
 " shall she remember you to him ? " 
 
 " By all means," I said ; " tell him I am very well and very 
 happy." 
 
 " Shall we send any message to Mary Harbury 1 " asked 
 Sappho, maliciously. 
 
 "None; except that if the Count sees her, it would be a 
 comfort to' me to know that her sampler was finished." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 399 
 
 " Sampler," said Sappho ; " what's that ? " So I had to 
 explain to her what a sampler was. 
 
 " Very useful, iio doubt, and very pretty, I daresay ; quite as 
 pretty as I hear Miss Harbury is." 
 
 I really could not carry on the conversation, — it was too dis- 
 gusting, — so I let it drop. 
 
 After our letters were finished Sappho took charge of them, 
 and the Signor drove me into town ; we were to dress and sleep 
 at his house on Condi Terrace. I left him to go to his business, 
 and walked about the city, seeing the sights. 
 
 The inseparables — Plunger and Twentyman — -joined me, and 
 in such a strong body, we thought we might go and see Saint 
 Spiridion, the patron saint of Corfu. 
 
 When I say see Saint Spiridion, — or Santo Spiro, as he is 
 called for short, — I really mean it. Of some saints you can 
 only see their bones or relics. The skeleton of a mediaeval 
 saint was too precious to be kept all in one place. It was dis- 
 tributed over the Christian world — a head here, and a jaw-bone 
 there. This church had a thigh-bone or a shin-bone ; and so on 
 with his fingers, toes, and teeth. Nay, some mediaeval saints 
 had two heads, and double bones in their bodies ; else how can 
 it be that one head of St. Machutus is to be found at Pisa, and 
 another at Innspruok 1 But at Corfu you may see Santo Spiro, 
 body and bones, and a very nasty sight I think it, very much 
 like a baked monkey, all brown and shrivelled, but still unmis- 
 takably human or simious, — is that too hard a word ? I beg 
 pardon ; I mean monkey-like. Yes, there he lies, they tell us, 
 the very body of one of the prelates who assisted at the Council 
 of Nice, fifteen hundred years ago and more. That shrunk and 
 shrivelled hand signed the form of faith laid down at that 
 (Ecumenical Council. I wonder how many of the hands of the 
 bishops now at Eome will be seen on earth, lying in silver 
 shrines, like Santo Spiro, say, in the year 3000 a.d. " Very few, 
 I imagine, and yet what is it compared with Egypt's mummies, 
 which are, they say, three thousand years old 1 
 
 But to come back to Spiro. We saw him on paying a fee, I 
 think it was a guinea. They unlocked the silver shrine, and we 
 saw all his glory, and, if I may coin a word, " shrivelry." Nor 
 did they forget to point out that the soles of his sandals were 
 smeared with clay ; for, you must know, that once a-year, when 
 the crops are ripening, Santo Spiro walks out of his shrine by 
 night, over. the fields, blessing them and bringing increase. 
 Oh ! most powerful Santo Spiro, thus to stand between man 
 and heaven ! 
 
 Once a-year, too, — but it was not when we were there, — the 
 
400 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Saint was borne about the city, in procession with the arch- 
 bishop and all the clergy, and the General and British troops 
 fall in, in honour of the saint. I forget whether I was told 
 that the " Lord High " went, too, but I rather think he did not, 
 lest he should make Santo Spiro proud. I believe, too, that 
 since we were there the British troops have not been allowed to 
 take part in the procession. I only tell you what used to be 
 the case in the days of King Tom. 
 
 After seeing the saint, we went round the fortifications, and 
 took a boat, and went over to Vido, the low island that forms 
 the port, and which we made so strong for ourselves, only to 
 blow it up when we went at the instigation of Austria. 
 
 The Lord High's dinner-hour was seven o'clock to the minute, 
 so that we had little time to dress after our sight-seeing. 
 
 Did I wear the uniform of a full cornet in the North Warwick- 
 shire Yeomanry ? No ; I did not. I went in mufti, as I believe 
 it is still called ; and the Major and Twentyman were in mufti 
 also. At ten minutes to seven we drove up to the palace, and 
 were ushered into the Lord High's presence. He was a fine 
 man, with a very commanding air, looking, as he had proved 
 himself to be, well fitted to rule the Greeks. He was very 
 polite, but he could not be expected to spare much time to us 
 when there was the Russian agent and his wife, and the French 
 agent and his wife, and many ministers and high officials 
 of the Septinsular Republic, and General Quickstep and his 
 wife. 
 
 Five minutes to seven came. 
 
 " Are we all here ? " said King Tom to his secretary. 
 
 " All, your Excellency, except that T. G. Lord, who came yes- 
 terday in his yacht. You told me to invite him." 
 
 " Let us have dinner to the minute," said King Tom. And 
 at seven, as it struck, we walked, more than thirty of us, into 
 the dining-hall — a very fine room, as, indeed, all the rooms in 
 that palace are. 
 
 It was rather hard on the Lord, though, for the soup was not 
 cleared away when in he walked unannounced. 
 
 I looked round as he entered, and, to my surprise, saw it was 
 Scatterbrains. He took his seat opposite to me at the only 
 vacant place, looking as cool as an ice-plant. 
 
 " Halloa ! is that you, old fellow ? When and how did you 
 come here 1 " 
 
 " Just for a three months' run with two friends. And pray 
 what brought you here % " 
 
 " Idleness and my yacht, the Mermaid. There was nothing 
 to do in Ireland. We had shot the grouse till they were as 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 401 
 
 wild as hawks. Some one told me there was first-rate wood- 
 cock shooting here, and so I got the old craft out, and here we 
 are. We have made a splendid passage of it.'' 
 
 Then he subsided into a series of attentions to a lady near 
 him — a Greek, with very little French, and most awful Italian. 
 Scatterbrains knew French well; it was his only accomplish- 
 ment, but he was soon aground I remember the lady said to 
 him — he had beautiful hair then ; now he is as bald as a coot : 
 " Comme vous avez beaux chevaux; " and when he nodded, with a 
 most puzzled face, she went on : " Moi aussi fawns eu des beaux 
 chevaux, mais a present Us commencent a tomber." 
 
 I am afraid I burst out laughing so loud that I frightened the 
 lady, for she said little more ; but it was comical to find her out 
 making such horrid mistakes. 
 
 Just after that Twentyman gave me a nudge, and when I 
 looked round he said : " Is that the Scatterbrains who told you 
 the story about the fishermen 1 " 
 
 " Yes ; there is but one Scatterbrains in the world, the dear 
 old fellow ! " And then I thought, as I looked at him, how 
 jrood he had been in aiding me in my designs on Arethusa that 
 evening last summer. 
 
 I suppose he saw what I was thinking about, for, as soon as he 
 had recovered himself after his French passage with the Greek 
 lady, he laid his hands on his left side, and said, quietly : 
 
 " Is it all right here 2" 
 
 "Yes; quite right. Come to me at 10, Condi Terrace, to- 
 morrow morning, and I'll tell you all about it." 
 
 " All right, I'll come ; " and then his natural politeness led 
 him to make another attempt on the lady next him, quite, I 
 am bound to say, as unhappy as the last. Then he gave it up 
 as labour thrown away, and turned his attention entirely to his 
 plate. 
 
 All that I remember of the rest of the entertainment was 
 that it was very good, very long, and very hot. Every one sat 
 next to the wrong person, and there was no conversation. As 
 a rule, diplomatic conversation is not lively ; at a dinner you 
 ought, in fact, never to have more than one diplomatist ; you 
 will find him quite enough. If there are more present, they 
 are jealous of one another, if they are of the same nationality ; 
 and if they are of different nationalities, they guard the tips of 
 their tongues so jealously, lest they should let out state secrets 
 unawares, that they cannot be said to converse. At a true 
 diplomatic dinner, almost the only safe question at Corfu was 
 the great one : " Whether the woodcocks had arrived in 
 Albania ? " " Est que les becasses sont arrive 'es ? " To that it 
 
 d r 
 
402 JLNNALS OP AIT EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 was possible to answer " Yes " or " No," but little else, except, 
 perhaps, a hope that they would soon come, coupled with the 
 historical fact that they had been very late last year. But, 
 thank heaven ! that dinner was not one of Haute Politique, 
 where every single man present, in his befrogged and bestarred 
 ■coat, is supposed to be bursting with state secrets, which he 
 must not, for the life of him, tell. If he dared, he could, but 
 . as he can't, he doesn't ; and so the dinner drivels away in com- 
 monplaces, and the guests go away with an indigestion from 
 over-eating and drinking. 
 
 Still it was dull enough, and I was not at all sorry when it 
 was over and we were taking our coffee in the great drawing- 
 room. There it was that I introduced the Major and Twenty- 
 man to Scatterbrains, who charmed them by asking them to 
 come and see him on board the Mermaid. 
 
 King Tom kept early hours, so we all went away soon, and as 
 the Greeks kept early hours too, it was not long before I was in 
 bed and asleep in Condi Terrace. No ! I did not dream of Santo 
 Spiro clambering over my chest with his clayey feet and staring 
 at me out of his shrivelled monkey-face, I dreamt, as I always 
 dreamt, of Arethusa. 
 
 CHAPTER L. 
 
 HOW I STATED ON AT GASTOURI. 
 
 We had scarcely done breakfast when Scatterbrains came to 
 take me out for a walk. This just suited me, for the Signor had 
 his office to attend to, and we were not to go back to Gastouri 
 till the afternoon. 
 
 " Tell you what, old fellow," said Scatterbrains as we got on 
 to the parade, "those Heavies are coming on board to lunch, so 
 you had better come too." 
 
 To this I agreed, and then as we walked under the shade of 
 the arcades to escape the burning sun, I told him all my story 
 and how I had sped. He was my oldest friend. I had been 
 with him under Dr. Cutbrush, who us,ed to try to flog knowledge 
 into him by what may be called the breech-loading process. In 
 this the worthy doctor utterly failed, but either he or some one 
 else had made Scatterbrains a right good -fellow ; so trustworthy 
 and reliable. I rather think he always had it in him. It was 
 his nature, and as he grew up it came out. He was common 
 sense itself. He was a man then to whom you might tell 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE, 403 
 
 everything, and I told him everything. When I had done I asked 
 without giving him any time to think, " What he thought of it 1 " 
 
 " Well, don't take one's breath away. Let me think." 
 
 And he did think for two or three turns of the arcade ; during 
 which he stopped and stared vacantly into Taylor's Repository, 
 while I went in and bought the. biggest bottle of ess bouquet that 
 I could find to pay my bet to Signorina Sappho. 
 
 Even when I came out he said nothing, and but for his still 
 smoking I should have thought him asleep. 
 
 At last he said : 
 
 "I think it a very bad business." 
 
 " Why ? " said I. " I have had it all my own way." 
 
 "I don't see that. You have offended your Aunt, — that's 
 plain ; you have slighted Mary Harbury, — that, I suppose, you 
 don't deny ; and you have gone away from the woman you love 
 for three months. I don't like it. Women are women." 
 
 He would say no more, and as it was time to look after the 
 Heavies, we picked them up. From the Stairs the stentorian 
 voice of Scatterbrains bawled out, " Mermaid ahoy ! " His gig 
 pushed off at once, nnd her eight oars soon brought her to 
 where we were. In we all got ; Scatterbrains took the yoke- 
 lines, the rnen gave way, and in almost less time than it takes 
 to write the story of our embarkation we stood on the quarter- 
 deck of the Mermaid. 
 
 She was a fine vessel ; not a racing craft, but fast for her 
 accommodation, which was very good. A three-masted schooner, 
 with plenty of beam, and tall 'tween decks. The skipper 
 used to say he feared no wind in the Mermaid, the harder it 
 blew the steadier she got, and then it only was that you found 
 out how fast she was. I forgot to say, — a most grievous 
 omission, I know to yachtsmen, — that she flew the white ensign, 
 which, for the uninitiated I must explain, means that Scatter- 
 brains was a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, whose abode 
 is at Cowes Castle. 
 
 We had a famous luncheon, and the Major did ample justice 
 to it. There was a round of cold boiled beef. He had not seen 
 such a bit of meat since we left London. It did his heart good 
 to see it. Nor was Twentyman, nor was I, nor Scatterbrains 
 himself behindhand. For the time being it was to all of us the 
 very best bit of beef we had ever seen, and so it would be till 
 he saw the next good piece. Then it, too, w6uld have its turn 
 of praise. How fortunate is life in having a succession of 
 charms, and how silly are those who linger in recollection on 
 things past, and who do not look forward and appreciate their 
 blessings, present and to come, instead of brooding on the 
 
 d d 2 
 
404 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 remembrance of what having once been can never again return 
 in exactly the same shape ! 
 
 There is a piece of moralising for you all out of a round of 
 boiled beef ! 
 
 " Deuced good luncheon," said the Major, after he had eaten 
 everything that came in his way. 
 
 "Yes, very," said Twentyman, who always said amen to the 
 Major's grace. 
 
 " Glad you like it," said Scatterbrains ; " now let's go on deck 
 and have a weed. You don't smoke, Halfacre, I know ; no 
 doubt your friends do ?" 
 
 " I should just think so," said the Major ; " what I should 
 have done without smoking all my life I'm sure I can't tell. 
 Why, a cigar thinks for one." 
 
 " Yes ! and often a deal better," said Scatterbrains, " than 
 the fellow himself could think. Smoking brings out one's ideas ; 
 first comes a cloud, then out of the cloud come shapes. That I 
 call thought." 
 
 " Do you mean that all thought is smoke ?" said I, bitterly. 
 
 " No ; but I mean that, under the influence of smoke, one's 
 thoughts become clearer, and take shape out of it." 
 
 " That I can't tell," I said, " as I am no smoker. Perhaps you 
 will tell me I am no thinker, and that proves your point." 
 
 " That's just what I am," said Twentyman ; " I can't think for 
 the life of me." 
 
 " I don't think we shall settle the question," said Scatter- 
 brains ; " let us smoke our weeds out in peace and try not to 
 think." 
 
 " Quite so," said Plunger ; and so they smoked on in 
 silence. 
 
 Then we shook hands, and the gig was manned, and we were 
 put on shore, and I went back to Gastouri with the Signor. 
 
 As I went I wondered what right Scatterbrains had to say 
 that it was a bad business. I daresay he wouldn't have done it 
 better himself. In fact I was rather hurt at his saying that 
 what Lady Meredith, and I, and even Aunt Mandeville, had 
 called good was bad. 
 
 We found the Signora as melancholy as usual and the Signo- 
 rina as lively. She was greedy for news. Who were there at 
 the dinner 1 How many ladies 1 What did they wear 1 Did 
 they look well 1 " The young ones I mean," she said ; " old 
 ladies are always frights. I daresay Mrs. General Quickstep 
 wore her amber satin and her green turban. Just like a Turkish 
 Fakir." What officers ? A few, including the Heavies. Any 
 one else ? Yes, a lord. What lord ? Lord Scatterbrains. Do 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 405 
 
 you know him % Yes, and he's coming out here to-morrow to 
 see me. 
 
 " To see me, you mean," said Sappho ; " it must be me he is 
 coming to see." 
 
 " I can only say what he said ; but of course he will pay his 
 respects to Signora Maurocordato and you." 
 
 " Shall I like him as much as I like you 1 " 
 
 " How can I tell ? I did not know till now that you liked 
 me." 
 
 "Just like men; — waiting like children till they're told. 
 They ought to find out for themselves : " and then off she went 
 into one of her laughs — only to shake it off and run away up- 
 stairs. 
 
 We did not ride that afternoon ; we all walked, the Signor, 
 and the ladies, and I, down the hill in front of the house to the 
 sea-shore, and there we watched the fishermen dragging their 
 nets and bringing up all sorts of strange creatures out of the 
 deep. Cuttle-fish, echinuses, sea-anemones, molluscs ; — in short, 
 I know not what, and of all colours and shapes. The wonders 
 of the deep. What struck me most was that they threw nothing 
 away. All was fish that came to their net. So unlike our 
 fishermen, who, when they haul a net, are more busy in killing 
 and casting out dog-fish and others which they declare to be un- 
 eatable or poisonous, than in securing the edible portion of their 
 haul. But this was a long time ago. I believe our fishermen 
 are not above eating dog-fish now ; but it did strike me as 
 strange that everything that fishermen catch in the Levant 
 should be of use, while the greater portion that they catch in 
 the British Isles should be rejected as worthless. 
 
 Then we sat down and talked of the sea and the strange 
 things in it ; and of the stars, as they came out — bright and 
 sparkling — not like stars with a cold, with comforters round 
 their rays, as they look in our damp English sky ; and of the 
 moon, and how it affected people at the full. 
 
 All at once — thinking to trap Sappho in her words — I said : 
 
 " What do you think of our White Lady, who appears once a 
 year at the full of the moon ?" 
 
 " My brother,'' said the Signora, "has written to us all about 
 her. It is a subject I would rather not talk about. It is 
 painful." 
 
 While her mother said this Sappho seemed to listen and said 
 nothing. So my attempt had signally failed, except that I learnt 
 that the White Lady had sufficiently interested the Count to 
 make him write a full account of her to his relations. 
 
 After that little was said ; we climbed the hill slowly, 
 
406 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ate our supper solemnly, and crept up the ladder to bed in 
 silence. 
 
 As I looked out the triumph of night was complete. She 
 flashed her glories over land and sea. There was no sound, 
 save the distant murmur of the surf as it chafed on the rocky 
 shore. 
 
 Though the Signora spoke seldom, her words were words of 
 might, like those of a sorceress or magician in olden times. 
 There was a weight in them beyond the weight of speech. They 
 were more like dogmas reduced to writing. From them there 
 was no appeal. You might as well have thought of Barham 
 turning the Thirty-nine Articles into the verse and metre of the 
 Ingoldsby Legends as of Signora Maurocordato uttering one 
 cheerful word. 
 
 When she spoke conversation ceased, and it did not revive for 
 hours. Thus it was that we were all of us very dull the next 
 morning. Sappho looked, for her, wretched. I felt as though 
 I had done something very wrong, though what it was I could: 
 not at all make out. The Signor was almost surly. He looked 
 as though all his wine had turned sour in the night. The 
 Signora looked like herself — the woman of sorrows. 
 
 We were all glad when breakfast was over, and still more so 
 when we heard the heels of Scatterbrains' horse clattering in the 
 courtyard. 
 
 " I am so glad he is come," said Sappho. " He will cheer us 
 up ; and I even forgive him for saying that he was coming to 
 see you and not me. I wonder what he is like 1 " 
 
 All this time I have never described Scatterbrains. As I 
 think I have drawn the picture of almost every one in this book, 
 I may as well draw his to complete the gallery. 
 
 Viscount Scatterbrains was a tall young man, just about my 
 own age. He was dark, with dark eyes ; his nose was slightly 
 aquiline — not, of course, so much so as that of the late Duke of 
 Wellington, though his was also described as " slightly aquiline." 
 It was not " moderate," like Major Plunger's. It was, as I have 
 said, " aquiline." More I cannot say. He had fine teeth, and 
 not small hands and feet. No ; they were decidedly large.. 
 Everybody can't have small hands and feet, or shoe-leather and 
 gloves would be cheaper. Fancy if there were no men's gloves 
 bigger than seven and, a-half ! Yes ; his feet and hands were 
 large, but not clumsy. But the great charm about him was his 
 expression : it was so frank and open. You had only to look at 
 him to see he was a man who would never tell a lie. He was 
 not at all clever : a dunce at school, and no genius at Oxford j 
 but he had, as I have told you before* the priceless gift of 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE.. 407 
 
 common sense. He would tell you in a moment what you 
 ought to do, and when he had told you, the best course was to 
 take his advice. You were likely to get no better. No ; not if 
 you sought for it a whole summer day. His manners were off- 
 hand and abrupt ; but I don't know that any one, except some 
 very silly women and sillier men, liked him the worse for thatv 
 You saw at once that you had a true man before you. "Why do 
 I call him Scatterbrains 1 Am I his maker ? Has he not been 
 handed down to me 1 Besides, if you look again, perhaps he 
 was called Scatterbrains because he scattered other people's 
 brains — not because his own were scattered. At any rate, he 
 was no fool, and so there you have him before you. 
 
 As he came in the Signor, who had made his acquaintance the 
 day before, and who had given him the invitation, without which 
 Scatterbrains would Qertainly not have come, rose in a solemn 
 way to receive him. Bat before he could say a word Sappho 
 came forward, and said : 
 
 "Welcome to Gastouri, Lord Scatterbrains. How long do 
 you mean to stay in Corfu V 
 
 " I don't know. I am come to shoot woodcocks." 
 
 "Truly a most lordly quest. Have you no woodcocks at 
 home?" 
 
 " Yes, in Ireland we have plenty ; but then there are more 
 here. Not to mention that there are other things to see besides 
 woodcocks in Corfu." 
 
 " Then you have come to see us, and not to shoot woodcocks. 
 How nattered the Ionians ought to feel ? " 
 
 "I am beyond flattering anyone," said Scatterbrains, who felt 
 he was being attacked. " What I like is truth, and I try to 
 speak it." 
 
 " Ah ! so we all do," said Sappho ; " but we so seldom suc- 
 ceed. I am sure I try every day ; but it breaks my heart to 
 think how many stories I tell without meaning it." 
 
 " Perhaps you're like Pontius Pilate, who, though he asked 
 what was truth, would not wait for an answer." 
 
 "That's not fair," said Sappho, exultingly. "I can't talk 
 against a book. Talk your own talk, and don't throw Bacon's 
 Essays at my head." 
 
 Now, I do not really think that Scatterbrains had ever read a 
 line of Bacon's Essays. Book-learning was certainly not his 
 forte. He must have snapped up the quotation at second-hand, 
 and used it he knew not why. It had passed at some time into 
 his inner consciousness, and now it came out of it. 
 
 He had evidently had enough of his tongue-fence with Sappho, 
 and retired from the field behind a few commonplaces to the 
 
408 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 Signora, who answered in the most matter-of-fact way. Then he 
 tried the Signor with some statistics as to what the chief crop of 
 the Islands was. How long ago it was since the last good olive- 
 crop? Why currants would not grow in Corfu, when they 
 throve in Cephalonia and Zante 1 On these and other points he 
 acquired a store of useful information, and if he had been Vice- 
 president of the Board of Trade in that day, you in all likelihood 
 would have seen it all in a book ; but as he was not, these 
 scanty recollections must suffice. As for me, I have no time to 
 waste on oil and currants ; I must get on. 
 
 Just before he took his leave, Sappho again attacked him by 
 saying : " I hope you don't mean to take Mr. Edward away 
 with you to that stupid woodcock shooting ? It is too soon for 
 it yet, and he is too good to be wasted on it if it were.' 1 
 
 " Well," said Scatterbrains, " there are bpars and bustards on 
 the plain, and chamois on the mountains. Why shouldn't he 
 come to shoot them instead of idling his time here 1 " 
 
 This speech Sappho was pleased to take to herself, and she 
 was almost angry. 
 
 " So much obliged to you for putting us at Gastouri below 
 wild boars and bustards. Like to like, my lord. I should say 
 Master Edward had chosen the better part ; and I say again, I 
 hope you will not take him away from it." 
 
 It was getting warm under the verandah where we were 
 sitting, and the common sense of Scatterbrains told him it was 
 time to go. He got up, therefore, and took his leave with the 
 most studied politeness and a smiling face. 
 
 After he had gone the round of the family he shook hands 
 with me, and said outright : 
 
 " How much longer are you going to stay here ? " 
 
 It was such a home question that I could not answer it at 
 once. " Oh ! I am sure I don't know. Perhaps a month, or two 
 months. It is much pleasanter here than in town." 
 
 "No doubt," said Scatterbrains ; "but you'll think better cf 
 it : you will never stay so long as that." 
 
 " He shall," said Sappho, almost wildly, " if I have my way. 
 Good-bye, Lord Scatterbrains. I never wish to see you again." 
 
 " What a very unfortunate man I am ! " said Scatterbrains, 
 with the utmost coolness. " We never know what is for our 
 good." 
 
 " A nasty, provoking, cold-blooded brute ! " said Sappho, 
 throwing herself back in her chair after he had left us. " Why 
 should you not stay with us as long as you like, and be happy ? 
 Besides, to come and say that, just when we were planning all 
 sorts of expeditions for you to show you the country.! " 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 409 
 
 " Well, I am not gone yet, and I certainly shall not go over 
 to Albania to lie in the marshes in the Mermaid, and run the 
 risk of fever, merely to shoot wild boars and bustards. I do 
 not like shooting well enough for that." 
 
 " Oh, yes ! we know," said Sappho. " You follow gentler 
 game — Mary Harbury and her sampler.'' 
 
 If anything could have made me rush back home before my 
 time, it would have been that Mary Harbury with her everlast- 
 ing sampler haunted me in those lovely islands. But then I 
 reflected, that if I ran back before my three months were over, 
 I should only rush into the actual presence of Mary Harbury 
 and her sampler, and that instead of hearing of them I should 
 see them. I preferred, therefore, to stay where I was. 
 
 Now, I daresay, all you young ladies who have young gentle- 
 men attached to you, think I was behaving very badly in exposing 
 myself to the charms of Sappho Maurocordato when my heart 
 was fixed for ever on Arethusa Chichester. Even supposing the 
 temptation would not be too great for me, you will ask, Was it 
 fair towards Sappho to expose her to temptation ? If I say there 
 was no temptation about me, you will smile. You will tell me 
 that every heart has another heart waiting for it, its counter- 
 heart — I know the printer will spell this counterpart unless I 
 look sharp after him ; that all men are tempting at times, espe- 
 cially if they are shut up alone in a house with a young lady, of 
 some of whom it may be said that it is safer to have nitro- 
 glycerine in the house than them. If I tell you that Sappho 
 Maurocordato was quite able to take care of herself ; that I had 
 no reason to suppose that she was not going to be married to her 
 cousin Yanni or some other Greek Yanni, you will still say that 
 she ought not to have been tempted ; that there is no proof that 
 she was engaged to any cousin, and that it remained to be proved 
 that she was able to take care of herself. As you are so unrea- 
 sonable, I throw myself back on the great axiom that there are 
 things to do and not to talk about, and that this was one of 
 them. I did it, unawares, strong in my unalterable affection for 
 Arethusa, which nothing could shake, and very glad to get away 
 from the mounting guard and " shoulder arms " of Corfu, to the 
 quiet shade of Gastouri. Besides — and this ought to crush your 
 scruples — had I not that letter of introduction 1 Did not Aunt 
 Mandeville know that I had it ; and had I not written to her to 
 say that I was quite well and happy at Gastouri ? I had every 
 right to. stay at Gastouri, and I stayed there. Young ladies or 
 young gentlemen, I don't believe that one of you could have 
 done better. 
 
 If I tell you, besides, that Sappho was like a sister to me, you 
 
410 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ■will laugh and say : " How could I, who never had a sister, 
 know what a sister was like 1 " That is very true. I never had 
 a sister, yet the poets have imagined and described scenes in 
 heaven, ay, and in hell, that no eye, save that of their mind, 
 hath ever seen ; and so I, too, can imagine what a sister's ten- 
 derness might have been to me, and fancy that in Sappho 
 Maurocordato I found that sister for a while. 
 
 That was her great charm ; she was always fresh and merry, 
 but she never gave herself any love-sick aire. To use a vulgar 
 expression, she never set her cap at me, and seemed thoroughly 
 heart-whole. If she had a love-secret, she kept it well hidden. 
 
 But she was always ready to make a party for me. We never 
 rode alone, I declare — no, not for a hundred yards ; we did not 
 ride together for whole mornings together, as I have seen some 
 young ladies of good position only last season ride in the " Kow." 
 Am I sour moralist enough to cry out at their doing so ? If 
 they like it, and their parents permit it, they are quite welcome 
 to do so as far as I am concerned. All I say is, that I never, in 
 all those months, ever rode a hundred yards alone with Sappho 
 Maurocordato. Wherever we were, and wherever we went, there 
 was either the Signor, with his heart full of business, or the woe- 
 begone Black Lady, as I might call the Signora, watching over 
 their daughter. Now, young ladies, and old ladies, dear kind 
 friends, throw stones at us if you can. If I really must tell you 
 my feeling on the matter as I rode about with this very pretty 
 girl, it was this ; that though she pretended never to have heard 
 about Arethusa and her fountain, she very well knew all about 
 my Arethusa from the Count, and that she respected my secret. 
 Time will show if I was right. 
 
 So on and on I stayed at Gastouri. The weeks came and the 
 weeks went, and sometimes I went into Corfu to see the Major 
 and Twentyman, whose leave began to grow short. They never 
 came back to Gastouri. That one visit and the wine was enough 
 for them. Sometimes we. joined them and the other officers in 
 a paper chase on horseback — a kind of mock hunting, in which, 
 over the vine-stumps and olive-groves, one got nasty falls ; but 
 if they had no conversation out of the saddle they had less in it, 
 and little passed between us. 
 
 I had no letters from Aunt Mandeville, but that did not 
 surprise me. She was not much of a writer. Poor Aunt Man- 
 deville ! This was about the end of October, when I had been 
 away more than a month — nearly six weeks, in short. I re-> 
 member thinking, "Half my exile from Arethusa over. In two 
 months I hope to be back at Mandeville Hall, and Arethusa will 
 he at Leamington. How glorious ! " 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 411 
 
 Where was Scatterbrains 1 Strange to say, I never saw the 
 dear fellow in Corfu after that visit to Gastouri. His warning 
 was more serious than I took it for at first. Whether he had 
 gone away in, a huff, or whether wild stories of the boars and 
 bustards, a~nd the showers of woodcocks over in Albania, had 
 hurried him off in his zeal for the chase ; certain it is, that three 
 days after that visit we saw the three-masted schooner beating 
 out of the South Channel at Corfu, bound for the Gulf of Arta, 
 no doubt. Yes ! it was the Mermaid ; we saw her close be- 
 neath us from Gastouri. There was flying her white ensign 
 proudly, as she held her own against the breeze on the losing 
 tack. Gone, and Scatterbrains with her. 
 
 " I am glad he is gone," said Sappho. " I hope I may never 
 set eyes on him again." 
 
 During that month I think we went all over the island. We 
 went down to Lefkimo, to the Leucimne of Thucydides, to see 
 the site of the sea-fight at the beginning of the Peloponnesian 
 War. That was at the extreme end of the island, towards the 
 south. Then another day we took boat, or rather ship at Gas- 
 touri, and sailed away to the bend of the island, which faces the 
 town, of Corfu. We did that to climb Mount St. Salvador, 
 3000 feet high. The ladies were left at a village half-way up, 
 while we men went up to the convent at the top, and had a 
 view of all the islands, and Albania, and even of the Gulf of 
 Otranto. Another day we went to Govino — a pass in the middle 
 of the island, looking down on avenues of cypresses and orange- 
 groves ; on another we went to Pantaleone, and had a merry 
 picnic under the oak ; but as I sat under it, I thought I would 
 much rather have been at Chiswick, sitting under that beech 
 with Arethusa, than with all the women in the world. 
 
 Last of all we went to the old monastery of Palseocastrizza, 
 haunted by two or three old monks. There it stands, looming 
 huge over the sea, and looking down on its perfect horseshoe bay. 
 We stayed there till the moon rose over the bay, reminding me 
 strangely of Arethusa and of Ilfracombe, and thjjln we rode home 
 as fast as we could, for fear fever should lay hold of us as we 
 passed the old arsenal of the Venetians. Dear me ! it was all 
 very pleasant. Sappho was to me as a sister, and I ever bore 
 about with me the memory of my love. How sweet it is for a 
 young heart to keep a secret, and how bitter are secrets to the 
 old ! How they burn their way out ! 
 
 Was I happy ? No ! But as happy as I could be anywhere, 
 anxiously expecting my release. 
 
 November came, and with it the necessity on the part of th§ 
 Signer to go down to Cephalonia and Zante, and then up the 
 
412 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 gulf to Corinth, and across the isthmus to Athens. What would 
 be easier or more pleasant than that I should go with them ? 
 Sappho settled it all, and it was settled in half an hour. We 
 were all to go, the melancholy Signora as well. She clung to 
 her husband like fate. 
 
 As for me, I liked it much better than staying any longer at 
 Gastouri. When travelling I could pay my own expenses, and 
 I began to think that I was a burden to my hosts, though 
 Sappho always declared I did not cost them a penny. I was the 
 only Englishman, she said, who never cared whether I had 
 butcher's meat or not. I was a thorough Greek, and lived like 
 one of them. Still, as soon as we set out I should at least pay 
 my own expenses, and perhaps some of theirs. How were we to 
 go ? By the Austrian Lloyd's steamer, of course, first to Argos- 
 toli in Cephalonia. There she was to drop us, and when the 
 Signor had done his business, another steamer would take us on 
 to Zante, and then a Greek steamer would take us up to Corinth. 
 
 It was pleasant, and it was easy. So I wrote my plans home 
 to Aunt Mandeville. I told her I was going to travel with a 
 charming Greek family. I remember I sent a duplicate by 
 Major Plunger and Twentyman, whose leave was up, and who 
 went sorrowfully back by the way which we came, just about 
 the time that the Maurocordatos set off on our expedition. I 
 was not, you understand, to come back to Corfu, but to make 
 my way home by the Straits of Messina and Marseilles. 
 
 I always thought it very odd that Sappho should be so 
 kind to me, when she evidently hated the English from the 
 bottom of her heart, she hated them with the holy hatred of race. 
 She looked on us as invaders and oppressors, who coerced the 
 Septinsular Kepublic in its aspirations for liberty and union 
 with Greece. Even then, in the stern days of King Tom, her 
 motto was Ei/o<nr, and Efotris is the Greek for " union." Well, 
 King Tom is dead, and King Storks, the best king they ever 
 had, has departed, and they have got their Evoa-is, and a sad 
 mess they seem to have made of it. But in those days the 
 grand idea was young and ardent as Sappho herself. This 
 seemed her only serious subject, and I believe she took to me 
 more because I was not a soldier, not one of those red-coated 
 tyrants who kept down her people, as she fancied, than for 
 anything else. 
 
 So, young ladies, you see there is good sometimes in every- 
 thing ; good even in not being a soldier. 
 
 By way of precaution I wrote a letter to Colonel Chichester 
 just before I started, and addressed my letter, "Post Office, 
 Leamington," &c, telling him what my plans were, — that I was 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 413 
 
 leaving Corfu with a Greek family, to travel through the Islands 
 to Athens — that would take up all of November — and that I 
 hoped to be at Mandeville Hall by Christmas Day. 
 
 Having written these letters, taken leave of Major Plunger 
 and Twentyman, called on the Lord High, and the General, and 
 my friends, — What more, may I ask, could I have done before 
 leaving Corfu 1 " Nothing," I answer decidedly, — " Nothing." 
 And with this feeling I packed up my things, like a wise man, 
 with my own hands, not troubling the mouldy major-domo, 
 except to give him a douceur. Then I went down to the port at 
 Corfu with the Maurocordatos, paid my passage to Argostoli in 
 Cephalonia, and went on board, by good luck, our old friend the 
 Ferdinando. 
 
 CHAPTER LI. 
 
 HOW I TRAVELLED WITH THE MAUBOCOKDATOS. 
 
 Off we went, out of the harbour, past the Casino, past the 
 One Gun and Palseopolis, past Gastouri, past Lefkimo^ past 
 Paxo. It was fine weather, but with a little sea on, which, in 
 the course of the afternoon, sent the ladies to their berths. 
 The Signor and I paced the deck till supper-time and bed-time, 
 and then I went to my berth and slept, only to find that the 
 steamer was lying at anchor in the harbour of Argostoli. There 
 we all landed. We saw the lions, we saw the British resident, 
 we saw the Cyclopean walls of the old primeval cities, we saw 
 the strange subterranean current that works the mills, we saw 
 the Black Forest crowning the mountain in the centre of the 
 island. All this I and the ladies saw while the Signor was busy 
 with his wine, and currants, and oil. 
 
 In the afternoon we passed Ithaka, longing to land on that 
 dry-weather spot, famous for Penelope and Ulysses, and now for 
 quince marmalade. But we had no time to stop; we were 
 bound for Zante, " Zante, the flower of the Levant '' — the beau- 
 tiful fantastical island, with its revengeful race, of whom the 
 director of police told me, when I asked him the difference 
 between Corfu and Zante : " The difference is this, it takes ten 
 policeman to arrest one man in Zante, but in Corfu one police- 
 man will arrest one hundred Corfiotes." It is a sort of paradise 
 of murderers, Zante. There is at least one murder every day. 
 Zante would not be Zante without it, and the whole population, 
 man, woman, and child, think it is their bounden duty to assist 
 
414 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 any murderer to escape from justice. Their excuse is that San 
 Dionysio, or S.an Geronimo, once helped a murderer down from 
 the gallows ; and as they are bound to do what the saint did, 
 why they do it. Close to the lawless mainland, too, a murderer 
 is safe once he is off the island. But it is a lovely spot, looking 
 away to the ancient Messenia and right up the Gulf of Corinth. 
 But the glory of Zante, which it shares with Patras and Vos- 
 tizza, is currants. As Bergen in Norway, and Wick in Scotland, 
 are all herrings, so Zante, in the currant season, is all currants. 
 We were there just at its height, and currants were the reason 
 of the Signer's going there at all. How many barrels of indi- 
 gestion did we not see in the shape of the currant-crop, piled up 
 on the wharf in casks waiting for transport to take them to all 
 parts of the world 1 How many doctors' bills after Christmas, 
 and how many bottles of black draught might not the philo- 
 sophic eye have seen, attending on those casks, after greedy 
 little boys had consumed them in plum puddings and minced 
 pies. 
 
 I remember that in the evening, while the Signor was still up 
 to his eyes in currants and accounts current, the ladies took me 
 to a concert, where we had some good music, and then a dance. 
 I danced with Sappho, of course ; and she said, as others have 
 said, that I danced very well — for an Englishman. 
 
 Next morning we were up early, and away. The Ferdinando 
 was half-full of currants. She was going to Patras and Vostizza 
 and Corinth for more currants, and we were to go in her. First 
 we touched at Patras. No ! we ran over first to Missolonghi, 
 and had a look at the low town in the marshes. There it lay 
 lost in sand and mud. But to that sand and mud it owes its 
 fame, for they formed its defences in the famous siege, the 
 Silistria of that great .war. There, too, lost somewhere in the 
 marshes, lies Byron's heart. Yes, absolutely his heart, which 
 was lost by the defenders of Missolonghi, when they effected 
 their retreat rather than surrender to the Turks. 
 
 After that we went over to Patras, and again it was currants 
 — currants. Again we went on shore ; again we saw consuls 
 and vice-consuls, and currants. So it was at Vostizza and other 
 places up the Gulf. Vostizza, where there is the finest plane- 
 tree I ever saw. Reader, if you ever go to Vostizza, look at 
 that tree, and let the currants alone. 
 
 What of the scenery? It was magnificent. I remember 
 once old Dr. Cutbrush caning a boy very much for saying that 
 Achaia was a mountainous country. " It is as flat as my hand ; 
 how could the Achsean League have made all those famous 
 marches through a hilly country 1 " So the poor fellow was 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 415 
 
 caned ; but now that I was at Vostizza, on the old Achaean 
 coast, it was plain that old Cutbrush was wrong, and the little 
 boy right. Achaia is even hillier than the opposite coast ; and 
 right opposite stands Parnassus, not to mention the Thessalian 
 range looming behind it. 
 
 From Vostizza we ran over to Salona ; and while the Signor 
 was again hard at work, we went to Delphi. Yes ! we stood on 
 the great plateau where the temple of Apollo once stood, and 
 whence the Pythia uttered her oracles when under the influence 
 of the genius loci. I proposed to Sappho to play the Pythia, 
 and utter an oracle. She said the days of oracles were over, 
 and that if she uttered one nobody would believe her. 
 
 " Suppose I were to prophesy that you would marry Mary 
 Harbury, what would you say 1 " 
 
 " I should say what you say, that the days of oracles were 
 over, and that the prophetess of Delphi prophesied deceit." 
 
 "We shall see,'' said Sappho. " You behave just like those 
 who inquired of the oracles in ancient times ; they would not 
 believe what they heard unless it jumped with their fancy. 
 Suppose I were to prophesy that the Fountain of Arethusa, of 
 which you are always talking, would never be content with half- 
 an-acre of ground for her basin, what would you say then ? " 
 
 " I should say the prophetess was a demon, and the oracles 
 the invention of devils." 
 
 " Don't lose your temper," said Sappho, mockingly. " I did 
 not utter the oracle. I only asked you what you would say if 
 it were uttered. So you think the fountain would be content 
 with such a little plot of ground ? We shall see. But you 
 must own, it is not much for a fountain, which dashes all the 
 way down the Acroceraunian mountains to escape a river-god, 
 to be content at last, after all her headlong course, with a poor 
 plot of ground half-an-acre in extent." 
 
 " Sappho, you will drive me mad," I said. 
 
 Just then the Black Lady came up to us. She had been 
 sitting just out of earshot, on a great boulder. 
 
 " Sappho," she said, " it is getting late ; we must get back to 
 the steamer : let us go." We went. I forgot to say we had 
 ridden to Delphi from Salona, and had been there the greater 
 part of the day. Slowly we rode back on that November 
 afternoon. It was dark when- we reached the Ferdinando. 
 With a feeling of gloomy foreboding at Sappho's ill-omened 
 words I slunk away 'to my berth. 
 
 Next morning was bright and lovely, as we ran across the 
 Gulf for Loutraki, at the head of the Gulf, the port of modern 
 Corinth. The steamer was now full of Greeks, armed with all 
 
416 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the cutlery of their race, with old-fashioned flint-guns and pistols, 
 and yataghans. Very picturesque they looked, and very ill- 
 looking most of them. Handsome and yet ill-looking. A school 
 of porpoises ran by, and instantly twenty of those old, long- 
 barrelled guns were discharged at the devoted fish. Some were 
 hit ; for the waves were red with blood ; but none turned over 
 in sign of death while the steamer was near. 
 
 And now the time was come for leaving the Ferdinando. 
 There was a strong breeze blowing right up the gulf, making 
 the spray fly on the rocks and stones of the shore, which formed 
 the sole landing-place at Loutraki. Yes ! at the Isthmus of 
 Corinth there was not even such a jetty or slip as one meets in 
 the meanest English fishing-town, to shelter a boat in landing 
 her passengers. Some boats put off from the shore ; and wo 
 saw several loads trying to land, and get a good ducking. One 
 boat was capsized on the rocks, and stove in ; though I believo 
 no one came to grief. But landing, especially for ladies, looked 
 
 ugly- 
 While we stood looking over the side, and hesitating about 
 engaging a boat, the captain of the Ferdinando, a most polite 
 Austro-Italian, — if you can understand such a hybrid, — came 
 up, and offered to put us on shore in his own boat. " We shall 
 get a little wet, but I think 1 can run her in safely under thut 
 big stone on the shore." As it was not likely that we should 
 get any better offer, we accepted the proposal, and off we started.. 
 We certainly did take in some water ; in fact, the spray flew all 
 over us in showers, but the rowers were strong, and as soon as 
 we got near the stone, and the water shoaled a little, out jumped 
 the two foremost, and seizing the boat on either side, held her 
 straight, while the captain steered her in with the way that was 
 still on her. Very glad was I, for my own sake as well as that 
 of others, when I found myself safe on land. I like ships, but 
 I hate little boats, especially in the Gulf of Corinth, with a 
 strong breeze blowing on shore, and no shelter to run for. 
 
 But there we were on land. It was all right ; we thanked 
 the captain heartily, and went up from the beach. 
 
 At the Hotel of the Isthmus — a sort of fifth-rate inn — was a 
 great gathering of Greeks, as usual, discussing politics. I really 
 believe it was one of those insurrections which are always taking 
 place in modern Greek history. But besides being a political 
 meeting, it was a kind of fair, and I observed that the Signer 
 here, too, did a good stroke of business ; what he did it in I 
 can't imagine, for the country seemed barren, except of the 
 Isthmian pine — a dwarf sort of conifer. New Corinth, except 
 that I do not wish to insult Old Corinth, I should call a nasty 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 417 
 
 village ; and as for Old Corinth, one miserable hovel, and seven 
 superb columns of a Doric temple, are all that is left of the 
 proud city, the wealth and luxury of which were such that, as 
 the old proverb ran, " It was not every man's money to go 
 there ; " meaning, that if he went there without a good store of 
 money and wealth he would soon be ruined. 
 
 But then there was the Acro-Corinthus — the citadel of the 
 old city. Well, we went up it, and a very steep climb it is — 
 higher than up to Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, if you have ever 
 been there. And what did we find up there? About three 
 hundred soldiers, regular Greeks, — I mean Greek regulars, — of 
 whom I may say, that if the bandits, of whom we hear so much, 
 are worse-looking, they must be very ill-favoured. 
 
 Those gentry might be anxious to acquire money by all 
 lawful means, and one of these seems to be brigandage in 
 Greece, but I very much doubt, at the time of our visit, if any 
 of them possessed a silver bit. The Signor turned from them 
 in disgust, and said he had no dealings with such men. In 
 this I can well believe he spoke the truth. A man might 
 deal a long time with such beggars before he made any- 
 thing out of them, and he might lose a good deal in trying 
 to do it. 
 
 They were picturesque enough to look at, and disgusting 
 enough to make one look suffice. We turned away from them 
 then to the view, and that was indeed splendid — all down the 
 Saronic Gulf to iEgina, away into the Morea to Argos, and 
 further on towards Sparta and Taygetus. As for Megara, it 
 seemed to lie under our feet. All this we saw, to say nothing 
 of the view the other way, when we turned and looked back on 
 the Gulf of Corinth, and the sea and mountains we had passed 
 the day before. 
 
 But the more one gazed, the more one was struck with the 
 savage barrenness of the country round Corinth and the Isth- 
 mus; land once blooming with fertility, and now a howling 
 wilderness. All across the narrow neck of land we could trace 
 the rude attempts made to sever it, only to wonder why it had 
 never been done. 
 
 But we had to get to Athens that day; we could see the 
 smoke of the steamer coming for us up the other gulf. We 
 descended, therefore, followed by about fifty of our ferocious- 
 looking friends, who might have figured amongst Callot's 
 voleurs and brigands, in his " Miseries of War," with great 
 effect. 
 
 For some time I could not imagine what these worthy cut- 
 throats were going to do ; but when we descended on to the 
 
 E E 
 
418 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 plain, we found they were to be our escort across the Isthmus, 
 to protect us from the brigands. Juvenal's 
 
 " Sed quis custodiet ipsos 
 Custodes ? " 
 
 rose on my mind. " Pray heaven," I mentally ejaculated, " I 
 may never meet ten of these fifty, when I am crossing the- 
 Isthmus alone on a dark night ! " Nay ! for that matter I 
 should not at all like to meet three of them at mid-day in the 
 same lonely place. 
 
 And now we are off, some twenty of us, in four tumbledown 
 carriages, of a kind which it is impossible to describe. They 
 were not ancient chariots, but they looked as though they 
 might have been the stock-in-trade of some livery-stable keeper 
 in Old Corinth when Mummius sacked it. Too bad for the 
 rapacious Roman to take as spoil, and so they had remained 
 there ever since. 
 
 We got into them, I and the Signor, and the ladies and two 
 Greeks, in fustanellas ; that is, with their shirts outside their 
 Beinkleider, and with cutlery enough to stock Mr. Lund's shop : 
 only, of course, not so good. They wanted, these amiable 
 Greeks, to keep their guns with them, two long-barrelled, 
 Venetian pieces ; but we remonstrated, and so they were tied 
 on the top of the vehicle. One of them — not the pieces but 
 the Greeks — told us that he was an Akarnanian going to Athens 
 to demand justice of King Otho, that his gun was an heirloom 
 in the family, and that on the stock were more than one hundred 
 notches, showing how many Turks had been shot with it in the 
 course of generations. His father had used it at Missolonghi 
 and Athens in the War of Independence, and he had used it a 
 little in Akarnania, when he crossed the frontier against the 
 Turks. Then they shot as many Turks as they could. He 
 was now going to get justice from King Otho for some cattle 
 which the Turks had " lifted '' from his land. 
 
 He was rather amusing, that Greek, and I hope he got his 
 justice, though I doubt it. 
 
 Less than half-an-hour's jolts and jumps brought us to the 
 other side. Here there was another political meeting, at which 
 all the men assembled and made long speeches. It ended, like 
 an old Guy-Fawkes day in England, with bonfires and firing of 
 guns. I saw our Akarnanian fire his off several times. All 
 this time, while the men were settling the affairs of Europe, 
 and voting Turkey to eternal perdition, I saw several women, 
 the wives, no doubt, of these patriots, working hard in the 
 fields, many of them with a child at her back. Such was Greek 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 419 
 
 life at the Isthmus, and such is Greek life 'wherever I have seen. 
 it in Greece : " Very little work, and a great deal of talk." 
 
 We got on board the steamer, and steamed away down the 
 gulf. How lovely it was ! And then, as we turned and made 
 for the Pirceus, and saw the Acropolis right before us, with all 
 its marbles flushed with the rosy rays of the setting sun, and 
 when I saw iEgina, "that eyesore of the Pirseus," as Pericles 
 well called it, standing there a perpetual reproach to the Attic 
 race, and when we saw Salamis, and, last of all, when we ran 
 through the narrow mouth of the Pirseus, and took up a berth 
 amongst the crowd of shipping in that narrow port, how many 
 mingled recollections of Greece and her ancient glories did not 
 throng in my mind ! 
 
 " Yes ; here we are at Athens," said Sappho. " Here is the 
 Piraeus. There is an English line-of- battle ship, and another, and 
 another, and two French and one Russian. And we shall go up 
 to Athens, to our capital — the capital of us Greeks till we have 
 Stamboul — and we will drive along the long walls built by The- 
 mistocle's and Pericles, our ancestors." 
 
 So she went on identifying herself with the race from 
 which it is not so very plain that the Modern Greeks sprang. 
 
 But who could gainsay a woman in this mood? 
 
 We landed, we got our things together, we hired a carriage. 
 Now, I believe, there is a railway, then carriages were exorbi- 
 tant. We drove to the " H6tel de Russie," and were soon 
 seated at the table-d'hdte, which was served almost as we entered 
 the hotel. 
 
 So there I was at Athens, about the middle of November, 
 with the Maurocordatos. 
 
 CHAPTER LII. 
 
 WHAT HAPPENED AT ATHENS. 
 
 As soon as dinner was over, Sappho insisted that we should 
 be taken out for a walk by the Signor. She had never been in 
 Athens before, so it was all new to her. The woe-begone Sig- 
 nora stayed behind, as usual, to write letters. For myself, I 
 was too impatient to see the sights to think of writing, though 
 the post was leaving for France that very night, and if I missed 
 that chance I could not write for another week. But it was no 
 
 E E 2 
 
420 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 use thinking of writing. I could not write from Athens to any 
 one and not tell them something of Athens. Besides, I was too 
 excited to write. 
 
 Away we went then, we three. It was dusk and we could 
 only rush round the town. It is not very big now, and it was 
 much less then. The Signor knew Athens well, and was our 
 guide in the fast-darkening twilight. " Yonder," he said, " is 
 the Temple of Theseus, and over against it is the Areopagus ; 
 somewhere near the latter, low down in the hollow, was the 
 Agora, the market in which the ancient Athenians, so like the 
 modern Greeks, spent most of their time in doing nothing, and 
 asking silly questions." 
 
 Then we turned and walked round the Acropolis on its deso- 
 late side, past the Roman buildings at its base and on till we 
 came to the Arch of Hadrian, the only bit left of his new city, 
 and not the city of Theseus, as the inscription tells us, still so 
 legible on the arch that a child may read it. We went through 
 the arch and gazed over the great arid waste, only relieved by 
 the magnificent columns of the Temple of Jupiter, standing 
 like so many giants that have survived the destruction of the 
 rest of their race. Then we went back to the slope of the 
 Acropolis, to the border of the heaps of rubbish and dust which 
 man and time have hurled down from the rocky mount. We 
 must have passed over the site of the Temple of Bacchus — not 
 a gin temple, but where the masterpieces of Greek tragedy and 
 comedy, the sublimity of iEschylus, the beauty of Sophocles, the 
 pathos of Euripides, and the wit and satire of Aristophanes, 
 were poured out year by year to the delight of Athens and her 
 allies. When we were there no one knew exactly where the 
 site of that temple was. It was reserved for a patient German 
 to declare where it must be from written proof. The Greek 
 government asked him what he thought ought to be done. 
 " Dig," said the German ; " dig here ; " and they dug with such 
 success that they completely unearthed the seats of the old 
 theatre, and found them and the stage lying there comfortably 
 tucked up under ever so many beds of dust. As it was we 
 passed over it, and turning round the base of the Acropolis, 
 and now leaving its desolate side, we found among some mean 
 houses the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, the most elegant 
 bit of architecture, perhaps, in the world. 
 
 But here our archaeological explorations came to an end. 
 
 " Papa," said Sappho, " it's no good going on any longer pre- 
 tending to see in the dark. I don't know what Mr. Halfacre 
 can do, but I really am not a cat — I can't see when there is no 
 light." 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 421 
 
 In fact, we had gone on and on for some little time, fancying 
 we saw things because we were told we ought to see them. The 
 Signor said " See this," and we saw it. How strong is faith, 
 even in sight-seeing ! Dear reader, do you never see things 
 because you believe you see them? 
 
 Sappho's common sense — in this she was Scatterbrains in 
 petticoats — brought us to ourselves. 
 
 "Yes," said the Signor, "it would be better to have light ; 
 we can come again to-morrow. Let us go to our hotel." 
 
 Thither then we returned, delighted with what we had not 
 seen. 
 
 Did I lie awake that night thinking of Arethusa ? I did 
 better ; I fell asleep thinking of her, wishing she were there 
 with me to see those glorious works of art. The last thing I 
 remember was saying, " When we are married we will come 
 here, and I will be her showman, and she will believe me as I 
 believed the Signor when he showed me things in the dark. 
 She will have faith in me, as I have faith in her." 
 
 Was not that a long sentence for a man to carry in his head 
 just as he was falling off to sleep 1 But it really was my last 
 waking thought that night ; in my dreams, of course, Arethusa 
 was always with me. My nights, at that period of my exist- 
 ence, were the dearest part of my life. 
 
 Next morning I was up very early. I was down long before 
 Sappho appeared, or any of them. I stole a march upon her 
 basely, and went out for a little walk. Then I saw things 
 which I had not seen the night before — little things, but still 
 essential parts of life in Athens. First of all, I saw the Dust. 
 I have spelt it with a big D to show what a feature it is at 
 Athens. If there are dustier places in the world than Athens, 
 all I can say is, I never saw them. I don't believe that all the 
 dustmen in all the world, with all their brooms and carts, 
 would ever sweep it away, if they worked day and night. 
 Dust ! You walk out in London on Sunday in a dry summer ; 
 — I say Sunday, because, except in a few favoured districts, 
 there are no water-carts in London on Sunday ; heaven is sup- 
 posed to lay the dust all over London on that sacred day ; — • 
 you walk out in London on Sunday, I say, and you come back 
 with your boots dusty. You are abused for bringing so much 
 dust into the house, and you fly to brush it off. That is after 
 a ten-mile walk. But in Athens your boots are dustier at your 
 first step than if you had walked twenty miles along an English 
 high-road. You put your foot out, and it sinks into a thin, 
 whitish powder, down for inches, with what result as to the 
 polish of your boots I need not say. No ! Athens is the city 
 
422 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 of dust. Let no one deny it. At first, as I walked on, I 
 thought it was only the street in which our hotel was that was 
 very dusty ; but I soon found that all the other streets were the 
 same, only many of them were dustier. It is worse now, no 
 doubt, than in ancient times ; then there was more shade and 
 more water. The Turks and Greeks had not out down all the 
 olive-trees on the hills, and Ilissus and Cephissus were real 
 streams, not dry water-courses flooded, perhaps, ten times in 
 the year. Then, too, there was at Athens the Academy and its 
 groves of planes. Now, except the puny plantations of Otho 
 and his Queen, and the few pepper-trees growing along the 
 walks, there is hardly a green thing in Athens except the palace 
 garden. 
 
 The next thing that struck me in that morning's walk was 
 the excessive abundance of officers and generals in uniform, even 
 at that early hour. The Greek army seemed to consist entirely 
 of officers. If there were any privates they kept themselves 
 carefully out of sight. Perhaps if they showed themselves 
 they were afraid they might be called on to mount guard. I 
 observed, too, that the officers and the generals were in a highly 
 excited state, loitering about in knots, and discussing politics. 
 I believed we were on the eve of a revolution : but it was all 
 nothing ; it was merely the way in which this army of officers 
 spent its days in talking politics and neglecting its duty. One 
 half the mornings wasted by men in generals' uniform, in 
 babbling at the corner of the streets, and in the market-places, 
 would have cleared all Greece of brigands, drained her marshes, 
 and laid out roads all over the countiy. 
 
 Ah ! what good would one year of King Tom's reign have 
 done the Greeks in those days ! 
 
 But I saw more. I climbed up to the rock of the Areopagus; 
 I stood where the Bema — the tribune— is supposed to have 
 stood ; I was on the very spot from which Demosthenes 
 launched his philippics against the rising might of Macedon, 
 and where St. Paul stood, and confuted the philosophers. Down 
 below, in what used to be the market, where were the crowds of 
 gay idlers, of Athenian citizens, the spoilt children of Pericles 
 and Alcibiades, who would not come up and stand round in 
 sufficient numbers to make a legal assembly, who caused a 
 " count out," as our whips would say, and who ran up and down 
 the Agora shirking the heralds, the whips of the republic, who 
 ran after* them with a rope stained with vermilion, trying to 
 hit them, in which case the marked man was forced to attend 
 the assembly or be fined 1 Yes ; where were they 1 Their 
 works of art and literature remain, and will remain for ever, but 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 423 
 
 where were they ? All I could see from the Areopagus were 
 three generals standing in the deserted space, and gesticulating 
 together. Though they were a hundred, yards off, at least, I 
 knew they must be talking politics, and in their mind's eye, 
 already established as field-marshals of the grand army of the 
 Greeks, the head-quarters of which are at Constantinople. 
 
 But I must get back to breakfast, and leave the ancient 
 Greeks to Madam Harbury, whose interests in the good men of 
 old you well know. 
 
 As I walked back to the hotel, the Temple of Theseus was on 
 cay left, and the front of the Acropolis straight before me. Seen 
 at that distance the temple might have been built not a hundred 
 years ago. There it stands with its roof on, and its columns 
 reddish-yellow, with that beautiful lichen which only grows over 
 Greek marble to make it more lovely. The dragomans will tell 
 you, as mine told me, that this reddish-yellow was the blood of 
 the Greeks that stained the columns as it spurted out in some 
 imaginary Turkish massacre. Don't believe them : it is a lichen 
 growth, and no human blood. 
 
 Yes ; there before me was the Acropolis ; the Temple of the 
 Wingless Victory on the extreme right nestled up in a corner. 
 Hard by it a grand mediaeval watch-tower, which some fools are 
 for pulling down. I beg you to believe I am not one of them. 
 Then right in front the Propylsea, the marble defences of the 
 gate, all in marble, and strong enough to stand twenty centuries 
 of time and sieges, man's worst work on earth. Further back 
 on the left, the Erechtheum ; still, I believe, rather a puzzling 
 temple to the learned ; and above all, and behind all, and over 
 all, absolutely crushing them with its weight both of size and 
 foeauty, the Parthenon. Yes ! the Parthenon. There it stands, 
 .shorn of its marbles and of its great statue of the mighty god- 
 dess. A temple which has been ' besieged, blown up, battered, 
 spoiled and robbed, and which still stands, after all that has 
 befallen it, and proudly says : " Man and time have done their 
 worst, and man more than time ; yet here I am. They have 
 but taken away my jewels and my dress. Here I am, still 
 .alive, in glorious beauty, though naked and stripped to the 
 .skin." 
 
 As I walked home on the inhabited side of the Acropolis — 
 for, you must know, a great part of the modern city has nestled 
 under one side of the Acropolis, and is as thickly peopled and 
 :as busy as the opposite side, where the city of Hadrian stood, is 
 waste and desolate — I saw the wall running round the crest of 
 the rock, and saw it, as we are told, full of bits of statues and 
 •columns. If you look to Thucydides you will understand the 
 
424 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 political necessity which made the old Athenians, — who could 
 work with a will when they chose, — build that wall in such a. 
 hurry, as to spare no materials, sacred or profane, that came in 
 their way. 
 
 I found them all waiting breakfast for me, and Sappho rather 
 sulky at my having got the start of her. 
 
 " Very mean of you to take that advantage of a lady, who 
 has her hair to do, and I don't know what besides. What have 
 you seen ? " 
 
 Then I told them where I had been, and what I had seen, not 
 forgetting the dust or the generals. 
 
 " Yes," said the Signor. " It is dusty in Athens, especially 
 at this time of the year, when there has been no rain for 
 months. I daresay we shall soon have some showers to lay the 
 dust." 
 
 I did not tell him what I thought — that it would take all the 
 water in the gulf of Corinth to lay the dust of ages which lay in 
 the streets of Athens. But I thought that I now saw how it 
 was that the plays of Aristophanes are so full of allusions to- 
 eyes and eye-diseases, and why the great orators worked them 
 up into their speeches, as when Pericles made that hit at 
 iEgina, which I have already told you. Athens must always, 
 have been a bad place for eyes, and oculists must have done a. 
 good business there. How could it be otherwise, when the sun 
 glares down on the white soil, and every gust of wind sends the 
 impalpable powder in clouds into your eyes 1 
 
 After breakfast, we again set out on our exploration of Athens. 
 Now we had daylight and a long day before us. Both Sappho- 
 and I were for going up to the Acropolis at once, but the Signor 
 would not let us. He hired a carriage, and we drove to see the 
 palace. I am sure I don't know why we went j perhaps he 
 thought its architecture a good contrast, and preparation for the 
 Parthenon. Perhaps he was really proud of it, though I believe 
 it was the work of a German. I am not going to abuse it. I 
 call it very pretty, and so is the garden ; very pretty — wonder- 
 ful, in fact, for Athens, where it costs as much to make one blade 
 of grass grow as it did the Pharisees of old to make one 
 proselyte. Yes, it is at Athens, water, water, water, and again, 
 water ; what that garden cost in water-carts, to keep it green, 
 would have made ever so many miles of road. 
 
 After we had seen the palace, we drove round to the desolate- 
 side of the Acropolis, now in the full blaze of a mid-day sun. 
 How hot and dusty the vast expanse looked, and how dazzling 
 those gigantic columns looked in the glare. One, I remember, 
 had a chapel on the top of it— a sort of Simeon Stylites hermi- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 425 
 
 tage, erected for himself by some holy anchorite. He must 
 have been both hot and cold by turns up there. 
 
 Then we drove through the Arch, and admired the clearness- 
 of the inscription, which is cut in letters so clear and large, that 
 you can read them from below, and so on, along that side, below 
 the great heaps of rubbish, reversing the way we had come 
 in the dusk the evening before, until we turned at the end 
 of the rock, and the carriage drew up at the entrance to the 
 Acropolis. 
 
 Yes, there we were, going up to see the Parthenon. Did we 
 go in by the side-gate 1 No ; we went straight up the clive — 
 the slope that leads through the Propylsea. What was the 
 Propylsea ? I can't help the hard word ; I did not make it. 
 The Propylsea are the " defences before the gate," — the barbi- 
 can, or whatever else you like to call it, in Gothic architecture. 
 It was a marble outwork, built by Pericles, to protect the real 
 gate of the Acropolis. You know the Acropolis was the citadel 
 of old Athens ? Yes, I thought you did. This outwork was 
 very strong and solid, and all of marble. There are marble 
 blocks and marble beams, so solidly put together, all fitted so 
 nicely, without mortar, that it is a wonder to see ; some of the 
 beams have toppled down, not from any settlement, but from 
 the misfortune of war. I forget how many times the Venetians 
 and Greeks besieged the Turks in the Acropolis, and how many 
 times the Turks returned the compliment — certainly a good 
 many times. Well, we scrambled up the steep slope, over the 
 marble steps, amazed at the beauty of the work ; and then we 
 made straight for the Parthenon, across a whole desert of blocks 
 of marble, huge drums of columns, and broken capitals. Yes,, 
 we both reached it together, Sappho and I. The Signor was 
 slower in his movements, and had to pick his way across the 
 blocks. There we stood before the great temple, together, 
 staring up at the Pediment. 
 
 " Yes," she said, bitterly, " you may look ; you won't see 
 much there. Where are the sculptures of that Pediment, and 
 where are the friezes and metopes that once adorned the walls 
 of this our national monument ? Our ! I say — our ! " 
 
 Then, without waiting for an answer, she went on : "I know 
 where they are. Papa saw them in London, in a great, gloomy 
 building, which you call your Museum, full of smoke and blacks. 
 He went there when he was in England on business, and saw 
 what you call " the Elgin Marbles," after the robber who stole 
 them away. They ought to be here, for he said he did it to- 
 save them from the Turks. Now the Greeks are here, why 
 doesn't he send them back ? " 
 
426 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 So she went on, dilating on this sentimental grievance, till 
 her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkled as she spoke. It was 
 in vain to tell her that Lord Elgin really preserved the marbles 
 by taking them away. She always returned to her text : " If 
 that was the only reason, why doesn't he send them back 1 '' 
 
 But we had not gone there to quarrel about the Elgin Mar- 
 bles, but to admire the Parthenon. By this time the Signor 
 had joined us, and we paced it every way — in its breadth and 
 its length, and we were in ecstasies at the trueness of the 
 workmanship, and the wondrous fitting of the huge blocks 
 together. 
 
 Not content with admiring it from below, Sappho must see it 
 from above, and up we went to the back of the Pediment, across 
 one of the huge marble beams, which must have been four or 
 five feet wide. There is a story of a man who, having crossed 
 this marble bridge, lost his head, and refused to come back with 
 his friends. What they did with this giddy-headed mortal I 
 am sure I don't know ; all I can say is, he was not up there 
 when I ascended. The Signor was content with the back of the 
 Pediment, which looked a barrier like a mountain ; but Sappho 
 insisted that the right thing was to go on to the cornice in front, 
 on which the Pediment rests, and at the extreme end of which 
 is still one bit of sculpture which Lord Elgin did not carry 
 away. 
 
 I was ready enough, and we soon stood on the cornice ; get- 
 ting out on it at the extreme left as you stand with your back 
 to the Pediment. 
 
 That, if you like, was giddy work, to look down seventy feet, 
 and seemingly to stand on nothing to spectators from below. But 
 after all it is not so very bad. The cornice is broader than it 
 looks — four feet, I should say, by guess after all these years. 
 It was rather what I call " tippy." In places the blocks had 
 lost their bearings and lay up and down at all sorts of odd 
 angles, but still we walked along it to the extreme right, and 
 then I had the satisfaction of seeing that the bit of sculpture 
 left behind by Lord Elgin was so worn and weathered as to be 
 worth little as a work of art. 
 
 " Now you see it," I said, " what do you think of it ? Don't 
 you think it would have been in a better state if it had gone 
 with the rest 1 " 
 
 " Very likely," said the wilful lady ; " if it had gone with the 
 rest, it might come back with the rest. What I wish to know 
 is when the rest will come back ? Oh, you English— you Eng- 
 lish robbers ! " 
 
 There she stood in the blazing sun staring out of her great 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 427 
 
 eyes down to the Pirseus and Salamis and Mgina, and across the 
 blue sea to the Morea. She looked like the great goddess her- 
 self as she denounced us as a nation. 
 
 "Yes! robbers. You were stolen yourselves. The Normans 
 came and stole away your freedom, and ever since you have 
 stolen from all nations. Here a rock, or a headland, or a port ; 
 there a province or half a continent. But what you most like 
 are islands. Even robbers have tastes, and your taste is islands. 
 I should like to know how many islands you have stolen. If 
 another nation discovers an island, you seize it and say you were 
 there first. If they colonise it or settle it, you seize it all the 
 same. If it isn't yours, it ought to be. You. are worse than the 
 Dutch. Who discovered and settled most of the West India 
 Islands ? The Spaniards and the French. And whose are those 
 islands now ? I suppose Van Diemen was an Englishman ; his 
 name has such a very English sound. And our islands, the 
 Ionian Islands, why has England got them ? Only because they 
 are islands. And Heligoland, why have you got that 1 Only 
 because it's an island, and that you might smuggle your nasty 
 cotton into Germany. That's what papa says when we are alone. 
 Go behind this Pediment and ask him if what I say is not true ? 
 Nothing satisfies your greed for islands. If Stromboli throws 
 up an island that only lasts a week, some brave English Post 
 Captain sticks the Union Jack on it and makes it British soil. 
 I really believe Englishmen think that every island in the world 
 naturally belongs to them. I daresay the reason is that you 
 think yourselves safe on your islands, shut in all round by water. 
 But perhaps the time will come when a stronger than you shall 
 come and force you to disgorge the spoil that you have heaped 
 up in your asylum of thieves. There ! I have done ; the mad 
 fit has passed off. Let us rejoin papa." 
 
 I had stood gazing at Sappho all the while that she denounced 
 us as a nation of thieves, and I must say she played the part of 
 a prophetess to perfection. I liked her better, too, than when 
 she sat on the tripod of the Pythia at Delphi, and mocked me 
 with riddles and oracles as to my Arethusa. We can bear, — at 
 least I can, — a national wrong better than a private insult. 
 "When she had ceased, I only said : 
 
 " Very fine declamation, indeed ! Some of it deserved, I 
 daresay, though not all. The English nation, neither as a 
 nation, nor as individuals, are so bad as we seem. But I am 
 not going to contradict a young Greek lady before the Pedi- 
 ment of her own Parthenon. Here, I think, you stand on 
 your own ground, and have a right to say what you like. 
 Perhaps, though, if you Greeks had robbed more as a nation 
 
428 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 and less as men, if you had been a little more like -Englishmen 
 and a little less like Greeks, you would have been stronger as a 
 nation and more respected as individuals. It's the old story of 
 great and little dealings. A great conqueror kills his thou- 
 sands and his hundreds of thousands and is crowned ; a little 
 man, a grocer it may be, kills his rival and is hanged. It is the 
 way of the world. So it is with England, and so it is with 
 Greece." 
 
 " Very bitter," said Sappho, " and, like all bitter things, very 
 nasty. Again, I say, let us go back to papa." 
 
 I am sorry to say we found the Signor fast asleep with his 
 back to the Pediment. If the glories of Greece and the infamy 
 of England were at all on his mind, it must have been in his 
 dreams ; but I am sure he was not dreaming of anything so 
 great. If he were conscious of anything in that sweet snatch 
 of mid-day sleep it was of oil, and olives, and wine, and marma- 
 lade, and figs, and, above all the rest, of currants — currants as 
 black, and sleek, and glossy as black Genoa velvet, as I heard a 
 currant-merchant at Patras describe his crop. 
 
 Just so does the breeder of a pure short-horn cow declare 
 that there is no beauty on earth to compare with his " Last 
 Eose of Summer." Nothing that Phidias or Praxiteles ever 
 carved, or Apelles or Zeuxis ever painted, is at all equal to the 
 grace and loveliness of a pure short-horned cow. Nay, I am 
 not sure that he does not think that beautiful women ought to 
 go on all-fours like cows, and the fat wives of that African king — 
 the King of Lollipoppo, if I remember right — across whom 
 Grant and Speke came in their search fer the sources of the 
 Nile. 
 
 Well, we found the Signor fast asleep, and we woke him up. 
 I am afraid he knocked the back of his head against the hard 
 marble with the start he gave, for Sappho, still wild with her 
 declamation, put out her mouth, and shouted out, " Papa, 
 dear ! " " 
 
 " What is it 1 " said the Signor ; " I have been so fast 
 asleep." 
 
 "Yes, I know you have," said Sappho, "and we have been 
 waiting for you to call us ever so long, and as you never called, 
 I called you, that is all." 
 
 "Oh, I see," said the patient Signor, rubbing his head. 
 " I suppose we ought to go down and see the rest of the 
 Acropolis 1 '' 
 
 " Of course we ought,'' said Sappho, and down she went first, 
 I next, and last of all the Signor. 
 
 We saw the Erechtheum, and the Temple of Victory, and all 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 429 
 
 the rest of -the Parthenon ; and Sappho, little Goth that she 
 was, chipped off a great piece from the drum of a pillar that lay 
 shattered there, that I might take it back with me to England. 
 I abused her for it, and kept the bit of marble. Dear me ! 
 some things are so soon lost, and there are some that one never 
 loses. There lies that bit of marble after all these years on this 
 very writing-table. I have used it ever since as a paper- 
 weight. 
 
 " There, take it,'' she said ; " you won't be worse than Lord 
 Elgin. You English, you know, are all thieves in one boat. 
 It's no use for one of the crew to be squeamish." 
 
 After that we walked round the wall that is built round the 
 edge of the Acropolis, and where it was low enough we looked 
 over and down into the town, out over the city of Hadrian, and 
 the columns of Jove's Temple, and we tried to trace the dry 
 beds of the Ilissus and Cephissus, and coming nearer we had 
 a fine bird's-eye view of the palace and its garden, — that one 
 green spot in a desert of dust, and we could see the Queen 
 tending her flowers, and the Bavarian gardeners watering, 
 watering, watering, so long as we looked. Behind the palace 
 rose Lycabettus, and Sappho and I resolved that it should 
 not be long before we were up at its top. 
 
 " Now I think we really ought to go home to your mamma," 
 said the Signor ; " it is just two o'clock." 
 
 Back then we walked to the hotel. There we found the 
 Signora quite happy writing. I have told you that writing is 
 infectious. So after luncheon I sat down and wrote a long 
 letter to Aunt Mandeville, telling her all my adventures. Poor 
 dear Auntie ! I said nothing in it likely to trouble her. I 
 wanted to amuse her by showing her that I was amused and 
 happy. I did not tell her that the great cause of my happiness 
 was that in a month I should be back in England, and able to 
 see my Arethusa. 
 
 After I had done writing that long letter, I gave it to the 
 Signora, and begged her to post it with hers. After that the 
 energetic Sappho again dragged her father out, and told him of 
 our intention to climb Lycabettus. 
 
 "Dear me, Sappho," said her father, " don't you think you 
 have almost done enough to-day in the way of exercise 1 I have 
 never been up Lycabettus in my life. I should think it was 
 harder work than you would like." 
 
 " If you had been up it," said Sappho, " there might be some 
 excuse, but, as you have not, you had better come.'' Then 
 she threw her arms about him, and said, in a very sweet 
 voice : 
 
430 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Do come, dear papa ; I should like it so very much.'' 
 
 Need I say that the Signor went like a lamb after this gentle 
 appeal ? 
 
 We drove to the foot of the hill, and then went up on foot. 
 It is nothing of a climb, but then it was very hot. There is a 
 fierceness in the sun in Greece, even in November, that pros- 
 trates one when exposed to its rays. How it seemed to settle 
 itself, with all the malignity of the Dog Star, on my back all 
 the way up ! How the poor Signor puffed and panted ; how red I 
 know I was in the face ; how flushed Sappho got, but how 
 steadily she strode on, racing with me for the summit, and 
 winning by a yard or two ! Of course, I let her win. I was 
 not going to be such a fool as the man who rode a race with a 
 pretty young lady with a large fortune — and won it, like a fool. 
 Of course, she married some one else. Men ought always to let 
 women do what women think they can do as well as men. It 
 is no glory to beat them. It will not reverse the sad sentence 
 of all the ages and centuries that, on the whole, and in the long 
 run, and with few exceptions — " Woman is the weaker vessel ; " 
 but, in cases where it can be at all done, it is just as well some- 
 times to let the grey mare be, as well as think herself, the 
 better horse. So it was with that race up Lycabettus. I am 
 quite sure Sappho Maurocordato was intensely pleased to think 
 that she had beaten me in a fair race to the summit. 
 
 " I don't know how it is, my Lord," said the Hampshire 
 farmer to Lord Palmerston ; " I don't know how it is. They 
 tell us it is colder on the tops of the hills than down in the 
 valleys ; and yet I never walk up to the top of that hill yonder 
 from my farm down here without feeling very hot." 
 
 We, too, were like the Hampshire farmer ; we were very hot 
 when we got up to the top of Lycabettus. There are convents 
 and . monasteries everywhere in Greece, and I believe there is 
 one on Lycabettus ; all I know is, we did not enter it, but sat 
 down under a big stone, and again admired the view. The hill 
 must have been made for no other purpose than for sight-seers 
 of all times to survey the glories of Athens. From the Acro- 
 polis we had Athens under our feet ; but from Lycabettus one 
 far overlooks the Acropolis, and sees further and further away 
 into the Morea. Having exhausted the vocabulary of synonymes 
 to wonderful and beautiful, the patient Signor proposed a 
 descent ; but Sappho was for staying a little longer, till it was 
 not so hot. What a father that Signor was ! The patience of 
 an ass or of Job was as nothing to his. Down he sat again with- 
 out a murmur, and again he fell asleep. 
 
 " Poor papa ! how tired he is ! " said Sappho. Then, with 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 431 
 
 one of her bursts of merriment : " Do you know why I like 
 you?" 
 
 "No. Why?" 
 
 " Because you never make love. You are not as other young 
 men are — what I call 'philandering.' If you have affections, 
 you keep them to yourself. Of course, I don't believe you care 
 one bit for Mary Harbury 1 " 
 
 " You are quite right." 
 
 " Do you care for any one 1 " Then, seeing that I was in a, 
 dilemma, she went on, "Well, don't confess; I don't care to 
 know who it is." 
 
 " Of course, you can't care to know, if you say you like me 
 because I never make love." 
 
 "Yes; but don't you know that is often just the way to 
 make others love you? " 
 
 " I know nothing about it," I said, rather roughly. 
 
 "Well," said Sappho, "that will do. I think we may go 
 down now. Wake up, papa. We are quite ready — quite ! " 
 
 She said this last " quite " most maliciously. 
 
 Down we went, and as the carriage had been sent away when 
 we went up, we had a long walk back, to the hotel. 
 
 On the way I told the 'Signor I should like to see Marathon 
 when I was at Athens. This put the worthy man into as great 
 a dilemma as Sappho's question on the top of Lycabettus had 
 put me. 
 
 " Marathon ! ah, yes, Marathon ! " And then he hummed 
 and hahed much as dear Mr. St. Faith used to do in his 
 sermon. " Do you particularly wish to go to Marathon ? " 
 
 " Of course he does," said Sappho. " Mr. Halfacre, you 
 know, papa, has only just left school. He wants to go and see 
 the place of which he has learnt so many lessons." 
 
 " Why don't you say," I retorted, " that Mr. Halfacre wants 
 to go and see the spot, the sacred spot, where the Old Greeks 
 beat the Old Turks? for I take it the Persians were to the 
 ancient Greeks pretty much what the Turks are to the Modern 
 Greeks." 
 
 " Very nicely said. You're a very good boy. You have 
 learnt your lesson well. Papa, dear, let us take him to 
 Marathon." 
 
 "That is easier said than done," said the Signor. "But if 
 we are to go I must 16ok out for a guide. I wonder whether 
 Themistocles Kakourgos is in Athens." 
 
 " That's rather an ill-omened name," said I ; " Kakourgos ; 
 why, that means ' ruffian,' or ' evil-doer.' " 
 
 " ' What's in a name ? ' " said the Signor. " ' Handsome is 
 
432 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 that handsome does.' We have that proverb in Greek as well 
 as you in English. All I say is, if I go to Marathon, Themis- 
 tocles Kakourgos goes with us." 
 
 " I am sure I have no objection," I replied ; and so the 
 Signor went off in search of Themistocles, leaving me and 
 Sappho at the door of the hotel. 
 
 " And pray who is this Themistocles 1 " I asked, as we went 
 upstairs. 
 
 " Oh, a friend of papa's, who has dealings with him, and lives 
 up the country in the direction of Marathon." 
 
 In a few minutes, — certainly in less than a quarter of an 
 hour — the Signor returned. Had he seen Themistocles ? Yes ; 
 and he was coming to supper. Then we could settle about 
 going. 
 
 Accordingly at supper-time, about eight o'clock, a rap came 
 at our door. 
 
 " Come in,'' said the Signor, and in walked Themistocles. 
 
 When I say " walked," — that is not the word ; he stalked in, 
 taking long strides across the room. First he turned to the 
 Signora, and shook her hand so heartily that she groaned. 
 Then he slapped the Signor on the back, just as if he had got 
 a bone in his throat. I am sure I don't know what he would 
 have done to Sappho had not that young lady fled the room. 
 Last of all, he walked up to me, and stared me full in the face. 
 
 From all this, you will see that Themistocles Kakourgos had 
 not been taught manners in his youth ; nor had- he expended 
 much of his capital on learning that branch of knowledge since. 
 
 Then he threw himself into an arm-chair, and asked when 
 supper would be ready. 
 
 " Oh ! very soon, very soon," said the Signor, in a deprecatory 
 way. " It will soon come." 
 
 The supper came, and it came in the shape of a much more 
 magnificent repast than we had had all the time I had stayed 
 with the Signor. Suffice it to say, that it was not only very 
 solid, but that it comprised all the delicacies of the season, 
 woodcocks included. Where they got them, in treeless and 
 waterless Attica I am sure I can't tell ; but there they were. 
 
 If Themistocles was a good guide, he was as good a trencher- 
 man. Down his throat went everything. I really thought he 
 must have just come off a long fast. Nor did he spare the 
 wine : Santorin and Cyprus were his favourites. They were 
 stronger, and had no rosin in them. After he had done, he 
 began to pick his teeth with his fingers. I suspect a tooth- 
 pick would have been as much thrown away upon him as a 
 tooth-brush. Yet he had huge, regular, white teeth. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 433 
 
 At last he came to business. 
 
 " Well, Spiro ! " he said to the Signor, " what can I do for 
 you 1" 
 
 " We want to take this gentleman, who is a great friend of 
 mine, to Marathon ; and we want you to come as a guide." 
 
 " When do you want to go 1 " said Themistocles. 
 
 " As soon as possible. To-morrow, if jt suits you. How are 
 the tracks?" 
 
 The Signor said " tracks," — not roads ; for there are no roads 
 in Greece, — and he said it in a very suggestive way. 
 
 "The tracks," said Themistocles, "are always good when I 
 ride over them. I can always get along. But you know I am 
 a poor farmer, and I can't go for nothing." 
 
 " Oh ! of course," said the Signor. " That is understood. 
 This gentleman will make it worth your while." 
 
 "Done then!" said Themistocles. "I'll take you there. 
 You, and Miss Sappho, and your friend, and find horses, and 
 bring you back for ten gold pieces, — French or English, I don't 
 care which. But I will have no silver. To-morrow, if it doesn't 
 rain, — which it isn't at all likely that it will — I will be here 
 with the horses at ten o'clock, and then we can make a good 
 start, and sleep at Marathon, and come back the next day." 
 
 Having said this, he tossed off the remains of the bottle of 
 Santorin in a tumbler, bade us good evening, and strode out of 
 the room. 
 
 I remarked that the waiters stood aghast at his boorish ways, 
 amd were evidently in great awe of him. 
 
 "Your friend seems what we call a rough diamond," I 
 remarked to the Signor, as soon as he was out of hearing. 
 
 " Yes, indeed. But then he is an honest man. That is to 
 say, if Themistocles gives his word to do anything, he will do 
 it. But we should never have got him to go unless we had put 
 him into a good humour with that supper." 
 
 As he said this the Signor pointed to the table,, on which 
 literally nothing was left but bones, broken bits of bread, and 
 empty bottles. 
 
 Now I suppose all of you think I am going to take you off 
 for two days into Attica, and to show you Marathon, as 
 Themistocles Kakourgos showed it to us. But you are all 
 quite mistaken. This story, truthful as it is, must come to an 
 end soon, "and I have no time to take you with me to Marathon. 
 You must be. content to know that, true to his word, Themis- 
 tocles came with his horses next morning, and very good nags 
 they were. Under his guidance we rode, the Signor, Sappho, 
 and I, to Marathon. Yes, we saw everything. We saw that 
 
434 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 famous plain, and somewhere or otter I have a flint arrow- 
 head — one of the Persian shafts, no doubt— which I picked up 
 there. In the evening we went to a sort of farm-house, not 
 the abode of Themistocles, but of one of his friends. It was a 
 cut-throat sort of place, but we both fared and slept well in it. 
 After supper — not so delicate, but quite as profuse as ours at 
 the hotel — Themistocles and his friend sang Romaic songs, 
 about robbery, and love, and Turk-slaying. Then we all lay 
 down — that is, all the men — before the huge fire, on goat-skins 
 and sheep-skins, and slept well. As for Sappho, she was stowed 
 away in a sort of side-room, out of which we had, from time 
 to time, heard women's voices, though we saw no faces. 
 
 Next morning we were up early, and had breakfast. I re- 
 member it was coffee, full of grouts, and fried eggs, and dried 
 mutton and botargo. Then we bade adieu to the friend of 
 Themistocles, who was not nearly so great a bear, and so we 
 rode back to Athens, highly delighted. 
 
 We shook hands with Themistocles at parting, but we did 
 not ask him to supper. When he was gone, and we had heard 
 the last of his horses rattling down the street, I asked the 
 Signor how Themistocles got his living. 
 
 " In many ways," said the Signor, dryly. " By selling wood 
 and oil to me and others ; but mostly by brigandage. Did you 
 not hear him say that the tracks were always good when he 
 went over them i By that he meant that they were bad when 
 he did not go as guide. Very bad, for then he would not 
 scruple to rob you, nay, to cut your throat if you resisted. But 
 when you can get him to say that he will go as guide for a fixed 
 sum, it is a point of honour with him to go and bring you back 
 safe, and then you may trust him thoroughly.'' 
 
 " But the police," I said. " How is he here in Athens, if he 
 is known to be a brigand, without being arrested % " 
 
 " Oh, as for that," said the Signor, " if the police were to 
 arrest every brigand who is known to be in Athens, they would 
 have nothing else to do. All I know is, Themistocles has never 
 been arrested ; and I also know that you would never have 
 gone to Marathon and come back safe and sound, had it not 
 been for Themistocles Kakourgos and that supper." 
 
 So now, reader, you see why I told you about this little trip 
 to Marathon. It was to show that 'brigandage, when I was in 
 •Greece, was just as flourishing an institution of the country as 
 it is in this year of grace, 1870. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 43j 
 
 CHAPTER LIII. 
 
 HOW SCATTERBRAINS SCATTERED US. 
 
 So we went on spending day after day at Athens very plea- 
 santly. Sometimes we went up to the Acropolis to look at the 
 Parthenon. We were never tired of looking at it, and some- 
 times we went about the city on exploring parties. Once we 
 took boat and went to Salamis, and had a pic-nic there. Fancy 
 a pic-nic at Salamis. We were just planning a voyage down to 
 Sunium — and I verily believe Themistocles Kakourgos would 
 have been our guide — when something happened which discon- 
 certed all our plans. 
 
 One morning, towards the end of November, we were sitting 
 at breakfast, and Sappho was reading the newspaper. The 
 Signor had business letters, and the Signora — as usual — looked 
 woebegone and said nothing. I was doing nothing, and — as 
 usual — thinking of Arethusa. 
 
 All at once Sappho broke out : 
 
 " Well ! if he has not pursued us here ! " 
 
 " Who," I asked ; " who has pursued us 1 " 
 
 " Why, that friend of yours ; that rude man, Scatterbrains, as 
 you call him. I see his yacht has arrived at the Piraeus, and of 
 course he is on board." 
 
 " I am very glad ; I like Scatterbrains so very much." 
 
 " More than I do," said Sappho ; " I hate rude men." 
 
 Athens is a small place. To be in Athens and fancy you can 
 escape notice is an absurdity. Scatterbrains soon found us out ; 
 and besides, he had come to seek us. 
 
 In less than an hour from the time that Sappho had read out 
 his arrival, he walked into our room. 
 
 "So glad to see you, Halfacre ! So very glad! I have been 
 chasing you all the way from Corfu. I came back from my 
 shooting about ten days ago, and there I found a lot of letters 
 for you, lying at the post-office, so I laid hands on them, and 
 here they are." 
 
 As he said this he handed me several letters. 
 
 "How good of you !" I said; "just like you, old fellow, 
 always ready to do any one a service. How long are you going 
 to stay here ? " 
 
 " Oh, I'm sure I can't tell. I come when I like, and I go 
 when I like. I suppose I shall go when I have had enough of 
 
 f f 2 
 
436 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the place. But I -will go away and leave you to read your 
 letters." 
 
 There were several letters ; but only two that I cared to 
 see — one from Lady Meredith, and one from Aunt Man- 
 deville. 
 
 " I wonder what can have made Lady Meredith write to me," 
 I said, as I broke the seal ; " no bad news, I hope." 
 
 Now, as I tell you everything, you may read the letter. 
 
 "Meredith Park, 
 " November 10th, 183—. 
 
 "Dear Mr. Halfacre, 
 
 " I do not know whether you will thank me for writing 
 to you ; but, after much consideration, I have made up my 
 mind to take that step, and to write to you freely. I am sorry 
 to say that your affairs do not progress very well. A certain 
 young lady and an uncertain Count see a great deal of one 
 another at Leamington, where the hunting season is — as you 
 know — just beginning, and, though I believe what I hear to be 
 all gossip, still I do not at all like what I hear. 
 
 " I drove over to Mandeville Hall the other day and saw your 
 Aunt. She was not very well, and I should say rather vexed 
 with you. She says you never write to her, and that she hears 
 you are amusing yourself with a very pretty young Greek lady. 
 I must tell you that I believe this report was brought to 
 Warwickshire, a day or two before I called, by your friend, 
 Major Plunger, who was full of his Corfu experiences, and says 
 that you cut all the English and lived entirely in one Greek 
 family. 
 
 " I do not know whether you will be surprised or pleased to 
 hear that I found Count Manteuffel staying at Mandeville Hall. 
 Your Aunt says she thinks him charming. He said, from his 
 experience of the fascination of the Greek ladies, that he did 
 not wonder that you should have forgotten Mary Harbury. He 
 called her Miss Harbury ; of course I call her Mary Harbury. 
 I need not say that Miss Chichester was not at Mandeville 
 Hall. 
 
 " As I went away, Mr. Brooks said, in his most confidential 
 way : ' That foreign Count, my lady, which his name no servant 
 can't pronounce, comes here a'most every day. Mrs. Mande- 
 ville do get quite fond of him.' 
 
 " Now I think, all things considered, the best thing you can 
 do is to come back as soon as you can, even before your time is 
 up. I do not, of course, believe that you are falling in love 
 with any young Greek lady — I know you too well for that ; but 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 437 
 
 I think it would, be as well if you showed your face at Mande- 
 ville Hall as soon as possible. 
 
 "With Meredith's kind regards, believe me, my dear Mr. 
 Halfacre, 
 
 " Yours sincerely, 
 
 "Emily Meredith." 
 
 " What a dear, good woman ! " I said, right out. " How she 
 watches after my interest, and yet I can make neither head nor 
 tail of her letter. What can Auntie mean by saying that she 
 never hears from- me ? Why, I have written over and over 
 again, and told her where I was, and what I was doing." As 
 for the gossip about Arethusa and the Count, I don't think it 
 worth a thought. I know he used to rave about her, and I 
 daresay he raves about her still, and thrusts himself on her 
 when they meet ; but as to anything else, after what has passed 
 between Arethusa Chichester and myself, it is simply ridiculous. 
 I trust her as she trusts me, and when we meet she will tell me 
 all, as I will tell her all. 
 
 " But that Plunger ! to go and tell lies about me. I daresay 
 he and Twentyman have made a fine story out of my visit to 
 Gastouri. Won't I pay them out when I get home 1 " 
 
 All this I said before I even opened Aunt Mandeville's letter. 
 As I have let you read the other, you may read hers : 
 
 " Mandeville Hall, 
 
 " November Uth, 183-. 
 
 " My dear Edward, 
 
 " Though I have written several times to you to complain 
 of your silence and neglect, I really must write again to say how 
 much shocked I am to hear from Major Plunger, and indeed 
 from your last letter, that you have quite thrown yourself into 
 the arms of a Greek family at Corfu. I daresay they are very 
 respectable people — at least, I hope so. Count Manteuffel, of 
 whom I see a good deal, says that they cannot be the family to 
 whom he gave you letters of introduction, because that was 
 one of the first families in the Ionian Islands. I am sorry to 
 say that I could not gather either from Major Plunger or Mr. 
 Twentyman the name of the family with whom you are living. 
 The Major said, as is the truth, that he is not a good remem- 
 berer of names ; but he could answer for it that Miss Sappho, 
 as he called her, was a most charming person, and had got you, 
 to use his vulgar expression, completely under her thumb. 
 
 " I must say, Edward, that this news has been a very great 
 blow to me. To think that you should so misbehave — you 
 
438 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ■whom I have reared up for myself to be my own child, and to 
 show me duty and obedience. This criminal passion is a thou- 
 sand times worse than that boyish fancy which you had, or 
 professed to have, only a few weeks ago, for Miss Chichester, 
 and I am both shocked and distressed at your levity. 
 
 " I am sorry to say I must now repeat my wish, — I ought to 
 say my command, considering the relations which exist between 
 us, — that you will at once write to me without a moment's 
 delay after you receive this, and give your consent to that union 
 with Miss Harbury which, while it will gratify one of the- 
 dearest objects of my life — that of seeing you happily settled 
 for life — will, at the same time, save you from the moral ruin 
 toward which you seem to be hastening. 
 " Believe me, 
 
 '' Your affectionate Aunt, 
 
 " Eleanor Mandeville." 
 
 Now I put it to any of you, what was I to make of this 
 letter ? It was a thousand times more puzzling, to say nothing; 
 of its unkindness and severity, than that of Lady Meredith, and 
 yet you have seen how hers puzzled me. What did Auntie 
 mean ? What did they both mean by saying that she never- 
 heard from me ? Oddly enough that was just the complaint 
 that I had felt inclined to make against her, for I could only 
 remember two letters that had reached me from her, while I 
 had constantly written. However, there was no use denying- 
 the fact that stared at me out of both letters. Aunt Mande- 
 ville declared that she had not heard from me. As for Plunger's, 
 forgetting the name of the Maurocordatos, that was too like- 
 him to excite anything but mirth in my mind. A man who> 
 could not pronounce " Manteuffel," after months and months' 
 practice, was not likely to be successful with the harder Greek 
 name. But what did Count Manteuffel mean by saying that 
 the Greek family; with the daughter of which Aunt Mandeville- 
 plainly supposed that I had formed a disreputable connexion, 
 was not the Greek family to whom he had given me letters of 
 introduction 1 That again was a thing which, if those had been 
 the days of Dundreary, I should have said, " No fellow could 
 understand." 
 
 No ; I could make nothing out of Auntie's letter. The worst 
 was that it had to be answered ; that last part must be- 
 answered, and answered decidedly. Again, Aunt Mandeville- 
 had stepped between me arid my love ; her tyranny made me 
 free before, and it should make me free then. Much as I loved 
 her, I would not go back at her beck and call, as though I were: 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 439' 
 
 her pet dog ; and I would not give up Arethusa, and I would 
 not marry Mary Harbury. 
 
 Then, too, all ye young lovers, — young men, with hearts, and 
 young ladies who have exchanged your hearts for theirs, — stand 
 by me while I lay this insulting, tyrannical ukase before you, 
 and say whether, as a free man and true lover, I was bound to 
 obey it. Of course you are all on my side. 
 
 ' ' The God who sends sweet love to us, 
 He never loved a slave." 
 
 I was right, then, in rejecting, without hesitation, Aunt Man- 
 deville's ultimatum. Yes, I would write to her that very day, — 
 it was post-day, luckily, — the one day in the week that the post 
 left for France, — and refuse to come back before my time ; and 
 when I did come back, I would say no power on earth should, 
 ever make me marry Mary Harbury. 
 
 Dear me ! what a passion I was in when Scatterbrains came 
 to look me up in my bedroom, after waiting ever so long for me 
 in the sitting-room, with his enemy Sappho ! You must re- 
 member, all of you, that Auntie's letter added insult to injury, 
 when it suggested that my " criminal passion," as she called it, 
 had made me forget my " boyish fancy " for Arethusa. 
 " Boyish fancy, indeed ! she shall see whether it is a boyish 
 fancy," I said, out loud, as Scatterbrains entered the room. 
 
 " Well, old fellow ! read your letters % You needn't tell me 
 there is something unpleasant in them ; I can see it in your 
 face. What is it % Can I do anything' for you 1 " 
 
 So I made him sit down, while I stamped up and down the 
 room, and told him all. When I had ended* he said : 
 
 " Now, you see the truth of what I said, that you had got 
 into a mess, and that I did not like it at all. You go away, 
 leaving your Aunt half-angry, and then you put yourself into a 
 false position by going and living with a femily of foreigners all 
 this time on the mere strength of a letter of introduction from 
 a man who is a rival in love, and who is really half a stranger. 
 You often say there are things to do, and not to talk about, and 
 things to talk about, and not to do ; but this was a thing neither 
 to do nor to talk about, and which, if any one did, he was sure 
 to be talked about. Talked about you have clearly been ; first, 
 by stupid people, like Plunger and Twentyman — dolts, who 
 mean no harm, and really wish you well, but for all that can 
 ruin your character by their very stupidity. You ought to have 
 remembered, too, that there are knaves as well as fools in the 
 world. How do you know that some knave has not been talk- 
 ing about you, and garbling your doings, on purpose to do you 
 
440 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 harm ? That's what you've got by your imprudence. You see 
 the one fact remains, out of which a whole tower of fraud can 
 be, and probably has been, raised. You did throw yourself into 
 the arms of this Greek family. But it is no use crying over 
 spilled milk ; what is past is past. I want to know what you 
 mean to do now 1 " 
 
 " What do you advise ? " 
 
 " What you ought to do," said Scatterbrains, " is as plain as 
 day. You ought to write to your Aunt a dutiful letter, saying 
 that you are coming home at once: put your letter into the 
 post, and take your passage on board the steamer, which will 
 carry it to-night to France. When I got to Marseilles, I should 
 let the letter precede me by a day or two ; and when it had 
 produced the effect it is sure to have on your Aunt's feelings, I 
 would show myself at Mandeville Hall, and ask her forgiveness." 
 
 " What ! " I cried, " and marry Mary Harbury ? " 
 
 " Well, as you put it in that way, I think I would. It will 
 save you a deal of trouble. Mind, I don't say you ought, 
 but, in a worldly point of view, it's by far the best thing you 
 could do." 
 
 "Never! never!" I said; "I hate you, Scatterbrains, for 
 giving me such base advice ! " 
 
 " Well, if you won't, you won't," said Scatterbrains, dryly ; 
 " but even if you won't, you ought to go home, and have it out 
 with your Aunt, face to face. You ought never to have left 
 a jealous woman, as I know she is — so jealous that I'll be bound 
 to say she'll be furiously jealous of Mary Harbury before you 
 have been married six months. I say you ought never to have 
 left a jealous woman like that, and placed your character at the 
 mercy of backbiters. No ; the sooner you go back the better, 
 even if it is only to say ' No ' to Mary Harbury." 
 
 But, no ; I would not be persuaded. I felt too hurt ; I was 
 too proud to care what any one said of me. They might say 
 what they liked, as they had already accused me so unjustly. 
 I would write and say " No " to Mary Harbury. It was so 
 much pleasanter to say " No " by letter. I would not run 
 away like a thief in the night from the Maurocordatos, who had 
 been so kind to me — from Sappho, who had been as a sister to me. 
 I would tell them I was going in a week or ten days, and then I 
 would go to Marseilles in the French steamer, and be home at 
 Mandeville Hall, true to my time, before Christmas. 
 
 " Dear me ! " I recollect saying, " how we fret and vex our- 
 selves about trifles. Here am I making so much out of these 
 two silly letters when there's nothing in them. When I get 
 home I'll explain it all away in five minutes; and as for 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 441 
 
 Arethusa, who will bet that I shall not be sitting side by side 
 with her under the Passion Flower at Mandeville Hall on 
 Christmas Eve ? " 
 
 " You're a fool," said Scatterbrains, as he heard my determi- 
 nation, and saw me sitting down to write to Aunt Mandeville. 
 
 Yes ! but though the letters were silly, both of them intensely 
 silly in their suggestions of my wickedness, still there was that 
 tyrannical wish or command at the end of Auntie's letter that 
 had to be answered. 
 
 Now I don't call mine at all a good letter, but, such as it was, 
 here it is : 
 
 " Athens, November 25th, 183 — . 
 
 " Deak Aunt Mandeville, 
 " Your letter of the 12th has followed me hither from Corfu, 
 whence, as you know by my former letters, I was to start with 
 my friends some time ago. We have had a very happy time of 
 it, and I have seen many things and places, all about which I 
 hope to tell you when I return. 
 
 " I assure you I am quite at a loss to understand the cruel 
 insinuations against my character contained in your letter. I 
 have done nothing since I left England that I or you need be 
 ashamed of, and though I cannot return so hastily as you com- 
 mand, I shall be quite able to explain my conduct when I know 
 more precisely what it is that you complain of. I certainly can 
 accuse myself of no want of dutiful affection towards you, but I 
 should accuse myself both of baseness and bad faith towards 
 one who must ever be the object of my tenderest affections, if I 
 allowed you to suppose for one moment longer that I can ever 
 marry Miss Harbury. Absence from England has only con- 
 vinced me more and more that for me such an alliance is 
 impossible, and, therefore, though it gives me the greatest pain 
 to thwart your wishes, I positively refuse to marry the young 
 lady for whom you have intended me. 
 
 " I hope to be back in England, true to my promise, before 
 Christmas-day. 
 
 " Believe me, 
 " Your very affectionate nephew, 
 
 " Edward Halfacee." 
 
 Just as I had finished this letter Scatterbrains looked in 
 again. I thought he was coming to apologise for calling me a 
 fool. But I was wrong. Scatterbrains was one of those fellows 
 who never apologise ; perhaps because they never do anything 
 that needs an apology. At any rate he did not make one to 
 me. All he said was : 
 
442 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Done your letter 1 " 
 
 " Yes ! Just done." 
 
 " Then give it to me and I'll post it ; " and with that he 
 snatched it up and ran away with it to the post, posting and 
 paying for it with his own hands. When he came back he said : 
 
 " I daresay that's a very silly letter, but your Aunt will get it. 
 That won't be one of the letters she has not got." 
 
 Then he tried, in spite of the letter, to get me to go that 
 night, but I was too angry and harsh to yield. 
 
 " A wilful man must have his own way," he said ; " but now 
 I am here I don't mean to leave you." 
 
 True to his word he took up his abode in the same hotel, 
 much to Sappho's disgust. 
 
 " Just like you Englishmen ! Here's a man who has got a 
 lovely yacht, with berths far more comfortable than the beds in 
 any hotel in Athens, and yet he must leave her down there in 
 the Piraeus and come up to us in this vile hotel, to us who don't 
 want him." 
 
 I must say she did everything to disgust Scatterbrains and 
 scare him out of the hotel and Athens, but he was proof against 
 all her freaks, and held to me like a man. 
 
 " If you were coming at all," she said to him, " why did you 
 not come the same day that we came ? We are a fortnight 
 before you, and have already seen all the sights. Do you expect 
 us to go all over them again with you ? " 
 
 But Scatterbrains was quite a match for her. 
 
 " Yes ! " he said, " I do. What's a sight that you can't bear 
 to see twice ? Not a sight at all, I should say. Very like those 
 very pretty girls that one sees once and never wishes to see 
 again." 
 
 " Why is that ? " said Sappho snappishly. " Why should 
 one not like to see a pretty girl again ? " 
 
 " Because some very pretty girls make themselves so very 
 disagreeable that no one cares to see them again." 
 
 " Downright stories,'' said Sappho. " I don't believe there's 
 any man alive who does not care to see a pretty girl twice,' 
 however disagreeable she may make herself to him." 
 
 " Well ! whatever you may think, it's my feeling," said Scat- 
 terbrains. 
 
 And so the two went on, day after day, sight-seeing and 
 wrangling, till even I, who admired Sappho's readiness, began 
 to think such perpetual sparring a bore. 
 
 I could not help loving Scatterbrains ; he was so true and 
 loyal to me, and was for ever giving me such good advice. His 
 object was open and avowed. He said hethought I had sjayed 
 
ANNALS OiF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 443. 
 
 quite long enough with the Maurocordatos, and wished to sepa- 
 rate ns. I even believe he would have carried me off on board 
 his yacht and set sail with me if he dared. But I must say 
 Sappho gave him no chance. He asked the whole family to 
 come on board and see the yacht, but on such occasions Sappho 
 represented the whole family, and gave it a decided negative. 
 She hated yachts, she said, and English yachts most of all, 
 especially when she did not like the owners. 
 
 But one thing Scatterbrains did succeed in. As my pride 
 was satisfied in having written off that refusal to my Aunt, I 
 was now not so unwilling to go home, and so I was persuaded to 
 take my passage for Marseilles by the next steamer, which was 
 to start in a few days. 
 
 I don't think I ever saw any one half so happy as Scatterbrains 
 was when we drove down to the Piraeus to take that passage. 
 
 " Talk of Circe and Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens,'' he 
 said. " Let the ancients keep them, and let little boys be 
 flogged for not knowing their names and what they did to the 
 unhappy men of old time who fell into their clutches,— but of all 
 dangerous things commend me to a clever young lady who pre- 
 tends not to be in love with a man, and likes him because he 
 does not love her, and, in fact, ' is unto him as a sister.' " 
 
 " Why, Scatterbrains, you are getting Biblical — your style 
 bewrayeth you. Do you know I think you are very hard on 
 Sappho?" 
 
 " No, I am not ! Not half hard enough. She is a wicked 
 young woman, take my word for it." 
 
 " No !. I won't take it. She has been kindness itself to me, 
 and has done me a deal of good since I have been here.'' 
 
 " She has done you a deal of harm, I tell you ; a deal of 
 harm already, and will do you more harm yet." 
 
 "I see we shan't agree on this point," I said, "so we had 
 better talk of something else." 
 
 As the hour of parting was approaching, I daresay you'will 
 like to know how the Maurocordatos bore it. As for me, you 
 know that all I wanted was to get back to my Arethusa j mean- 
 time Sappho Maurocordato amused me, and was good to me. 
 
 But for the Maurocordatos ! Well ! the Signora remained the 
 Signora to the end. Perhaps she was a little less woe-begone, 
 and looked as if a weight were taken off her mind. But if she 
 did, it was very little ; about as much as when the tide rises in 
 a tideless sea, rising two or three inches, perhaps, and then all 
 the dwellers on the shore of that sea hold up their hands, and 
 talk of the high tide. Just so, I daresay, the Signora thought 
 she should quiet her feelings by being a little: less: gloomy at 
 
444 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 my departure ; but all I can. say is, if she thought it much, I 
 thought it very little. 
 
 As for the Signor, he looked on it as a matter of business. 
 Friends must part as ships must sail and currants ripen. In 
 his heart, when he heard the day of my departure was fixed, he 
 drew up for me a bill of lading, as he would have done for any 
 vessels consigned to him ; ending, no doubt, as all bills of lading 
 used to do in the pious old times before the flood of unbelief 
 came over us and swallowed us up, with " And so God send 
 that good fellow Edward Halfacre safe to port." 
 
 That was how the Signor took it. Life was all a matter of 
 business to him. Something to be done to the best of his 
 ability, and he did it. 
 
 But Sappho — for, as I have told you, she really was the 
 family, — how did she bear it ? Very well indeed, at first. She 
 said, indeed, when Scatterbrains, in a fit of exultation, which 
 was very unlike him, broke out at the table-d'Mte, after we had 
 taken the passage, with : 
 
 . " Well, Miss Sappho, it is all settled ; Mr. Halfacre has taken 
 his passage for Saturday next." 
 
 When Scatterbrains said this, she said she had heard before 
 of passage-money forfeited, and berths that were never filled by 
 those who took them ; but, after a little banter, her vexation 
 wore off, and she accepted what she could not help. I think 
 she was more and more sisterly and attentive to me that last 
 week than during all the time before, and I felt very grateful to 
 her. We went here and we went there, our guard being now 
 permanently increased by Scatterbrains, who played the part of 
 a male duenna. 
 
 " How close he keeps to us ! " said Sappho. " He speaks as 
 little as papa ; but then, unlike papa, he never falls asleep. Do 
 you think he ever falls asleep 1 " 
 
 Yes ! we went here and there, and she bought me little 
 presents, and I bought her little presents, and I was always 
 thanking the whole family through her for all their kindness, 
 and wondering if I should ever be able to repay it. 
 
 So it went on till the last day came ; the very last day. I 
 was to sail the next morning. I think we all felt dull, even 
 the Signora ; but Scatterbrains, — he was positively uproarious. 
 " What fun it would be on board the steamer ! How delightful 
 the Straits of Messina would be ! " He went on at such a rate 
 that in a little while he would have declared the Gulf of Lyons 
 to be the most delightful bit of smooth water in the world, — a 
 perfect mill-pond, — when you and I, reader, know it is about 
 the roughest gulf in the universe. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 445 
 
 Yes ! he was disgustingly uproarious ; as badly behaved as a 
 clown at a funeral, with his low joke's and jests. Sappho coidd 
 hardly sit out the dinner that day ; she had been writing hard 
 all that morning at some letters which she wished me to take 
 with me. 
 
 " What shall we do this last evening 1 " said the mild Signor. 
 
 "Anything but have your friend Themistocles again to 
 supper," I said. " I really do not feel equal to him to-night." 
 
 " Never fear," said the Signor, taking what I said seriously. 
 " Themistocles is miles away, busy bringing down a cargo of 
 wool for me from Thessaly. But what shallwe do ? '' 
 
 " Do ? " said Sappho. " What should we do but go up to the 
 Acropolis for the last time ? " 
 
 It was no use for Scatterbrains to hint that we had seen 
 enough of the Acropolis. " No doubt he had," Sappho said. 
 " Its beauty was wasted on him. You are for all the world like 
 those British sailors, — those most enlightened ruffians of the 
 sea, — a party of whom I saw up there the other day, when I 
 overheard one of them say to his shipmate : * I say, Bill, they 
 tell me these stones was set up nigh a hundred years ago, in 
 the time of King George I.' Yes ! you are just like them. Of 
 course, you don't care to go up and take a last look of the 
 Acropolis ; but Mr. Halfacre does, and I am going with him, 
 and papa is going with him." 
 
 " And I am going with him,'' said Scatterbrains, with as much 
 temper as he ever showed, which, it must be owned, was very 
 little. 
 
 " Come along, then, my Lord Duenna," said Sappho, with one 
 of her laughs, as she ran out of the room. Back she was in an 
 instant with her bonnet — these were hatless days, young ladies, 
 — and away we went. 
 
 I remember we walked, I and Sappho together, and then 
 behind us, — close behind, — Scatterbrains and the Signor. Up 
 we went by the way we had so often gone before, under the 
 Acropolis, keeping it on our left, and then when we got to the 
 front turning and scrambling up by the shattered steps on the 
 slope, up to the Propylsea. 
 
 As we passed under the marble beams of the entrance, Sappho 
 said, " For the last time ! for the very last time ! " with more 
 sentiment than I had ever heard her mingle with her words. 
 
 " Yes ! " I said ; " the more's the pity. But, you know, the 
 dearest friends must part." 
 
 "Are you quite sure?" said Sappho, turning sharp round, 
 and looking me full in the face. " Are you quite sure that we 
 are your best friends ? " 
 
446 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Why should you not be 1 " 
 
 " Ah ! why should we not be 1 That's one question ; but are 
 we 1 and that's another." 
 
 " I feel as if you were, Sappho," I said. Yes ! it was the first 
 time I had called her Sappho. 
 
 " And I feel as if I were not," said Sappho. " There ! " 
 
 She said nothing more, and would say nothing more just then. 
 She left me, and took Scatterbrains under her wing, and showed 
 him many things that he had never seen before. Then she came 
 back, and insisted on our going up in the dusk to see the last of 
 the sunset from the Pediment of the Parthenon. She was wilful, 
 and she had her way. Yes ! we must all go up, the Signor and 
 all, though h% begged to be allowed to stay below. 
 
 " No ! we will all go," she said, " or none of us shall go." So 
 we all went. Up the staircase we went, and across the beam- 
 bridge, and reached the back of the Pediment, where the Signor 
 had his nap a week or two before. " Now, papa, you stay here, 
 and we three will go on to the cornice. We can't see the sunset 
 well from here." Out on the cornice we three stood, Scatter- 
 brains, Sappho, and I, looking at the sunset, when Sappho, in a 
 mad fit, took off the hat of the unhappy Scatterbrains, and threw 
 it down to the ground. 
 
 " There ! " she said, " that beggar will run off with your nice 
 new hat if you don't run down and fetch it. I saw you liked it 
 by the way you brushed it. If that beggar once puts it on his 
 head you will never be able to wear it again. Why do you stay 1 
 Why don't you go ? Or — " and she said this in a savage voice, 
 intensely low, but wildly fierce — " or shall I push you over, and 
 send you down a shorter way, like your hat ? Go ! Why will 
 you not go 1 " 
 
 She was so earnest that even Scatterbrains yielded. Besides, 
 his common sense told him it was the only way to save his hat ; 
 for it was quite true that it had fallen close to where a filthy 
 beggar sat — one of those beggars only seen in Greece and the 
 East, the very recollection of whom makes the flesh creep at 
 this distance of time. Slowly and rather surlily he retreated, 
 leaving us alone on the cornice. 
 
 Don't take the trouble to come back," she cried out after 
 him ; "we shall soon be down." 
 
 Then, when he was gone, edging away more to the middle of 
 the cornice, further from the spot where her father was, she put 
 her mouth close to my ear, and whispered, " If I said I loved 
 you, would you believe me ? " 
 
 " No,, I would not. I have never thought you loved me ; — 
 you have never shown it. It has been the great charm of my 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 447 
 
 stay under your roof — that I felt I could stay with you and not 
 love you. Did you not say, only a few days ago, that you liked 
 me because I never made love to you 1 " 
 
 " Yes ! " said Sappho, bitterly. " You felt you could stay 
 under our roof and not love me. Did you think I could live 
 with you so long under one roof and not love you ? You ought 
 to know by this time that the more a man does not. love you, 
 the more a woman loves. And you say you do not love me 1 " 
 
 " How can I, Sappho ? I love some one else." 
 
 " I thought so. I knew it. I shall be revenged." That was 
 all she said, except, " I forgive you ; but I shall be revenged ! 
 Let us go baok." 
 
 So we went down and walked home in silence ; and as I went 
 I thought myself the most unfortunate of men, who was not 
 allowed to love one woman as his mistress, as I loved Arethusa, 
 and another as his sister, as I loved — or liked, if you like it 
 better — Sappho Maurocordato. 
 
 "When Scatterbrains met us, down below, Sappho seemed to 
 have completely recovered her composure. 
 
 "Was it not a good joke to throw your hat over, Lord 
 Duenna 1 " she said. " You can't fancy what secrets Mr. Half- 
 acre and I talked aho.ut while you were rescuing your hat from 
 the beggar 1 Did he put it on 1 If so, pray don't come near 
 me for a week. Dear me ! I suppose you will never come to 
 see us as soon as Mr. Halfacre is gone, and your occupation of 
 nursing him and keeping him out of bad company, by your 
 example and advice, has ceased. Do come to see us ; we shall 
 be so dull." 
 
 " Sorry I can't,'' said Scatterbrains, still thinking of his hat 
 and of me. "Sorry I can't; but the Mermaid sails for the 
 Straits of Messina to-morrow afternoon. It will be a race be- 
 tween her and the steamer, which gets away first. But if I can 
 do anything for you in Italy I shall be so happy." 
 
 "No, thank you, nothing," saidSappho, doggedly. "I only wish 
 you had not come here to scare our friends away by your advice.'' 
 
 " Yes ! " I said, when I went to bed that night, " I am the most 
 unfortunate of men. Here I am, desired to marry Mary Har- 
 bury on one hand, and on the other, a young lady — to whom, 
 by her own confession, I never made a sign of love — falls in love 
 with me, and says that she will forgive me, but she will be re- 
 venged. A very strange sort of forgiveness that, which r pants for 
 revenge. But howsanshe revenge herself? 'Can she rob me 
 of my Arethusa 1 What nonsense ! Good night, Arethusa ! 
 Good night, darling ! " And in .five minutes I was lost in dreams 
 of my own true love. 
 
448 ., ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 
 
 CHAPTEK LIV. 
 
 HOW I WENT BACK TO ENGLAND. 
 
 Next morning I was up at daybreak. It is no very heroic 
 thing to do, even at the end of November, and at Athens. 
 How clear, and bright, and pure that daybreak was, and how 
 really glad I was to be going back ! My pride was satisfied. 
 I had written my mind to Aunt Mandeville, and I felt like a 
 free man. But I loved her very much, only not so much as 
 Arethusa, or as much only in a different way : that's the best 
 way to put it. Of course I was sorry to take leave of my kind 
 Greek friends ; but what Sappho had said the night before was 
 a proof how dangerous a thing it is to play with gunpowder, — 
 I beg pardon, with young ladies who may be falling over head 
 and ears in love with you while you are only " liking " them. 
 I suppose it is the way of the world ; or, at any rate, of that 
 portion of it formed out of young ladies ; but it is very incon- 
 venient, that is all I say as I look back at my life. 
 
 We all met at breakfast much as usual. I thought-Sappho's 
 eyes were red ; but she made no sign of grief. She was merry 
 and bitter by turns : and when Scatterbrains came in she did 
 not spare him. 
 
 All my things were packed up and ready ; under the convoy 
 of the steward of the Mermaid they had already been sent 
 down to the Piraeus, and put on board the steamer. Her name 
 was the Piluse, and she had come last from Constantinople. 
 She was to start at one p.m., and it was now nearly eleven, so 
 that I had little time left. I saw that Sappho wanted to be left 
 alone with me ; but we had already had, I thought, explanations 
 enough. "Was I not forgiven for something that I had never 
 done, and was she not to be revenged for some wrong that I, at 
 least, had no hand in? Perhaps you will say, you stern 
 moralist, — if any stern moralist has followed me so far — that I 
 had passively done that charming young lady wrong, by staying 
 with her, and throwing temptation in my sister's way ; but 
 then, you know, I have always told you that I was a most 
 modest man, with a very mean opinion of myself. What I 
 have repeatedly said in life is—" ' Temptation,' ' Fascination,' — 
 what nonsense ! Who can find any such thing in me 1" And 
 yet, after all, I may be wrong ; for who can account for likes 
 and dislikes? — who can say in what nameless somethings or 
 nothings attraction or fascination, or temptation, — call it what 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 44:9 
 
 you will, — consists ? And the toad, that ugly creature, and 
 the basilisk, that monster of romance — have they not, hideous 
 though they be in outward show, great powers of fascination 1 
 And " May's brown bird," the nightingale, whose garb is as 
 though she were the maid-of-all-work to all the feathered 
 tribes, — has she no power of fascination under her plain 
 •attire 1 
 
 I suppose, then, that I must give up the passive temptation, 
 and confess myself wrong so far ; but then you must recollect 
 how young I was. I can assure you — as though that would do 
 any good now — that I would never think of exposing any 
 young lady to such passive temptation again. 
 
 But to come back. I saw Sappho wished to be left alone 
 with me, — and I did not wish it. I whispered to Scatterbrains 
 not to leave me ; and, I must say, he clung to me like a 
 Siamese link. I only use that simile, because that link seems 
 to be positively the last invention of this inventive age ; and to 
 show you that I am not any old fogy living away in Cornwall, 
 and a whole year behind my time. Yes ! he stuck to me like a 
 Siamese link, when Sappho proposed to go out to shop, and 
 -get some drawings of Athens, — horrid lithographs done by a 
 miserable Bavarian artist, who, not being able to make a living 
 .at Munich, followed the fortunes of King Otho to Athens, only 
 to starve. Now-a-days, please to observe, we should have gone 
 .and got some of those matchless photographs of Constantinos, 
 which are the delight of all visitors to Athens. 
 
 Well ! when Sappho proposed to go and get the lithographs, 
 Scatterbrains said : 
 
 " Stop a bit ; you need not take all that trouble." 
 
 Off he went, like a carrier-pigeon, and in two minutes came 
 faack with his hands full of them. He had got them already, 
 .and they were quite at the Signorina's service, if she would do 
 him the honour to accept them. You can't think how cross 
 Sappho was. All she wanted was to go out for a walk with me. 
 She did not care one bit for the lithographs ; but she had to 
 look at them, and that took up time. It would have done any- 
 one good, it was as good as a farce, to see the serious way in 
 which Scatterbrains handed her each wretched print one after 
 another, dilating on the beauties of each, as though Phidias 
 .himself had engraved it on the stone. But it was all to kill 
 time. Qn that day, at least, he showed that he was as good at 
 killing time as woodcocks. He did not murder it as some 
 people do ; he only killed it ; so civilly and gently, — just as 
 wives are sent out of the world so softly by their husbands ; not 
 by blows, and kicks, and cuffs ; but by infinitesimal doses. In 
 
450 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 justice to both sexes, let me add, and as husbands are some- 
 times despatched by their wives. No ! I am not going to side 
 with either sex. I am above such meanness. I am just, and 
 describe life as I have found it. Six to one, and half-a-dozen 
 on the other, is about the betting in the matrimonial race. 
 There are no odds ; it is all even. 
 
 So there Scatterbrains sat, killing time so politely, you could 
 scarce see how fast its tide of life was ebbing. At last it was 
 half-past eleven. Then Scatterbrains looked at his watch, and 
 said we ought to be going. He never liked to run anything 
 too close. Besides, I had not chosen my berth. He, too, had 
 to get on board the Mermaid. We both ought to go. 
 
 " Papa, dear," said Sappho, " can't we go down to the Piraeus 
 with them, and see them off?" 
 
 " Certainly, my love," said the Signor. I believe he would 
 have said " Certainly," had Sappho said to him, in her sweet 
 Toice, " Papa, dear, you must have your head chopped off!" 
 
 That was a move which Scatterbrains had not foreseen. He 
 thought, and I thought, that all the leave-taking — all "the 
 sighs, and sobs, and shrieks," as he unfeelingly called it — would 
 have taken place at the hotel. He made a protest, but an 
 ineffectual one. 
 
 " I think ladies will be very much in the way on the wharf 
 at the Piraeus. The port is always thronged with ' those brutal 
 British sailors,' as Miss Sappho calls them so truly. Nor are 
 the French, or Russian, or, for that matter, the Greek navies, 
 much behind us in bad behaviour. Don't you think you had 
 better stay here, and have your parting here, under this 
 roof?" 
 
 " No, I do not think so," said Sappho. " I am not afraid of 
 being insulted by any one out of this house." And, as she said 
 this, her blue eyes glared at Scatterbrains as fiercely as dear 
 Aimt Mandeville's brown eyes had once or twice glared on me. 
 They both had that intense, bright flash in them which can 
 only be likened to a flash of lightning, blasting and withering 
 you up with its intensity. So Sappho glared on Scatterbrains ; 
 and if he had not been of a very cold nature, he must have been 
 set on fire, and burned to a cinder. 
 
 Against such arguments language was of no avail. The 
 patient Signor got his hat, and Sappho was soon ready. I took 
 leave of the Signora, whose face seemed to brighten as I made 
 her a speech, which, if there had been a penny-a-liner present, 
 would have been described as "neat, and full of pathos." 
 Scatterbrains bowed profoundly. The bill had been long since 
 paid ; the carriage was at the door. Down we went, amid the 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 451 
 
 good wishes of the landlord and waiters, and we were off. How 
 relieved Scatterbrains was at that departure ! and how very 
 much more pleased he would, have been, had we 1 two been alone 
 in the carriage ! 
 
 I do not believe one single word was spoken all the way 
 down the Long Wall. Sappho and Scatterbrains were each 
 waiting to have the last word. Like duellists, each wished to 
 have the final shot, and both were chary of throwing away their 
 first barrel. 
 
 Well, we arrived at the Pirseus. Of course there was plenty 
 of time — there always is, on going on board ship. Did you 
 ever hear of a man who just missed a ship ? But how many 
 times have you heard of people missing a train? Going on 
 board ship means wasting half a day at least. For my part, I 
 wonder how it is that ships ever get to sea at all. So much has 
 to be done to the ship, which seems to .take a pride in 
 getting the passengers on board, and then making them wait. 
 The tide, I believe, in tidal rivers, is the only reason why 
 vessels ever go to sea in time ; but in the Pirseus there is 
 no tide. 
 
 We were certain to have to wait then, but for all that we 
 were bound to be on board before one o'clock struck. The 
 Piluse, you know, was a French boat ; and, on board the French 
 boats everything is done after the laws of the Medes and 
 Persians, and not after the Code Napoleon. I believe if a pas- 
 senger arrived alongside five minutes after one, and the vessel 
 did not start till five p.m., the unhappy wretch would not ba 
 allowed to embark. 
 
 Well, there we were, on the wharf. There was the Signoiv 
 mild and amiable ; there was Sappho, lovely and dangerous, 
 her cheeks all aglow, and her eyes flashing blue fire at Scatter- 
 brains. There was Scatterbrains, for him, in a great state of 
 excitement, rubbing his hands. " So glad, old fellow, to think 
 you are really going. Mind and write." 
 
 There was the steamer, with her steam up, puffing, and 
 snorting, and screeching, and whistling, as though she were 
 going to start that very minute. At her side were lighters, 
 feeding her bunkers with the coals that were to make her 
 snort and puff all the weary way to Marseilles, that were to 
 furnish her passion for travel with fuel. Barges there were, 
 too, laden with heaven knows what ! — some kind of cargo ; but 
 what cargo the Peluse got from Attica, no man can tell. But 
 there they were. Perhaps it was the wool which Themistocles 
 Kakourgos had brought, all the way from Thessaly, for the 
 Signor ; who could tell 1 There, too, dancing on the blue water 
 
 gg 2 
 
452 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 at our very feet, down a few broken stairs, lay the Mermaid's 
 gig. In her was Scatterbrain's coxswain, and her eight A.B.'s, 
 in blue jackets, and drill trousers, and straw hats, with a black 
 ribbon, on which was painted Mermaid. There she lay, and in 
 her Scatterbrains had resolved to put me off to the steamer. 
 He would not have left me alone with Sappho for anything. 
 What a good friend he was ! yet how little did he know of the 
 workings of my heart ! How little does any man know of the 
 workings of another man's heart ! Happy are we if we know 
 the workings of our own, — the real, very reason why we do this 
 or that. Yes ; the Greek sage was right, who said that " Self- 
 knowledge came down straight from heaven." I sometimes 
 think she has been so badly treated by those who do know her, 
 that she has gone back again to the skies, along with modesty, 
 virtue, and several of the ten commandments. 
 
 We stood a few minutes — five at most — looking at the busy 
 port, so small and so bustling, crammed with huge men-of-war, 
 the real old match-box, the sailing three-decker, that most 
 beautiful of all vessels ; while ever and anon the gigs 
 and barges shot across from ship to ship, or made for one 
 or other of the landing-places. Overhead was the blue 
 sky and the burning sun, scorching even in the last 
 November days. 
 
 Then Scatterbrains said, " Time's up ! We must go. Good- 
 bye, Signor, and thanks for your kindness. Good-bye, Miss 
 Sappho ; you will not forget me ? " 
 
 " No, I will not,'' said Sappho ; " you may be sure I shall 
 never forget you, nor him too ;" and she pointed at me. 
 
 Now it was my time. " A thousand thanks, Signor," I said ; 
 " if you ever come to England, I hope to repay you a small part 
 of your kindness." 
 
 The Signor was going to say something appropriate to the 
 occasion, but now again he was not allowed to do more than 
 begin, and he began with his favourite word " Certainly." 
 
 " You had better not thank us till you know what you have 
 to thank us for, — that is to say, mamma and me. Papa knows 
 nothing about it." Then she went on : " Perhaps you would 
 like to know what ' it ' is. It is a little word, but it means a 
 great deal. There, Mr. Halfacre, I hate scenes just as much 
 as your friend here. But I did wish to give you this packet 
 alone, by yourself. It is not my fault that I have to give it 
 to you here on this wharf in the full glare of day.'' Then to 
 Scatterbrains : " Don't be afraid ; there is nothing explosive 
 in the packet. It won't blow up and kill him as soon as he 
 opens it. There is nothing in it but letters. Take it, Mr. Half- 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 453 
 
 acre, and if you will do what I wish, you will not open the 
 packet till you have passed the Straits of Messina. There, 
 good-bye. I shall never see you again. Come, papa ; even my 
 looks will not stand this sun. It makes me feel faint. Good- 
 bye ; " and with these words she turned, and was gone before I 
 could say a word. 
 
 " Shall I run after them, and ask her what she means ? " I 
 asked of Scatterbrains. 
 
 " Certainly not. You know already what she means. That 
 girl means mischief against some one. Perhaps not against 
 you, but because of you. As for me, she would kill me with 
 her own hands if she could. She is a modern Medea, and I am 
 glad she is gone. There's the steamer's bell ! " 
 
 With these words he hurried me down the stairs. In a mo- 
 ment I was in the stern-sheets of the Mermaid's gig, and in less 
 than no time — which means in no more time than sufficed to 
 open my bag, and throw Sappho's packet into it — I was along- 
 side the Pttuse. 
 
 " Good-bye, old fellow," I said to Scatterbrains ; " how good 
 you have been to me ! " 
 
 " Well," he said, " I really do think I have done you some 
 service. I only hope it may not be too late. You know I 
 think worse of your affairs — your love affairs I mean — than you 
 do. Lovers are blind, they say, and so are you. If it were not 
 your own case, you'd look at it just as I do. I say again it's a 
 bad business. Mind how you get up the gangway. Good-bye. 
 God bless you ! " 
 
 He sat down in the gig, the men gave way, and I was left 
 alone on the quarter-deck of the Peluse. 
 
 " I cannot understand why he should call it such a bad busi- 
 ness. But what an odd girl Sappho is ! She was as open and 
 playful as a child at first, and now she is a very Sphynx, with 
 her forgiveness and her revenge. How she hates Scatterbrains ! 
 Well ! here is her packet safe in my bag, — letters she wishes 
 me to post, I suppose. Why did she say not to open it till I 
 was through the Straits of Messina ? Ah, I see ; she thinks, if 
 I open it before I have passed the only place at which the 
 Pttuse stops between this and Marseilles, that I shall throw the 
 letters into the post-office at Messina, and that her friends will 
 have to pay the postage ! How like a woman ! However, I 
 will respect her wishes. Lie there, packet-full of a young 
 lady's revelations to some other young lady in France ! — no 
 doubt her bosom friend ; lie there, safe and untouched, till the 
 time comes when I may open you with a safe conscience. But 
 what a deal of trouble to take about such a small matter ! As 
 
454 ANNALS OF AN "EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 if I would not willingly have paid the postage on them' for heri 
 over and over again ! " 
 
 After these reflections, and with a light heart — for was I not 
 going home to Mandeville Hall ? and was I not still true to my 
 Arethusa, who was dearer to me each day? — I sought the 
 steward, chose my berth, made myself as comfortable as I could, 
 and then went on deck to see what was going on around us. 
 They were busy getting the steamer's head round with warps, 
 but she was still fast to the shore by hawsers. Don't suppose 
 there was then any quay in the Pirseus, at which ships could 
 lie and passengers walk on board. I am not so sure that there 
 is anything of the kind there now, much less was there all those 
 long years ago. The steam-whistle was screaming more and 
 more shrilly. One or two ships' boats, with letters for the bag, 
 were allowed to come on board, and I remember that one dark 
 ing little " middy," who brought a boat from the old St. Vincent, 
 was most brutally treated by the French captain. The poor 
 little fellow, just out of the nursery, could not speak a word of 
 French, — like you, Mrs. Faultfinder, who are holding up your 
 hands that a boy of that age should not be able to speak 
 French, when you yourself can't speak one single word of it. Did 
 I not hear you when you were at Boulogne, only last summer, 
 in a butcher's shop, say to the butcher : " CJioppez moi cet beef." 
 Well, like you, this poor little middy, perhaps, knew it when he 
 saw it written, but he could not speak it. He had been sent 
 on board to ask if the Pttuse had brought a bag for the St. 
 Vincent from Constantinople. The Admiral expected despatches. 
 Had the French captain got them 1 I stood by when the little 
 fellow delivered his message like an officer and a gentleman, 
 and I heard what the French captain said, and what do you 
 think.it was, leaving out the swearing? It was very simple : 
 " Je nfi parte pas V 'Anglais, et je n'en veux pas." That was all 
 the auswer the little middy got, and he would actually have 
 gone away without the bag, and, of course, been " mast-headed" 
 by the Admiral, just as " middies " always are in naval novels, 
 had I i riot made interest with the steward and got him the bag. 
 
 As for the captain's neither speaking nor wishing to speak 
 English, why, I heard, him talking English every day on board, 
 in very bad but very fluent language. Nothing can describe 
 the, confusion that prevailed on board the Peluse. If the cap- 
 tain had :said the despatches had . been lost, I could quite have 
 believed him, for what with coals, freight, and passengers, the 
 decks, were so lumbered and hampered that there was not a 
 square yard clear. 
 
 Not very far from us was the Mermaid. She got up her 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 455 
 
 anchor in true man-of-war fashion. There was no lubberly 
 slipping her moorings, which was all the Bttuse did. No ! there, 
 were the A.B.'s hard at work heaving up the anchors with the 
 ■capstan, I am sure I ,don't know the depth of water in the 
 Pirseus ; but it seemed^ and no doubt it was, very hard work in 
 that sun. Soon after I saw they had, what is nautically termed, 
 " got '' their anchor, and, in a few more minutes the Mermaid 
 ■was being towed out the narrow mouth of the harbour by two of 
 her boats. At that time the wind was light, and we were sure 
 to overtake her. Even at that distance, I still thought I saw 
 the glow of triumph on the hearty, honest face of Scatterbrains, '. 
 so glad was he to have got me safe on board the Peluse. 
 
 Yes ! there he went, getting up sail after sail, and even 
 setting a balloon-jib to catch all the wind he could. We, too, 
 got out very soon after him, and, of course, , overtook him in a 
 little while. We passed quite close to him, and as he saw me 
 leaning over the side, he laughed loud, and called out : 
 
 "All right, Halfacre ! i I'll race the PUuse to Messina, if we 
 «an only get a wind." 
 
 But there was no wind, and we soon left him hull-down. 
 
 I am not going to bore you with any more descriptions of 
 scenery. You have been very good to me, reader, and proved 
 yourself "gentle" in every respect. Infacfy I am going to bore 
 you veiy little longer with the annals of my eventful life.! You 
 will soon get to the end now. Of course I could tell you how 
 we had the coast of Attica on our left, and Argolis.on the right 
 hand ; how we saw Sunium, the famous Attic headland, whence, 
 as he doubled it, the old Greek saw the statue of Minerva stand- 
 ing on the pediment of the Parthenon ; just iu the very middle, 
 where Sappho had made that strange declaration to , me on the 
 night before. And so I could tell you stories about Argos and 
 the Treasure House of Atreus, and the site of Sparta, and, Tay- 
 getus, and Olympia. In fact, I could tell you a great .deal 
 about many places famous in song and story in the Morea ; for 
 I have seen them all since. But I had not seen them then. 
 They do not come into this story. They belong to another 
 •eventful period of my life. There they are, but I cannot use 
 them. How could I do so, without wrecking the. PMwe [under 
 Cape Matapan ; when all the world knows that she was not 
 -wrecked, but had a safe passage to Marseilles. 
 
 I do not mean even to tell you anything about the passage. 
 Have you never been anywhere, or on some journey, when every 
 incident that befell you, and every soul you met were as dull as 
 ■ditch-water 1 I admit that I have been very lucky in my 
 .travels, and have met as little " ditch-water " as most people ; 
 
456 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 but of this voyage to Marseilles, I must say that a more unin- 
 teresting set of people I never met, and never hope to meet 
 again. They ate, and drank, and talked, and slept like other 
 people, and that was all. In the night the wind got up a little, 
 and by morning it blew strong. It was a fine sight to see Cape- 
 Matapan and the Island of Cerigo, the Greekmost, if I may coin 
 the word, of the Ionian Republic. Dear it was to me, a lover 
 • of the worship of Venus, which prevailed there in ancient days. 
 When I went to it in after-years, I was glad to find that neither 
 beauty, nor the love of beauty, had quite died out. Two lovers- 
 had just had a furious fight for the prettiest girl on the island, 
 and one had stabbed the other. Of course, the lover favoured 
 neither by the beauty, nor by the goddess of beauty, — the uglier 
 of the twain, I mean — was the successful stabber. But it- 
 availed him nothing. His rival got well, and married the beauty,, 
 while he, the stabber, was working in chains, and trying with, 
 other criminals to make a road over the rocky island. 
 
 On and on we went merrily, and now we saw Etna, like a 
 great snow giant, looming away — I am afraid to say how many 
 nautical miles off. I say nautical miles, because I have a very 
 hazy notion of how long a nautical mile is, and I want to make 
 Etna as far off from us as I can. I remember we saw him in the- 
 afternoon of the day after we left Athens; just at first like a faint 
 cloud, and he went on getting bigger and bigger as long as we- 
 could see that night, and when we got up in the morning, when- 
 we were fast closing in with the Straits of Messina, then the old 
 giant was still looking after us and down on us, though we had 
 passed the point whence we might have had our best view of 
 him in the dead of night. 
 
 Yes ! there was Messina, that laughing, joyous-looking town, 
 with its mole, and its harbour, and its quay, and its cathedral, 
 nestled under the hill side ; a nymph of Sicily looking at her 
 own lovely face in the mirror of the sea. 
 
 There it was in the real good old dull despotic time, when 
 King Bomba was in full force, and the priests felt too sure that 
 they would never be overthrown to be frightened, and so did not 
 oppress the people very much. All priests and tyrants are bad 
 enough in their natural state ; but let them once get unnatural 
 — let them only be frightened — and you will see what they 
 will do. 
 
 Some ten or fifteen years afterwards Messina saw what they 
 could do when they were frightened. When Bomba's generals- 
 bombarded the quay and the mole and ravaged the fair city 
 with fire, and sword, and lead, the worst of the three. But 
 when we were there, in 183 — , politics were still as death. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 457 
 
 Stagnation was the motto of the town, which seemed to think 
 of nothing but going to church in the morning arid evening, and 
 selling coral all day. •» 
 
 We landed — I and some of the dull freight. They were 
 English, coming from somewhere and going, I hope, to some 
 place where I shall never see them again. They spoke neither 
 French nor Italian. They were mean and extortionate ; ever 
 desirous of cheating the coralmongers, and ready to run away 
 without paying them at all. 
 
 "Look here," I remember one of them said, "this is the 
 thing to buy." And if he did not pull out a bottle of rum, 
 which he drank openly in the streets, and even in the 
 cathedral. 
 
 I must say I was quite disgusted with them, and ran away 
 and left them to themselves. " I say, you sir," one of them 
 cried after me, " come back and help us with your lingo." But 
 I would not come back, and fled. Eight sorry was I to see 
 them come back in the afternoon ; but not surprised to see that 
 the rum had taken such hold of two of them that they had to 
 be handed up the side like children. 
 
 Yes ! in the afternoon, so long did the Peluse lie off that 
 lovely city. Since then it has been wasted by sieges and 
 bombardments, and decimated by cholera ; but wherever I go I 
 think of the smiling city, and of the coralmongers, and — I am 
 sorry to add — the two drunken Englishmen, who, I believe, 
 thought I was a courier out of place, because I was an English- 
 man, and could speak Italian. 
 
 Just as we were getting under way I had a disappointment : 
 a sail came rapidly up the Straits. Long before she dropped her 
 anchor I knew the trim three-masted schooner. It was the 
 Mermaid, which had lost the race, indeed, but had just come in 
 in time to see the last of us at Messina. 
 
 I suppose you think all this time I was dying to open the 
 packet which Sappho had given me. Nothing of the kind ; I 
 was quite content to wait till we had passed the Straits of 
 Messina, — nay, to wait much longer. There was something in 
 it, no doubt, for me, or why should I open it 1 But I really had 
 no curiosity about it, and preferred to look over the side as we 
 passed through the fabled whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis, 
 which, I daresay, are sometimes strong tideways, dangerous to 
 the boats of the ancients ; but which, when the PUuse passed 
 them, were as smooth as the Siren's glass itself, and showed no 
 terrors. 
 
 " Yes ! " I thought, " like all evils, worse in imagination than 
 in reality. How providential it is that all pleasure is more 
 
458 ANNALS OF AN EYENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 pleasant when it comes, and all evil less evil ! " Perhaps you 
 will say, some of you, that the case is the same in both — that 
 all pleasure is more pleasant in anticipation, and all evil less 
 evil. I know it is the common belief, but ' it is not mine. It 
 was not mine on that December evening as we passed through 
 Scylla and Charybdis. 
 
 "Yes!" I said, "this is an emblem of my, life. I am now at 
 the turning-point of my destiny. I have refused to marry Mary 
 Harbury, I resisted the charm of Sappho Maurocordato. These 
 are my Scylla and Charybdis. I have passed through them 
 safely, and now I shall be happy, and marry my own Arethusa.'' 
 As I said this my whole heart and being were lighted up with a 
 glow of peace and good-will towards every one, and I felt as 
 though all the trials which I had undergone — and to me they were 
 trials indeed — had steeled and strengthened me, and made me 
 a better man. But I had quarrelled, or nearly so, with Aunt 
 Mandeville, who had been so good to me. Do you suppose 
 I had forgotten that free gift of the twenty thousand pounds so 
 nicely and generously done 1 No, I had not ; but I always said 
 to myself, "No, Auntie can never be so unjust. She will give 
 up her idea of rounding off the estate in a ring-fence, and, with 
 that idea, Mary Harbury's chance will fall to the ground. I 
 will live with her, and be good and. kind to her, and she will let 
 me marry Arethusa. Not this year, or next, perhaps, but some 
 time. Yes ; that is what it will be. I have faith in heaven, in 
 Auntie, in Arethusa, and in myself. All will go well with a 
 little patience." 
 
 If any man ever went to bed in peace and charity with 
 all men, it was I, Edward Halfacre, that night after passing 
 the Straits of Messina. Yes; I felt at last as if I were 
 entering upon new prospects of pleasure and fresh regions 
 of delight. 
 
 Next morning I was up early, still pleased with everything. 
 Why, I could now almost count the hours that were to pass 
 before I saw Arethusa. 
 
 It was a lovely day, the sea as smooth as a mirror, and the 
 Peluse went through the water famously for her. 
 
 " Now," I said to myself, " I will open her packet, and try to 
 solve her mystery." I sat down under the shade of a boat — 
 for the sun was still almost hot enough for an awning — and 
 broke the seal. The packet was like a Chinese puzzle, for it 
 had another packet inside it. There was, besides, a long letter in 
 Sappho's handwriting, which I read before opening the other 
 packet. As you know everything about me, you may as well 
 know this. Here is the letter : 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 459 
 
 Athens, November 29th, 183 — , 
 " Dear Mr. Halfacre, 
 
 "Dear Edward, I would much rather say, but you will not 
 let me, still less will you let me thus address you after you have 
 read the confession I am about to make. It is not a confession 
 of love ; I have already made that, and you know with what 
 result. It is a much worse confession which I have now to 
 make. You fancy that mamma and I were very kind to 
 you while you were with us, but, for the greater part of the 
 time, we were doing you all the harm we could. Mamma is 
 quite under the influence of my uncle the Count, whom you 
 know in England. When you were coming to Corfu — in fact, 
 long before you arrived — the Count had written to us to take 
 care of you. You little know what care he meant; you little 
 think also that we came all that way to Brindisi on purpose to 
 meet you, and to see that you fell into no other hands. You 
 were as much our prisoner — in fact, all the while you were in 
 Corfu — as any wretch in a dungeon ever was. You did not feel 
 your chains perhaps. I might take pride in that, for I was your 
 gaoler. But why were we to keep you in prison — why were we 
 to watch you, and ' take care of you,' as my uncle said ? That 
 you must ask him, if it be not . too late, when you reach 
 England. All that I can say is, that we promised — mamma 
 and I, that is to say ; papa had nothing to do with it — to take 
 care that you should write no letters to, and receive no letters 
 from, any one in England, that we could prevent your writing 
 or receiving, and we kept our word. The other packet will tell 
 you what became of your letters. This is a sad confession to 
 make — saddest of all for a girl to make to a man she loves. 
 Why did I Jove you? Ask the wind why it blows? I never 
 meant to love you. I meant to repay on you some of the 
 insults which our race has received from yours. That was why 
 my uncle found us such willing tools. Mamma hates the 
 English, and I hate them, but I love you now. I knew all about 
 your fondness for your Arethusa. I only pretended that I 
 knew npthing about the nymph, her namesake, because I could 
 not bear to think that you should love her and talk about her 
 to me. I have forgiven you for loving her. Can you forgive 
 me for loving you? Next to your Arethusa, whom I hate 
 worse than all the English, I hate Lord Scatterbrains. I 
 trembled to think that he might have spoiled all our plans when 
 he came so suddenly to Corfu. Had he stayed there he.would 
 have spoiled them ; but, like a thorough idle Englishman, he 
 sailed away to shoot woodcocks, and left his friend, you, a prey 
 to our designs. He could do nothing when he came to Athens 
 
460 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 to save you. It was too late ; but I hate him still. There, I 
 have told you all I choose to tell. I am not sorry that my 
 office of gaoler is over ; and yet it is not often that the gaoler 
 ends by being in love with the captive. Good-bye, and forgive 
 me for all the injury I have done you. You will not know how 
 great it is till you get to England. 
 
 "Sappho." 
 
 There, now I ask you all, did you ever read snch a letter % 
 Fancy what I felt when I read it — I who was just then so full 
 of peace and good-will to every human being. 
 
 Still I did not see the very great harm they had done me. 
 She had only alluded to some dark designs of the Count. If he 
 had any on my Arethusa, I defied him there and then to do me 
 any harm with her. I trusted her as thoroughly then and there 
 on the deck of the PUuse, after a separation of more than two 
 months, as I had done under the Passion-flower at Mandeville 
 Hall. " I had better open this other packet. Perhaps I shall 
 understand it all better then." 
 
 Almost mechanically, then, I opened the packet. It contained 
 every letter that I had written to England since I had been in 
 Corfu, except three. The first was the one I had written to 
 Aunt Mandeville after my arrival, and the second that which I 
 wrote to her to say that I was going off to Athens with a Greek 
 family ; the third was that I had written to Colonel Chichester, 
 telling him the same thing. All the rest were there. They 
 were the only three that I had posted with my own hands. All 
 the rest I had given either to Sappho or the major-domo at 
 Gastouri to post, and there they were, unopened and unposted. 
 The packet also contained a number of letters from Aunt Man- 
 deville, which I had not the heart to read then, but which must 
 have been those which she said she had written to me, and to which 
 I had returned no answer. Those, too, had been intercepted. 
 You remember I told you that, so far from feeling guilty of not 
 having written or of having neglected her, it was I that thought 
 I had a right to complain, for that on the whole she had written 
 me veiy few letters. 
 
 Never was man so puzzled. Never was man so grieved. It 
 was plain that I had been the victim of Count Manteuffel's de- 
 ceit ; that he had kept my letters from me for some object of 
 his own. But how could he harm me 1 Certainly not with Aunt 
 Mandeville, as soon as I got back and exposed him withthese 
 letters in my hand. And still more certainly not with Are- 
 thusa, who loves me as I love her. 
 
 Now I saw why Sappho had begged me not to open the> 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 461 
 
 packet till I was beyond the Straits of Messina. She was afraid, 
 if I did it before that, I might post a letter there, and that it 
 might get to England sooner. That was all ! 
 
 But now another thing struck me. The only letter that 
 Aunt Mandeville would have had from me for more than a 
 month, would be just that very defiant and undutiful one which 
 I had written, and which Scatterbrains had posted with his own 
 hands. If it had stood as one of a series, the exception to 
 several loving letters, it would have been different, but there it 
 stood alone, hard and harsh. How much I wished that I had 
 never written it ! Why did I not take Scatterbrains' advice, who 
 always saw so much better what was good for me than I could 
 see for myself 1 
 
 My only consolation was that I could fly across France and be 
 in England as quickly as the post ; but there still remained the 
 fact that my undutiful letter to Auntie had left Athens ten 
 days before I did, and that it would reach her at least a fort- 
 night before I could get to Mandeville Hall. 
 
 CHAPTEE LV. 
 
 HOW I WENT BACK TO MANDEVILLE HALL. 
 
 Oh ! how I longed for the hour of my arrival at Marseilles ! 
 In vain the steward assured me we should not be long. We 
 were just going through the Straits of Bonifacio, and we should 
 be at Marseilles in twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours ! 
 that seemed an age. It would not be less, he said, especially 
 as the Gulf of Lyons would be " en tres mauvaise humeur." As 
 I told you before, it has always been in that humour when I 
 have been on it. That time, however, I should rather have 
 preferred it to blow great guns. A tempest would have suited 
 my sad state of mind better than anything else. Do you know 
 what it is when one maddening thought will perpetually return 
 to the imagination ; when nothing can shake it off 1 So it was 
 with me whenever I thought of my visit to Greece ; everything 
 connected with it seemed to turn against me. Even the 
 wretched gossip of Major. Plunger and Twentyman, which of 
 itself could not have harmed me if my letters had not been 
 tampered with, might do me the greatest harm when it was the 
 only received account — the only account, in fact, of my doings. 
 Then, too, I saw how just those very letters of mine which had 
 reached England would confirm Major Plunger's story, for they 
 
462 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 were just the very letters in ■which, as ill-luck would have it, I 
 had written hastily to say that I was going off on a long tour 
 with a Greek family. When they came to hand every kind friend 
 would say, " Mjajor Plunger's account of Edward Halfacre is quite 
 right. Here are his own letters to prove that he has gone off 
 with a Greek family, and in that family, hoth the Major and 
 Mr. Twentyman say, there is a very pretty daughter. There's 
 the attraction, no doubt." Yes ! the more I looked at it, the 
 worse the matter seemed, even to my own eyes. How true it 
 was of Scatterbrains to say that it was the greatest mess he 
 had ever heard of ! 
 
 Well ! we reached Marseilles. I flew, — now-a-days I should 
 have flown to the telegraph office, of course, and sent off a 
 telegram to Aunt Mandeville to ease her mind and mine. It 
 would have reached her in a few hours at latest. But, alas for 
 me ! there were no telegraphs then, and no railways. You 
 happy people who travel by express train from Marseilles to 
 Paris in eighteen hours, little do you know of what a journey 
 over the same ground by post was in 183-. I am almost afraid 
 to say how long it was. Four or five days, I think. Again, a train 
 will take almost any number ; but a diligence could take very 
 few, and the malle-poste, or mail, fewer still. One had to take 
 places for days beforehand, — I flew, then, to the post, only to 
 find the diligences and malle-poste for that evening quite full. 
 By great luck, however, I got a seat in the malle-poste for 
 the day after. So there I was, planted in Marseilles for thirty- 
 six hours. What did I do 1 I sat down at once and wrote a 
 long and kind letter to my Aunt, in which I assured her of my 
 affection, and told her that owing to some foul play, which I 
 would explain to her when I came, neither my letters had 
 reached her, nor hers me. I said nothing about my love affairs. 
 I was still as firm as a rock in my determination ; but I had 
 made my protest once, and that was enough. When I had put 
 that letter into the post, and paid for it with my own hands, I 
 felt easier — not happy, far from it, but easier. What I did 
 with myself all that time in Marseilles I hardly knew. I walked 
 along the quay, — the Cannebiere, I think they call it, — and ad- 
 mired the shipping. I remember the smell of the harbour was 
 horrible, worse than the worst bilgewater on board ship. I 
 admired the flower-market, and bought a nosegay of orange- 
 flowers. " Such orange-flowers," I said to myself, " shall Are- 
 thusa soon wear at her wedding." Did I do anything more 1 
 What could I do but try to eat, drink, and sleep, and long for 
 the hour on which the malle-poste was to start the evening 
 after 1 
 
ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 463 
 
 At last the time came. They used to think a great deal of 
 themselves, those malle-postes ; and their guards and the pos- 
 tilions thought much of themselves ; but they were wretched 
 things after all. By a great favour you sat side by side with 
 the conducteur in a sort of coupe. He smelling of garlic and 
 bad brandy, and it open to the air. When it was cold it was 
 very cold, and when it was hot very hot. 
 
 I decline to say anything about that journey, except that it 
 seemed endless. Man and horses did all they could for us, but 
 to me we seemed to drag over the ground. 
 
 What good resolutions did I not make on that journey, and 
 how more and more plainly did I see that what Scatterbrains 
 had said of my affairs was quite true. 
 
 Well ! we reached Paris. There I might have had another 
 wait. The matte-poste for Calais might have been full. Thank 
 heaven, it was not ! We reached Paris at eight o'clock in the 
 morning, and at eight at night I was in the Calais mail, leaving 
 the capital fast behind us. That, too, was a weary journey. 
 How slow the milestones seemed to come, and how hideously 
 the cracking of the postilion's whip sounded in my ears ! That 
 wondrous cracking, nay ! the very postilions themselves, have 
 passed away, and exist no longer. 
 
 We reached Calais. There again I had to wait a night at 
 Dessein's. In what a different mood from that in which I started 
 at the end of September !' 
 
 Next morning came the crossing. How I laughed at the 
 fears of the few passengers, chiefly French ! How I scorned 
 their precautions against mal de mer ! It even gave me plea- 
 sure to see them- ill. Did I offer any elderly French gentleman 
 brandy-and- water 1 No ! 
 
 We had a slow passage, but that, too, was over. We reached 
 Dover in time for the mail to London. " There was only one 
 inside place,'' the man at the booking-office said. "I would 
 not like that,'' he supposed. Yes ! I would. I was too glad to 
 have anything. Besides, I might sleep inside. I was now 
 easier. Had I not touched English soil ? I know little of that 
 night ; I believe I did sleep. I recollected little till the mail 
 rattled along the streets in the Borough, and over London 
 Bridge, then quite new, on its way to the General Post Office, 
 the haven for which all the royal mails were bound. 
 
 It was about seven o'clock in the morning — a damp, raw 
 December morning. There was just time to catch the High- 
 flyer, which started at eight from the " White Horse Cellar." I 
 caught it. Here again there was only one inside place, but I 
 was glad to get it. Inside there were three old women, or- 
 
464 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 ladies, as I have no doubt they called themselves. If they feel 
 hurt at my calling them women, I beg leave to apologise. 
 
 As I was inside, I escaped the observation of the guard and 
 coachman. I did not very often go up to London, and hardly 
 ever by coach. All my coaching experiences were between War- 
 wick and Oxford, by that Pig of dilatory memory. But perhaps 
 the guard might know me, and I wanted no one to know me 
 till I got home. 
 
 I believe I fell asleep on the way. I know I refused to get 
 out and have anything to eat when the coach stopped to dine. 
 No ! I had a biscuit in my pocket, which I had bought on board 
 the steamer, and some sherry in a flask. The biscuit was a real 
 captain's biscuit, that makes your eye-teeth shake in their 
 sockets to look at. I remained inside the coach, gnawing that 
 and taking a mouthful of sherry every now and then, till the 
 coach started again. 
 
 I was very cold. How could it be otherwise 1 I was lightly 
 clad, and had no wraps. Recollect I had come from the broiling 
 sun of Athens about ten or twelve days before. 
 
 I do not know whether I told you before that the coach 
 passed a spot nearer by two miles to Mandeville Hall than "War- 
 wick itself, where it stopped. It struck me, as we were nearing 
 our journey's end, that it would be better to get out there and 
 walk to the Hall across the fields. It was about five o'clock and 
 nearly dark, but I knew the way well, and I would run all the 
 way to keep myself warm. I stopped the coach suddenly, gave 
 guard and coachman their fees, and said I would send for my 
 luggage to the "Dun Cow." I don't think either of them 
 recognised me, but as the coach drove off I heard the guard 
 say: 
 
 " He's going to Mandeville Hall ! Come down, I suppose, to 
 see after the poor old lady to-morrow. To-morrow's the day, 
 ain't it i " 
 
 " Yes, and they say " That was all I could hear of the 
 
 coachman's answer. 
 
 " To see after the poor old lady to-morrow. What can they 
 mean ? " I said to myself. 
 
 Then I ran on along the foot-path by the river, passing the 
 very spot where Mary Harbury had fallen into the stream. The 
 Avon ran thick and swollen. " I should never have been able to 
 do it now," I said. 
 
 Then I left the river-side, and ran up the brow of the hill 
 where I had so often walked with Arethusa. I reached the 
 terrace. The house seemed strangely dark. There were lights 
 in the hall, but in my Aunt's own room, out of the window 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 465 
 
 from which she had so often leant and spoken to me, and looked 
 so lovingly at me, there were no lights. 
 
 " Very strange,'' I thought, as I passed along the terrace. 
 
 Here I saw a figure coming towards me in the mist. It 
 looked big till it came near, and then I saw, by the mere shape 
 alone, that it was our rector, Mr. St. Faith. 
 
 " Do you not know me!" I said, almost leaping towards him, 
 for I was in that state that my heart yearned towards any one 
 that knew me. " Do you not know me 1 How is my 
 Aunt 1 " 
 
 " Good God ! " said the Eector, in a broken voice ; " do you 
 not know what has happened 1 " 
 
 *" I know nothing," I said. " I have heard nothing. I have 
 come across France and England as fast as I could, for I wished 
 to reach home and to see my Aunt." 
 
 "Alas!" said the Eector, giving up all attempt at self-con- 
 trol, " you will never see your Aunt Mandeville again. She is 
 dead. To-morrow is the funeral." 
 
 I stood rooted to the ground. I said nothing. The shock 
 was too sudden and too great for words or tears. What I felt 
 at that moment no tongue could tell. 
 
 How long I should have remained standing there I cannot 
 tell. I remember nothing, except that I stood there face to 
 face with Mr. St. Faith. At last he took my hand. Then I 
 said : 
 
 " Can I see her 1" 
 
 "Alas, no !" he said. "I have just seen the coffin soldered 
 down. You will never see your Aunt Mandeville more in this- 
 world." Then, as if to turn the subject, he went on : " But did 
 you not. go to the banker's 1 . Did you not get the letter I wrote 
 to you more than a week ago V 
 
 No ! I had not. I had come straight through London with- 
 out losing a minute. 
 
 " Poor boy ! " said Mr. St. Faith ; " you have been much to 
 blame ; but you must not go in there yet. Come with me to- 
 the Eectory. I have much to tell you." 
 
 I let him do with me as he pleased. I walked mechanically 
 with him to the Eectory ; let him send over to Warwick for my 
 luggage ; dressed, and sat down to dinner with him, doing all 
 these things as though I were in a dream. 
 
 After dinner Mr. St. Faith said : " Now let me tell you what 
 happened. I said you were much to blame, and I say so still. 
 To say the least of it, you had no right to leave your Aunt so 
 long without any tidings of you. But when to that is coupled 
 the fact that you had wholly given yourself over to one woman's 
 
466 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 influence all the while you were away, I do not know what is to 
 be said for you." 
 
 " But tell me about my Aunt," I said. " Do not speak of 
 me or of my conduct. . Tell me about my poor dear Aunt Man- 
 deville." 
 
 " I am going to tell you about her,'' said the Eector. " When 
 your Aunt, of whom you say you were so fond, though I do not 
 think you have shown it by your actions, could hear nothing of 
 you, she turned for information to others. The only person who 
 could give her any help was Count Manteuffel, that foreigner 
 who stayed at the Hall before you went away. I do not like 
 him, but it is no use denying that your Aunt did. She had a 
 romantic feeling towards him from the first, as being one of 
 the old Mandeville stock, and this feeling your bad conduct 
 strengthened. Even soon after you went, the Count was con- 
 stantly at the Hall, but latterly he was there every other day. 
 Your poor Aunt used to say, ' The Count was here yesterday, 
 and has given me a fine history of Edward's doings in Corfu. It 
 is a bitter grief and disappointment to me. I really thought 
 he loved me too much to disgrace himself in that way.' At last 
 she seemed to have summoned up all her courage to write to 
 you strongly. 
 
 " ' I have written to Edward to-day a letter which will settle 
 matters between us, and upon that letter much will depend.' 
 
 " She said, ' much will depend ' in a very determined voice. 
 
 " I am sure no one ever prayed more for a soft answer to that 
 letter than I, but what was it when it came, just a fortnight 
 ago 1 I call it, under all the circumstances, a most unfeeling 
 letter. Your Aunt never held her head up after it, and, humanly 
 speaking, it killed her. She had been ailing more or less ever 
 since you left. She never forgot or forgave your refusal to marry 
 Miss Harbury. But when your letter came she showed it to me, 
 and said : 
 
 " ' Now see his hypocrisy — the boy whom I had nursed and 
 reared for my own — at the very moment that he is lost in this 
 criminal intimacy with this Greek girl, he writes and says he 
 will not marry Mary Harbury. Why 1 Because of his unalter- 
 able affection for another, meaning me to understand that Miss 
 Chichester is the object of his affections. No ! I cannot forgive 
 it. It will be the death of me.' " 
 
 "Was she long ill?" I faltered out. 
 
 " She did not take to her bed till the last two days. Before 
 that she went about as usual, sending for her London lawyer, 
 and settling her, affairs. But it was plain to me, at least, that 
 her heart was broken: by, what she persisted in callings your 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 467 
 
 vicious, criminal conduct, and your hypocrisy and deceit. The 
 Count saw her only three days before she died, the last day that 
 any one saw her, in fact ; and she told me that his letters from 
 Athens quite bore out her view of the case. Then she took to 
 her bed, when, as she told me, her worldly affairs were settled, 
 and died. Dr. Mindererus could do nothing for her. She 
 simply lay in bed, and died. It was quite sudden. Mrs. Curl 
 went into her room in the morning, and found her dead, with 
 her hands folded across her bosom, looking up with a sweet but 
 very sad expression. There, I have told you my story, and a 
 very sad one it is. To-morrow is the funeral." 
 
 Did I say nothing in my defence to Mr. St. Faith 1 Ah ! yes ; 
 I told him my story, and showed him the letters. But, after 
 all, of what avail were any explanations, when she, with whom I 
 wished to stand justified, was dead? 
 
 " You have been very unfortunate^ but you have been much 
 to blame, for giving yourself over so blindly to one family ; and, 
 by so doing, you have furthered any designs which the Count 
 may have had. But we will talk of this at another time. You 
 have much to go through to-morrow, and you need rest." 
 
 Best ! what a mockery that seemed. All I could say was : 
 
 "Dead, dead! and I was not with her. My poor dear Aunt 
 Mandeville!" •: .■• 
 
 It was not late, hot so late. I put the Bector on one side, 
 and went up to the Hall. He tried to follow me, but I would 
 not have his company. I must be alone. 
 
 It was not far from the Bectory, and I soon reached the hall- 
 door. There the lights still burned. I rang, and Brooks let me in. 
 
 " Dear me ! Master Edward, how like a ghost you do look ! 
 We hoped you might come in time, and you have come in 
 time." 
 
 " In time ; what do you mean 1" 
 
 t( In time for the funeral — it's to-morrow." 
 
 "Where is it?" I asked. 
 
 " Here, in the hall, on the long table. She has been lying 
 in state, like." 
 
 I went in. I thrust Brooks on one side, and then I walked 
 up to the table on which was all that was left of my Aunt. Yes, 
 there it lay, the ghastly coffin, with its trim fittings, and its 
 handles, and its inscription : 
 
 ELEANOR MANDEVILLE. 
 
 BORN 1780. DIED 183-. 
 
 To think that I. should never see' her sweet face, and those 
 
 h h 2 
 
438 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 large, bright, brown eyes again ! That they had been closed, 
 and, though I -was innocent, closed so soon, perhaps, because of 
 me. 
 
 There was no one by to see a strong man weep, and I 
 wept. 
 
 There were lights, — many lights in the hall, which was hung- 
 with black ! Yes ! there I was alone with the dead ; and just 
 above us, looking down on the very coffin, as though her sad 
 eyes could read the inscription, which told her that a new comer 
 was about to be laid in the family vault — was the picture of 
 Lucy Mandeville, the White Lady, in whose fate my Aunt had 
 taken such an interest. 
 
 I turned and almost ran from the hall ; for I thought of the 
 night when Arethusa, and I, and Mary Harbury had passed 
 through it so stealthily to frighten Count ManteufFel, and all 
 that had passed since came back on me with overpowering 
 force. 
 
 I called for Brooks, and I went to my Aunt's room ; that 
 morning-room in which I had so often sat with her, ever since I 
 came to her a child of ten years old to be hers, and to be with 
 her always. Now she was gone — gone before I could justify 
 myself, and expose the frauds which had been practised on both 
 of us. How bitter is unavailing remorse ! And yet I had done 
 nothing to be ashamed of. 
 
 Yes ! there was her room, just as she had left it. You might 
 almost expect to see her erect form come in. There was her 
 ebony chair ! 
 
 There was her writing-table. On it lay unopened the letter I 
 had written from Marseilles, the inkstand she used, and the pen 
 with which she wrote her last letter. I took it up, and looked 
 at it in a dreamy way. Too late ! Too late ! 
 
 " Poor Missis," said Brooks, who stood by holding a candle ; 
 " she never wrote with that pen after Mr. Quill brought her 
 down her will to sign. 'Twas but three days before she died, 
 poor lady ! just ten days ago." 
 
 Then I walked all about the hall. Upstairs to my Aunt's 
 bedroom, and then into mine. That dear room, which had been 
 mine ever since I was a boy. Then I crossed the hall again, 
 quickening my step, and bowing my head as I passed that long 
 tableland not so much as daring to look at the White Lady. I 
 ran up the staircase into the King's Room and the Queen's 
 Room. I even looked into the dressing-room. I looked at all 
 the pictures, as though I were taking leave of them as old 
 friends. It was a state between sleep and waking. I might 
 have been either a ghost or a somnambulist. Why I went 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 469 
 
 round the Hall I can scarcely tell. Perhaps Brooks thought I 
 was the young heir impatient to survey what he might now call 
 his own. But I know none of you who read this book will think 
 *o ill of me. 
 
 No ! I did not go to the Passion-flower. 
 
 Then I seemed satisfied. We went down into the hall, where 
 ■we found Mrs. Curl, my Aunt's maid, and the housekeeper. 
 They were both very fond of me ; but I had no heart to speak, 
 — to say more than : " Good night, I shall be here to-morrow." 
 
 Then Brooks opened the door, and I was gone out into the 
 ■cold mist. 
 
 Had I any comfort in all this woe ? Yes ! one. I was true 
 to Arethusa, for whom I had brought all this grief and trouble 
 on myself, and I felt sure she would be true to me. 
 
 Mr. St. Faith was waiting for me. 
 
 " Poor boy ! " he said ; " how wan and white you look ! Come 
 to bed and try to get a few hours' sleep." 
 
 I went to bed only to toss about. My only hope on earth 
 now was Arethusa. 
 
 CHAPTER LVI. 
 
 THE FUNERAL AND WHAT FOLLOWED. 
 
 We were up early. Weddings and funerals are no lovers of 
 sluggards. We dressed ourselves. We tried to eat our break- 
 fast ; but it was little use. Lump after lump stuck in the 
 throat. 
 
 Then Mr. St. Faith and I walked up to the Hall. It was a 
 very private funeral. Mr. St. Faith had arranged it all. It was 
 well known that he was to be one of the executors. At the 
 funeral were only to be Mr. St. Faith, Mr. Grubb, Mr. Quill, the 
 lawyer, old Dr. Mindererus, and myself. Mr. St. Faith told me 
 that the Count had offered to come, " as a mark of respect to his 
 -deceased friend ;" but that the offer had been declined, on the 
 ground that the ceremony was to be strictly private. 
 
 " You know, Edward," he said, " the will must be read after 
 the funeral, as a matter of form. Mr. Quill, who only made it 
 -ten days ago, has got it with him. He came down to Warwick 
 by the mail, last night, and we shall find him at the Hall. 
 
 This he said as we walked across the park. 
 
 To all he said I only answered " Yes ! " In fact, I was quite 
 foeyond business. I was following my poor Aunt in thought to 
 
470 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE.. 
 
 those blessed regions whither I firmly believed she had departed. 
 I was not on earth, but in heaven, or at heaven's gate, a heart- 
 broken suitor to her forgiveness. 
 
 Though the funeral was strictly private, the tenants insisted 
 on coming. There were many of them in the hall when we got 
 there ; their honest faces full of grief, for they had lost' a good 
 landlady. 
 
 " Bless her dear heart," I heard one of them say, " she never 
 raised my rent one penny, all these years." 
 
 "No ! nor never a-would as many years more," said another. 
 
 There we met Mr. Grubb, and there, for the first time, I saw 
 Mr. Quill, my Aunt's London solicitor, a busy, important little 
 man, who had a bag in his hand, which, as soon as he came, he 
 made Brooks lock up in a cabinet and give him the key. 
 
 Well ! why prolong the gloomy description of the necessary 
 end ? The undertakers approached. Me they came to first as- 
 chief mourner. My father was still at Two Bivers, and both my 
 brothers were out of England. I was the only blood relation 
 present — the only Halfacre. 
 
 These gloomy men seized me and pinioned me in crape, as 
 though I were going to execution. Yards upon yards of crape 
 they swathed round me and my hat. Then I was ready to take 
 my place in the procession. No ! I have forgot the gloves. 
 Why are undertakers' gloves always made for giants 1 Why is 
 eight and a half the very smallest size that an undertaker ever 
 has 1 One would think that grief swells the hands as well as- 
 the eyes of mourners. 
 
 Then Mr. St. Faith, Mr. Grubb, Dr. Mindererus, and Mr. Quill 
 were pinioned in like manner by two undertakers, only they 
 were swathed in silk. Then came the chief tenants, and last of 
 all the servants. 
 
 After that the head-undertaker told me that all was ready. 
 It was to be a walking funeral. The tenants in relays bore the 
 heavy coffin to the church, which was in the park, between the 
 Hall and the Rectory. The gloomy procession started, and the 
 old Hall had seen the last of its mistress. 
 
 I must hasten on. We reached the church ; and as we neared 
 it Mr. St. Faith went before to receive the remains in company 
 with his curate. Never did that most comforting service, that 
 most noble of all the services, sound less comforting to human 
 ears than mine. It was over ; thank God ! it was over. We 
 had laid her in the vault among the old Mandevilles, and my- 
 Aunt was now the gravefellow of Lucy, the White Lady. 
 
 We left her there. I lingered about the vault, and saw the 
 mason's men hard at work, relaying the stones over the hola 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 471 
 
 that had been made i'rr the pavement. But even I had to leave 
 at last. Mr. St. Faith pulled me away. 
 
 "We must leave her," he said. "We must go up to the 
 Hall." 
 
 We went back to the Hall. 
 
 " That's the young heir," I heard a woman say ; " that's 
 Master Edward. How poorly he do look ! " 
 
 We reached the Hall. The servants made way for " Master 
 Edward " as I entered. We went to the library, where the 
 cabinet was in which Mr. Quill had safely locked up Aunt Man- 
 deville's last will and testament. Before opening it, he went to 
 a table, and drank a glass of sherry and munched a biscuit. 
 Mr. Grubb did the same, while Mr. St. Faith, the doctor, and I 
 threw off our trappings of crape. 
 
 After he had eaten and drunk, and also uncraped himself, Mr. 
 Quill said, in a serious, medical voice : 
 
 " I think we had better now proceed to read the will. Mr. 
 St. Faith, you are one of the executors, and, Mr. Grubb, you are 
 another." 
 
 " I believe I am," said Mr. St. Faith. 
 
 Mr. Quill then drew out the key of the cabinet, with great 
 deliberation, looking at it once or twice before he put it into 
 the keyhole. He unlocked the cabinet. He drew out the bag, 
 — a blue bag, — loosed the strings, and produced the will. It 
 was engrossed on bilious-looking parchment. Even the will had 
 a yellow, jaundiced look. 
 
 After a preliminary hem or two, Mr. Quill began : 
 
 " This is the last will and testament of me, Eleanor Mande- 
 ville, of sound mind, though of weak body. I die in peace and 
 charity with all men, even those who have so grievously of- 
 fended me. 
 
 " I give and bequeath to my nephew, Edward Halfacre, the 
 sum of £5000 consols, in addition to the sum of £20,000, 
 which I have already transferred into his name in the books of 
 the Bank of England. I would have further increased this 
 bounty, had he not so conducted himself as to disgrace the 
 family and himself. 
 
 " I give and bequeath Mandeville Hall, and all the estates, 
 manors, hereditaments, rights, privileges, and easements what- 
 soever thereunto belonging, unto Maximilian, Count Manteuffel, 
 of His Prussian Majesty's Horse Guards, absolutely and without, 
 any reservation. 
 
 "I do this because I recognise in him a branch of the old 
 Mandeville stock, and I rejoice to think that the estate will be 
 held by one of the family. 
 
472 ANNALS OP AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 " Appended to this will, my executors will find a memorandum, 
 which I desire they will open and communicate the same to the 
 said Maximilian, Count Manteuffel, in the nature of a wish. I 
 make no condition of this in my will, because I do not desire, 
 when I am dead, to lay on the living a command which the 
 living have already refused to obey while I am alive. 
 
 " I give and bequeath to each of my executors the sum of 
 £500, free of legacy duty ; and I desire that the Keverend 
 Charles St. Faith, B.D., rector of Mandeville, and John Grubb, 
 Esquire, of ' The Warren,' in this parish, will be the executors 
 of this, my will. 
 
 " I give and bequeath to each of my servants one year's 
 wages, free of legacy duty ; and I also give and bequeath to 
 Mary Jellybag, Ellen Curl, Thomas Brooks, and John Ribbons 
 an annuity of £50 sterling a-year each for the term of then- 
 natural lives. 
 
 " I give and bequeath £500 to the poor of Mandeville 
 parish, and £250 towards the erection of a new school in that 
 parish. 
 
 " Signed, sealed, and published, this 6th day of December, 
 183 — , by me, Eleanob Mandeville, of Mandeville Hall, in the 
 County of Warwick. 
 
 " In the presence of us : 
 
 " John Sttjbbs, Clerk to Messrs. Quill & Quill, 
 Pump Court, Temple ; and 
 
 " Edward Smith, Schoolmaster, Mandeville 
 School." 
 That was the will. There it was : signed at the bottom in 
 Aunt Mandeville's clear hand. 
 
 Eleanob Mandeville. 
 
 There was a codicil to the will ; an afterthought executed on 
 the same day. It gave all the plate, pictures, furniture, wine, 
 horBes, carriages, and live stock, in or at Mandeville Hall, to 
 the said Maximilian, Count Manteuffel ; and it also revoked the 
 absolute gift of the estates to him without reservation, by settling 
 the estates in tail on him, and the heirs male of his body 
 lawfully begotten, provided he took out letters of naturalisation. 
 The plate, pictures, and furniture were to be heirlooms, and to 
 follow the estate. My Aunt also requested the Count to 
 change his name, Manteuffel, if possible, into Mandeville. 
 
 How did I bear it 1 Very well. I showed no sign. When 
 my Aunt was gone, I can truly say I did not care for the 
 estate. 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE.' 473 
 
 Mr. St. Faith and Mr. Grubb looked very much, surprised ; 
 but what could they say, especially when all that I said was as 
 coolly as if I had no concern in the matter 1 
 
 " Mr. Quill, you will of course communicate the contents of 
 Mrs. Mandeville's will to Count Manteuffel." 
 
 " Certainly ; it will be my duty to do so," said Mr. Quill. 
 " In fact, I will do so this very moment ; what is his address ? " 
 
 " You will find him at Leamington," said Mr. St. Faith. " He 
 has been there constantly for some time. That is to say when 
 he was not over here." 
 
 "And now," said I, "Mr. St. Faith, there is nothing more for 
 me to do in Mandeville Hall. Let me go with you to the 
 Rectory." 
 
 "I shall only be too happy," said the dear good man. "Bless 
 me ! I can scarcely believe what I have heard read. I knew 
 nothing of all this. It seems like a dream. Stay at the 
 Rectory, Edward, as long as you like. Make it your home." 
 
 " It will be too near to Mandeville Hall, I am afraid," I said, 
 bitterly : " but for a day or two. Don't suppose, though, that 
 I feel the loss of the estate at all. Oh, that I could bring my 
 dear Aunt to life, and have one five minutes' conversation with 
 her all alone, that I might prove to her how cruelly I have been- 
 calumniated ! " 
 
 I left the room, and went into the hall, leaving Mr. St. 
 Faith to say a few words to his fellow-executor and the soli- 
 citor. 
 
 And now I suppose you all think my cup of bitterness was 
 full. Don't you know, all of you, that the cup of bitterness is. 
 never just full? It is always full to overflowing? 
 
 As I went into the hall, Brooks came up. " A letter for you, 
 Master Edward, just come from Leamington." I looked at it 
 and said to myself : " How kind ! here, at least, will be some 
 comfort, some words of sympathy, perhaps, from her I love and 
 trust more thoroughly than life itself." You must all admit I 
 needed comfort, and I had a right to expect it then. That letter 
 was in Colonel Chichester's handwriting. 
 
 How eagerly I broke the seal ! It was half-a-sheet of paper, 
 enclosing a note from Arethusa. Yes ! — in Arethusa's own hand- 
 writing. The first letter that she had written to me since we 
 had been engaged. 
 
 There I stood, in the hall — the old hall, which I was so soon 
 to leave for ever, — opposite to the White Lady, — on the very 
 stones where I had waited, with Mary Harbury, longing for 
 Arethusa's return. Now I was on the same spot, about to read 
 a letter from my own true love; was not that a consolation for 
 
474 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 the trouble that I had undergone, all for her sake. I broke the 
 seal and read : 
 
 "Leamington, December 16th, 183 — . 
 " Dear Mb. Halpacbe, 
 
 " As I hear that you have returned to England, I write to 
 beg that you will not attempt to see me any more. Your own 
 feelings, after your late conduct in Greece, will have suggested 
 this course as wisest and best for both of us, even without any 
 communication on my part. In fear, however, lest your sense 
 of what is right and proper should have been so perverted by 
 your course of life lately as to make you suppose that I could 
 ever bear to see you again, I write this, with my father's full 
 approbation, to inform you that we can in no case receive you 
 even as a visitor into our house. 
 
 " Believe me, 
 
 " Sincerely yours, 
 
 "Arethusa Chichester. 
 
 " P. S. Far better would it be for you to marry Mary Har- 
 bury, and make some compensation to your poor Aunt's memory 
 by fulfilling her wishes !" 
 
 And now will any of you say that my cup did not run over 
 in streams ? 
 
 The half-sheet contained the following lines scrawled inside it : 
 
 " Leamington, Dec. lGtlt. 
 "Dear Sir, 
 
 " My daughter has requested me to forward to you the en- 
 closed note. I need only add that I agree with every word 
 contained in it. 
 
 " I am, yours faithfully, 
 
 "John Chichester." 
 
 What followed t I cannot tell you. I have a dim recol- 
 lection of standing there with the note open in my hand, under 
 the picture. Then Mr. St. Faith came up to me, as in a dream, 
 and said, " Come home, Edward, with me." It seemed to me 
 that he ' added, " and marry Mary Harbury." Every one and 
 everything now seemed either to bawl out or to whisper, " Marry 
 Mary Harbury." Had, not Arethusa said so ? 
 
 They led me away to trie Rectory. They put me to bed. 
 Some one said, — I think it was Mr. Grubb ; some strong man 
 who hadihold.of me, forcing me into bed : 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 475 
 
 " Poor fellow ! He bore up till then. That last blow was 
 too much for him." 
 
 After that I remembered nothing. It seemed all blank, all 
 dark, all black. Sometimes angels seemed fighting for me, and 
 then' black demons drove them away. How I used to rave, 
 they told me long afterwards, of one long, yellow, lemon-haired 
 fiend, who used to torment me ! Count Man-devil I used to 
 call hinl - 
 
 But all things must have an end, and even a brain-fever. I 
 was strong. I shook it off. They were all so kind to me, — 
 Brooks and Mr. St. Faith, and the Grubbs, and even Madam 
 Harbury. Mary Harbury was very kind too ; she used to bring 
 flowers out of their conservatory. Poor thing ! once she brought 
 me a passion-flower. The sight of it drove me mad again, and 
 I had a relapse. 
 
 Oh ! that Christmas which I was to have spent so happily, 
 where was it ? Lost for ever to me. It was mid-February 
 before I came to myself. In March I was much better, and 
 Mr; St. Faith, that angel, used to leave me. 
 
 You would not think there-had been anything left for me to 
 suffer. Now would you 1 But I had. I remember one day in 
 March, when Mr. St. Faith had gone over to Harbury on 
 sessions business, Brooks, who now lived in the village on his 
 pension and his savings, came to see me, and said : 
 
 " Master Edward ! . there be something in the ' Leamington 
 Courier ' you'd like to see, I know, so I brought it to you, — here 
 it is." 
 
 I held out my long, lean hand, and took the paper, wonder- 
 ing like a child what it could be. It was only a short para- 
 graph, and here it is : 
 
 " Marriage in High Life. — On Tuesday last, at the Church 
 of Leamington Priors, by the Bev. Stephen Close, Maximilian, 
 Count Manteuffel, Captain in His Prussian Majesty's Horse 
 Guards, to Arethusa, only daughter of John Chichester, Esq., 
 late Lieutenant-Colonel of His Majesty's 204th Foot." Then 
 came the comment. " We understand that the noble Count, 
 who, as our readers are aware, lately almost providentially suc- 
 ceeded to the old Mandeville estates in this county, is about to 
 leave England with his lovely bride, who has been the belle of 
 all our balls this winter, for a lengthened tour on the Continent. 
 On his return in the summer, the noble bridegroom intends to 
 comply with the request of the late Mrs. Mandeville, and apply 
 to His Majesty for leave to assume the name of Mandeville, and 
 take out letters of naturalisation;" 
 
 That was all. That was what. Brooks thought: it: would do 
 
476 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 me good to see. He was right. It did me good. It hardened 
 me and gave me strength ; the strength that every man feels 
 •who knows that he is guiltless, even when those dearest to him 
 turn against him. 
 
 " Dear me ! " said good Mr. St. Faith, when he returned from 
 his sessions business and saw the newspaper lying on the table ; 
 " have you seen it 1 " 
 
 " I have seen it," I said, " and it has done me good. To- 
 morrow I will get "up and be a man again.", 
 
 "Poor dear Mrs. Mandevill&," said Mr. St. Faith; "her 
 dearest wish has remained unfulfilled." 
 
 " Yes," I said, "poor dear Auntie ; it was all my fault." 
 
 " No," said the Rector, " I do not mean that. I am not so 
 unfeeling. Do you not remember the memorandum which she 
 left with her executors ? Do you know what it was 1" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " This. That memorandum contained a request to be con- 
 veyed by her executors to Count Manteuffel that he would, if 
 possible, out of regard to Mrs. Mandeville, ' round off the Man- 
 deville and Harbury property in a ring fence, by marrying Mary 
 Harbury.' " 
 
 " But he did not find it possible. He could not marry Mary 
 Harbury," I said bitterly. 
 
 " He never tried, Edward. His heart was lost to Arethusa 
 Chichester long before he succeeded in persuading your Aunt to 
 leave him Mandeville Hall." 
 
 True to my word I got up on the morrow. Each day gave 
 me fresh strength and health. There are some things, and the 
 human heart is one of them, that grow harder by being trampled 
 on. Go to ! Hearts are but clay, like the rest of our bodies. 
 They are hardened in the kiln of adversity. 
 
 CHAPTER LVII. 
 
 THE BITTER END. 
 
 Did I not complain ? Get thee behind me, Satan ! I did not. 
 I was too proud to proclaim my wrongs. Besides, what good 
 would it have done 1 My adversary had killed and taken pos- 
 session. To whom should I complain ? It was enough for me 
 that Mr. St. Faith should quietly let Warwickshire know the 
 facts of the case. Even then some kind, people said the facts 
 were much against me. But most people were very kind to me 
 
ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 477 
 
 — Lady Meredith most of all. She had gone to Paris for the 
 winter, just after she wrote to me, and before she came back all 
 the harm was done. 
 
 Even Major Plunger and Twentyman were in despair at the 
 mischief they had made. Like most stupid people, they were so 
 wise after the fact. 
 
 " My dear fellow," said the Major, beginning to talk, " if we 
 had only known what we know now." 
 
 " We had better not say anything about that," I said.- " Let 
 us bury the past." 
 
 "But," said the honest Heavy, "such conduct is disgraceful. 
 The whole country ought to cut him." 
 
 "Ah !•" I said bitterly, " perhaps people will say of him as was 
 said of William Penn, that he was ' a pen that had often been 
 cut, but never mended.' I think he is beyond either eutting or 
 mending." 
 
 Did I accuse her ? Never. No word of complaint or accusa- 
 tion against her ever crossed, or ever shall cross, my lips. She 
 was deceived, like all the rest of us. It still gives me a melan- 
 choly satisfaction, after all these years, to- remember that she 
 wrote her letter to me before she knew of the will in her 
 husband's favour. She evidently was not in the plot to rob me 
 of the estate, for in that very letter she bade me marry Mary 
 Harbury, and round off the estate. 
 
 Are they alive ? Yes, both. They have no children, and when 
 her husband dies Mandeville Hall will come to my eldest brother, 
 as my Aunt's next of kin. 
 
 I have never been near Mandeville Hall since that day of the 
 funeral, and very seldom in Warwickshire or in England. I have 
 been a rolling stone. At the last Warwickshire election I hear 
 they called Count Mandeville, who took an active part, " Count 
 Lean and Green," in allusion to his gaunt frame and yellow 
 akin. 
 
 Mr. St. Faith is still alive, the dear old man ! Major Plunger 
 sold out, and died some years since. He talked to the day of 
 his death of the unfairness of foreigners coming over and buying 
 up all our best horses. Not long ago I saw Colonel Twentyman 
 and his wife at Brighton. He was looking over the new pier 
 into the sea, just as he used to look over the bridge at Warwick. 
 He has been a gallant officer since you knew him, and killed ten 
 men in the Balaclava charge. He has the Victoria Cross, and 
 the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and St. Lazarus,- and St. 
 Abraham. 
 
 " Madam " Harbury is dead. I think she starved herself to 
 death. Perhaps she has by this time solved that knotty question 
 
478 ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 as to the patriarchs and good men of old, which so distressed her 
 on earth. I pray that she may find more charity, wherever she 
 is, than she showed to those around her here. 
 
 Mary Harbury is still Mary Harbury. I saw her last Christ- 
 mas, when I went down to see Mr. St. Faith. She is a fat, 
 middle-aged woman, very kind and good to the poor, by whom 
 she is much beloved. Mr. St. Faith says she has been sent by 
 Providence to fill Aunt Mandeville's place to the poor of both 
 parishes. She never married, and, so far as I have heard, never 
 had any thoughts of marriage'. She is better as she is. 
 
 Scatterbrains, the dear old fellow, lives in Ireland on his 
 estates, and has a house full of children. He came back in the 
 Mermaid too late to be of any good, and showed his common 
 sense and good feeling by never saying a word of my affairs. He 
 knew that there was no mending them, and therefore he said 
 nothing. I often see him. 
 
 I think I have nothing more to tell you. " Yes 1" What is 
 it ? " Was I ever married V " No." 
 
 Now, do not any of you lay down this book, and think I am 
 unhappy. I am not. Were that part of my life to come over 
 again, I should act just as I did, except that I would not, if I 
 could help it, fall into that trap so skilfully set for me in Corfu. 
 In all else I should have been just the same. This is my con- 
 solation, that I was faithful and loyal to my love. Strong in 
 this feeling, I have lived on still proud and shy. Let no one 
 dare to pity me. I am quite content ; nor would I care to call 
 the king my cousin. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BKADBDRY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEI'RIARS.