Macmillan's magazine

.

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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXIII

MACMILLAN'S

\ VOL. LXXXIII

|

NOVEMBEE, 1900, TO APRIL, 1901

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1901

The Eight of Translation, 'and Reprodwtion is Reserved.

JOHN BALE, SONS & DANIELSSON, LTD.
83-89, GREAT TITCHFJELD STREET, LONDON,

INDEX.

PAGE

Art and the Woman ; by Two BROTHERS 29

Art, My ; by Madame RISTORI 182

At Merlincourt 196

Book-Hunting 453

Cardinal's Agent, The ; by GERALD BRENAN 306

Census-Schedule, The ; by GEORGE BIZET 428

Christmas Carol, A 141

Christ's Hospital, Something about 285

Coinage of Words, The ; by Sir COURTENAY BOYLE, K.C.B 327

Edward Fitzgerald and T. E. Brown 212

Faust of the Marionettes, The ; by H. C. MACDOWALL 198

French and English ; by GEORGE H. ELY 257

French Prisons and their Inmates, Some ; by Captain EARDLEY-WILMOT . . . 335

Gallant little Wales ; by JOHN FINNEMORE 62

House by the Sea, The 137

Hudson's Bay Company, Chronicles of the ; by A. G. BRADLEY 231

In the Advance ; by ERNEST DAWSON 441

Island of the Current, The ; by CHARLES EDWARDES 445

Jack's Mother 217

Klondike, Impressions of ; by CHARLES C. OSBORNE :

III.— IV 48

V.— VI. Conclusion 148

Literature and Democracy 401

Man in the Ranks, The 471

Missionary in China and Elsewhere, The ; by H. C. MACDOWALL . . . . . . 280

Missionary in China, The ; by F. THOROLD DICKSON 95

On the High Veldt ; by a City Imperial Volunteer 390

Our Army and its Critics ; by the Hon. J. W. FORTESCCE 70

Naval Chapter in Indian History, A ; by W. J. FLETCHER 204

North and South ; by W. A. ATKINSON 376

Notes from a Sentimental Journey 112

Passing of the Queen, The 374

Pictures, Two Great ; by M. H. WITT 190

Pioneer of Empire, A 386

20397

Index.

PAOE

Police-Officer's Tale, The ; by HENRY FIELDING 291

Private Whitworth, B.A. ; by A. G. HYDE 35

Queen Victoria 321

Beform Bill, An Ideal ; by JOHN BULL, Junior 222

Reservist in War, The ; by a Regimental Officer 152

Rhodesia and Northwards ; by S. C. NOEEIS 272

Royal Edwards (A.D. 901—1901) 366

Seaming House 433

Secret of Ireland, The ; by STEPHEN GWYNN 410

Sentiment, A Lovely 59

Settlement of South Africa, The 51

Shakespeare's History, Studies in ; by J. L. ETTY :

III. Richard the Third 15

IV. Henry the Eighth ' 420

Sinner and the Problem, The ; by ERIC PARKER :

Chapters I. — in 1

Chapters iv. — vii 81

Chapters viii. — x 161

Chapters xi. — xrv 241

Chapters xv. — xvm 342

Chapters xix.— xx. Conclusion 461

Sketch from Memory, A ... 360

Sufferings of an Honorary Secretary, The ... 124

Union and Annexation ; by Professor LODGE 103

Victoria 400

Vital Statistics ; by BENJAMIN TAYLOR 300

Weathering an Earthquake ; by A. M. BRICE 129

Wheat-Crop, The Evolution of a ; by HAROLD BINDLOSS 23

When the Big Fish Feed 266

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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

NOVEMBER, 1900.

THE SINNER AND THE PROBLEM.

BY ERIC PARKER.

CHAPTEB I.

THE sun was almost down to the
tree-tops before I, who had wandered
searching half the morning, found my
flowers and my brick wall to work at.
For (and may some god defend me
for a poor painter) I cannot work as
others, good souls, are able ; need-
ing first a proper mood to catch
hints and tints, and a subject be-
fitting my mood, and the sun on all,
and I know not what else beside.
But just as the big thrushes in the
elms were beginning their evening
anthem I turned in my walk, and
the scent of cowslips came down
wind to me from the meadow, and
the old walls were dark against
a yellow sky. Send me twice a
month a sight like that !

Some, truly, can chop sticks from
any wood to boil their pot, but not
I. Believe me lazy, but I needed
that hint of cowslips, and began
straightway aworking the scent of
them into my sky, if you will take
my meaning. There were bluebells
and anemones for a goddess's bride-
bed at my feet, and, just seen, the
turret-end of the house, where the
chestnuts broke away beyond and
left a clean background of thin
chromes and greens ; and I had set
up my folding-stool under a laburnum-
tree that rained gold in the breeze,
No. 493. — VOL. LXXXIII.

though that was not yet chill, for
it was a full hour to sundown.

•Mine host had bidden me to his
house an invalid ; or almost that,
though I was on the high road to
recovery, thanks to his wife's good
fare and the winds that blow. What
had ailed me I know not with cer-
tainty. Heaven forbid that I should
add my cackle to the verdict of those
doctors ; truly they pulled out a
string of unmannerly names from
their pockets as monks count their
rosaries, and found symptoms in me
enough, I once thought, to have laid
low an army. Fly I Fresh air !
whispered I ; and / will I I roared
back to myself, and left the doctors
to squabble unpaid till I could paint
a picture and help them. Mine
host had promised me flowers and
leaves and lawns here, there, and
everywhere, to' tempt brush and
paper; and here I had found a
picture well to my liking under my
laburnum-tree.

These, then, I needed, — good fare
and the winds that blow. And I
was like to find both, it seemed ;
for we lay on the rib of a hill, and
over the back came the breath of
the sea, wet and salt many a mile
inland, purring through the trees ;
so that I, a layman who could make
neither head nor tail of doctor's
jargon (nor swallow their physic for

2

The Sinner and the Problem.

that matter), opened my lungs into
the air and shouted when I reached
the hill-top. That was cure enough,
I should fancy, fur any sick man ;
and beside all this, mine host had
chosen the place for his school-boys,
and in affairs of climate and health
I know (for he told me) that parents
are particular beings. Good fare,
too, there was to be had in abun-
dance, home-brews and white bread
rolls and cream in side-dishes, big
rounds of beef and apple-pies. I
found my pipe a friend again, too,
and that rejoiced me not a little, for
I know no better weather-glass, so
to speak, than a man's pipe : if it is
ever cajoling and tempting him, he
may slap his thigh and thank the
powers ; but if he forget the taste,
or it lies sulking in his pocket, why
then he had best shift his lodging
or his doctor.

Below me in the valley stretched
woodland country ; oak and ash and
elm as I could tell by the colouring,
for the ash had hardly budded and
the oaks were new-leaved, crimson
and russet. A lake, too, lay there,
fed (I fancied) by a stream or two
from the hills, and another streak of
water ran a gold riband out to the
river and the ships ; this also, it
seemed to me, joined the lake, but
so thick were the trees that one
might pardon a mistake. I could see
a tiny hamlet nestling under a spire,
and near the lake, that mirrored
bronze leaves and yellow sky, a red-
brick house, square-built and solid.

But I was neither up the hill nor
down, for we stood half-way on the
slope, and the path I had trodden
lay along it, and I had but noticed
the red-brick house on my left
beneath me, as a poor painter with
doctors' bills in his pocket may
glance at the dwellings of the rich,
and sigh, knowing they are not for
him and the likes of him. For me,

just then, I was making the most
of my light, and my painting pro-
mised well, as I thought ; and I
plied my brush happily, thanking
heaven that there was time enough
and to spare for a round dozen of
pictures before I must back to the
smoke and rattle of the town. And
there were intervals in the thrushes'
singing when I thought I could hear
the first few uncertain notes of the
nightingale, before his love is on him
and willy-nilly he must sing, a long-
drawn whistle, keen and thrilling,
and then a jerk and a fal-la-la, as if
he caught himself in song before the
time ; but I listened for him, because
I love the nightingale above all sing-
ing things, and he sent me mad once
before on a hot night in May, — it
must be ten years since.

So my painting grew till the light
had nearly gone ; already the lake
and the woods had dulled, and only
on the hills the sun shone. Then
I heard steps behind me, steps as
of two, treading softly on the grass
and the flowers. They paused at my
back, and I did not look round, for
a painter must make more of his
time than need a — curate, I meant
to write, and let that stand ; but
the colour was wet then, and I
was busy with a half-light in the
chestnuts.

" That's very pretty," spoke a voice
at my elbow.

I finished for the day and turned
on my camp-stool. Two boys stood
by me, their hands in their pockets,
and it seemed my picture had
attracted them. One of them, the
younger (as I guessed) looked at me
and repeated the compliment. Now
my pictures (praise Hooker !) have
found favour before, and disfavour
too, for what that be worth ; but I
like an honest criticism, and this
came of conviction. He looked
curiously at my paint-box, and picked

The Sinner and the Problem.

up a fallen brush, handing it me with
respect, which pleased me mightily;
I cannot tell why, unless that, as a
rule, I am left to gather my brushes
myself. I told him that I felt
honoured by his approval, and I
asked what the other thought ; but
he did not answer directly.

" He likes it because it's green and
red and yellow," said he at last.
" He paints like that himself, in the
papers." He threw himself down in
the grass, and kicked his toes into
the ground one after another, regard-
less of the bluebells. "Now I like
a picture where you can see every-
thing in it, — little frogs and things
in front, I mean ; and something
happening, — a fight, or a house on
fire."

Lack-a-daisy, thought I, but this
is a Philistine ; and I declare I nearly
launched at him the greater part of
my views on Impressionism and other
kindred matters, which would have
puzzled him sorely, I should think, as
mayhap they have puzzled others.
Howbeit, I considered, such things
are not for children to quack over,
after all, and asked him another
question. "So he paints ? " said I,
nodding at his playmate.

"Oh, he does everything, paints,
and draws, and carves people's
names, — that isn't allowed, at least
not on the desks ; but he doesn't care,
he says. He's always in some row
•with the masters ; he tells lies and
cribs and that sort of thing," he
added, not, I could see, without a
certain admiration. " I should think
he was breeched once a week. When
were you breeched last 1 " he asked,
turning his head to glance at the
figure that stood by my side listening
till the tale of his enormities should
be told. I guessed the outlandish
word indicative of a beating.

" Monday," came the answer medi-
tatively, but he blushed and looked

away ; I was a stranger then. This
day, be it said, was Wednesday.

" You're a regular sinner, it seems,"
said I. And on my soul, as I caught
his eyes, I could not help laughing,
till the other stared at me from the
grass in wonder. But the Sinner he
remained, because of that, till the end
of the chapter.

"Draw me," he said.

The impertinence of the small being !
Here was I, a stranger in the land,
not having set eyes on him to my
knowledge before, the sun a flaming
half-circle on the hills, and I must
needs unpack my pencils for him, —
him, breeched once a week ! Yet he
seemed confident enough, and pre-
sently out came my book, and I drew
him where he stood. And as I drew,
I hummed under my breath the lilt
of a tiny French song that comes
to me sometimes when I am amused
beyond my ordinary habit; for a
painter must laugh to live, or the
Hanging Committee might kill him
with so little as a bad light for his
picture. When I had nearly finished,
and the sun showed only a rim of fire,
I found that the other boy was
whistling my little song. He had
not moved from the grass, and two
holes by a clump of primroses showed
the dints of small iron-shod boots.

" Had you heard that before 1 " I
asked.

"That, your tune? No," he
answered simply ; " I like it, though."

The Sinner came round behind me
to look. "He's always whistling.
The music-master says — " He lost
his thread as he caught sight of the
drawing.

Truth to tell, that did not make a
bad picture. When I have looked at
it since, I have heard nightingales
and smelt cowslips ; but others, I
know, have seen little else but a
twelve-year old boy with frayed
knickerbockers, a tip-tilted nose, and
B 2

The Sinner and the Problem.

a cap on the back of his head. Yet
one old man looked at it twice, and
drew a clump of primroses in the
corner of the page ; and as he was
old, and met my meaning half-way, so
to speak, I left it there. To be sure,
since the primrose-clump, some have
hinted at a child listening to spring-
birds ; but he knew it all from the
beginning. He was not a critic,
let it be said.

Of the other I began a picture, too,
lying with his chin on his hands, but
I had not more than outlined him in
charcoal before a distant bell gave
tongue at the school, and the pair of
them looked at each other.

" Can we come and watch you
paint every day ? " questioned the
Sinner.

Now I am a selfish, solitary person,
and particularly dislike a companion
when I am sketching. I cannot tell
why, but the knowledge that he (or
she) could speak to me, even though
I know him by nature taciturn,
shrivels me into a mere bundle of
nerves, and I cannot put brush to
paper without a half-turn of the head
to make certain of his silence. Such
companions I have had in my time,
of course ; and always I have worked
abominably till they were tired of
watching, or perhaps tired of me.
Street Arabs I can tolerate, and reck
their chatter little more than a dog's
bark, and it may be I had thought
of those when the Sinner made his
request ; also, I hardly expected him
to come.

The other boy stood shaking him-
self, and humming my song. He was
older, as I guessed, than the Sinner,
and might have been thirteen. A
big mouth, indefinite nose, and
greenish eyes, — so much I noticed
in the twilight then, and never was
able to catch the same impression of
him afterwards. And this is a
curious matter ; for an early impres-

sion (with me at least, — I know not
how other folk may find it — ) becomes
so overlaid with after-thoughts and
after-circumstances, that I have some-
times wondered whether in truth I
saw and heard aright on first meet-
ing, or whether I cosseted and
developed my own fancies and rhythms
into face or voice, gradually to
eliminate and destroy them later. It
may be so.

"I shall call you the Problem,"
said I to him, for he had not once
glanced at my charcoal outline.

CHAPTER II.

MINE host's custom was to dine
after sundown, whenever that might
be. There is more in that notion than
might appear ; for there are not a few
of my friends whom I am unable to
gratify with my company, in summer
weather at least, knowing that I must
up and away into the house at half -past
seven or go fasting to bed. That is an
ungrateful custom truly, to draw blinds
and light you a lamp when the sun
is still warm and the world alive
beyond the windows. For the light
is the life to such as I am, and I will
not sit by tallow and spermaceti when
shutters are all that are between me
and the sunshine.

But I was to speak of mine host.
Whether because of the hard work he
made in the daytime, or in obedience
to habit and the click of his good
lady's needles, he slept soundly after
dining, and filled the house with the
echoes of his sleeping. This I did not
discover at first, until (I think on
the third evening), after monstrous
attempts at vigilance, he broke off a
pronouncement on politics with a pro-
found snore, and I turned to my book.
On the following morning he wished,
as I fancied, to beg my pardon, but of
course I would none of that, and told
him it had been my own intention

The Sinner and the Problem.

to retire early, but that I feared to
show him discourtesy, which appeared
to relieve his mind to an immense
extent, though he can have had little
opinion of my resolution afterwards,
good soul, if he ever thought more
about the matter. But presently he
proposed that, if I liked the notion,
I should spend an evening or so with
his assistants, who, he thought, might
amuse me. And I, willing to leave
him in peace to dream after his dinner,
proposed in reply that I should throw
in my lot with these younger men
after sundown, pleading irregularity
in my times of going out and coming
in (I might wish to catch an evening
effect a score of miles away, and so on
and so on), and thinking in this way
the less to disturb his comfort. The
upshot was that he agreed with me,
as indeed I knew he must ; and that
same evening I was to visit the men
in their own part of the house.

I had seen these two in the distance
often, and had shaken hands with
both, but as yet I had had little
speech with them. One I guessed at
forty or thereabouts ; clean-shaven he
was, except for a small growth of hair
by his ears, which gave him to my
mind the idea of a confidential family-
servant. Also he rapped out an un-
musical voice with something of a
twang on certain syllables, — hardly
an accent you could call it, but I had
seen the other man shift uneasily on
his chair once or twice when he was
speaking. Him I named the Chief
Butler, and as for the other, so little I
made of him at our first meeting that
insensibly he became the Other Man,
without any more ado about it.

But besides these few impressions
as to their characters I had little
else to go upon, for I was busy now
with a pair of sketches, one from
my laburnum-tree and another sunny
study of the place, taking a somewhat
nearer view ; so that I had seen

nothing, it might be said, of the
general household, except the two
young scamps who found me out on
my first day at the school.

It seemed that mine host's school-
boys were allowed to do much as they
chose in play-hours, and as the Sinner
was pleased to constitute himself a
critic of my performances, the Problem
followed him ; though, beyond a desire
to accompany the Sinner, I fancy he
would not have cared greatly in what
part of the grounds he spent his spare
time, so long as he were allowed to
ruminate undisturbed when he came
there. He lay upon the grass, as a
rule, in his favourite position with his
chin on his hands, never speaking un-
less in answer to a question ; and the
Sinner stood motionless behind me,
watching.

" To whom does the red-brick
house in the valley belong t " I asked
the Problem.

He looked at me keenly. " The one
by the lake? "he asked.

" Yes," said I.

" Red-brick ? "

" Of course."

" Go on," said the Sinner.

" Well, it belongs to a lady."

" An old lady ? " I asked.

" Not what you would call exactly
old. No, not very old ; I think she's
twenty-one," said the Problem. Good
heavens, I thought, and what, then,
was I?

" They had a feast because she was
twenty-one, — that's how he knows,"
interrupted the Sinner.

"Tell me more about her," I
demanded ; but just then the bell
rang and the pair of them took to
their heels, leaving the question un-
answered. I wondered more than
once after that if I had not already
seen her walking by the waterside;
and because I had no answer to what
I asked, I fell to meditating on the
necessities of a scholastic life, when

The Sinner and the Problem.

the long summer days must be chopped
into hours and half-hours to regulate
work and play. Little would that suit
a man of moods like myself, nor to
leave my bed by candlelight for that
matter. Then suddenly an impulse
seized me to stand for a time beneath
the school-room windows and fancy
myself a boy again, with an Algebra
never to be found when wanted, and
a dog's-eared Caesar's Commentaries.
I could hear the Chief Butler in fine
fettle, if I am a judge of a school-
master's temper. In truth, I listened
to the man as one listens to one's own
tongue, hearing it for the first time
after a month in a French village.

" Will you look at the board, boy,
and not sit there telling me that a
multiplied by b comes to a + b 1 "

Wretched man that I am, but I
wondered what in the world was on
the board !

" You sit there, making those
stupid idiotic remarks, with that
stupid idiotic grin, and you don't
take the slightest trouble to think
out the simplest things — the simplest
things that any baby could tell you
without thinking for a moment. Do
think. You thought it was a + 6?
You've no business to think. Will
you just try for one minute — ab,
very well. A b, ab ; now then, what
does a multiplied by b come to ? —
What ? Wait after school."

Inevitable ending ! As I left that
window, one thought rose insistent ;
verily, I would not be a schoolboy !

I wandered to another room and
at first heard nothing, and then the
voice of the Other Man. And as I
left him, may the Academy hang me,
but for worlds I would not have been
a schoolmaster !

I took occasion in the evening to
question the Chief Butler on his call-
ing. He had asked me much of my
own past life, and somewhat piqued
me, perhaps, for I have no school or

college career to boast of. Little
learning I possess, indeed, compared
with the knowledge of these men
with liberal educations, for I ran
away from home at fifteen, and found
my way to Glasgow, where I was
potboy in an inn to tell the truth,
and saved and scraped enough there
to get me to Paris. True, there was
one piece of book-learning for which
I had an affection, the writings of
the Latin poets; and I have always
had a certain aptitude in making
Latin verses. I used to amuse my-
self in the evenings — strange employ-
ment for a Glasgow potboy ! — in
turning my thoughts or reading into
lyrics and elegiacs and so forth, and
once was soundly cuffed by the bar-
man, who accused me of aspiring to
education at the University. Well
I remember his puzzled face as he
glanced over what I had written, —
Greek to him, forsooth ! But he lit
his pipe with my ode to Lalage.
Indeed, I never had a home, as the
word is generally understood ; only
an uncle who paid my schooling, and
thanked his stars, I fancy, when I
left him. But not all this did I tell
to the Chief Butler, though the Other
Man and I came into confidence
later, as I shall have to show.

" I commenced brushing at twenty-
one," gave out the Chief Butler, and
the Other Man shuddered. " I sup-
pose that I know now pretty well all
there is to be known about teaching
mathematics to small boys. Twenty
years is a long time, a very long
time."

He would make this remark in a
reflective tone, and the Other Man,
who knew better than I what might
be coming, twice prevented the con-
tinuance of his speech with a prof-
fered whisky-bottle, which the Chief
Butler refused. I did not under-
stand this at the time, but learned
afterwards that he had forsworn such

The Sinner and the Problem.

luxuries. Still, I wanted to know
the Chief Butler's ideas on the larger
views of life, and drew him to speak
of them.

"Soon," he said, "I shall have
saved enough to start a little place of
my own." And he would go on to
sketch his plans, which truly showed
forethought enough for a Minister's
Budget. He spoke drily and exactly,
calculating for our benefit the smallest
and most trivial expenses, laying
out a hundred here and saving fifty
there with admirable certainty and
precision.

"You will need a wife to help
you," I said once, for I found just
then a curious fascination in listening
to the monotonous voice figuring
twenty years in advance.

At the word ivife he looked at me.
" Yes, I shall be married then," said
he, and became reflective. The Other
Man told me that before it had been
suggested I should spend my evenings
with these two, the Chief Butler
used his time in filling sheets of paper
with estimates and sums in addition.
There was a large book bound in
black leather which lay solitary in a
locked drawer. In it, I was told,
were copied out on the left-hand
pages concise accounts of the prob-
able expenditure of each year of
this school-in-the-air, driven down to
pence in places and everywhere in
the exactest method. He had worked
at it for years, it seemed, and indeed
the only literature to be seen in the
room was concerned with what might
help him, — year-books of public
schools, store-lists, agents' circulars
bound in cloth, works on architecture
and surveying, and I know not what
else beside. At the end of each
year's account, near the bottom of
the page, was an estimated surplus,
with notes as to its value if invested
in safe but paying securities; there
were calculations also of the amount

he would leave behind him, given
that he died in such and such a year,
and pages at the end of the book
wherein he laid out at length
imaginary wills and bequests, among
which the Other Man had set eyes
on the words To my Wife. The
right-hand pages he had left blank,
to chronicle there as the actual years
went round his real expenditure.
He was to retire at seventy, and his
washing-bills were modest. Although,
however, he would speak of the object
of his life with freedom, yet this
book he had shown to none ; but
once the Other Man, returning from
a visit before he was expected, found
his companion out and the book
lying upon the table. He opened it,
little thinking of the possibilities it
contained, and not at first realising
its meaning ; and he asserted to me
(there may be truth in this) that
the Chief Butler would have shown
the book to either of us, but for one
thing, — he had taken into considera-
tion the expenses of a family.

The mathematics of the matter were
rehearsed to me, then, as a novice in
such things. To the Other Man, of
course, it was ancient history, and he
would do his best to change the sub-
ject, the difficulty of doing so serving
but to spur him to fresh endeavour.
He had discovered, he told me (and
indeed I have seen him succeed), an
infallible method. He would stand
before the fireplace and hold forth him-
self on any theme that took his fancy :
he would make speeches for a lawyer,
a condemned criminal, a politician,
would recite, parody, invent ; but
always, nearly, with the same effect,
the silence of the Chief Butler. He
might, had he chosen, have left the
man to add and subtract alone ; but
I fancy he took a certain pleasure in
routing the enemy, and would steel
himself to listen to the ledgers of the
fourth year, for instan.ce, until he

8

The Sinner and the Problem.

found an opportunity of breaking in
with a flood of eloquence to crush his
opponent. It was a kind of duel, and
he took delight in calling his man out
as often as might be. For the Other
Man, as I could well understand, was
of a nature entirely different. His
room was littered with papers and
books ; of a careless habit, he seldom
replaced the last he read in the place
it came from, and a motley crew it
was that strewed his table. Yet a
certain air of comfort, born of deep
arm-chairs and stray tobacco-jars, sur-
rounded his belongings ; and withal
a curious sadness was about the man,
which I never fathomed then, though
I noticed that he seldom spoke to the
schoolboys, or, if he did, he spoke
gravely and in contrast to the ready
laughter of the elder master, who
joked with difficulty but often, in-
sisting on his points. At all events,
the younger man enjoyed not half
the other's popularity.

But I was anxious to repeat to
these the question I had earlier asked
the Sinner and the Problem, small
scoundrels who fled at the sound of
a bell. " Whose is the red-brick house
in the valley ? " I asked.

" It belongs to one of the county
families," answered the Chief Butler.
" The old landlord was a great
traveller, and spent most of his time
on the continent. At present, of
course — "

"Are you thinking of sketching
the lake ? " asked the Other Man.

" It was the old man who added
the left wing," the Chief Butler went
on. " I saw the estimates at the
time ; in fact, I think I may say that
if I — "

" You had better get one of your
small friends to take you there," in-
terrupted the Other Man. " They're
allowed a free run of the place, I
believe, — some relations of hers. And
the woods are worth a visit."

" Relations of hers, — of whose ? " I
asked.

There was a pause, and the Chief
Butler spoke. "When the old man
died, he left a daughter, quite young.
And now — "

" She walks in beauty, like the
night," interposed the Other Man.
" My friend here — but there, he is
wondering if I have quoted any-
thing."

There was no doubt he was, and he
changed the subject to one which
afforded him surer ground for argu-
ment,— that of school-catering. The
Other Man, I could see, was waiting
his time, — he allowed his antagonist
to take the field first ; and I in turn
waited for him, idly wondering what
combination of circumstances had
brought the men together. For the
Other Man remained an enigma. I
could see that he found no pleasure in
the routine of his duties f he never
intended, as I knew, to set the goal
of headmastership before him, nor, so
far as I saw then, had he any object
to aim at whatsoever. Indeed, he
had told me in so many words that,
though he disliked this, he had no
wish to adopt any other profession ;
but he went through his necessary
duties in a matter-of-fact spirit, with-
out ever grumbling, as did his com-
panion, at petty annoyances and trivial
hardships. He had a fine taste in
literature, as I soon discovered, and
was better read than I in many of
the standard French writers ; he had
some notion of German too, but in
that I could not test him. I under-
stood that his career at Oxford had
not, from his tutor's point of view,
been all that it might have been.
He had obtained an Honour degree,
but his reading had been too cosmo-
politan for the liking of the examiners,
and he had attempted to translate at
sight much which had occupied others
two years in the understanding. He

The Sinner and the Problem.

had not, it seemed, adhered to any set
course of study, but rather had pleased
himself as to which books should lie
on his shelves and which on the book-
sellers'. And not only in his reading
had he offended the authorities. To
his mind, they had attempted to exer-
cise over him a control and supervision
little short of ridiculous, considering
(as he would say) that he might not
perhaps have come to Oxford a Solo-
mon, but was not minded to leave it
a schoolboy. Against the dons of his
college he bore a resentment, none
the less deep-seated because he seldom
spoke of it without laughter. He
seemed to have looked for sympathy
in his own pursuits, and to have
been met with no more than an
enquiry as to matters of the towing-
path, to have wished to discuss reli-
gious subjects with his tutor, and to
have been stopped short with ques-
tions on his absence from chapel ; and
eventually his interviews with those
set over him were confined to formal
visits made necessary by notes de-
livered to him by the porter. He had
been wont to dine in his lodgings, and
to dress for a solitary dinner. For he
was something of a gourmet, perhaps,
and something of a dandy. I never
saw him when he was not faultlessly
dressed, — a matter which interested
me, for there were few to notice it —
and on the subject of undergraduates'
dinners he was an authority. His
opportunity of retaliation came, at
the present juncture, when the Chief
Butler had wandered rather farther
afield than usual.

" At the 'Varsity "—I disliked this
word, but certainly the other is a
most unmanageable length for a man
with no time to waste — " At the
'Varsity," said the Chief Butler, " they
must have made a lot out of hall-
dinners. Look at the figures of the
business. Take a hundred-and-twenty-
five men, round numbers, and make

your charge for dinner two shillings.
Say that twenty have taken their
names off hall at the buttery, and
fine them sixpence a head for doing
so; there's ten shillings clear profit.
Say that five more have taken their
names off in the same way, and have
changed their minds and dined in
college after all ; charge them for
their dinners, and fine them for chang-
ing their minds, — there's another half-
crown. Then the others pay you £10
a night, — £10 12s. 6d. altogether —
roughly speaking £75 a week. Now
that sum, taking into consideration
the kind of dinner provided — "

But the Other Man saw his opening
and was off in pursuit of a glutton
who penned a weekly article on eating
for an evening paper. " Your soup,"
he declaimed with a marvellous play
of countenance, " your soup, if indeed
your appetite be Gargantuan, will
steam before you, redolent of nothing
in particular. So you be in an empiric
mood, you will taste it, and ponder
on the philosophy of Heraclitus.
c All is fire ' — was not that it ? — and
this is a study in black and white,
a symphony in pepper. Linger, that
you lose not casual suggestion of cat
— your waiter rescues you — and wel-
come an entree. Fish after soup?
That were a Rabelaisian excess. No,
your entree claims precedence, and
presto, look, a whisk of pewter covers,
and you have your choice, courtly
croquette of unassuming sheep, or
rechauffe of once clucking roost-
champion. At such a crisis pause !
The true artist's soul is stirred to its
depths ; a mistake, and ^Esculapius
will be your creditor. You hesitate 1
You are saved. There's quantity in
those croquettes ; turn rather to thick-
rumped roysterer of the barn-yard,
coy in traditional cloak of white sauce
and grated beet. 'Tis a meal for
an antiquarian — help your neighbour
freely. And now — "

10

The Sinner and the Problem.

The Chief Butler, who was a good
churchman, half rose, thinking the
end near. But the Other Man, notic-
ing the movement with the tail of
his eye, waved a hand to deprecate
interruption.

" And now, what consummation
would you suggest ? Heaven forbid
an anti-climax ! A serious matter,
this ; do you accept the responsibility ?
Well, then, you must choose between
Norwegian blackcock, racy of peat,
paint-pot, or what may be, and deli-
cately scalded leg of mutton, to which
the willing caper adds appropriate
zest. Come, up with the dice ! for
there is a glint of tinned apricots
refusing to be ignored. Without fear
banish your black - game, cut your
capers, and consider a sweet. Con-
sider it, no more ; and the end is
really at hand. To dine wisely in
hall, is not that to dine well at the
Mitre afterwards ? "

The Chief Butler sat perfectly
silent. Presently he drew out his
watch, wound it carefully, and went
to bed. I too was silent for a short
time; and then I asked the Other
Man a question. " If you can talk
like that — but why do you speak of
the impossibility of entering any pro-
fession but this, for which you are not
fitted, and which you hate 1 "

He did not reply immediately.
" Does the prophet always desire
honour — in his own country ? " he
asked slowly.

I did not understand the answer
to that till some time later ; but the
puzzle he set me to guess was not the
only result of that night's conversa-
tion, for I think it was on that
evening that in consequence of my
questions there first existed for me
a Lady of the Lake. In any case,
thought I, at the lake-side there was
a chance of lining my pocket, for the
colour of the trees in the water had
caught my fancy, and once, I thought,

I had seen the Lady of the Lake
guiding her punt among the swans.

CHAPTER III.

Now, because of the answers I had
had from all I questioned on the sub-
ject of the red-brick house in the
valley, I was occupied with an inex-
tinguishable desire to walk by the
lake myself, and perhaps gain a nearer
sight of its Lady than was possible
from under my laburnum-tree. The
house was distant may be half-a-mile
or so, in the lap of gently sloping
hay-fields and hills where daffodils
bloomed in April. But now the
hedges were white with the fire of
the may, and cuckoos called up from
the lake and wood-peckers whistled,
till I tuned them to a song bidding
me down and look about me. And
the larks were gone wild in the sky,
and the wind that blew from the
West was clean with the smell of
rain and earth and primroses, and
the sun shone in the lake and made
it a mirror for me, and the life of
the big world ran riot in my blood,
as it must in the blood of all men in
the month of May. In the night,
too, when the woods were dark and
dewy and the moon above all, I could
hear the nightingales singing. Just a
twitter and a twitter, — then a keening
note, long-drawn and pure and sorrow-
ful, and then a throbbing passion of
singing that shook and thrilled up
the hill to me, and I could not sleep
for the mere joy of it all.

And once, when I had listened far
into the night, the song of the nightin-
gale was still in me the next morning
as I painted, — aye, and for long after,
till June and July had gone in a
flame of roses, and an August sun
lay heavy on the woods, while the
birds sat quiet and small, their spring-
anthems over and done with, and for

The Sinner and the Problem.

11

some the days drawing on for journey-
ing and travel.

" Sinner," said I, " I want to see
the Lady of the Lake." He did not
understand, as I might have known,
for I spoke out what I was thinking,
and he knew little of that. " I want
to paint the lake in the valley, where
the red-brick house is, and to do that
I must have permission."

" Oh, I'll take you," said he. " I
know her ; she's my aunt's cousin, and
we go there sometimes; we haven't
been since you came."

The Problem looked up. " He gets
butterflies and things," he said. " I've
been with him."

" We could go this afternoon.
Would you like to?" asked the Sinner.
" Of course," I said. " It may not
be fine to-morrow." Now the sky
was cloudless, and the glass as high
as I have seen it, and as a fact, it
was fair weather for a month to
follow ; but there, who could know
that?

The boys were off to beg leave
of absence. This, I learnt afterwards,
took the form of a direct petition from
myself ; thus are we misconstrued.
" We knew we should be allowed to
go, if we said that," explained the
Sinner later. "You meant it, too,
didn't you ? Or was it only to amuse
us?"

" He wanted to draw the lake,"
said the Problem. " He told you
so ; " which the Sinner took as a very
good reason.

"I wonder if you'll fall in love
with her," went on the Sinner.
" Every one does, you know."
" Who is every one ? "
"Oh, my aunt says every one
does. At least, she said that once ;
and another time she said it was
scandalous, and that she tried to
make people fall in love with her, —
every one, even if she didn't like
them."

" Your aunt tried 1 "
The Sinner looked up at me sur-
prised. " Oh no," he said seriously.
" I shouldn't think any one could
love my aunt ; she's too thin, I
should think."

" And she wears black cotton
gloves," said the other, "and specta-
cles, and she has black hair, — at
least, a little — and elastic side-boots,
and a red point to her nose, and
she always carries an umbrella and
goloshes." When the Problem laid
himself out to criticise an acquain-
tance he was certainly frank ; but he
made you see with his eyes, so to
speak. It was not the kind of criti-
cism I had learnt to expect from
the Chief Butler, for instance ; when-
ever that man set epithet to man
or woman, I found myself instinc-
tively defending and suggesting, and
must pick out possibly good points
for a contrast. He had a curious
trick of provoking opposition, and
often enough I knew nothing of
those he might be abusing, but they
were my friends so soon as he spoke
of them.

" But you, how did you hear all
this about your aunt's cousin ? " I
asked.

" She didn't mean me to hear," he
said reflectively. " I was under the
sofa, you see."

" Under the sofa ? "

" Yes. I had a ferret, you know,
and I thought perhaps it would find
rats and things if I took it round
the house ; and in the drawing-room
the string got caught on the sofa-leg,
so I had to go under it to undo the
string ; and then my aunt came into
the room with a lady, and they
talked a long time, and I had to
keep still."

" And the ferret ? "

" Well, that was how it was. It
came out, because I couldn't catch
it in time, and I saw it put up its

12

The Sinner and the Problem.

nose to look at my aunt, and then
she screamed and jumped off the
sofa, and so they knew it was me,
after that."

"You deserved a beating that
time, Sinner."

" Of course I wasn't very big,
then," he answered. " Now I just
run away, you know. But she didn't
say much at the time, only I had to
go to bed. I had to say I was
sorry afterwards, too. If I had
thought, it would have been better
to have said so when she came up
to my room ; but , you see, she took
my ferret away, so I wasn't."

I pondered a little on this dire
relative of the Sinner. A week or
so after this I met her, and changed
my opinion of her somewhat ; but I
found that I could have drawn a
portrait of her from the Problem's
description.

We were walking along the edge
of a nut-copse, and I was about to
ask some further question on the
subject of this Gorgon of an aunt,
when both boys darted from my side
in pursuit of a small butterfly. The
Problem, after various wild sweeps
with his net, to the imminent peril
of my hat in which the insect
appeared to find a peculiar attrac-
tion, at last caught it, and flung
himself down on the grass, net and
all, to examine.

"It's a Green Hairstreak," he re-
ported. The Sinner gave a short cry
of delight, and I stood watching
the two, their heads close together,
engaged in placing the creature in an
infernal-looking bottle. They gazed
at it with the utmost affection and
joy as it fluttered wildly under the
cork, laid its little brown wings
together, and presently was quite
still, the moon-green on its under-
wings gleaming through the glass.
I reflected on the strange mixture
of instincts stretched on the ground

before me, — small bodies alert with
life and happiness and love for their
fellow-creatures, who yet could look
with the greatest interest on the
dying struggles of a little insect,
rejoicing in the certainty of power
and possession. But the tiny bright
wings soon lay in a cork-lined box
for a coffin, and a pin fastened them
motionless ; while the common white
butterflies danced by over the hill
and up again into the sun, like the
happy unheeded nobodies they were.

Down the wood-path we went, and
the cuckoos flirted out their notes
from the tree-tops, and sat on the
oaks and made echoes for us. And
there in the middle of the water,
throwing bread to her swans, stood
the Lady of the Lake in her punt
among the lilies : one hand she kept
to her pole, but carelessly, so that
she drifted ; and with the other she
scattered morsels of bread like a
snow-shower, while the big white
birds put down their long necks and
lifted them again, oaring themselves
leisurely and with swelling ripples
under their breasts. Then the Sin-
ner went down to the reeds and
called to her, and she looked up
and saw us, and I could hear the
water drip from her pole as she
poised herself to send it down deep.
She came to us, the waves lapping
in the shadow of the curved wood
with sounds that quickened and
died again as the punt started and
slid over the water.

On my honour, until the reeds bent
and rustled by the bank, and the
Sinner and the Problem busied them-
selves with a chain and a spike, I had
not thought what I should say to her.
The Problem saved me the trouble of
thinking. He waved a hand in my
direction. " We've come," he said.
" He wanted to see you."

She looked at him as he lifted his
face to speak to her, and he returned

The Sinner and the Problem.

13

her gaze with unquestioning direct-
ness, as if in all the world it were the
most natural and proper introduction
possible. Then she turned her eyes
upon me; and perhaps it was what
she saw there (for if ever a poor
painter made a sorry show of con-
sternation, I did then), that made her
lips twitch and the dimples dance at
the corners, and her eyes the while
glanced from him to me and back
again, till she broke into the merriest
peal of laughter, and I perforce with
her.

" I hope that is true, at all events,"
said she.

"I ought to explain," I began. "I
am a painter, and your beautiful lake
attracted me, and — "

"Oh come," she said, stepping out
of her punt, " is another explanation
necessary ] I do not so often get at
the truth of things, as to need to shut
the lid of the well when I have found
it." Her eyes still darkened and
lightened with laughter, and she laid
a hand on the Sinner's shoulder.
"This boy is a cousin of mine; he's
not a bad boy in his way, but he's
usually in other people's way too.
Aren't you 1 " she added. The Sinner
stood quite still, but his gaze was
concentrated on a patch of flowers
I could see at a corner where some
golden-brown butterflies flaunted.
He reminded me of a puppy on a
chain, with a cat out of his reach ; he
knew that the hand prohibited an
instant escape to the chase. "He's
longing now to be off and after those
fritillaries." The Sinner looked up at
her. " Yes, the fritillaries are out.
I thought you would have come to
see before. There, now run and be
happy." She watched the small stal-
wart legs carry the owner apace to
the corner with an approving smile.
" Now this boy," she went on,
" doesn't run away like that ; he is
quite different. When they come

down here, he walks about with me,
and doesn't bother about the poor
butterflies." The Problem glanced at
me, and I thought of the Green Hair-
streak. " But there," she added,
"you will be longing to get to work
on the lake ; I oughtn't to have kept
you so long. It is pretty, isn't it ? I
spend quite a large amount of time in
my punt, — perhaps the boys told you1?
Are you staying at the school 1 " she
went on, without waiting for a reply.
"And you have made friends with my
boys, it seems 1 Then I must have a
rival ; I thought I was the only per-
son honoured. I call them my boys,
you see ; but I haven't seen them for
a long time, and we are going to have
great fun this afternoon. You, of
course, will be wanting to paint, so
we'll leave you and perhaps come back
to criticise." And without a word
more she was off with a merry nod
over her shoulder, and the Problem,
not even glancing at me this time,
with her.

Here was a pretty state of things !
I had not spoken a dozen words to
her and there she left me for the
afternoon to make a picture of her
lake, and she away with those little
ragamuffins picking flowers and catch-
ing butterflies. For I watched her to
the corner of the path, and before she
turned the wood's edge she had raced
the Problem for a clump of primroses,
caught him away as he began to pick
them, and put three in his buttonhole.
I could see her pull a pin from her
coat to fasten them prettily ; and then
they were round the corner and I saw
no more of them.

I went slowly up the path in the
opposite direction. At least, thought
I, am I not company enough for my-
self, needing but brush and box and
paper? And at length I picked a
spot where the sun shone slantwise
on the water through a net of beech-
leaves, and set myself to paint the

14

The Sinner and the Problem.

calling of the cuckoos into my picture.
I could hear beyond the wood the
sound and an echo of laughter, and
more than once I caught myself with
my brush wet with a wash, having
forgotten the colour of it. No mood
this for a poor painter with a doctor's
bill to pay, and I laid my sable about
me with some effect, as I thought
then. But there was little of the
laughter to be heard after a while,
because of the cuckoos ; and I fell to
wondering whether it was not, after
all, the associations and memories of
the season that set their note to a
pleasant tune rather than the actual
melody of it, finding a certain mono-
tony in the cadences. Perhaps I was
a couple of hours at the picture, and
the cuckoos called all the time.

All at once I found that I was not
painting at all. No, my brush had
dried to a stiff point in the sun, and
the paper held little but a dull-tinted
wash of water and a grey-blue sky
and the colours of the trees. My
sakes, thought I, but here's a recom-
mendation for another visit ! And I
listened before I began again whether
there were voices near me, or whether
I should have time to turn a respect-
able amount of white paper a better
colour before they were back to me
again. And then there was a faint
rustle and a hush behind me, and I
turned, and there were the Lady of
the Lake and the Sinner and the
Problem watching me.

The Sinner was jubilant. " Didn't
you hear us come 1 We've been here
ever so long, and you haven't been
doing anything but stare at the sky."
He came nearer to inspect. "Why,
you've hardly painted at all."

Then came another voice. " Did
you find it hard to choose the place ? "
asked she mischievously, and set her
head on one side to criticise. " No

one has ever yet actually been drowned
in the lake," she added in a melan-
choly tone. I looked at my easel ;
verily, it was gloomy water.

" We've had such fun," went on
the Sinner, " all of us. We got tired
of looking for butterflies, so we took
off our shoes and stockings and went
and paddled in the brook and tried to
catch the trout. She drove them
down to us and I nearly caught one,
only it was a minnow. We've got
awfully wet." This seemed to afford
him immense joy. " The brook's quite
shallow, you know, and there are
simply millions of fishes. She's got
wet, too," he added, nodding.

The Lady of the Lake had, I
fancied, started a little at the Sinner's
open relation of her doings. Then
she laughed, a subdued little chuckle.
" Evidently they don't mind what
they tell you," said she. " They treat
me like a boy, too. Indeed, if I were
to see much more of them — when
shall you finish that picture ? " she
broke off abruptly.

I said that I thought I should not
continue it; and then I made haste
to say that I wished to try another
from a different point of view, taking
in the house. She looked at the boys
and commented on the wetness of them.

" If we catch cold, you will too,"
said the Sinner ; and at that she
pretended to shiver and took out her
watch.

"Come, we had better be going,"
said I. And as I shook hands with
her she must have seen the ill-humour
in my eyes, for she turned with a
laugh to the Problem and told him
to take care of his nosegay and to
remember who gave it him. And
she kissed the Sinner and was round
the corner of the house before I
realised that I had not obtained
permission to paint a better picture.

(To be continued.)

15

STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORY.

III. RICHARD THE THIRD.

IN the study of such a wildly
extravagant age as the fifteenth
century one is constantly brought
face to face with characters and
events so egregious and so abnormal
that, at a distance of four hundred
years, it is almost impossible to give
them credence. "We may have con-
temporary or nearly contemporary
evidence in support of the wild stories
of the time, but even that is not
sufficient to convince us that at some
few periods in the world's history,
and those not the lowest in point of
culture and general civilisation, men
have utterly belied their nature and
continually outraged laws obedience
to which is almost instinctive. It is
urged that the wickedness of the time
must have been exaggerated, that the
writers who record it were clearly
influenced by party-spirit or personal
feeling, and that we are therefore
bound to give a charitable interpre-
tation to the events recorded. Still
the tradition remains and records
support tradition. For the violent
lawlessness of England in the fifteenth
century we have such evidence in
contemporary chronicles, and in those
traditions which writers of the highest
character in the next age have handed
down, that it is impossible to deny
the substantial truth of their account.
And indeed, when we consider the
period as a whole and call to mind
the long story of treachery, oppres-
sion, feebleness, and slaughter which
led up to the last few years of horror
and murder wherein Richard of
Gloucester moves like a thing accursed,

we can understand that men had gone
mad, that they had almost lost their
humanity, and that they cannot be
judged by the standard of other ages.
Many attempts have been made
at different times to overthrow the
traditional view of the character of
Richard the Third. Shakespeare's
treatment of his character is at first
sight so singularly inartistic and so
wildly improbable that men have been
repelled from it ; they have sifted the
evidence for his crimes and have
found, as they thought, that for most
of them there is only the evidence of
tradition, whereas the better side of
his character has been completely
ignored. Thrown thus violently on
the side of Richard, whom they con-
ceive to have been so maligned, they
reconstruct the story of the times in
his favour, presenting him as a tyrant
indeed and unscrupulous, but full of
virtuous impulses and merciful inten-
tions. Thus they reject Sir Thomas
More, Shakespeare, and the rest,
either as being influenced by Tudor
prejudices, or unwilling to doubt a
story which lent itself so well
to the purposes of a dramatic his-
torian. With regard to Shakespeare
also it has been suggested that the
Elizabethan dramatists were, through
their study of the Italian drama,
infected with a certain morbid love
of evil men and cruel stories as the
material for their plays ; hence came
such plays as TITUS ANDRONICUS and
THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, and hence
also the character which Shakespeare
ascribes to Richard the Third.

16

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

It is perhaps as well to begin by
saying plainly that Shakespeare's
Richard cannot be considered a
strictly historical portrait. To the
most superficial view it is clear that
the historical plays differ from each
other not only in the amount of
accuracy which they attain but in
the care expended to attain it. This
of course corresponds to the difference
in the motive of the several plays.
It is quite common to hear Shake-
speare's historical plays spoken of as
a mere dramatised chronicle; but
such criticism is trivial and inaccurate.
The fact is that each separate play,
or, in two cases, group of plays, was
written with a separate and distinct
object. Thus KING JOHN is essen-
tially a moral study, the story of
a conscience; historical accuracy is
not here of the highest importance.
RICHARD THE SECOND, like HAMLET,
is an almost minutely careful analysis
of a very peculiar character ; here the
historical setting is of greater import-
ance because of the influence which
actual circumstances exercised upon
the king's character. The three plays
in which the tale of Henry the Fifth's
life is told are, likewise, in their
principal aspect the story of the
development of a man's character,
but of a less subtle, stronger, more
independent character, the treatment
of which is naturally less delicate and
follows broader lines ; nevertheless
the historical side of these plays is
still important and their accuracy in
the main outlines undeniable.

What then of the three parts of
HENRY THE SIXTH and of RICHARD
THE THIRD ? All these four plays are
remarkable for considerable historical
inaccuracy in their details, and
Richard of Gloucester, who is really
the protagonist in the third part of
HENRY THE SIXTH as well as in
RICHARD THE THIRD, is a creature of
such Titanic wickedness that we can-

not believe that Shakespeare intended
it to be taken as an accurate portrait
of the real man.

I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear,
Indeed, 'tis true that Henry told me

of;

For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs

forward :
Had I not reason, think ye, to make

haste,
And seek their ruin that usurp'd our

right?
The midwife wonder'd and the women

cried
"O, Jesus bless us, he is born with

teeth ! "

And so I was ; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite and play

the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped

my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to

answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no

brother ;

And this word " love," which grey-
beards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another
And not in me : I am myself alone.

(III. HENRY THE SIXTH, 5, vi.)

Some recent critics have maintained
that the first part of HENRY THE
SIXTH is not by Shakespeare at all,
but by some friend or pupil ; and the
play is, both historically and artistic-
ally, so inferior that one would
willingly believe it. But take the
four plays, and more especially the
last two, the third part of HENRY THE
SIXTH and RICHARD THE THIRD, and
consider what can have been Shake-
speare's motive in casting into drama-
tic form such a chronicle of crime
without a single attractive character
to relieve its gloomy monotony. The
question is difficult ; but I believe
that his object was sufficiently simple.
He wished to present in the boldest
outlines and the simplest form the
tragic story of the Wars of the Roses.
Now in that chaotic struggle the two
factions were so confused, men's

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

17

motives and actions so uncertain, that
modern research cannot be said even
now to have arrived at a really satis-
factory account of the period. It is
then no matter for surprise if Shake-
speare's dramatic version is full of
inaccuracies. The question then re-
mains, how far these plays may be
taken as a true picture of the strife of
parties in these wars; and next, if
the men of that time were such as
Shakespeare has depicted them, what
possible explanation there may be for
such a departure from the normal in
that particular generation.

Ever since the deposition of Richard
the Second, — perhaps from before that
event, but the deposition is a con-
venient landmark — England had been
in a state of unrest. Henry the
Fourth was never really secure on his
throne ; the rebellions of the Percies
were a real danger to him, and during
their latter stages we may see the
beginning of the Yorkist Party. The
Lollard risings in this and the suc-
ceeding reign were more dangerous
than they have usually been considered,
especially as the Lollard doctrines
appear to have contained a political
programme of a somewhat extreme
democratic nature. At the beginning
of his reign Henry the Fifth was
threatened by a formidable Yorkist
conspiracy, and his freedom from
domestic disturbances during the rest
of his life was entirely due to his
successful war with France. So soon,
therefore, as his strong hand was
removed, and so soon as the English
arms in France became less prosperous,
civil disturbance was inevitable.

The quarrels of Cardinal Beaufort
and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester,
were, as has often been said, the
beginning of that ministerial struggle,
which was the first phase of the Wars
of the Roses. It is beside the ques-
tion to give here even the barest out-
line of that struggle ; I would merely
No. 493. — VOL. LXXZIII.

suggest that the nature of the strife
and the manner in which it was con-
ducted were eminently calculated to
produce such characters and such
actions as Shakespeare describes in
HENKY THE SIXTH and RICHARD THE
THIRD. On the one side was a large
party of the nobility, thoroughly dis-
gusted with the misgovernment at
home and the ill success of the
English armies in France, who were
willing to try the effect of a change in
the dynasty and who hoped to better
their own fortunes in the process.
On the other side was the party led
by Queen Margaret of Anjou, who
felt that their own interests were
bound up with the maintenance of the
Lancastrians in power. But it must
be observed that on either side were
many who had no real preference for
York or Lancaster, and who were
always willing to join the winning
party, or the party from whom at any
given moment they appeared likely
to gain most. Hence the constant
treachery and desertion which is one
of the chief characteristics of this
war, and hence also the savage
cruelty shown to the vanquished ; for,
while the leaders hated each other on
personal and political grounds, deser-
tion often provoked the desire for
revenge on lesser captives. Thus
there is nothing unhistorical in the
cruelty and treachery of the characters
in these plays.

Can however the crudeness of the
plays be defended, the absence of
relief from the gloomy nature of the
action ? Above all, can Shakespeare's
conception of Richard himself be
supported 1

As to the crudeness of the plays
and the absence of relief, I would
suggest that the former quality was
intentional and the latter inevitable.
Shakespeare had it in his mind to
commemorate the madness of a na-
tion, the madness, at least, of its

18

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

ruling classes, a madness shown in
bloody and treacherous deeds, a de-
scription of which is only tolerable if
it be bare, classical, and unadorned.
Such a picture must be painted in
broad masses of crude colour, such a
story must be told plainly, simply,
unrelentingly ; the pathos, if pathos
there be, must be kept in the back-
ground ; nothing must distract the
eye from the terrible actors going to
their doom.

And the absence of relief is inevit-
able ; can we imagine the scene
between Richard the Second's queen
and the gardener transferred to these
plays? No such gentle, child-like
character is admissible ; rather we
have Margaret of Anjou raging like
a Fury against her enemies, and,
when she has been overthrown by
them, haunting them and exulting in
their overthrow. To the old Duchess
of York she cries :

Bear with me; I am hungry for

revenge,

And now I cloy me with beholding it.
Thy Edward he ia dead, that stabb'd

my Edward ;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my

Edward ;
Young York he is but boot, because

both they
Match not the high perfection of my

loss:
Thy Clarence he is dead that kill'd my

Edward ;

And the beholders of this tragic play,
The adulterate Hastings, Rivers,

Vaughan, Grey,
Untimely smother'd in their dusky

graves.

Richard yet lives, hell's black intelli-
gencer,

Only reserved their factor, to buy souls
And send them thither : but at hand,

at hand,

Ensues his piteous and unpitied end :
Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar,

saints pray,

To have him suddenly conveyed away.
Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray,
That I may live to say, The dog is

dead!

(RICHARD THE THIRD, 4, iv.)

And for pathos we have the scene
in which Henry the Sixth, after
moralising on the miseries of kingship,
is himself the spectator of a son's grief
for the father he has killed and a
father's grief for his son. This scene,
indeed, may be taken as the epitome
of the Wars of the Roses as Shake-
speare conceived them ; a contest for
no principle, a strife in which closest
kinsmen and dearest friends are forced
to seek each others' lives, while the
King, the unwilling cause of all this
misery, sits and watches in tears.
Containing as it does some of the
finest lines in these plays, it is per-
haps worth while to quote this scene
in part. King Henry mourns his
fate with more pathos, if less subtlety,
than Richard the Second.

Would I were dead ! if God's good will
were so ;

For what is in this world but grief and
woe?

0 God ! methinks it were a happy life,

To be no better than a homely swain ;

To sit upon a hill, as I do now,

To carve out dials quaintly, point by
point,

Thereby to see the minutes how they
run,

How many make the hour full com-
plete ;

How many hours bring about the day ;

How many days will finish up the year ;

How many years a mortal man may
live.

(III. HENRY THE SIXTH, 2, v.)

Then come the deaths of a father
at his son's hands and of a son at
his father's, and the King and the
unwilling murderers lament their
unhappiness alternately.

K. Hen. Woe above woe 1 grief more

than common grief !
O that my death would stay these ruth-

ful deeds 1

O, pity, pity, gentle heaven, pity 1
The red rose and the white are on his

face,

The fatal colour of our striving houses :
The one his purple blood right well

resembles ;

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

19

The other his pale cheeks, methinks,

presenteth :
Wither one rose, and let the other

flourish ;
If you contend, a thousand lives must

wither.
Son. How will my mother for a

father's death

Take on with me and ne'er be satisfied!
Father. How will my wife for

slaughter of my son
Shed seas of tears and ne'er be

satisfied !
K. Hen. How will the country for

these woful chances
Misthink the king and not be satisfied !
Son. Was ever son so rued a father's

death ?
Father. Was ever father so be-

moan'd his son ?
K. Hen. Was ever king so grieved

for subjects' woe ?

Much is your sorrow ; mine ten tunes
so much.
(III. HENRY THE SIXTH, 2, v.)

Lastly, granting the historical truth,
the artistic fitness of the setting, is
it possible still further to maintain
that Shakespeare's conception of the
central figure is in any sense his-
torical and, supposing it to be his-
torical, is such a character a fit subject
for artistic treatment 1

Mr. James Gairdner, the most
distinguished of the modern bio-
graphers of Richard the Third, has
told us that, influenced by Walpole's
HISTORIC DOUBTS, he was for years
under the impression that the tradi-
tional view of Richard's character
was incorrect and unjust ; after the
study of the original authorities,
however, he became convinced that
the portrait of Shakespeare and Sir
Thomas More is in its main outlines
a true one. It is unnecessary to
repeat here the cogent arguments
which Mr. Gairdner brings forward
in favour of his view. Suffice it to
say that of all the crimes which tradi-
tion has ascribed to Richard, for
some there is good evidence, for all,
taken separately, strong probability,
while against no single crime can any

weight of evidence or improbability
be brought. It is, then, only when
taken in the mass that this king's
wickedness becomes incredible; and,
even when thus viewed, it is less
difficult to believe, when we remember
that More and Shakespeare have
suppressed the better side of Richard's
character, so that we have after all to
deal with a mixed nature, in which
the bad element was certainly unusu-
ally excessive, but which was not for
that reason wholly abominable.

Apart from the disorder of the
time in which he lived, — a time
particularly likely to produce mon-
strous and abnormal characters, —
the circumstances of Richard's own
youth were such as to check every
merciful impulse in him and encourage
his tendencies to cruelty and ambition.
There seems little doubt that he was
physically weak and deformed, though
later ages probably exaggerated his
deformity to match the tradition of
his crimes.

I, that am curtail'd of this fair

proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling

nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my

time
Into this breathing world, scarce half

made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by

them ;
Why, I, hi this weak piping time of

peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on my own deformity :
And therefore, since I cannot prove a

lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken

days,

I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these

days.

(BlCHAED THE THIRD, 1, i.)

Being thus physically disabled but
possessing a passionate nature and
great intellectual powers, it was not
c 2

20

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

unnatural that his disposition became
soured, while his disadvantages pro-
voked and stimulated his political
ambition. As he himself says :

Then, since this earth affords no joy

to me,
But to command, to check, to o'erbear

such

As are of better person than myself,
I'll make my heaven to dream upon

the crown,
And, whiles I live, to account this

world but hell, •
Until my mis-shaped trunk that bears

this head
Be round impaled with a glorious

crown.

(III. HENRY THE SIXTH, 8, i.)

Starting, then, with a nature thus
embittered and almost frantically
ambitious, the cruel element in his
character would be still further irri-
tated by the wrongs of his house.
There is little to choose between the
two parties in respect of their con-
duct to vanquished enemies ; each
vied with the other in deeds of
savagery. But Clifford's murder of
the Earl of Rutland (which appears
to be authentic, though Shakespeare
is wrong in making him the youngest
of the sons of York), and the murder
of the Duke of York himself by
Margaret and Clifford with every
cruel circumstance which a horrible
ingenuity could suggest, are among
the worst of the crimes with which
either party can be charged. The
murder of Prince Edward of Lan-
caster by the three York brothers,
and of King Henry by Richard,
may be in some degree attributed to
revenge and political necessity.

But what of the rest of his crimes
for which not even this excuse can
be made? It might be possible to
maintain that he was cursed with
blood-madness, a form of lust which
some writers have thought they
found traces of among the tyrants

of medieval Italy, that he was a wild
beast by nature and that, having
once tasted blood, he was never
satisfied except when he was killing.
I do not, however, believe that
Richard was by nature cruel, not
at least that he found pleasure in
cruel deeds. He was utterly un-
scrupulous in the attainment of his
ends, though strangely scrupulous in
his conduct when his ends were once
attained ; for example, he allowed
stories to be circulated against his
mother's honour in order to assist
his claim to the crown, and yet in
his own conduct towards her he
was always remarkably respectful and
affectionate. He was merciless to
individuals who stood in his way ;
yet as king he showed a real desire
to rule for the benefit of the people
and to remove some of the heavy
burdens which Edward the Fourth
had laid upon them.

The truth I believe to be that,
starting with an overmastering am-
bition for that which was almost
unattainable, he found himself com-
pelled to commit murder after
murder, while assuming a most re-
volting hypocrisy, in order to reach
the end which he had set for himself.

And I, — like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with

the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the

way;

Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out, —
Torment myself to catch the English

crown :
And from that torment I will free

myself,

Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.
(III. HENRY THE SIXTH, 3, ii.)

The attainder of Clarence and the
murder of the Princes he must have
plotted from the first. The former
of these two crimes he probably
achieved by working on King

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

21

Edward's suspicions, never entirely
laid to rest after Clarence's treachery
with Warwick, and by hinting at
the danger involved in Clarence's
knowledge of Edward's early mar-
riage to Lady Eleanor Butler, a story
which he afterwards made use of
in preparing the way for his own
seizure of the crown. The mystery
about the murder of the Princes has
never been wholly cleared up, but
there is little doubt that Shake-
speare's account of it is substantially
true.

These, then, were crimes which
he must have always anticipated ;
so also was the murder of the
Woodville relatives of the two
Princes, who undoubtedly would have
hindered his designs. But he did
not stop here ; having advanced so
far he was compelled to have recourse
to further violence in order to secure
himself in a position to which he
had no right. He was, moreover,
full of suspicion and haunted by the
fear lest others should prove as
treacherous as himself- This accounts
for such acts as the execution of
Hastings and his scheme to marry
Edward the Fourth's daughter, Eliza-
beth, even during the life-time of his
own wife.

At his best, then, Richard the
Third was a traitor, a murderer, a
tyrant, and a hypocrite, and one
wonders what there can have been
in such a character which could gain
for him the affection of some at least
of his contemporaries and inspire later
writers with the desire to defend his
memory. That he could persuade
Anne Neville, whose husband he had
helped to murder, to marry him, that
he could win and retain the affection
not only of such men as Hastings and
Buckingham, but also of the citizens
of York and the people on the Yorkist
lands in that neighbourhood, that he
could win over Elizabeth Woodville,

the mother of the murdered Princes,
to a scheme for his marriage to her
daughter or, as some say, to herself, —
all these facts argue a power of attrac-
tion which is not visible in Shake-
speare's portrait of him, for all that he
mentions the facts themselves.

What was the secret of this attrac-
tion ? It must have been, I think,
this, that Richard of Gloucester was
the strongest man of his age. An
abler statesman than his brother
Edward and very little inferior to him
in military skill, his self-command
gave him a control over men and
events which Edward never could
reach. As brave as Warwick and
intellectually far his superior, he
showed great skill in taking the place
which Warwick's death had left vacant
and putting himself at the head of the
old nobles against the influence of the
Queen's relatives. To this alliance
alone he owed his crown ; without
Buckingham's aid his unscrupulous
cunning would have been useless.
Had not the daring of his wickedness
exceeded all proportion, he would
have been as great if not greater than
Louis the Eleventh, for the task he
had set himself was fully as hard as the
French king's. But such prodigality
of crime becomes even in a strong
man weakness and, from a purely
cynical point of view, can only be
excused by the impossibility of the
goal he was seeking. In any case
Richard of Gloucester is a less detest-
able figure than Louis the Eleventh,
for, though we may hate and fear him,
he is not the object of a contempt
which forbids pity.

Was Shakespeare then justified in
ignoring the better side of Richard's
nature and thus intensifying the
blackness of his character ? And
again is such a character a fit subject
for artistic treatment ?

It is abundantly clear that, as in
the actual events, so in Shakespeare's

22

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

account of them the last few years of
the life of Richard of Gloucester form
a climax, a period into which all the
evils of the preceding years are
crowded. I have already maintained
that the bare, grim, crude nature of
Shakespeare's story of the Wars of the
Roses is intentional and appropriate.
His picture of Richard the Third is
the natural sequel. Even if we were
forced to grant that the fabric he has
built is founded on an assumption that
a wholly bad character is possible, the
logical results are so well worked out
that the impossible becomes plausible.
In the closing scenes of that awful
drama, in the story of its climax he
could not have drawn in uncertain
outlines the man whom he clearly
regarded as the embodiment of all the
evils of the time. He could not afford
to be tender with Richard's character ;
he was bound to make the climax
of such a story monstrous, if he was
to avoid a bathos. After that grim
frieze of murderous scenes in high
relief he could not fill the last panel
with an accurate portrait, giving each
feature its due and forbearing to
emphasise the sternness of the face.

And for some few even unqualified
evil comes within the sphere of their
art. Shakespeare's Richard the Third
and Milton's Satan have an atmo-
sphere of their own ; they are laws to
themselves, above and beyond the
reach of the law of probability. But
they may not be imitated ; the
character of Cenci is revolting, un-
natural, impossible.

And after all there is an admirable
grandeur, a pathetic loneliness both in
Richard the Third and Satan. His
fierce bravery in battle even in boy-
hood was such as to win the admiration
of his father ; and at least he died
like a hero. After a night of terrible
dreams, having seen the ghosts of all

his victims, he feels that the curse
of his relentless ambition has made
him hated and utterly alone.

All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty !

guilty 1
I shall despair. There is no creature

loves me ;

And if I die, no soul shall pity me :
Nay, wherefore should they, since that

I myself

Find in myself no pity to myself ?
Methought the souls of all that I had

murder 'd
Came to my tent ; and everyone did

threat
To-morrow's vengeance on the head of

Kichard.

(RlCHAED THE THIRD, 5, ill.)

Thus desperate, thus left alone,
deserted by half his forces in the
battle, he could not be persuaded to
fly.

Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die :
I think there be six Eichmonds in the

field;

Five I have slain to-day instead of him.
A horse ! a horse ! my kingdom for a

horse !

(RICHARD THE THIRD, 5, iv.)

Such a death was at least better
than that of Louis the Eleventh, shut
up alone in the castle of Plessis, sur-
rounded by endless fortifications, pro-
tected by hosts of guards, and seeking
vainly to prolong his life with spells,
charms, relics, masses, and incanta-
tions. Richard of Gloucester died, as
he had lived, fighting. Like others
cursed with a deformed mind or body,
he was a gambler, and the stakes for
which he played were so high that his
life was not too dear a forfeit on his
failure. But he had played with
courage and skill, and, though he
failed, he failed so nobly as almost to
atone for his previous success.

J. L. ETTY.

23

THE EVOLUTION OF A WHEAT CROP.

IT is necessary to know the
Canadian prairie in all its varying
moods before one learns to appre-
ciate it as it deserves. To the casual
observer, whirled from ocean to ocean
by the expresses of the Canadian-
Pacific Railway, the wide levels of
rich alluvial soil, which run west-
wards from the dwindling pinewoods
and willow-beds east of Winnipeg,
appear for the most part a dreary
wilderness. In winter this is a frozen
waste with streaks of white haze
driving across it before each bitter
blast, and a monotony of withered
grass in summer, when the drifts are
calcined earth and stinging alkali.
Unattractive wooden towns, flanked
by gaunt elevators and sometimes
whitewashed stockyards, rise, naked
and unadorned, beside the straight-
ruled line of rails, and in their
streets the deep mud of early spring,
changing to blinding dust, lies ankle-
deep until the snow covers it again.

At first sight it is all, in Western
parlance, a hard country, but a good
one for the strong for, unlike the
languid Tropics, the prairie improves
as one views it closer. Instead of
weakening under sweltering heat, or
sinking into sensual idleness, its in-
habitants develope the sterner attri-
butes of untiring energy, endurance,
and resourcefulness, which are all re-
quired by the Western wheat-grower.
Still, there is -another and a softer
side, and this was especially manifest
at Fairmead.

Fairmead, in Assiniboia, deserved
its name, for after the bare sweep of
Manitoban plain there was a grateful
softness about its swelling undula-

tions and willow-groves shrouding
deep ravines, while, walling off the
waste of prairie like a rampart, a
thick bluff of wind dwarfed birches
stretched on either side. Here, for
a few weeks in spring, it was pos-
sible to fancy one's self in England ;
then the resemblance faded and it
was part of the Dominion again.
The frost had vanished from the sur-
face of the land, though it still lurked
a foot or two beneath, while here and
there a flush of green crept across the
withered sod, when I visited Fair-
mead to assist in the spring-plough-
ing. Two young Englishmen, of good
up bringing, owned it then, and as
they were staking their all on the
weather that season it was, said my
partner, everyone's clear duty to
assist them. They had invested in
all some £400 in three hundred
and twenty acres of virgin soil, and
after painfully breaking it and losing
several crops, had now sunk their
last dollar in seed-wheat and im-
plements.

A rush of warm breeze from the
Pacific, which had crossed the snow-
barred Rocky Mountains unchilled,
set the dry grasses rippling, and long
wisps of cloud drove swiftly across
the luminous blue. This, and the
blackness of ashes among the burned
stubble, was all that broke the har-
monious colouring of white and grey.
Not being a skilful teamster I had
brought oxen, and waited beside them
while Hunter (my host) and his half-
tamed horses reeled round and round
together amid a tangle of harness
which they seemed determined he
should not put on, until at last

24

The Evolution of a Wheat-Crop.

he conquered, and we were ready to
begin. Then he leaned breathless
for a moment on the plough-stilts,
a typical son, by adoption, of the
prairie.

The long skin-coat and fur cap had
been replaced by loose blue overalls
and a broad felt hat, while the laugh-
ing face had been bronzed to the
colour of coffee by the blink of snow
under the clear winter sun. In spite
of the coarse garments the pose was
statuesque, for the swell of hardened
muscles, the clear eyes, and darkened
skin told of perfect health ; and when
he hailed me to break the first clod
the voice had an exultant ring. For
several years this man had toiled far
harder than any British field-labourer
in the calling he had voluntarily
chosen; but instead of adding coarse-
ness the work had rather refined
him. Now he was entrusting all
that remained of his younger son's
portion to the black soil, which had
twice before taken his seed -wheat
and returned him only frozen grain.

I called to the oxen, and the big,
slow-moving beasts settled their
shoulders against the collar, as with
a sharp crackling the half-burned
stubble went down before the share.
Straw cannot be sold in that region,
so little is cut with the ear, and the
tall stalks are burned off the first
warm day in spring. Pale flowers,
like a purple crocus, were crushed by
the hoofs, and rich black clods curled
in long waves from the mouldboard's
slide, while amid good-humoured
banter two fiery teams came up and
passed. The plough-ox is slow, if not
always sure, but he learns by experi-
en e, "which the horse does not; and
pre?ently it was my turn for a
laujh, when the foremost plough
brought up with a shock upon soil
still frozen beneath the surface. The
beasts, stung by the jar of the
collar, tried to bolt ; the plough first

tilted, then fell over on its side, with
one of the horses fouled in the traces
rolling beside it, while the other strove
to rear upright. Hunter, however,
was used to this, and, or so I fancied,
even that unruly team realised that
he had an affection for them. With
soothing words and much patience
he set matters right, and when I was
half a furrow ahead began again. A
partly broken horse is a difficult beast
to handle, and it is not wise for a
stranger to meddle with a frightened
team. "Keep off," said Hunter, de-
clining my assistance. " They're a
little excited now, and might take a
fancy to kicking the life out of you."

At the end of the next long furrow
there was a temptation to halt, for
silvery birches drooped their lace-like
twigs over the ploughing, and I could
see jack-rabbits, still wearing their
white winter robes, scurrying through
the shadows of the bluff, while a flight
of duck came flashing down wind
athwart the trunks to descend with a
splash upon a lake the slow creek had
formed in the hollow. Summer in
that land, however, is all too short for
the work that must be done in it, and
swinging the plough I resolutely
started another furrow. Then there
followed an exasperating interlude, for
the oxen thoroughly understand that
it hurts them to run the share against
frost-bound soil, and when the draught
increased in stiffer land they came to
a dead halt. Nothing would persuade
them to advance a step, and when I
plied the long wand the cautious
veteran, President, quietly lay down.

" You'll lose your temper long
before you convince an ox," said a
laughing voice. " Let them have
their own way. Pull out and go
round ; " and in that way the matter
was settled. "With several such in-
terruptions the ploughing went on
while the perspiration dripped from
our faces, for on the prairie warm

The Evolution of a Wheat-Crop.

25

spring comes as suddenly as the
winter goes. And while we worked,
the air vibrated to the beat of tired
wings as, in skeins, wedges, and
crescents, ducks, geese, cranes, among
other wild fowl, passed on their long
journey to the untrodden marshes be-
side the Polar Sea. Many of them
halted to rest, and every creek and
sloo (a pond formed by melting snow)
was dotted black and grey with their
gladly-folded pinions. In another few
days they would be empty again, we
knew, and remain so until, with the
first chills of winter, every bird of
passage came south to follow the
sun.

At noon there was a longer rest
than we needed, because in that in-
vigorating atmosphere a healthy man
can out-tire his team, and we lounged
in the log-built dwelling over an
ample meal. It was a primitive erec-
tion of two storeys caulked with moss
and loam, but it had cost its owners
much hard labour ; sawn lumber is
out of the question for the poor man,
while birch-logs fit for building are
difficult to find. Neither was the
meal luxurious ; reisty pork, fried
potatoes, doughy flapjacks, and the
universal compound of glucose and
essences known as drips. Still, on the
prairie a man can not only live but
thrive on any food. Then it was time
to hunt the oxen out of a sloo, where
they stood with their usual persistency
until their unfortunate driver waded
in with a pike.

Then the work began again, and
the burnished clods stretched further
and further into the stubble. A
British ploughman would not have
approved, but Hunter cared little that
the furrows were curiously serpentine ;
that was perhaps the richest wheat-
soil in the world, and had been wait-
ing for centuries to yield up its latent
wealth. Every minute was of value,
for autumn frosts follow hard upon

the brief northern summer, and the
grain must be ripened before they set
in. So, while the shadows of the
bluff lengthened across the grey white
plain the ceaseless crackle of stubble,
tramp of labouring hoofs, and shear-
ing slide of greasy clods, went on
until, long after the red sun dipped, a
dimness blurred the narrowing hori-
zon and the night closed gradually in.
Then, tired but satisfied, we fed the
weary beasts, and after the evening
meal sat beside the twinkling stove
in the snug room, while outside the
stars burned down through crystalline
depths of indigo, and under a dead
cold silence the grasses grew resplen-
dent with frostwork filigree. The
elder Hunter had a taste for music
and natural history, as a result of
which gorgeous moths were pinned
under the trophies of skins and oat-
heads on the wall, while a battered
piano (of all things), which had suffered
from a trying journey, stood among the
baked clods we had brought in from
the ploughing.

His brother's voice was excellent,
and while they sang songs of the old
country, which after all was home, I
lounged in my chair, drowsily listen-
ing, and wondered whether some day
health and work and food might be
found for our many ill-fed and hope-
less sons in that wide country. Yet
it was evident there was no room for
the drunkard or slothful there, for
when Hunter, closing the piano with
a sigh, returned to Canada, he dis-
coursed on his position and that of
many others like him. " We were
frozen out last season again," he said,
" and lost nearly all we had. We
got implements, seed, and provisions
on a bond this time, and we're hiring
no help. If the beasts will only stand
it, we'll do the whole thing ourselves.
If we get a good crop, there'll be a
balance in the bank after paying
everyone. If we don't, the dealers

26

The Evolution of a Wheat-Crop.

will take everything, — except the pro-
visions, and somehow I'll pay for
them. Then we'll strike out over the
Rockies for British Columbia. You
can't expect bad luck everywhere."

Credit, which is universal in that
region, has its advantages as well as
its evils, for it divides the risks of the
weather, while a bounteous harvest
enriches farmer, dealer, and manufac-
turer alike. There is no room for
half-measures upon the prairie, where
a man must raise wheat or go under.
Still, if possessed of average strength,
he need never suffer privation, and it
is perhaps this reason which leads the
settlers to face trying uncertainty and
arduous toil with a cheerful courage
not always found at home. So we
ploughed and cross-ripped the clods
with disc-harrows, and when the
seeders had drilled in the grain, I
shook hands with Hunter and went
back to my own partner.

It was hay-time when I visited
Fairmead again, and found my hosts
darker in colour and considerably
more ragged than before. There is
little leisure for the amenities of civili-
sation during the busy summer, and
the mending of clothes, and sometimes
even their washing, is indefinitely
postponed. The prairie also had
changed, for the transitory flush of
green was gone, while birchen bluff
and willow-fringed ravine formed com-
forting oases of foliage and cool
shadow, and, when the blazing sun
beat down upon the parched white
sod, the rippling waves of dull green
wheat were pleasant to look upon.
Now, thereabouts at least, horses and
oxen must be fed during the long
winter, when the prairie is sheeted
with frozen snow, and the hay-
harvest is accordingly a matter of
some anxiety. Artificial grasses are
rarely sown, and the settler trusts to
Nature to supply him, while through-
out much of Manitoba and Assiniboia

on the levels the natural grasses are
too short for cutting. The hay must
therefore be gathered in the dried-up
sloos where it may reach almost breast-
high. Timber for building being also
lamentably scarce, implements, for lack
of shelter, are usually left where they
last were used, and while I drove
off with the light waggon, my friends
set forth in search of the mowing-
machine. It was dazzlingly hot and
bright, and the long sweep of prairie
seemed to melt into a transparent
shimmering, with a birchen bluff
floating above it like an island here
and there.

At times a jack-rabbit, now the
colour and much the size of an Eng-
lish hare, fled before the rattling
wheels, or a flock of prairie-chicken
flattened themselves half-seen among
the grass, while tall sandhill cranes
stalked majestically along the crest of
a distant rise. On foot one cannot
get within a half-mile range of them,
though it is possible to drive fast into
gunshot occasionally, but in hay-time
there is little leisure for sport. Thick
grey dust rose up, and the waggon,
a light frame on four spider-wheels
which two men could lift, jolted dis-
tressfully as it lurched across the
swelling levels, until a mounted figure
waved an arm upon the horizon, and
I knew the machine had been found.
It lay with one wheel in the air buried
among the grass, and half-an-hour's
labour with oil can and spanner was
needed before it could be induced to
work at all, while then there was a
great groaning of rusty gear as the
long knife rasped through the harsh
grass. Unlike the juicy product of
English meadows, it rose before us
saw-edged, dry, and white, though we
had no doubt about its powers of
nutriment.

There were flies in legions, and the
hot air was thick with mosquitoes
larger and more thirsty than any met

The Evolution of a Wheat-Crop.

27

in the Tropics (where they are bad
enough in all conscience), so declining
Hunter's net (which hung like a meat-
safe gauze beneath the brim of his
hat) I anointed my face and hair
with kerosene. Still, at times the
insects almost conquered us, as I
afterwards saw them put to rout a
surveying party in British Columbia,
and it became difficult to lead the
tortured horses. One does not, how-
ever, expect an easy time upon the
prairie, and the hay was badly needed ;
so bitten all over we held on until
the little sloo was exhausted. The
sun had already dried the grasses better
than we could do, and when the
waggon was loaded high I went back
with it while the others tramped out
into the heat in search of another
iloo.

When I reached the house it was
filled with Hunter's white chickens,
which had sought refuge there from
the swoop of a hawk. The caulking
had fallen out from between the
warping logs, and the roof, which was
partly tin and partly shingles, crackled
audibly under the heat. But there
was only time to pack up a little
food, and when the waggon was
lightened, grimed thick with dust and
a long wake of insects streaming
behind my head, I drove out again.
From sloo to sloo we wandered, halt-
ing once for a plunge into a shrunken
creek where lay three feet of luke-
warm fluid and two feet of mud, and
it was nightfall when we thankfully
turned our faces homewards. A little
cool breeze, invigorating as cham-
pagne, came down out of the North
where still lingered a green trans-
parency, and the sun-bleached prairie
had changed into a dim mysterious
sea, with unreal headlands of birch
and willow rolling back its ridges.
Every growing thing gave up its fra-
grance as it drank in the dew, and
through all the odours floated the

sweet pervading essence of wild
peppermint, which is the typical scent
of that country.

Somewhere in the shadows a coyote
howled dismally : at times with a
faint rustling some shadowy beast
slipped by ; but save for this there
was a deep, dead stillness and an
overwhelming sense of vastness and
infinity. Under its influence one
could neither chatter idly nor fret
over petty cares, and I remember
how, aching, scorched, and freely
speckled with mosquito-bites, we lay
silent upon the peppermint-scented
hay. Meantime, far out on the rim
of the prairie, the red fires rioted
among the grass, while here and there
long trains of filmy vapour blotted
out the stars; but Hunter had
ploughed deep furrows round his
holding and had no cause to fear
them. At last, only half-awake, we
unyoked the beasts, devoured such
cold food as we could find, and sank
into heavy slumber until the sun
roused us to begin another day.

It was late in autumn, and bluff
and copse were glorious with many-
coloured leaves, waiting frost-nipped
for the first breeze to strew them
across the prairie, when I saw the last
of Hunter's crop. The crackling
grass lay ready for its covering of
snow, and the yellow stubble, stripped
of the heavy ears, stood four-square,
solid, and rigid above the prairie.
The crop had escaped the frost, the
binders had gone, and now the black
smoke of the threshing-machine hung
motionless in the cool transparent
atmosphere above the piled -up
sheaves. Hunter's heart was glad.
After a hard struggle, patient wait-
ing, and very plain living, the soil
had returned what he had entrusted
it to him a hundred -fold. Better still,
frost having been bad in Manitoba,
Winnipeg millers and shippers were
waiting for every bushel.

28

The Evolution of a Wheat-Crop.

Still there was no rest for him,
and he worked as men who fight for
their own hand only can do, grimed
with smoke and dust beside the huge
separator which hummed and thudded
as it devoured the sheaves. Ox and
horse were also busy, hauling the
filled bags to the granary, which is
merely a shapeless mound of short
straw piled many feet thick over a
willow-branch framing, to form, when
wind- packed, a cheap and efficient
store. Men panted, laughed, and
jested, with every sinew strained to
the uttermost and the perspiration
splashing from them, for the system
of centralisation which makes a
machine of the individual has so far
no place in that country, and, being
paid by the bushel, the reward of
each was in direct ratio to his labours.
Yet there was neither abuse nor foul
language, and they drank green tea,
while no man derided the weaker
where each did his best and there
was plenty for all.

Then, when at last even the moon-
light had faded and three borrowed
waggons stood beside the threshing-
machine piled high with bags of grain,
a bountiful supper was spread upon
the grass, because room could not be
found in the house for all. Threshers
live upon the best in the land, as
do the kindly neighbours who work
for no money, and already Hunter's
chicken-house was empty, while the
painful necessity of acting as execu-
tioner with a big axe affected the
writer's appetite. The vitality some-
times lingers a few moments in
decapitated fowls, and the dressing
of several dozen, even when dipped
in boiling water, was not pleasant to
remember when eating them, in spite
of the consolation that no more
remained. Next day I knew I must
drive nearly fifty miles to the settle-

ment and back for more provisions.
They ate, then, as they had worked,
thoroughly and well, French Canadian,
Ontario Scotsman, young Englishman,
and a few keen-witted wanderers
from across the frontier of the great
Republic, forgetting all distinctions
of caste and race in the bond of a
common purpose. Tradition counts
for nothing on the wide wheat-lands ;
they are at once too new and too old
for it. Empty self-assertion is also
worthless, and it is only by self-denial,
endurance, and steadfast labour that
any one can win himself a compe-
tence there. Hunter had a right
to the content he felt, for by stub-
bornly holding on in the face of bitter
disappointments he had won that
harvest.

It was six weeks later, and the
prairie lay white under the first fall
of snow, when with three panting
teams, whose breath rose like steam
into the nipping air before us, we
hauled the last loads on steel runners
out of the sliding drifts, through the
smooth-beaten streets of a straggling
wooden town to the gaunt elevators.
Long, snow-besprinkled trains of
trucks were waiting on the sidings;
huge locomotives snorted, backing
more trucks in, for from north and
south and west other teams were
coming up out of the prairie with the
grain that was needed to feed the
swarming peoples of the older world.
At last the whirring wheels were
silent for a few moments' space : the
empty waggons were drawn aside to
make room for newcomers; and
Hunter's eyes were rather dim than
bright with emotion as he spread out
before me the receipts which he would
presently convert into coin and dollar
bills.

HAROLD BIKDLOSS.

29

ART AND THE WOMAN.

BY Two BROTHERS.

IF you compare the artistic gifts and
dispositions of any ordinary married
couple, you will find, more often than
not, that the wife has an advantage
over the husband. Not only are
her wits more vivacious than his, be-
cause she is more easily excited, but
her eyes, keen as the eyes of genius
and children, lay quick hold on trifles
which pass unobserved by him. Two
other qualities make women and
artists akin. First, their eye for
colour, which is seen to the best
advantage, perhaps, in the arrange-
ment of flowers ; and secondly, their
inborn good taste, which Joubert
describes as the artistic conscience
of the soul.

My love in her attire doth show her

wit,
It doth so well become her.

So sings the fortunate poet ; and if
there are some among us who can
echo these words truthfully, it is
because the natural good taste of
women does not always yield empire
and precedence to the fashion-plates.

So many women have in fact been
endowed by Nature with several of
the special qualities which go to the
making of the artist, that it is curious
in how little feminine art we feel the
free, wise touch of real talent, not to
speak of genius. Are the times we
live in hostile to the growth of
woman's artistic gifts, or is the fall-
ing off in these gifts to be accounted
for by certain fundamental charac-
teristics in woman's nature 1 These

are questions which it is our purpose
to answer to the best of our ability in
the course of this article. So let us
take our courage in both hands and
endeavour to strike at the root of the
explanation.

Every artist is an idler at heart.
He finds a sweeter joy in dreaming of
imaginative projects than in labour-
ing to make them real. Up to a
certain point it is wise in an artist
to dream ; but beyond that point he
must write, he must paint, strenuous
in execution, sparing no pains, bearing
up against failure, or his fancies will
end in going up the chimney. But
what, unfortunately, too often con-
firms the artist in his dreaming is
the fact that his very materials,
limiting and interposing between
conception and expression, confine
his imagination within certain fixed
and narrow bounds beyond which he
cannot go. In other words, as no dis-
tiller can preserve for us the natural
perfume of flowers, so no artistic
medium can impart to us the witchery
of vague form, of vanishing schemes
of colour, which keeps the artist
brooding spell-bound at his homely
fireside. " Every picture is a subject
thrown away ! " he says under his
breath in the words of Frederick
Leighton ; and then he begins dallying
with another and yet another art, so
that he may derive from each one
some elusive joy which his own cannot
communicate to him, owing to its
peculiar limitations. The truth is
that only the prick of need or of
suffering, of persecution, or of un-

30

Art and the Woman.

wearying self-sacrifice, can spur on
the artist bravely to encounter the
bitter disappointments which attend
upon his creative labours. In face of
this truth, we cannot but believe that
woman's passion for dress and show
and luxury has always stood in the
way of her higher artistic aspirations.
How is it possible for the mind to be
healthily imaginative and creative,
when its energies are for ever centring
about luxuries ? Wordsworth used to
say that all artists should be severely
frugal. Goethe declared to Ecker-
mann on three separate occasions, as
though the truth needed reiteration,
that noble edifices are for princes
only, not for artists : " Those who live
in them," he said, " feel at ease and
contented, and desire nothing further."
Is not this especially true of women
who have a feline love of comfort ?
The woman who paints, it is true, has,
in this particular, a hazardous advan-
tage over her sister the poetess, since
she can always imitate the superficial
charm of beautiful created things ;
but it may be said, without the least
extravagance, that she too will be
lost as an imaginative artist, if she
persist in living amid such externals
of home-life as cannot but stimulate
in her the facile talent of an artisan,
lacking in all those rare and precious
attributes which go to the making of
the creative and imaginative faculties.
Now, the power of observation in
women, keen as it is, busies itself
chiefly with things material that
meet the eye. In imaginative force,
as in that of reasoning, she is, as a
rule, the inferior of man. "She
argues generally," it has been well
said of her, " rather by induction
from special facts than by induction
from large principles ; and she has a
habit of leaping from a fact or two,
accidentally picked up, to a sweeping
generalisation, such as can be safely
built only on a broad and deep

foundation of facts. She seems to
have neither range nor patience, nor
grasp for severe reasoning." De
Quincey was of precisely the same
opinion. According to him, the con-
crete and the individual, fleshed in
action and circumstance, are all that
the female mind can reach ; and
George Sand, who may be supposed
to have known something of her own
sex, denied that women have a spark
of imaginative sympathy at all. En-
trenching ourselves behind these
authorities, we dare to offer the ex-
planation that the historic conditions
of woman's life, and her constitutional
determination to the showy and the
superficial, have been the means of
depriving her of the most inestimable
of all human attributes of greatness,
— the imagination. Hence her genius
may be compared more justly to the
bee, that keeps industriously close to
the earth, than to the singing skylark,
that is " near at once to the point of
heaven and to the point of home."
Nor is this all. So soon as the female
imagination becomes busy, we know
that a physician, or a change of air,
is urgently needed. It would be a
hard task to name even one poetess
of note who was not exceedingly deli-
cate, nervous, hysterical, who did not
work, like Mrs. Browning, under the
dangerous guidance of that irritation
of soul which ill-health is so apt to
set up in persons of a sensitive artistic
temperament. This ought not to be,
of course, but perhaps nothing save
the most careful nursing during a
long series of generations will ever
lead to the enthronement of Prospero
and Ariel in the intuitional minds of
women.

In face of this defect in the seat
of imaginative grace, it is not other-
wise than inevitable that women
should be of a rigidly practical turn
of mind. The blunt fact is that the
least practical woman is more prac-

Art and the Woman.

31

tical than the most practical man.
Thus, when the young painter is in
despair because his day-dreams look
ridiculous on canvas, his sister of the
brush, true to the active business-in-
stinct of her sex, is playing the gener-
ous picture-dealer in her thoughts.
The boy, more truly practical in his
native unpracticalness, tosses aside
his brushes, sets off for a joyous
ramble in the country, and finds on
his return home that his eyes are no
longer bad and jaded critics. It is
not thus that the girl behaves in
like circumstances ; she acts at once
upon the belief that the only sure
way of putting things right is to
add to her hours of work.

These remarks on woman's passion
for ease and on her imaginative
faculty apply with the same force
to the women of the past as of the
present. In the time of the Renas-
cence, for instance, when " the arts
were standing on the top of golden
hours," nearly four hundred girls set
the art-critics cherishing great expec-
tations of their good success ; but
of these only ten or twelve (notably
Sophonisba Angussola and Rachel
Ruisch) fulfilled the promise of their
youth ; the rest, sex-bound in silly
pretensions and barren unimagina-
tiveness, serve to symbolise the con-
trast between woman's uncounted
failures as a painter and her many
and varied artistic gifts and disposi-
tions. But what seems to fit the
case of the moderns only is the
assumption of mannishness, clearly
shown in their writings and paint-
ings. If we should judge from their
works, it would seem to be their
darling aim and highest achievement
to be unwomanly in their attitude
towards life and art, towards human
character and conduct. " Why was
I born a girl and not a boy ? " a
well-known female novelist asks her-
self ; and this question is put to us,

dramatically, by a great many other
women who are apparently yearning
to unsex themselves. This expression
of a feeling of discontent, almost of
self-shame, is most notoriously ex-
hibited in such books as Madame
Schumann's APOLOGY for her own
sex, and in Mrs. Meynell's prayer for
a masculine education that shall ob-
literate those eternal differences of
thought, feeling, temperament, and
experience, which now keep men and
women apart as artists, — a consum-
mation devoutly to be thwarted, for
we believe that only such women as
are womanly will ever rise to be true
artists. Let women look to it, then,
that they spin their yarns at the
distaff, and abjure not their sex after
the thorough-going manner of George
Sand.

That gifted Frenchwoman is, in-
deed, a typical instance of the un-
wisdom which Mrs. Meynell would
share with us. George Sand, setting
nothing by the truth that to her sex
Nature "is both Law and Impulse,"
firmly believed that, by masquerading
in boy's clothes as an eavesdropping
student of manners, and by saturat-
ing her mind with Parisian vices and
German metaphysics, she could easily
teach herself to vie with men in
their own inaccessible provinces of
thought. In this mad enterprise it
was that she embarked all her capital
of womanhood, and, so long as the
novelty of the adventure kept its
edge, she was as happy as a truant
schoolboy. Then the inevitable re-
action set in. All the woman in her,
perishing, became querulous, then re-
bellious, until at last the unhappy
novelist made peace with her own
nature. " Art," as she then told
herself, " is the mission of feeling
and of love, is the search after the
ideal ; and the modern novel should
do duty for the parable of old
times." This new attitude explains

32

Art and the Woman.

the sudden change from romances in
which "love means the annulling of
the moral law," to such touching
little stories as THE HAUNTED POOL.
Unfortunately the promise of more
womanly work was not resolutely
maintained. To the end of her life
her tainted mind kept on gravitating
to what the novelist herself described
as " the dung-hill of Lazarus " ; there
were times, that is to say, when she
could not help making literary capital
out of her occasional lovers. As a
rule, even in her prose idylls, she
plays the good woman somewhat
awkwardly and self-consciously, as a
man might. It is only when her mind
travels wistfully back to her youth,
and she relates those winsome memories
of her childhood, her least perishable
work, that George Sand regains for a
season her discarded womanliness.

Take, again, Frances Burney and
George Eliot. While the former
ruined her gay caricaturing genius
by trying to force it to speak with
the voice of Dr. Johnson, the latter's
less admirable work dates from the
time when, beginning to lose faith in
her intuitive insight into character,
she bewildered her mind with meta-
physical studies. In truth George
Eliot met with her artistic Nemesis
in Lewes's philosophy, as Madame de
Stael had come upon hers in Schlegel's
metaphysical chatter. The French-
woman, it is true, suffered less from
these studies than did George Eliot,
for she took her rugged appearance
so much to heart as to vie with the
most beautiful of her sex in being
nothing if not womanly in her inter-
course with men. Despite appear-
ances, her famous saying that she
would sacrifice all her genius for one
evening of Madame de Recamier's
beauty shows her to have been a true
daughter of Eve, and so does her
style, which is of the woman womanly
and most seductive.

A woman lies at the mercy of her
temperament, which is so impression-
able, in conception, as to be positively
dangerous. And so, in literature
and art, the instinctive readiness of
women to yield to the influence of
any man's work that they admire
ardently is a serious drawback to
their success. Some of them change
their styles almost as often as they
change their dress ; and it would be
easy to name others who give us
nothing but a patchwork of remini-
scences, nothing but a curious medley
of the various ways in which several
well-known men express themselves
in their work. It is true, no doubt,
that this overmastering instinct among
women of being subservient to the
talents of men is sometimes fruitful
of good things, as in the case of Lady
Alma-Tadema, whose art is a pretty
feminine reflex of her husband's ; but,
as a rule, it is a habit that leads to so
much devious industry, in so many
directions, that real, sustained, progress
becomes impossible. A woman may
have a dozen borrowed manners ; she
has seldom, if ever, a distinctive style
of her own.

What, then, is the true mission of
women in literature and the fine arts ?
" All that which is best in my literary
work," says M. Daudet, " is owing to
my wife's influence and suggestion.
There are whole realms of human
nature which we men cannot explore.
We have not eyes to see, nor hearts
to understand, certain subtle things
which a woman perceives at once."
True; and just as we men by the
natural temper of our minds are shut
out from those petticoat-haunted
realms of human nature, so the
woman can never find her way into
our own special provinces in the art
of interpreting human life and char-
acter. Hence the artistic mission
of woman is to reveal Nature in a
feminine guise, becomingly and nobly

Art and the Woman.

33

transformed by passing through the
alembic of womanhood. In every
line of a woman's writings should beat
the thanks that she was a woman,
and the trust that the Maker will
remake and complete her ; and to that
end she should seek to glorify her
sex in her creative work. None save
true women, and none save true men,
can either write or paint as such ;
and it is only by painting thus and
writing thus, that each sex can be-
come the artistic counterpart and
complement of the other.

The creed we are preaching was
practised by the admirable Mrs. Oli-
phant, in whose writings we meet
with the rare old style which Voltaire
admired so much in the letters of
Madame de Sevigne", and which
carried along with it through Maria
Edgeworth's stories the great and
generous heart of Sir Walter Scott.
This style, with its swiftness, its
gaiety of epithet, its rambling ease
and easy distinction, follows the con-
formation of the feminine mind, and
is common to all the illustrious
women-writers of the past, — to all
except George Eliot. Their style
should be the woman, always the
woman, and not, as it usually is to-
day, the infelicitous caricature of a
good many men. For women are
always at their best when they throw
off their work at a heat, as of a
musician improvising. It was thus,
as has been said, under an instinctive
rather than technical guidance, that
Jane Austen and the Brontes won
their literary victories, and that Maria
Edgeworth united her matter-of-fact
wit, her spontaneous gaiety and philo-
sophy, to the fire and waywardness
of the Irish character. Nor was it
otherwise than with the same free,
wise, unpremeditated art that Lady
Waterford called up her gracious day-
dreams into pictorial presence.

There are critics ready enough to
No. 493. — VOL. LXXXIII.

urge that women of genius cannot
help being manly in their handiwork,
because there has ever been something
masculine in their mental habits, and
in their cast of countenance, too,
not infrequently. Assuredly ; but
do we not learn from Goethe, Cole-
ridge, Tennyson, that all creative
minds must be androgynous? And
who will be so bold as to infer from
this that our double-natured men of
genius must needs be womanish rather
than virile in their creative work?
Consider what is the meaning of this
fusion of the masculine and feminine
qualities in the genius of each sex.
Does it mean that the artistic tem-
perament at its greatest is human
nature in its quintessential form and
power? If so, then perhaps genius
may be defined as a single creative
human power with a double sex. In
no conceivable case, however, should
what we may call the primitive Eve
in the male genius, and the primeval
Adam in the female, be the ruling
spirit in a work of art. Think of Sir
Edward Burne-Jones, in whose genius
there dwelt a woebegone troubadour
and a medieval nun, very meek and
wan and dolorous ! Can any true
man find it in his conscience to de-
clare that the ruling spirit in these
pictures is not the consumptive Eve
in the male genius ? And does not
his artistic sense suffer a certain shrink-
ing at the absence of any token that
it was a man, and not a woman, who
wielded the brush ? Pitiful this, but
true ; the greatest of unsexed painters,
male or female, living or dead, is the
painter of the Briar Rose !

This topsy-turveydom in the genius
of both sexes is an eloquent com-
mentary upon the decadent world we
lived in a year or two ago, for those
times of "doubts, disputes, distrac-
tions, fears " were, as we believe, any-
thing but friendly to true womanliness
in women, and nothing if not hostile

34

Art and the Woman.

to healthy manliness in men. The
fever and the fretfulness of life, the
ever-increasing popularity of French
realism, the permeating spread of
agnosticism, and the noisy revolution
through which the belligerent sex had
long been lighting its way to the
sterile bourne of a literary and artistic
mannishness, — all these agencies, to-
gether with the contagion of a vicious
newspaper press, combined grievously
to impair, if not momentarily to obli-
terate, the native modesty and spright-
liness of a great many women ; and if
we tell them once more that they only
did themselves, and us, a mischief by
trying to be distinctively manly in
their creative labours, it is because
we foster the hope that they will do
more womanly work in these days of
England's awakening. It is one thing
to admit the trend of national events
to have been their enemy, and ours, in
the past ; it is happily quite another
matter to look on in silence while they
go on murdering the woman within
their minds and hearts and intuitive
nursery natures. Inspirez et n'ecrivez
pas ! says a French writer speaking
to women, and this sound advice was
reversed in practice by our ladies of
the pen ; they wrote — heavens, how
they wrote ! — and our source of
inspiration was gone, impure, perni-
cious, bad. Of their writings it will
be enough to say that they were and
are a repudiation, frankly unabashed,
of all that is tender and lovable in
woman, and the evil effect of them
can be discerned in the sudden decline
and fall of so virile a genius as that
of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Let women
write or inspire ; the issue will be one,
provided they follow the guidance of
their hearts and run not counter to
the new spirit of the times. The days

of our decadence are dead, thank the
powers, and buried in the dung-hill
of French realism, and this, the spring
of our re-awakening, should have upon
women who write and women who
paint the effect of a summons to arms
in vindication of their native woman-
liness. Be their spirit of perversity
never so perverse, it should go hard
with them to escape from the inner
voice which bids them attune their
minds to the promptings of their
hearts. For women, who comply
rapidly with their surroundings, and
with the spirit of the age, are bound
to be influenced by the turn in the
tide of national tendencies, and these
making, as they do, at the present
time for true manliness in men, can-
not but make for tender womanliness
in women.

Art should reflect the sex of the
artist. Some truly great phases of
art, there are, no doubt, which are
neither masculine nor feminine, which
are merely epicene, as in the case of
Fra Angelico ; but we would point out
that Fra Angelico's epicenity of tem-
perament is counterbalanced by the
beauty and the deep sincerity of his
religious faith. The truth is that the
epicene in art needs some such strong
and noble counterpoise, else it is sterile
and has no future, lacking, as it is,
by itself in the full strength of the
distinctively male, and the mature
tenderness of the distinctively female.
In our times, unfortunately, the need
of a countervailing inspiration has
been often forgotten, as it was by our
morbid Pre-Raphaelites ; and hence
their influence has already passed
away, killed by a revival of that love
of enterprise which enabled England
"to gem the remote seas with splendid
repetitions of herself."

35

PRIVATE WHITWORTH, B.A.

The forward youth that would appear,
Must now forsake his Muses dear ;

•'*•*'•

Tis tune to leave the books in dust,
And oil the unused armour's rust —

IT seemed then that his case was
hardly unique, but merely a modern
instance of an experience not uncom-
mon in the past, at least down to
Andrew Marvel's time. This was
doffing the scholar's gown and throw-
ing aside the poetical pen to put on
the armour and sword of militant
patriotism ; Sir Philip Sidney was
an instance of it not so very long
ago, and Colonel Lovelace was also a
fighting poet. Going back still far-
ther there was ^Ischylus, and at a
still remoter period (if his memory
served him, for he was not good at
dates,) there was King David, who
wrote the Psalms, or most of them,
and also slew Goliath of Gath. And
doubtless history, if closely questioned,
would reveal other examples.

With him it was exchanging the
frayed gown of an English under-
graduate for a khaki suit, and the
pen of pleasant (if not very distin-
tinguished) scholarship for a Lee-
Metford rifle. " However could I
do it ? " he asked himself more than
once afterwards. "Were it not
better that the actual business of
fighting should be left to others,
whose loss to the nation and the
intellectual world would not be so
deeply felt 1 " It occurred to him,
in a moment of sardonic humour, as
a good question for debate at the
Union in the next Michaelmas Term.
How would it run ? Something like
this, perhaps: "That in the opinion

of this House the members of the
University who have lately left us
would have served the State better
by proceeding to their degrees (if not
plucked, of course), and then to their
professions and into Parliament, than
by offering their persons as targets
for our future fellow-subjects of the
South African Republics." He would
like to be present at the discussion.
It is true he had only gone in himself
for the Poll Degree, by the advice of
his college tutor ; but then on the
other hand he had won the Chan-
cellor's English Medal by his ode on
Empire, — not the British institution
of that name, but empire in general
and in the abstract, with its duties,
responsibilities, and compensating
glories. It was unquestionably an
imaginative effort of considerable
merit; but the headmaster of his
school had always said he had ima-
gination. The college tutor was not
quite so sure, though he admitted
that it might be something of the
kind.

Where was he now ] Down under
the belt of the world, lying flat on
his stomach on the stony earth, as if,
like a certain Greek deity, he derived
strength from the contact. All about
were rough boulders and upright pro-
jections of rock, a very nest of crags
and hummocks. He was on top of a
kopje in South Africa, in the firing
line, or what there was of it. On
his right and left were other earth-
D 2

36

Private Whitworth, B.A,

worshippers, of the same dull colour-
ing as himself and equally absorbed
in their devotions, though now and
then one would lift his head and
peep cautiously round his particular
boulder. Above all was a great,
cloudless vault, a hemisphere of in-
tense blue, vastly higher it seemed
than any English sky he had ever
seen. And away everywhere stretched
the bare, burning, yellow veld, decep-
tive as to distance and terrible for
foot-faring in days like this. A blue,
burnished dome, and a yellow un-
dulating plain, with clear-cut, severe-
looking mountains about the border,
just like those in the magazines at
home, only coloured, — these were the
main elements of their present world.

There were two others, however,
that were even more opposed to their
comfort than the veld. One was a
huge instrument of torture, a Nebu-
chadnezzar's burning fiery furnace,
which had moved slowly upwards
from the eastern horizon and now had
them in its dreadful focus. Every
minute their hand's-breadth of shade
grew narrower, and the angle of heat-
incidence more nearly vertical. There
were no sun- worshippers in that con-
gregation ; indeed, never had the
beneficent luminary been more roundly
cursed. They sweated and swore, or
prayed for a thunder-storm ; anything,
even the most terrific South African
deluge, were better than roasting like
the famous saint on the gridiron, —
though only the Volunteer, and one
besides, had ever heard of him.

The other element of discomfort, or
rather of danger, they couldn't see
at all, but they could hear it, — occa-
sionally, that is to say ; and it was
this that made them all so devout in
appearance. The sound was a little
like that of a swarm of bees ; but the
Volunteer knew they were not Virgil's
bees, but something a good deal nearer
to the Wasps of Aristophanes. They

were Mauser bullets, flying stings and
more deadly than any wasp ever
invented by Nature.

" This is goin' to be an all-day job,"
remarked the serjea.nt, who was pros-
trate at the Volunteer's left hand.
" It's a chance if re-enforcements come
before night, or if the enemy don't
get theirs first."

" And it ain't goin' to be no eight-
hour one, neither, with a lay-off for
meals and a smoke in between." This
came from another devotee on his
right, who had been a bricklayer in
earlier years.

" You can 'ave your meals comfort-
able enough if you lay close. What
do you want, the 'ole country?
'Ere comes the water-cart ! "

As the Serjeant said this a man
hung all over with canteens, and
holding the straps of several more
between his teeth, crept slowly
towards the sufferers. His manner
of approach was singularly abject,
suggesting that of one of his less
favoured subjects to an Eastern despot
in the deferential ages of the past.
He exhibited, in fact, a great re-
luctance to showing any part of his
person above the sky-line. "Blowed
if one of them F. Company fellers
'asn't been spillin' some of 'is claret
into our spring ! " he exclaimed
angrily, after freeing his mouth.
" But it don't show or taste in a
canteen," he added reassuringly.

" Claret ! 'Ere's a bloomin' feast ! "
said the ex-bricklayer. "Bully beef
and 'Er Majesty's chocolate, washed
down by champane ! " He chuckled
at the notion.

His hilarity was not shared by the
other men on the line, who passed
the filled canteens on to their com-
rades in silence. They all drank,
but with moderation, well knowing
the value of the precious liquid and
the uncertainty of its supply. Pre-
sently word was passed to save ammu-

Private Whitwortk, B.A.

37

nition ; but this was hardly necessary,
as the Serjeant had warned them.
They were in for an all-day job, as
he had said.

" However did I come to do it ? "
The Volunteer put the question to
himself for the hundredth time, in a
tone of philosophical inquiry merely.
He did not say he regretted it; he
was simply curious to trace the suc-
cessive steps which had brought him
to a position so opposed to the fore-
casts of his nativity. From a very
early stage of his career he had been
destined for one of the peaceful pro-
fessions, the fourth estate possibly,
though not the militant branch of it.
How then was he landed here 1 To
the best of his recollection, for his
brain was already confused by the
heat and the humming of the wasps,
it began with target-practice at home
with a parlour-rifle, by which he had
learned to shoot straight. Then he
had been so vain as to continue the
habit at the rifle-butts at the Uni-
versity, and this naturally led to his
joining the rifle-corps and being
numbered with its best shots. And
when the University decided to send
its patriotic contingent, or the con-
tingent decided to go, he must needs
volunteer with the rest. That was
about the way of it. He remembered
it had seemed a noble and virtuous
act : no doubt it was ; but had he
and the others quite counted the cost ?
It was all right, however, and he had
no cause of complaint.

This was what it was like to die
for one's country ! Only it seemed
like dying for someone else's ; they
were so far away. He made no
doubt that it would come to the
final sacrifice. Already half-a-dozen
men were bandaged at various points,
one with his head in an improvised
turban; and one lay silent as if
asleep. The incident rays had not
troubled him for some time :

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages ;
Thou thy worldly task hast done —

The lines slipped into the Volunteer's
head as he lay there.

Presently a man on the extreme
right saw his chance and fired ; with
effect, it seemed, for at once a swarm
of angry hornets buzzed in the air
above them, where there had been
quiet for some time before. " Sit
tight, lads ! " the serjeant had called
out before it began, so no one was
hurt ; but when it ceased he rated
the offender soundly for his disobedi-
ence. " Might 'ave cost us two or
three men on the firin' line, and it's
weak enough now," he said resentfully.

Where were those wonderful sub-
alterns he had heard of, who used to
pace to and fro beside their prostrate
men at such times, just to keep them
in tone 1 The Volunteer thought he
would like to see one of them stand
up here for five seconds.

The fiery sun rode higher and
higher in the heavens, and pelted
them more pitilessly than ever. It
was above the power of human flesh
to bear, so the spirit, which is the
stronger force, had to be called in to
help. They took it variously, with
philosophy or without, complainingly,
callously, stupidly, or piously, accord-
ing to temperament or character. In
most it induced heaviness or else
something like delirium ; their brains
were boiling.

The serjeant was in a particularly
hot corner, which he could not or
would not leave. " ' The hel'munts
shall melt with fervunt 'eat,'" he said
suddenly, waking out of something
like a doze. His voice had a strange,
distant tone, mellower and kindlier
than its wont.

"'Elmits melt with 'eat! We
ain't got no 'elmits, only 'ats. Old
man's goin' dotty." The whilom
bricklayer said this with some con-

38

Private Whitworth, B.A.

tempt ; he too had suddenly waked
up ; he had in fact been snoring.

The serjeant missed the muttered
gibe and went on in the same tone :
" ' The sun shall not smite thee by
day — The shadder of a great rock in
a weary land.' In a sitawation like
this, my friends, we can appreshate
these expressions of Scripshur ; for
the ancient people of the Lord lived
in a 'ot country ; and as they 'ad
many enemies like us they needed
plenty of cover, — plenty of cover.
Moreover they knew the importunes
of takin' it, and 'ad faith in the Lord
— in their off'cers — to bring them
there ; which is showed by the words,
' Lead me to the Rock that is 'igher
than I.' They trusted to the Lord
— their off'cers — the Lord, and we
should — should — " His voice quav-
ered and he stopped.

" 'Ere endeth the fust lesson," said
the man on his left.

The serjeant looked about with a
dazed face, mopping his brow :
"Blest if I didn't think I was in
our old chapel in Zion Lane, before
I came over to the Church. — Keep
a sharp look-out, men," he added in
a brisker voice.

To the Volunteer it seemed as if
his brain was the bulb of a ther-
mometer, his spinal cord the stem,
and that the sun was forcing the
mercury up or rather down his spine.
First he dozed ; then the pain
awakened him into a kind of feverish
madness. He tossed about in the
hot narrow space, singing softly to
himself and quoting little tags of
prose or verse. He had never
known before how tuneful and even
devotional his education had been ;
he seemed to have gone in for a
Musical and Theological Tripos com-
bined. Hymns, anthems, and chants,
introits and antiphones, Te Deums,
processionals, and recessionals followed
each other through his aching head

and came to his lips in broken
snatches. He seemed to know whole
epistles and gospels, creeds, prayers,
and confessions, by heart, but could
only -repeat them in disjointed frag-
ments. They were mostly appropriate
to the occasion : " Defend us — in all
assaults of our enemies — There is
none other that fighteth for us — Oh
God, make speed to save us — make
haste to help us — " He must have
secreted it all at the services in his
school and college chapels. How
truly medieval those institutions con-
tinue to be !

"Lord, have mercy upon us — Christ,
have mercy upon us — " This was
from the man with the bandaged
head. One side of his face was
covered with blood ; he lay motionless
on his side, and was evidently hard
hit.

Something in their ensconced posi-
tion moved the serjeant to sing, in a
high-pitched, wavering voice :

Rock of Hages, clef for me,
Let me 'ide myself in Thee.

" 'E's got cover on the brain,"
grumbled the bricklayer, irritably.

"Strikes me this is a bloomin'
Mornin' Suvvis," said the man on the
left.

The Volunteer closed his weary
eyes on the burning veld that shook
and quivered in the heat's witch-
dance, and opened them (inwardly)
on other scenes. Yes, though only
the usual training of a middle-class
English youth, his had certainly had
an ecclesiastical side. He could see
his old headmaster, surpliced and
gowned in the school-pulpit, a some-
what prosy old gentleman he had
always thought, although he had
recognised his genius ; and at college
there were the Reverend the Master,
the Reverend the Dean, and sundry
reverend Fellows ; frankly, he could

Private Wliitworth, B.A.

39

have done with less divinity in his
curriculum. Ah, there were the men
coming into chapel, passing the watch-
ful markers and dividing right and
left to the raised seats on either
hand, — what a seraphic, innocent-
looking crowd they were ! And soon
the organ-notes would mount up to
the dim, old Gothic roof, — his college
was famed for its music.

Those subalterns again ! Did those
young warriors, with nerves of steel
and stomachs of brass, who seemed
made without human emotions, did
they ever at any time think on their
fathers and mothers, on their brothers,
sisters, and harmless, necessary aunts ?
He was callow, he owned, and these
as yet made up his social atmo-
sphere ; the strange woman, the other
man's wife, who troubled the careers
of so many, had not affected his own
up to this time. He did not think
she ever would in any case; it was
a matter of taste. But neither had
the fair and virtuous maiden of the
older romance and equally real life, to
any great extent. He was, in fact,
deplorably young, if also as he be-
lieved somewhat presentable. Really,
how domestic and even parochial his
life had been, if he was a Chancellor's
Medalist and a University Volunteer.
Yes, it was the pater, and the mater,
and the kids generally ; there they
all were, at the long dining-table, the
kids making the usual row, or in the
drawing-room strumming the piano.
How clear the picture was ! Especi-
ally the mater, and Maud, and Dolly
the mite.

This was the cry-baby tap, and
would best be turned off, or he'd be
blubbering there on the ground.

Ah, going back to his college life ;
it had, after all, a secular side, and,
as it now seemed to him, a particu-
larly jolly one. The reading-men of
his year were certainly a pleasant and
intelligent set ; they had appreciated

his gifts if others had not. And there
were the suppers in the college and
other rooms, bump-suppers and those
of a more Attic kind,

Where they such clusters had,

As made them nobly wild, not mad,

though the college tutor had refused
to be impressed with their intellectual
tone. Then there were the sports,
cricket, football, and the boats
especially. In the mental haze in-
duced by his sun-bath he seemed to
be on the towing-path at the May
races, opposite the gaily attired
throngs at the Corner, himself in his
uniform, charging through the crowd
with his bayonet and shouting " Well
rowed ! " to the crews. He would
be thus in full cry when a shadowy
proctor, in gown and bands, would
loom up before him with the dreaded,
" Your name and college, Sir 1 " Or
it would be some one resembling a
military officer, who would sternly
demand the number or name of his
regiment.

"Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen,
was wounded by a musket ball which
broke his thigh and led to his death."
A soft-nosed bullet, no doubt; but
even that was better than being
roasted by the antipodean Sun-God.

" ' How different is this place ! ' "
That was Milton's Satan, he thought.
In his delirium little English vistas
swam before his burning eyes. Now
it was summer, a cool evening in the
home valley. There was the low
church-tower, sending forth its later
chimes ; and there were the red and
yellow corn-fields braided with green,
the soft, brooding hills with their
grassy slopes patched with squares
of clover and mustard, and the sun,
like a shield of dull fire, sinking to
rest in peaceful clouds — a vesper
symphony in purple and grey and
gold.

40

Private Whitworth, B.A.

"In the hour of death — Lord
deliver us ! " The turbaned man said
this in a faint voice, and then said no
more. The side of his face that could
be seen was composed as if in sleep.

It seemed to the Volunteer that he
must have dozed. What was this ?
Actually, a bit of shade ! The sun
was getting over to the west, and
the big rock sheltered them. Perhaps
they might live through it, through
the heat, that is to say, for the wasps
were still buzzing at every opportunity.
Ah, there was the water-cart again !
Red -faced, dust-covered, and breath-
ing hard, he crawled along on his
stomach as formerly, carrying and
trailing his liquid treasure. " Couldn't
git 'ere before, guv'nor," he said to
the serjeant, apologetically; "'ad to
supply F. Company's men on t'other
kopje. They're no good," he went on,
with mingled contempt and com-
miseration ; " lost two men try in' to
git water, — couldn't take cover for a
brass farden. Went with their backs
stuck up like a bloomin' camel's and
o' course got 'it; and one of 'em
dropped all their canteens into the
enemy's fire-zone ! Might 'ave thought
of other people if 'e was 'it ! "

It was certainly cooler, and his
brains seemed to have flowed back
again into his head. Presently
another object, with a flushed, dust-
grimed face and an eye-glass, ap-
proached in the same vermicular
manner. The Volunteer knew him
for a young officer of considerable
dignity and a commonly upright car-
riage ; but every one seemed now to
travel on the front part of his person.
It might be that the race was revert-
ing to a reptilian type.

The eye-glassed one said something
to the serjeant in a low voice, and
added in a louder tone : " You'd
better have your men in readiness."

" Right you are, Sir," answered the
serjeant.

Then the officer raised his head and
looked through the cleft between the
rocks. " Can you make out the
enemy's disposition here ? " he asked.

" Their disposition is to 'it every-
thing they can see," said the older
man in alarm. " 'Ave a care, Sir ! "
and the officer ducked with a hole
in his hat. " Rather venomous, ain't
they 1 " he said, and crawled away.

Soon the whisper was passed: "Re-
inforcements have helioed." The ex-
bricklayer was dull of hearing that
day, and hyper-critical. " 'Illoed, did
they?" he grunted. " Domn'd idiuts !
Ought to 'ave 'eld their tongues and
flanked 'em quiet and unbeknown.
Some reg'munts carn't do nothink
without 'ollerin' and shoutin'."

Ah, it would soon be their turn to
assault, and then he would be sacri-
ficed. Something within told him so,
for this was his first attack of the
kind. But he was dying for his
country, for the Empire rather, and
like the Venetian merchant he was
armed and well prepared. Would it
were over, though, for the long waiting
tried him sorely !

His head began to ache again and
gather feverish fancies. He found
himself whimsically troubled about
the inscription on his tombstone ; it
would probably be a little cairn some-
where out here on the veld. How
would it read ? Gerald Whitivorth,
University Rifle Volunteers, (B.A. by
Special Grace of the Senate) — that
would do for a beginning; but how
would they record that young Lycidas
knew how to sing and build the lofty
rhyme, and had not left his peer, — at
least at his own Alma Mater 1 That,
however, might be reserved for a
tablet in their parish church ; there
was a good place in the south aisle,
near the chancel —

R-r-r-r-r-r- ! A ripping through
the air, a great flash just over the
enemy's lines, and a heavy report that

Private Whitworth, B.A.

41

wakened the echoes. Then another, —
the relief was here with the guns !
They were giving them shrapnel, and
for a wonder had surprised them.
But the foe were game, and the
Mauser bullets were skipping about
everywhere. Nobody minded that,
however, for their own ammunition
had come, and they were giving as
good as they got.

Here was the order to attack, and
they were now climbing down the hill
and opening out upon the veld. The
shadows were nearly level, and the
enemy's fire made twinkling stars and
short lines of red in the dusky hol-
lows ; but it grew wild now and
intermittent. How realistic, how
deadly picturesque, it all was ! And
how grandly the deep bass of the guns
supported the lighter treble of the
rifles ! — just as it is in the war-corres-
pondents' telegrams when the censor
gives them a free hand. But it was
dangerous after all, for men did drop
now and then. They were climbing
the opposite hill now, and more shel-
tered, but picking their way with
great care. It was a bold, rugged
place, just the spot he would have
chosen for his immolation. Suddenly
a tempest of bullets like hail fell upon
them from a little kopje on the left ; a
family party of the enemy had waited
to bestow a farewell salute. All
sprang for the cover close beside
them, but all did not reach it. The
bricklayer fell heavily on his face and
moved no more : two other men
dropped to their knees ; and the ser-
jeant, who had given a warning shout,
fell on his elbow, and then rolled over
on his back.

It would be sin to throw away his
life, so the Volunteer jumped with the
rest. Then he looked back. His
carping comrade would never carry
musket more ; but the two who had
half-fallen were dragging themselves
in with a good deal of bad language,

while the serjeant, who lay in a hol-
low, seemed to show signs of life. He
was struggling, it appeared, with a
bandage, which he was trying to ex-
tract from some part of his clothes,
doubtless to staunch his wound. The
young soldier saw the position in a
flash, and with it his opportunity.
The man was bleeding to death and
must be brought in at any risk ; it
was a case for a Victoria Cross or a
celestial crown !

Both sides were now blazing away
furiously, the ambushed Britons cal-
ling their assailants " bloody 'igh-
waymen " and other worse names.
Directly in the line of fire lay the
fallen man ; but his saviour would
have only the enemy's to fear, as his
comrades would of course protect him.
Springing forward, he was at the
Serjeant's side in twenty steps, but
the task proved to have unexpected
difficulties. All men know how these
noble deeds are done ; you place your
victim (if you may so call him) on
your back, or if not too much injured
he walks by your side, supported by
your arm and with his own around
your neck. But here the victim re-
sisted rescue with a vigour astonish-
ing in a wounded man, shouting the
while something about cover. The air
rattled and hissed with shots and fly-
ing bullets ; the Volunteer struggled
vainly on the slippery stones, which
were wet from a little spring; the
men behind hallooed unintelligibly ;
and then something like a hot brick
hit him in the shoulder, and he fell
sideways, striking his head, and be-
came unconscious.

Sir Philip Sydney, at the battle
near Zutphen — Gerald Whitworth
(B.A.), at the assault near Schnitzer's
Farm — Yes, history was repeating
itself, almost to the letter. He was
lying on the stony hillside in the far-
gone dusk, his left shoulder tightly
bandaged and his head aching cruelly.

Private Whitivorth, B.A.

Strange to say the serjeant was not
there, and he was alone but for his
late comrade's silent form. " Oh fare-
well, honest soldier ! " Soon the inci-
dent of the cup of water would be
re-enacted: some one would offer him
a canteen, and he would pass it on
to a fellow-sufferer (who would be
provided for the purpose) with : " Thy
necessity is greater than mine," — or
rather something less archaic — " You
need it more than I, my man," or,
" After you, old chap."

" Here's two more stiff 'uns, — no,
one's only wounded." This was not
meant unfeelingly, but both the
stretcher-bearers were grievously tired.
Now for the historic re-enactment !
Not so, — they merely looked him over
with cool though not unfriendly calcu-
lation. " I say," said one, " you don't
seem much 'urt, and we're both nigh
dead with work ; so p'raps you won't
mind try in' to walk a bit, with a little
'elp from one of us. It will save us
comin' back for your chum." They
gave him a drink of something much
stronger than water ; and the young
man, whose sufferings perhaps had
been greater than those of many who
had completed the sacrifice he had
intended to make, walked with them
and their sad burden, through a region
of curious and painful dreams, to the
camp of his own battalion.

It was a fine morning, and the
Volunteer, with his left arm in a sling,
was sitting on the verandah of a local
farm-house used for hospital purposes.
A trim and pretty nurse, who treated
him with as much motherliness as her
two or three years seniority allowed,
had just brought him a cup of
cocoa, when he saw the Serjeant's
sturdy figure approaching. For several
reasons he had wished to meet this

excellent non-commissioned officer,
who, he had learned, had not been
injured after all and was in fact
the person who had bound up his
wound.

After the first greetings a slight
hesitancy was observable in his visitor's
manner ; it should be said that he was
aware of the youth's academic status.
" I 'ope you'll excuse me, Sir," he
began (unofficially he always addressed
him as Sir) ; " but I've been longin'
to ask you a question. Wy ever was
it you left your cover and came out
and tackled me in that 'ole t It's kept
me awake thinkin' of it, and I can't
make it out ; unless the 'eat 'ad
affected your brain."

" You're about right, serjeant," said
the Volunteer good-humouredly ; " it
was the heat. The fact is I thought
you were wounded."

"Lord bless you, Sir," said his
superior, light just dawning upon him,
" Lord bless you, I wasn't 'it. My
foot only slipped on them wet stones,
and as the cover was good I stopped
there."

" But I saw you trying to get out
a bandage or something from one of
your pockets."

"Well, I'm blest! I was only
pullin' out my 'ankerchief to wipe my
eyes so as I could see to give my
orders. Truth is I'm a 'eavy man and
I'd got very 'ot runnin.' — But I'm
seriously obleeged to you, Sir," he
went on with emotion, though his eyes
had twinkled for an instant ; " indeed
I am. The Scripshur says no one can't
do more than offer to die for 'is friend,
and you ought to 'ave the V.C. if any
one ought. I'd be 'appy to mention it
to the captain ; but you see, Sir, I
wasn't 'urt myself, and the cover was
reely ex'lent."

A. G. HYDE.

43

IMPRESSIONS OF KLONDIKE.
III.

THE scenery of Tagish and Marsh
Lakes is not particularly interesting ;
the hills on the east side are far away
from the water, and the shores on the
west flat and muddy. There was not
a breath of wind when we crossed
Marsh Lake, and, as we could not use
our sail, the nineteen miles seemed
interminable. Though an experienced
oarsman, I found the strain of con-
tinuous paddling very trying on
arms, shoulders, and back, and it
was a relief to enter the Lewes
River, when, aided by the strong
current, it did not take us many
hours to reach the head of Miles
Canyon. We had now come over
ninety-five miles from the head of
Lake Bennet or about eighty-six
from our camping-ground on its shore.
This distance we had made in two
days and a half, not counting delays,
and were rather proud of our per-
formance, as we had been canoeing
over lakes, and had only had a good
wind in our favour on the afternoon
we sailed down Lake Bennet.

The Canyon and White Horse
rapids proved far too dangerous for
our small heavily-loaded canoe, which
I therefore sent round by the tram-
way that runs to the foot of the
rapids ; but, wishing to go through
both canyon and rapids, I volunteered
to take an oar in a boat of medium size,
and was accepted. Our pilot, a half-
breed, was a splendid boatman, and
made a large sum of money by taking
boats through this dangerous stretch
of water.

The canyon is barely three quarters
of a mile long, and not more than a

hundred feet wide, except about mid-
way, where it opens into a circular
basin some four hundred feet in dia-
meter. Through this narrow gorge,
with its grim perpendicular walls of
basaltic rock rising on either side to
a height of from seventy to a hundred
feet, the water rushes with terrible
force. The pressure is so great that
the torrent is convexed, and on the
crest of this roaring volume of water,
which is very rough in places, we were
swept through the canyon in less than
three minutes. Though impressive
from the shore, the canyon is much
more striking in its depths, particu-
larly when you pass out of the bright,
warm sunshine into the gloom and
chill of the frowning gorge.

If plenty of steering-way be main-
tained, and the pilot keeps his boat
on the crest of the water, there is no
danger in the canyon. To the inex-
perienced the basin frequently proved
a difficulty, for the eddy is very
strong, and a boat caught in it may
be whirled about many times, or
dashed against the rocks, before the
central current can again be reached.
The Sioux Rapids, just beyond, are
far more perilous, and caused the loss
of three lives the day before I went
through. The water appears to rush
with greater force through the lower
than through the upper part of the
canyon, and its speed over the Sioux
Rapids can hardly be less than twelve
miles an hour.

From here it was smooth travelling
for a spell, and then, after two sharp
turns, we shot into the leaping and
foaming waters of the White Horse.

Impressions of Klondike.

On either side are low walls of basalt,
and as you near the foot of the rapids,
where there is a sharp drop, the
channel is narrowed by jagged ledges
of rock, which seem to stretch out
i*avenous teeth to catch their prey.
The last is the moment of greatest
danger. Where the "jump-off" occurs
the channel is not over fifty feet wide,
and the torrent, piling itself up on
both sides, leaps with great fury
through the centre. If a boat be
kept in the middle, and swung sharply
to the right the instant after the
drop, all danger is escaped; but to
get out of the centre of the channel,
to enter it slantingly, or to be caught
in the tremendous eddy on the left
below the rapids, is almost certain
destruction. The distance from the
head of the canyon to the foot of the
White Horse Rapids is about two
miles and a quarter, and the total
fall is no less than thirty-two feet.

I stood on the banks for some time
watching my fellow-travellers shooting
the rapids. It was an exciting and a
fascinating sight. Many of the men
had little experience in the manage-
ment of a boat, and none in the naviga-
tion of swift, rough water. The boats
were of every size, shape, and build.
There were flat ungainly scows, square
fore and aft, with long sweeps both
in front and behind ; cranky "double-
enders," sharply tapered at both stern
and bow ; structures that resembled
huge coflins, and too often proved
death-traps ; now and then strong,
symmetrically - shaped boats, which
showed at a glance the skill and
experience of the builders ; and, some-
times with only a solitary occupant,
frail-looking Canadian canoes which,
answering to every stroke of the
expert hands, bounded through the
flying waters, and seemed to mock
the dangers about them. To watch
the faces and demeanour of the men
who filled these boats as they shot

the rapids was an impressive study.
Some plied their oars with stolid
determination, others with irregular
futile strokes, which half maddened
the man at the helm, whose hoarse
commands to "pull, pull together,"
rose above the shriek of the swirling
waters. In the stern stood the pilot,
upon whose nerve and skill depended
the lives and fortunes of all in the
boat. Coatless and hatless, he stood
with clenched teeth, hard-set lips, and
wide staring eyes, his hair flying in
the wind, and the half-blinding spray
dashing in his face. Few went
through those rapids without feeling
they carried their life in their hands.
Several women remained in the boats
rather than be separated from those
they loved in the time of peril, and
their coolness and fortitude excited
general admiration. To suppose that
women cannot face danger without
blenching is a mistake. It was a
magnificent display of courage, and
brought to my mind the stern lines
of Montrose :

He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch

To gain or lose it all.

The banks were lined with hundreds
of spectators, who, like myself, had
experienced the excitement of the
voyage, and watched the fortunes of
their fellows with eager eyes and
absorbing interest. This was a drama
of real life, with its uncertain chances,
its inscrutable fate. Few scenes could
move the heart more than the sight
of those boats, filled with men and
women determined to put life and
fortune to the hazard ; it thrilled the
spectators, who watched for each
result with bated breath, breaking
into wild cheers for the successful,
and rushing to render practical aid to
the unfortunate.

Wrecks were numerous, but the

Impressions of Klondike.

45

loss of life comparatively small, the
estimate of the number of persona
drowned at these rapids in 1898 being
only thirty ; when one remembers the
many thousands of people who faced
the dangers of the White Horse, and
the very large number of boats
swamped, or dashed to pieces against
the rocks, the only wonder is that the
loss was not much greater. The left
shore, just below the rapids, was
strewn with boats and ruined outfits
when I arrived, and during my stay
there were two wrecks, neither of them
fatal, fortunately, though one man was
rescued in an unconscious state, and
another had a miraculous escape.

It requires a touch of imagination
to realise what being wrecked meant
to men hastening to the Klondike. To
obtain means to reach the goldfields,
where they believed fortune awaited
them, most of these men had spent
hard-earned savings, had left good
positions, had mortgaged their little
properties, had borrowed money, or
had done other equally rash things.
Each outfit represented a considerable
sum, and nearly every boat months of
labour, privation, and weary waiting.
Many had perished on the passes, or
had fallen victims to exposure and
disease. Of those who started over
the water-ways, not a few were
broken in health, shaken in every-
thing but their resolute determination
to press onwards to the Eldorado of
their dreams. Many had spent every
penny they possessed upon the year's
outfit they carried with them, while
not a few had lost all their money
through the wiles of sharpers, or
through their own degrading and
vicious habits. But to all these men,
not less than to the enterprising
trader hastening to Dawson with tons
of goods of more value than most
gold-mines, the loss of boats and
stores came as a crushing blow. Those
who witnessed it can alone appreciate

the pathos and the misery that
marked the wild stampede of 1898
to the frozen North, or the fortitude
with which the shattering of high
hopes and the quenching of feverish
expectations were borne. Of those
wrecked on the water-ways some
turned back, but the majority pressed
on. There were always plenty of
kindly offers of assistance, and the
large-hearted benevolence shown to
fellow-men in distress was one of the
redeeming features of that frantic
rush for wealth. Friends and ac-
quaintances fought at every turn : no
offer of money could induce people to
do a day's work ; but if anyone were
in real difficulty, there was never
any lack of ready and sympathetic
helpers.

From the White Horse Rapids to
Lake Labarge is about twenty-five
miles, and the length of the lake is
nearly thirty-two. Our journey was
uneventful, except during the last few
hours, when we experienced one of
those storms that arise so suddenly on
these lakes, and render their naviga-
tion by small boats extremely danger-
ous. The scenery here is very fine.
At the head from three to four miles
in width, the lake gradually narrows
near the middle, expanding again at
the lower end. We started in beautiful
weather. There was not a cloud in
the sky, and though there was a slight
breeze against us, we made good pro-
gress. For the first time we began to
realise that we were in a land of
deceptive distances. The large island
some thirteen miles from the head of
the lake, on the western side, looked
comparatively near by ten o'clock,
and we estimated that we should land
there for an early luncheon soon
after eleven. It was two hours later,
however, before we reached the low
gravelly shore, and then only by
plying our paddles with unceasing
energy. The sky was still clear, and

46

Impressions of Klondike.

though many times we wished for a
wind in our favour, we congratulated
ourselves upon having escaped the bad
weather for which the lake has an evil
reputation. After a hasty meal we
skirted the eastern side of the island,
which at its lower end is bold and
rocky, and made for the middle of the
lake. To the right, ahead of us, rose
great dome-like masses of limestone,
which are a striking feature of the
rugged eastern shore, while far off in
the distance we could see a series of
peaks from two to three thousand feet
in height. We had only made a few
miles when the breeze shifted to the
south, and we were able to raise our
modest little sail. But from a stiff
breeze the wind steadily increased in
force ; the lake grew rough, and the
canoe shipped so much water that we
deemed it prudent to make for the
shore. It proved an impossible coast
to land upon, and so we had no
alternative but to keep on under the
shelter of the masses of rock. A
squall struck us so suddenly that I
hardly had time to let go the sheet and
save the canoe from being swamped.
We took to our paddles again, but
it was very slow, laborious work, and
we were heartily glad when, just as it
was getting dark, we made the mouth
of Thirty Mile River, and secured a
camping-spot for the night. We had
covered some thirty-six miles, and the
severe paddling had tired us both out,
and rendered my left hand almost

Only a few days later the dangers
of Lake Labarge, from which we had
escaped, overtook a man whom the
Klondike could ill afford to lose.
Among our fellow-passengers on the
TARTAR from Vancouver to Skag-
way was a clergyman named Lyon.
He was as fine a specimen of an
English gentleman as one could hope
to meet anywhere. Tall, slight,
athletic, with fearless blue eyes, and

a particularly frank pleasant face, he
won for himself the affectionate regard
and respect of everyone on board ship.
His was one of those large unselfish
hearts which delight in doing good,
and inspire others with hope and con-
fidence. Everyone on the ship knew
him ; and though he was always a
quiet, dignified gentleman, he was the
life of the company. No one could
tell a story better, or enjoy one more.
His ready sympathy and interest in
everything that concerned others, his
manly manner, and robust, breezy
common sense, gave him a strong hold
over that strangely assorted company.
The Sunday morning service he held
on the TARTAR was crowded, and
the simple, practical address to the
congregation was listened to with
remarkable attention. One could not
help feeling that here was the right
man in the right place, and that Mr.
Lyon would exercise an extraordinary
influence for good over the lives of
the thousands of people flocking to
Dawson. His strong personality,
humanity, and strenuous religion, free
from all taint of mawkishness, were
admirably calculated to take the
imagination captive, and touch the
better emotions of a crowd of feverish
gold-seekers. But he was not destined
to carry out the missionary work in
which he was so deeply interested.
Through some mischance, the exact
nature of which remains unknown,
his canoe was swamped at the foot of
Lake Labarge, and both he and a man
who was with him were drowned.
Some days afterwards his body was
washed ashore, and was buried in a
rude cemetery at the back of the
Police Post. The route to the Klon-
dike is studded with lonely graves, but
there is none around which gather
more pathos and regret than that of
Walter Lyon.

Like the majority of our fellow-
travellers we imagined that with the

Impressions of Klondike.

crossing of Lake Labarge our difficul-
ties came to an end ; but Thirty Mile
River proved to be one of the most
dangerous parts of the journey.
Everyone had been forewarned of the
perils of the Canyon and White
Horse Rapids ; very few were aware
of the risks attending the navigation
of this swift river. Not only does the
current run with great velocity, but
the channel makes many sharp turns,
and is dotted with rocks, some of
which were just sufficiently covered
with water early in June to render
them a source of great danger. The
swirling eddies of the river added to
the difficulties of many, for only an
experienced eye could discriminate
these from the boiling caused by a
swift current passing over submerged
rocks. Though wrecks were not so
numerous as at the rapids, at least
three lives, and many boats with their
contents, were lost in Thirty Mile
River. The banks were strewn with
signs of misfortune when we passed
through, and as by far the larger
number of boats followed us, acci-
dents must have been of frequent
occurrence.

After reaching the Hootalinqua
River we parted company at one and
the same time with danger and clear
water. The remaining three hundred
and sixty-two miles of our journey
were over water-ways which grew more
turbid and dirty every day, until we
arrived at White River, some eighty
miles above Dawson, from which
point the Yukon River may justly be
regarded by the unscientific as, a vast
stream of liquid mud. At first the
water was only discoloured, and we
washed in it reluctantly, and drank it
with distaste ; but as it grew thicker
and thicker, until it hissed against
the sides and bottom of the canoe,
we turned from it with disgust, and
stopped at every creek, all too few
in number, to fill our vessels and

perform our ablutions. If the waters
of the White River carried but a
little more sediment than at present,
it would need no miracle to turn them
into dry land.

We had already passed two sets of
Custom House officials, and it caused
no little surprise and annoyance to
everyone to be compelled to land and
show their papers at Hootalinqua, Big
Salmon, Little Salmon, and Fort Sel-
kirk. This regulation, which should
never have been made, was soon after-
wards abolished. For large boats and
scows it was very difficult to effect a
landing at some of these places, and
as the officials scrutinised our papers,
and ordered us to report again at the
next station, we felt as if we were
travelling in Russia instead of in
Canada. The object, no doubt, was
to catch any boats which escaped the
vigilance of the police at Tagish ; but
the regulation was none the less a
vexatious one, and repeatedly had to
be enforced by the high-handed and
illegal proceeding of levelling a rifle
at travellers who misunderstood, or
attempted to disregard, the orders
bawled at them from the shore.

The occupants of many of the
larger boats and scows found plenty
of difficulties to occupy them in their
journey from the Hootalinqua to
Dawson. The Yukon River is a
puzzling maze of islands and bars,
and. as the channel is constantly
shifting, it is a trying river even for
the expert navigator. But our little
canoe slipped over everything, and,
when we were able to hoist sail before
a good breeze, almost flew down-
stream. The Five Finger Rapids,
some two hundred and thirty miles
above Dawson, are five masses of
conglomerate rock stretching across
the river, and divided by channels of
varying width. They offer no serious
obstacle to navigation, except when
the water is very low or very high,

Impressions of Klondike.

but as our canoe was heavily laden
we thought it well to put on the
canvas cover. It was fortunate we
did so, for the plunge through the
channel by the right-hand bank was
worse than it looked, and we shipped
enough water to drench the man in
the bow. Six miles further on are
the Rink Rapids, through which
there is a channel on the extreme
right where the water is smooth and
fairly deep. From here to Dawson
the main channel of the river is deep
and unbroken ; but it is by no means
easy to follow owing to the many
islands, and the bars at every
turn afforded most of us plenty of
excitement.

IV.

IN 1898 Dawson was a haphazard
collection of log-huts, frame-buildings,
and tents. From a sanitary stand-
point the site of the town is one of
the least desirable in the world. The
land is low and marshy, and is shut
in at the back by steep hills forming
an almost perfect crescent, at one end
of which are the bare cliffs through
which the Klondike River has cut its
way, and at the other a rugged bluff
which stretches out into the Yukon.
Owing to a landslide, which has left
a huge circular gap near the top, this
hill, hemming Dawson in on the
north, is the most striking landmark
in the district.

The distance between the two
horns of the crescent is about a
mile and a half, and along some two
thirds of this frontage, where the
river is not shallow, boats were tied
up four and five deep. During part
of the summer the population of
Dawson was over twenty thousand,
and as there were no streets, and no
sanitary arrangements, nothing more
horrible than the condition of the
town at that time can be imagined.

Even if the authorities had had the
will, they possessed neither the time
nor the power to grapple with the
difficulties that confronted them. In
every department the staff of officials
was inadequate, and too often it was
incapable. It says much for the
efficiency and energy of the small
force on the spot that the police, who
were called upon to perform multi-
farious duties with which they should
have had nothing to do, maintained
excellent law and order.

During the year I spent in the
Klondike there was very little
crime. Though a liberal percentage
of criminals was not wanting, the
people generally speaking were peace-
ful and law-abiding. Taken as a
whole I should imagine it was the
most orderly and well-behaved crowd
ever seen in a mining camp. The
cost and dangers of the journey un-
doubtedly excluded the rough element
to a large extent. There was also
too much hard work connected with a
trip to the Klondike in 1898 to make
it attractive to the average rascal,
who is invariably averse from manual
labour and hardship. Owing partly
to the vigilance of the police, and
partly, no doubt, to the difficulty of
getting out of the country, the
rogues and vagabonds who did reach
Dawson were successfully held in
check, and life and property were
wonderfully secure.

The stream of humanity that
flowed into the Klondike district
in 1898 was fed by almost all
classes and all nations. Of profes-
sional and well-educated men the
number was surprisingly large ;
farmers, mechanics and sailors were
numerous ; merchants, bankers, specu-
lators, journalists, the strenuous
pioneer and the ne'er-do-wells of the
world, the hardy workman and the
raw hand, the young, the middle-
I, and the old, — all were there.

Impressions of Klondike.

49

The sun seldom shone upon a more
motley crowd. Of the nationalities,
the American predominated ; next in
number came British subjects from
every part of the Empire, including,
of course, many Canadians ; French,
Germans, Swedes, Italians, and Rus-
sians made up a large element ;
and there was even a sprinkling of
negroes, and of Japanese whose ex-
cellent cooking stood them in good
stead. The only people conspicuous
by their absence were the Chinese.

That most of the forty thousand
people who flocked to the gold-fields
would be disappointed was a fore-
gone conclusion. The wealth of the
district, though unquestionably large,
had been ridiculously over-estimated ;
and very little was understood of
the real difficulties to be overcome
even if a valuable placer-mining claim
were secured. That the number of
such claims is very limited is now
well-known ; but that was not the
case two years ago. Evei-y yard of
the Klondike district was supposed
to contain gold in paying quantities ;
and the fabulous stories of the
wealth of the Stewart, Pelly, and
Salmon Rivers were too often ac-
cepted as authentic.

Of the people who went to ex-
plore these desolate regions few
knew anything about prospecting or
gold-mining except what they had
read in newspapers and cheap guide-
books; very few had any accurate
idea of the labour and time neces-
sary to prospect frozen ground.
Thousands of men hoped to dig up
nothing but nuggets, to obtain from
£1 to £100 out of every pan of
gravel they washed, or to gather a
competence, if not a fortune, off
river-bars. They did not even ex-
pect to have to undergo severe
labour to obtain these fabulous
results ; they imagined that when
once they had reached Dawson, or
No. 493. — VOL. LXXXIII.

any other point for which they were
bound, most of their hardships would
be at an end, that the gold would
be easily found, quickly won, and
a fortune made in a few weeks or
months. Consequently there was
mad haste to be the first on the
spot. Men did not care what they
dared, or what they endured, if they
could only reach the Eldorado of
their dreams before the majority of
their fellow-travellers ; and as they
neared the end of their journey the
fever and excitement increased.

The awakening for all these un-
fortunate people was a bitter one.
In that perpetually frozen land they
found it took days, and sometimes
weeks, of hard labour to sink, with
wood fires or heated rocks, two or
three holes to the required depth,
and when bed-rock was at length
reached the promised gold was
seldom found. Renewed efforts, ex-
cept for those who located the few
claims worth having which remained
in the Klondike district, only led
to fresh disappointment.

The prospectors forced their way
up the swift rivers, where rowing
was frequently impossible, poling
their boats, or more often towing
them along rotten over-hanging banks
and round steep bluffs ; here felling
trees to make a pathway, there
wading in icy cold water over bars
and up rapids. At the mouth of
every likely-looking creek the boat
was tied up, and the party, having
packed food, cooking-utensils, and
tools on their backs, each man carry-
ing from fifty to a hundred pounds
in weight, made forced marches in-
land to explore the stream. This
packing, of which so much had to
be done, none of the creeks being
navigable even by a small canoe,
was the hardest of hard work.
Even without a pack, walking through
swamps, woods, burnt timber, and

50

Impressions of Klondike.

dense, drenching wet bush was ex-
tremely laborious. The ground was
almost everywhere covered with
thick spongy moss, which is more
tiring than anything I know to
walk over. When it was decided
to sink prospect-shafts, repeated
journeys had to be made to and
from the boat to carry up supplies
and blankets, which are needed even
in the middle of summer.

In the bush the mosquitoes, and
later in the season the small black
gnats, were a torment by night and
by day. There were few men who
did not suffer cruelly from these pests,
of which I do not believe anything
that has ever been written is an
exaggeration. At times I have seen
the mosquitoes so thick that it was
impossible to work. Strong gloves
and veils afforded some protection,
but no care enabled one to escape
being constantly bitten ; and as most
of us found the bites exceedingly
venomous and irritating, life was
often rendered intolerable. Exas-
perating as these pests were in the
day-time, they almost drove one
frantic at night, making sleep impos-
sible, or at best a luxury purchased
at a heavy cost.

These were only a few of the hard-
ships and discomforts men had to
endure. Within a short time hun-
dreds gave up the struggle and started
for home; others camped at the
mouth of every creek hoping .to
profit by the discoveries of the more
industrious ; thousands spent the
summer in idleness and dissipation at
Dawson, which at that time presented
an extraordinary sight. Day and
night the drinking, gambling, and
dancing saloons were never closed,

and were nearly always crowded.
The main street, a morass of filth,
was thronged with idlers, lounging in
every conceivable attitude or sitting
on every available object.

Enfeebled by bad food, exposure,
and unaccustomed toil, worn out by
anxiety and broken by disappointment,
many died, and hundreds sank into
a state of hopeless despondency, from
which even the approach of winter
failed to rouse them. They lived on
in tents, or wretched cabins, until the
supplies brought with them were
consumed, and then became a burden
upon the charitable, or a charge upon
the public funds. Out of the small
revenues at their command the
Administrative Council at Dawson
during the winter of 1898-9 were
forced to spend nearly £20,000 upon
the care of the sick and indigent.
Many of those relieved were, of
course, worthless idlers, who never
had worked and never would work ;
but the majority were men broken
in body and in mind, the wrecks of
the tide by which they had been
swept on to the inhospitable shores
of the frozen North, or men who,
though willing and able to work,
could find no employment in the
glutted labour-market.

The number of deaths from typhoid
fever, dysentery, scurvy, and other
diseases, was appalling ; and it was
pitiable throughout the mining district
to see scores of men, once strong and
stalwart, now broken, emaciated, and
doomed, the ghosts of their former
selves. No one but those who wit-
nessed it can appreciate the amount
of human wretchedness which the
rush to the gold-fields involved.

CHAKLES C. OSBORNE.

(To be continued.)

51

THE SETTLEMENT OF SOUTH AFRICA.1

IT may be discouraging to think
that the task of political reconstruc-
tion in South Africa may prove in its
way as difficult as the trying war
through which we have just passed ;
but the thought may help us in the
long run if the country realises, at
last and at a great cost, how serious
and important an inheritance our
South African empire is. Ministers
have been careless, the country has
been indifferent, and South African
questions have been thrown down on
the floor of the House of Commons to
be wrangled over and decided in a
mere party spirit, with the inevitable
result that disloyalists have won and
patriots have lost. The time has
now come to close this chapter of our
Colonial history and begin anew in
a chastened spirit. Not only must
England's ministers take up the
great task in the proper spirit, but
the public at large, who are giving
a mandate at this election, must try
to understand the whole complex ques-
tion. Dr. Farrelly's book should prove
no slight help towards the elucida-
tion of the problem. Holding the
responsible position of Advising
Counsel for the Transvaal Govern-
ment during those eventful years
between 1896 and 1899, he was
naturally brought into close contact
with the official clique at Pretoria,
and was in the best position to have
his finger upon the pulse of public
opinion. With him also rested the
interpretation of legal questions aris-

1 THE SETTLEMENT AFTER THE WAR IN
SOOTH AFRICA; by M. J. Farrelly, LL.D.,
Advocate of the Supreme Court of Cape
Colony. London, 1900.

ing under the Conventions of 1881
and 1884. He made it his business
to travel frequently in all parts of
South Africa and to collect evidence
from every quarter. If Mr. Fitz-
Patrick in THE TRANSVAAL FROM
WITHIN has given us one side of the
South African problem, Dr. Farrelly
has given us another ; and it is not
too much to say that he has given
us even more to think about than
Mr. FitzPatrick.

Dr. Farrelly's remarks cover two
large fields, — the field of retrospection
and the field of anticipation. This is
as it should be in the case of South
Africa for, surely, there is no single
member of our scattered Colonial
Empire which demands a more con-
centrated and thorough study. By
the irony of fate it seems to have
suffered more than any other colony
from the fugitive impressions of
visitors and even from their (doubt-
less unconscious) misrepresentations.
There was none, indeed, who in an
unconscious way did more harm by his
speeches and writings than Mr. Froude,
when travelling as Lord Carnarvon's
accredited mouthpiece to further the
cause of South African Confederation.
He contrived to form some curiously
false ideas of the real Boer, whose true
character can be learned only by
experience, and he was unfortunate
enough to propagate them more widely
than he knew. When Mr. Froude,
in a fit of rhapsody, declared that he
saw among the Boers young women
who might have stepped from the
canvas of Van Eyck, and young men
who might have sat to Teniers, and
then proceeded to connect these crea-
E 2

52

The Settlement of South Africa.

tures of his imagination with those
Dutch sailors of the sixteenth century
who had dyed the seas with the blood
of the Spaniards, he was speaking to
an audience, not only in South Africa
but also at home, which took him at
his word and believed both the picture
and the genealogy to be true. He
was only ridiculous when he quoted
Horace to an audience of Boers, but
he was dangerous when he told them
in 1875: "English statesmen wish
to leave you to yourselves, to leave
you the full management of your own
internal affairs whilst we confine our-
selves to the protection of your
coasts. . . . We protect you with
our flag and with our fleet. . . .
We ask you for nothing but the
Imperial Station at Simonstown."
This of course was impossible, but the
seed cast by the hand of such a sower
found root in many places. Years
afterwards, in 1896, the idea was
re-echoed in that most mischievous
and foolish publication, A FEDERAL
SOUTH AFRICA, by Mr. P. A. Molteno.
" England will protect our sea-board,"
he wrote. " No Power can do it so
effectively, no Power will do it so
generously. She will earn her reward,
our gratitude, the honour of founding
and protecting the infancy of a great
nation. . . . but for all internal
questions between the Colonies and
States . . . there we must be
absolutely and entirely independent."
Mr. Molteno, whose father was a
worthy and respected sheep-farmer on
the Karroo, is, it may be observed, of
Italian extraction, and in no sense a
descendant of the Dutch mariners of
the sixteenth century.

Political propaganda are dangerous
weapons to deal with, and a few
words spoken publicly by a distin-
guished writer with a mission may so
easily be used as a peg upon which
to hang Republican theories and
Separatist programmes. For the last

twenty years Afrikanderdom, by which
must be understood Dutch and only
Dutch Afrikanderdom, has raised its
head in politics, reinforced by Hollan-
der adventurers, Italian paupers, Irish
Fenians, French Anglophobes, and
the scum of Republican and Socialistic
Europe. This can hardly have been
the gallant nation Mr. Froude had in
view, and we hope that with the dis-
appearance of the Transvaal auxi-
liaries and mercenaries by way of
Delagoa Bay we have seen the last
of them.

Another English Professor has, as
we know, more recently given us his
impressions of South Africa, but it is
clear that his words - also must be
modified by the light of recent events.
It is to be noted, however, that many
of his conclusions and much of his
text, illustrating the growth of Repub-
licanism, have been greedily appro-
priated by Mr. Molteno. Evidently
we must be on our guard against
English Professors travelling in South
Africa ; the young Afrikander is, like
Mr. Molteno, only too willing to dish
the visitors up in a sauce of his own.
Dr. Farrelly places us on our guard
against these literary tourists when,
in his estimate of the patient work of
Sir Alfred Milner he writes : " After
nearly two years of enquiry, — an
eminent writer has been found who
thinks six months sufficient — the High
Commissioner apparently grasped the
situation that there was a distinct
purpose to oust the Imperial power
from rule in South Africa and to sub-
stitute a Dutch-speaking Afrikander
dominion, separated from the Empire."
As if to illustrate yet again the
deceptive nature of South African
politics, Dr. Farrelly admits in his
preface (and this admission illustrates
the honest and thorough nature of his
investigations) that if he had written
down his impressions of the country
in 1897, two years after his arrival

The Settlement of South Africa.

53

in it, he would, nevertheless, have
seen reason to modify them very
gravely in 1899. It is worth noting
that, to begin with, he had adopted
Professor Bryce's general attitude
towards the South African problem,
and had imagined that time and
patience would heal all differences.
This view he found to be absolutely
baseless. His inner experiences of the
Afrikanders taught him that war was
in their hearts : " mere quietism and
inaction would never have averted it,"
he writes ; and again, " the question
was one only of time," for sooner than
give up a Dutch Afrikander Dominion
the Dutch "would have deliberately
gone to war."

Upon the constitution of this war-
party Dr. Farrelly throws some new
light. The men who were really most
instrumental in fanning the flame were
the young and educated Afrikanders.
The most significant sign of coming
trouble was really the replacement of
Hollander by Afrikander officials;
even the Johannesburg people scarcely
realised the political meaning of this
step, for they long thought that the
opinion of the educated Afrikander
was with the party of Reformers, and
that it was really the Hollander gang
who were forcing the late President's
hand. But Dr. Farrelly, with much
acumen and many proofs, points out
that Mr. Kruger never allowed his
hand to be forced by any one. With
regard to the Hollanders, all those
who have had a long acquaintance
with South African life must remem-
ber that this particular class of
European immigrant was not only
unpopular with the Boers, but abso-
lutely obnoxious to them. Mr. Kruger
used the Hollanders, as he used every
one else, for his own ends.

The Outlanders learned to know

the weight of the Afrikander's hand

in October, 1899, when that abomin-

j able order for expulsion was signed

by Mr. Reitz, one of the founders of
the Afrikander Bond, and Mr. Smuts,
the State Attorney, whose appoint-
ment to his position in the Transvaal
was said to have been made on the
recommendation of Mr. Hofmeyr,
the leader of the Afrikander Bond in
Cape Colony. This worthy, at the
time of the Bloemfontein Conference,
was supposed to have been a kind of
agent and amicus curice for the Cape
Parliament. There was more than
one curia in South Africa a year ago,
and it would have been well if, at
that time, Mr. Hofmeyr had made
it clear as to which of them enlisted
his greatest sympathies. At the
Colonial Conference of 1887 he
figured as a Cape delegate and pro-
posed a plan for Imperial Defence
at the Amphictyonic Council of our
Empire. In 1899 did he, or did he
not, warn the High Commissioner, or
the Government at home, of certain
military preparations in the countries
beyond the Orange River or the
Vaal 1 We would be glad to receive
some information on this point.

For the young Afrikander, who has
shown himself an adept at intrigue and
a past-master at the game of bounce,
Dr. Farrelly, after an intimate acquaint-
ance, has nothing but a well-grounded
contempt. " Messrs. Reitz, Smuts
and Fischer," he writes, "and the
rest of the young Afrikanders have
kept well outside the range of the
British guns." The British public
also are quite aware now of what is
meant by " dying on the stoep ; " and,
without disparaging the courage of
those who on some few occasions have
stood squarely up to us, it is not
unfair to say that the main aspects
of this war towards its close have
resembled a baboon-hunt among the
rocks and caves of the Drakensberg
and Lebombo ranges.

Dr. Farrelly's book is, as we have
said, a retrospect as well as a forecast.

54

The Settlement of South Africa.

He is under no delusions as to the
terrible official blunders made by
British Administrators in the past.
He throws the whole gloomy story
into a separate chapter, and those
who wish to grasp some of the
salient points of South African history
since British occupation had better
study it ; it will surely make them
more wise in the future. Seventy
years ago there was the astounding
policy, suggested by missionaries, of
surrounding Cape Colony with a
ring of independent States, an idea
absolutely impracticable in itself and
abandoned on the first show of Boer
resistance. There were the constant
changes of policy with regard to the
Basutos, ending with that disastrous
Disarmament Act and gun-war of
1882, which cost Cape Colony (Dr.
Farrelly might have added) four
millions sterling. There was inces-
sant vacillation about Natal, and the
issuing of constant and idle proclama-
tions to the Boers on the question of
the right emigration gave them to
discard their citizenship. There was
the Sand River Convention which left
the Boers an opening ; and, surely, in
later times, there could never have
been anything more feeble and futile
than allowing the Pretoria Convention
of 1881 to be replaced by the London
Convention of 1884. Dr. Farrelly's
opinion on the question of suzerainty
is worth noting as he thinks that it
was really abandoned, and most cer-
tainly the British Cabinet of the day
acted as if it were a dead letter. But
subsequent revelations have proved
that the signatories of the Convention
of 1884 were either hopelessly igno-
rant of the true state of South African
politics or, like Lord Derby, supremely
indifferent to them.

All this vacillation is useful to re-
member, for there must be no more
of it. The result has been to nerve
the arm of the Boers and to paralyse

our own. Even loyal British Colonists
had ceased to believe in the official
declaration of England ; not once but
many times their loyalty has been
strained to the breaking-point, and
to recover their confidence and to
win their support, it is probable that
England will have to make a sharper
and more thorough distinction be-
tween loyalty and disloyalty than, as
an Imperial Power holding the scales
between different races, she would
have wished. There is a balance of
compensatory justice still owing to
the loyalists, and there is a vast
amount of real loss to make good.
In the American War England made
very substantial rewards of land to
the United Empire Loyalists, and she
must act in the same spirit in South
Africa if she desires to encourage that
wholesome growth of loyalty.

Herein also lies a danger ahead, for
it must never be forgotten that there
is, and always has been, a considerable
residuum of loyal Dutch Afrikanders;
and justice will therefore have to be
of a very cautious and discriminating
character. Perhaps the most dis-
agreeable element to be faced in the
whole matter will be the decayed
Cape Colony politician who, renegade
Briton as he is, has trimmed per-
sistently while fattening on Boer
prejudices. Fortunately, with the
practical extinction of that abomin-
able political organisation, the Afri-
kander Bond, which, like a noxious
octopus, had its feelers all over the
Orange River and Transvaal terri-
tories, the type will cease to repro-
duce itself. In these conquered
territories its existence should be
absolutely prohibited by law.

With Dr. Farrelly's appreciation
of Sir Alfred Milner we can heartily
agree. We are glad to have it upon
such first-rate evidence that his
methods during and after the Blocm-
fontein Conference were, if anything,

The Settlement of South Africa.

55

too patient. We can recommend this
conclusion to all those who have per-
sistently tried to misrepresent the
methods of the Colonial Office and
the action of Sir Alfred. Indeed, it
is not easy to realise the difficulties
which the latter had to fight in his
dual capacity of Governor of Cape
Colony and High Commissioner of
South Africa. His hands were tied
at every turn. If the Cape (Afrikan-
der) Ministry disagreed with any
measures he thought fit to adopt for
the public safety, it was of course
open to him to do what Sir Bartle
Frere had done before him and to
dismiss them ; but we can all remem-
ber what an outcry there was at the
time, and how Sir Bartle Frere in-
curred the venomous rage of the
Molteno-Merriman coalition, a rage
which has descended to a younger
and more feeble generation. We can
remember also how at home Sir Bartle
Frere earned the reputation of being
a prancing Proconsul from the mouths
of irresponsible demagogues, whose
pernicious influence is only now being
extinguished for ever. Sir Alfred
Milner, then, might have well paused
before taking such a step as the
dismissal of the Schreiner Ministry.
And thus that Ministry, in spite of
many questionable incidents, such as
the importation of rifles and ammuni-
tion through Cape Colony to the Free
State, in spite of the culpable accu-
mulation of rolling-stock in the Re-
publics, and in spite of the culpable
negligence which left Mafeking de-
fenceless, prolonged its precarious
existence until the Boer mask was
thrown off and the insolent ultimatum
was flung in England's face.

But if the High Commissioner had
been able to act in a more direct
manner in Cape Colony, he might
have taken better measures of defence
without running the risk of offending
the Afrikander Ministry at Cape

Town. In fact the High Commis-
sionership, as it exists at present, is
an anomaly. In the settlement of
South Africa Dr. Farrelly points out
that there should be a complete re-
organisation of the office, and such
minor modifications of the local con-
stitution as may be required.

The problem is too complex, the issues
are too dangerous to be left altogether in
local hands. The community, torn by
racial and British dissensions, confronted
everywhere by an overwhelming majority
of Kaffir tribes, distracted by an anti-
British propaganda striving to expel the
Imperial power, the centre, too, of opera-
tions of world-finance, turning round the
vast South African product of gold and
diamonds, which, for the safety of the
Empire, must not be allowed to come
completely under the control of cosmo-
politan capitalists, a community such as
this is not one in which the welfare of
the Empire can be with safety entrusted
to local hands without Imperial guidance.
A community, too, the protection of
whose coasts, the integrity of whose
territory has lately been effected, once
again, at the expenditure of tens of
millions of Imperial treasure and thou-
sands of lives of Imperial soldiers.

Dr. Farrelly suggests, therefore, that
the High Commissioner should become
Governor- General of South Africa with
a direct authority from Parliament,
and holding, as in India, the super-
intendence, direction, and control of
the whole civil and military Govern-
ment. He is careful to mark that
the Indian precedent need not be
closely followed in the powers dele-
gated to the Governor-General, or in
the nomination of a possible Council
for South Africa. In view of colonial
susceptibilities it is wise to make this
clear; for the charge against Sir Bartle
Frere was that he aimed at govern-
ing South Africa on Indian lines.
However the change is a drastic
one, and whether we wait for South
African Confederation or not, it is
clear that something will have to be

56

The Settlement of South Africa.

done, and done soon. Everyone must
perceive that the solution of the pro-
blem is not only difficult but that it
is unique ; and, therefore, we cannot
be guided by precedent elsewhere,
whether in India or in our self-
governing colonies. Not many years
ago, and especially during the de-
bates which preceded the Bechuana-
land expedition of 1884-5, there was
much use in Cape Colony of the
now historic phrase, eliminating the
Imperial factor. In the minds of
many of those Afrikanders who used
this phrase there was much disloyalty,
but at the same time the idea under-
lying these words found ready accep-
tance fifteen years ago among those
British colonists who had grown tired
of the everlasting see-saw of party
politics at home. In addition, there
were -not wanting those who took up
the phrase for purposes of their own
in South Africa.

It was not altogether clear whether
tha Imperial factor wished to be elimi-
nated or not from South Africa at
that particular crisis. The signatories
of the London Convention of 1884
had shown themselves absolutely in-
different to the best interests of our
South African Empire, and there was
hardly any adequate allusion to that
vital change of Convention in the
House of Commons : the matter was
dealt with a little more fully in the
other House, and Lord Salisbury
uttered some memorable criticisms
when he suggested that the new
name of the South African Republic
might mean more than appeared on
the surface ; but it was eventually
dropped, little or no interference
being offered to the treaty-making
power of the Crown. Presently the
Convention was put aside, out of
sight and mind, only to be revived
and scrutinised feverishly many years
afterwards when the controversy about
the Preamble and the Suzerainty

clause arose. Then at last we knew
how much Lord Derby, Lord Rosmead,
and the rest had given away.

Another very grave misconception
of South African politics has arisen
from the continued application of a
false and misleading Colonial analogy.
How often have we heard the Cape
and Canada compared ! How often
has a parallel been drawn between
the disaffected French peasantry of
the Quebec Valley and the Boer
farmers of the veld! How often
have we been asked to treat the Boers
as if they were simple Acadian
peasants struggling for constitutional
freedom and needing only the pleasant
salve of another Durham Report to
make them all loyal ! But the Papi-
neau Rebellion of 1837 was very
different in motive and conception
from the carefully planned war of
aggression which aimed at destroying
the British Empire in South Africa.
The Canadian rising was a mere
holiday prank in comparison with the
Boer war. Nor is there any likeness,
historical or otherwise, between the
Calvinistic Boer of South Africa and
the Roman Catholic peasantry of the
Quebec Valley. One of the deepest
causes of difference between Boers
and British lay of course in the official
attitude of their respective govern-
ments to the natives. According to
the old Boer Grond Wet the native
was expressly excluded from equality
in Church and State, in other words,
he was stamped for ever as the
Gibeonite of society; and these dis-
abilities applied not only to the African-
born natives but also to such a class
as the Indian immigrants and the
Mahommedan traders who found their
way to the Transvaal from the Natal
coast. Here was of course a fruitful
source of friction with the British
Government who naturally desired to
secure favourable treatment for the
Indian coolies, and others, as British

The Settlement of South Africa.

57

subjects. Dr. Farrelly rightly em-
phasises that point when he fearlessly
asserts that under the old Boer
Government the commissioners for
native affairs had been permitted to
practise extortion, injustice, and
cruelty upon those under their juris-
diction. In fact the two systems of
government, the Boer and the British,
could never exist together in South
Africa, and confusion in the long
run would inevitably have been the
result had war been staved off for
a few years. Quoting a letter from
a leading Johannesburger, Dr. Far-
relly writes : " The question of the
treatment of the natives in the
form of the admission or not of the
coloured people to political and civil
rights still constitutes the main cause
which tends to maintain the separa-
tion of the Dutch and the English."
This must never be forgotten. The
difference is one not of degree but of
kind between the two races, and can
never be bridged over. It is one of the
deep causes which made a Boer war
inevitable. If English Radicalism,
which prides itself upon its humani-
tarianism and broad views of man's
rights, could once have realised this
fundamental point, there would not,
let us hope, have been a single pro-
Boer vote throughout the length and
breadth of the land.

Upon the two important classes of
subsidiary questions which now await
solution in South Africa, those re-
lating to language and land, Dr.
Farrelly offers some decided and most
useful remarks. " On one point," he
writes, " there should be no uncer-
tainty. English should be the official
language in every department of the
administration, in the public offices,
and in the Law Courts." This
deliberate opinion should be recom-
mended to a large number of charit-
able and broad-minded people at
home who, not wishing to make

defeat too bitter a pill to the Boers,
are inclined to allow the official use
of both Dutch and English. There
are many strong reasons against this.
In the first place the Dutch Afri-
kanders have used the language-
question during the last twenty years
as a political lever against England ;
they have openly said that the con-
cession, on this head, of 1882 was
merely a beginning of their cam-
paign against the British ; and we
know this campaign by its results.
Secondly, there is no real grievance
in making English the sole official
language because nearly every Boer
with the smallest smattering of
education understands it already, and
the Boer women understand it even
better than the men ; there can
therefore be no hardship such as
might be imagined if the case of the
Boers was like that of the Finns who
have been commanded to use Russian.
Thirdly, the Dutch language commonly
known as the Afrikander Taal is
nothing but a local patois, with no
literature or history of its own. What
is known as High Dutch at the Cape
is the Dutch of the pulpits and
seminaries. But outside the church
and the school the average Boer
speaks nothing but Kitchen or Hotten-
tot Dutch. To preserve the French
language for French Canadians is an
entirely different matter. Fourthly,
the Dutch Afrikanders have com-
pletely cut the ground from under
their feet by their own legislation
in the past towards the French
Huguenots, and, more lately, in the
Transvaal, by their exclusive and
high-handed treatment of the whole
question. We are not surprised,
therefore, to note that in Cape colony
itself there is a tendency among
the English-speaking members of
the Cape Assembly to repeal the
Act of 1882, and, reverting to
the old order of things, to demand

58

The Settlement of South Africa.

the sole use of English in an English
Colony.

This question of language is a far
more important one than appears on
the surface and in any new system
of education framed for use in the
Orange River and Transvaal Colonies
English text-books and English his-
tories alone should be allowed. The
Boer is amazingly prejudiced and
illiterate, and if we allow his educa-
tion to be conducted on Dutch Afri-
kander lines we shall infallibly lose
him. Dr. Farrelly has noted, perhaps
in too sweeping a way, but truly
enough in the case of schools and
seminaries conducted by the Dutch Re-
formed Church, that " The South Afri-
can Educational Institution, judged by
the fruits of their training the minds
of their alumni, can only be described
as an anti-British forcing -house."
Considering how much England has
conceded to Dutch sentiment in the
past, how ready she has been to listen
to the slightest grievance, how fair
her rule and how just her sway, it is
clear that she has been rewarded by

the most gross and base ingratitude.
One chapter is closed : another has
now to be commenced ; but we have
learned our lesson.

With firm and careful handling the
South African problem need not be
insoluble. Administration has its
triumphs no less than war. It will
be strange indeed should England fail
here when she has succeeded so admir-
ably in every other quarter of the
globe. Sir Alfred Milner has, as Dr.
Farrelly remarks, the sovereign virtue
of patience, while knowing when and
how to act. Englishmen must not
weary of South Africa now the war
is over, but learn to understand it as
one of their greatest responsibilities.
And to understand it, with all its
anomalies, its contradictions, its dark
chapter of ambition and intrigue in
the past, as well as to form a judg-
ment on its position and requirements
in the future, they can have no better
assistance than Dr. Farrelly's book.
It is one of the best and truest
volumes that has yet been printed on
South Africa.

59

A LOVELY SENTIMENT.

THE Princess lay back in her chair,
holding up her parasol very prettily
with both her jewelled hands. The
sun was setting, and the whole
marvellous stretch of the campagna
spread before us bathed in waning
pink light, while the sea-breeze wafted
up to us all the perfume of the rose-
gardens that lay beneath the old
marble terrace.

It was a wonderful old villa, such
a one as only the fancy of a man of
exquisite taste and boundless wealth,
like Cardinal Conti, could have con-
jured up in the golden days of Papal
grandeur, when the riches of the
world poured into the Roman coffers,
to be turned into marble and stone
by Bernini and Fontana and Michael
Angelo and Pierni del Vega ; an
old-world garden, where the youth of
the new spring seemed to wed with
the centuries of the past, clambering
in thousands of roses up the ruins
of the old aqueduct, and covering
with wisteria what still remained of
Galba's palace.

" You say that you find L'Acquaia
a good deal changed, Stelio," said
the Princess ; " and I fear not
for the better in your opinion.
You artists are such strange
creatures ; you like everything to be
in a state of ruin. I verily believe,
by the fuss that you've all of you
made about the changes in Rome,
that you would like us all to live
in the cellars of the Palatine, and
to plant creepers over the fronts of
our palaces. You are delightfully
inconsistent people ; for your studios
are models of snug homes, and there
is no luxury and no innovation that

is not to be found in your houses.
But to us, poor commonplace mortals,
you will not even allow the com-
fort of electric light and decent
cleanliness."

I smiled. "Surely, Princess, you
exaggerate."

" Oh, no," she said, as she played
with the mother-of-pearl handle of
her parasol. "When Lenbach came
last year to Acquaia and asked what
had become of the little chapel, he
raised his hands in horror when I
said that I had turned it into a
bathroom. And mind you, it was
not a religious horror ; for I had
told him that we had obtained the
Holy Father's permission, and that
a new chapel had been built in
the Orangery, No, no, he declared,
it was an action worthy only of
an American, — whatever reproach he
meant by that."

"You see," I explained, "Americans
have no sentiment; they are made
up expressly for modern life. They
would tell you, I dare say, that we
people of the old Continent with our
traditions are as lumbering as ante-
diluvian elephants. "

" You say," said the Princess,
" that Americans have no sentiment 1
There I'm thoroughly at variance
with you. Of course I know that
they were really created to ride in
tramcars and speak into phono-
graphs ; but I think that they were
created too for the advantage of us
Europeans. Why, what should we
do with all our old pictures and our
old titles without Americans to buy
them? And as for sentiment, I
assure you that they have it. Senti-

60

A Lovely Sentiment.

ment comes over the ocean as well
as petroleum and bananas. Now I'll
just tell you a little story."

As she spoke she closed the lace
parasol and leaned back in her rock-
ing chair. The old triton in the
middle of his white marble basin
kept blowing his shower of rain
over the water-lilies with a sound as
of music.

" You remember the old terrace
at the bottom of the garden1? /
never saw anything very wonderful
in it ; but then, as you know, I
never do see anything that I think
pretty except at Virot's, — the old
crumbling terrace all covered with
lichen — oh, yes, surely you do ? —
down by the statue of the armless
Diana, the poor maimed thing hold-
ing out her two stumps to the yellow
mimosa bush1? Well, to-morrow go
down there. You will find a nice
new spick-and-span terrace of Carrara
marble, and a Diana with two good
sound arms. In one hand she even
holds a bow, a most forbidding bow;
all the birds must be frightened at
it, I think, for they no longer sing
as they used to sing down there,
The old mimosa-bush, too, has died.
But to my taste, the place looks
much prettier and tidier and healthier
than it did ; I always associate ruins
with fever. Well, you will say to
yourself when you see all this, —
' What on earth has happened to the
Contis ! Have they discovered a
coal-mine that they should throw
away so much money on this ridi-
culous out-of-the-way corner of an
old garden?' Not a bit, my dear
friend. It is all due to the land of
Stars and Stripes, and yet the story
has something pathetic in it.

" You know the villa is sometimes
shown to strangers. English and
Americans often ask to see it ; they go
to Paul's secretary and get an order.
Well, once a benighted traveller from

San Francisco, or St. Louis, or some
other prairie saintship, came to Rome ;
and old Van der Bosh, who was then
ambassador, not knowing what to do
with the creature, sent him one day
to the most secluded of all the Roman
villas, — just, I suppose, to get breath-
ing-time from his society. Silas Block
started on the most eventful trip that
he ever took, and arrived at Acquaia
tired, hot, and feeling terribly lonely
and bored. The housekeeper showed
him everything that there was to be
seen, it appears — even to my dresses !
We were at Monte Carlo for a few
days. When he had seen all the
Venuses and all the old frescoes, poor
man, he pulled out his watch and it
was only two o'clock, and the train
was not to leave Anzio till six. Poor
Silas begged to be left to wander in
the garden, and I suppose that a hand-
some tip shut the housekeeper's eyes
to the transgression. Silas was left to
wander. Fate took him down past
the rose-garden to the shubbery, and
past the shubbery to poor armless
Diana's bower. But ere he reached
that, he was lost. For on one of the
old stone benches sat a beautiful girl,
dressed all in white, with glossy dark
hair and the pink and white com-
plexion which only an Irish girl can
have. Silas stopped and drew in his
breath. He did not know whether he
was dreaming or not. For a long
long time he gazed, slowly drinking
in the deadly poison of love that is
never more deadly than when one is
bored. And Silas was waiting for the
six o'clock train !

" Suddenly the girl looked up,
blushed vividly at seeing the look in
his eyes, and rose as if about to leave.
But Silas had not stopped bushrangers
with an unloaded Colt's revolver for
nothing. He took off his hat and
stated the case to the girl clearly in
a matter-of-fact way. He told her
who he was, how he came to be there,

A Lovely Sentiment.

61

and asked her to have pity upon him
till six o'clock.

"Her pity extended far beyond
that hour; for when we returned a
few days later, the English governess
was the affianced wife of the American
millionaire. The affair made some
stir at the time, and we all took a
violent interest in it ; for my own
part, I confess to a feeling of envy
that was in my heart when I thought
of my two sisters still unmarried. I
suppose, though, that they might have
sat for months under the protection
of the armless Diana uselessly ; some
girls have no luck. So Mrs. Silas Block
left the old world for the new, where
she sailed her own yacht and became
an unmitigated success. As for Silas,
he simply worshipped the ground that
she trod on ; he would have covered
it with gold at her asking. But there
is nothing more dangerous than to
have all that one wants ; it is as fatal
as the decree of ' Let the prisoner go '
in the time of Marat and Danton.
The poor little thing suddenly sickened
and died.

" Silas was inconsolable ; they say
he was nearly out of his mind. His
children gave him no comfort; they
were nothing to him. We did not
see him till many months after, and
even then he looked sadly changed.
And now we come to the most
touching part of my story. He did
not know how to say it, poor man, but
after a long preamble he asked Paul
whether anything would persuade
him to part with the terrace and the
old broken-down Diana.

" Can't you imagine Paul looking
very serious and laughing under his
long moustaches at the American's
naivete ? As if there were anything,
anything in the wide world that Paul
would not sell ! He is quite as good

as any American at driving a bargain.
He demurred, of course : it was very,
very hard, he said, for him to sell
his dearly-loved terrace, which bis
ancestor had built, of which his wife
was so fond ; but out of consideration
for the deep and beautiful sentiment
which prompted Silas to buy it, he
would part with it for a small price, a
merely nominal price, one hundred and
fifty thousand francs, really a sum not
worth speaking of, only the American
must put up a new terrace in its
place, an exact reproduction of the
old one."

"For future Contis to sell," I
observed.

" Just so," said the Princess. " So
the old broken-down terrace was
packed off to America, where Silas has
put it up in a park all walled in on
every side, of which he only has the
key, and where he passes many an
hour gazing at poor armless Diana, —
who stood the sea- journey better than
you or I would have stood it ! "

" I wonder how she likes the
Americans," I ventured.

We wandered slowly down through
the rose-garden, past the rushing water
that for so many centuries had been
the voice of Acquaia, to the green
nook where the brand-new Diana
reigned supreme. Somehow the spirit
of the place had gone. Yes, there
was the spick-and-span new terrace, a
perfect reproduction ; but the soul of
the place was there no longer.

"And now, just tell me," said the
Princess, " don't you really think that
Americans have sentiment 1 "

" Perhaps they are getting," I
answered, " what we are losing."

" That may be," cried the Princess.
" But Paul paid his own debts and
mine with the American's sentiment,
and I think it a lovely sentiment ! "

62

GALLANT LITTLE WALES.

ONE pleasant afternoon I was leaning
over my garden-gate, smoking a cheer-
ful pipe and watching the shadows of
the clouds dapple with broad bands
of delicious purple the sunny valley
below, when a man came to the foot
of the steps and smiled up at me.
It was Rhys Nant yr Onen, brown-
faced and bright-eyed, looking un-
wontedly smart for a week-day in
new homespun and carrying a genteel
walking-stick, in place of his cus-
tomary five-foot sheep-staff. He has
a belief (which the facts do not
justify) that he can speak English,
and he wrestled dreadfully in that
language awhile, before he fell into
his own tongue and we came to an
understanding. It then appeared that
he had been appointed gtvahoddwr
(that is to say, inviter) to desire
people to attend a marriage which
was to take place between John
Ty'n y Pant and Margaret Fron-wen,
and was now on his round bidding
the folk of the mountain gather to
the wedding. Just as he finished
his address to me, two women, an
old and a young one, came down
from the bog where they had been
turning peats. Rhys proffered his
invitation and it was received by the
older woman with a snarl.

" Never in the world," she cried ;
" I wouldn't go near the place."

" Oh, Mari," says Rhys soothingly ;
" come, now, you'll never be so hard
on them as that. Two young people
in the flower of their age and anxious
to see all their friends about them.
Come, now," and his voice flowed on
in the smooth, soft, sonorous speech
of the mountain, barely touching the

gutturals, just suggesting them, and
letting them slide, as always when
coaxing and cajoling.

" Me ! " cried the old woman,
shaking a skinny fist, and flashing
her great black eyes on the inviter ;
" when you know very well, Rhys,
how that family served me. Me go
to the wedding ! I wish them " —
and she ran off easily and swiftly into
wishes I do not care to translate.

" No, no, Mari," murmured the
peacemaker ; " you do not mean that
really. And mind you, John is no
blood-relation to that man ; he is only
a relation by marriage, and that is
very different."

" Yes, aunt," said the younger
woman, " there is no blood in the
matter ; and Margaret has always
been a friend of ours."

Old Mari glared from one to the
other as if struck a little by this
view, and they closed upon her from
each side to talk, and argue, and
soothe ; and Rhys proved himself the
very man for his task by finally
conquering her prejudice against the
bridegroom and wringing from her
a consent to appear at the wedding.

The women went away down the
road and Rhys looked up at me with
a grin. "Indeed," said he, "I was
wrong in asking old Mari without
going more carefully about it. John's
uncle by marriage ought to have
wedded Mari, and it had slipped
from my memory. Never mind, I
won in the end, and I am very glad
of it."

" Why in particular, Rhys 1 "
" Well, sir, there's the present for
the young folks, that's one thing ;

Gallant Little Wales.

63

the more I can get to the marriage
the better start for them. And I
was not willing at all to let old
Mari go in a bad temper, for she
might overlook them and spoil their
luck."

The Evil Eye is firmly believed in
among my mountain neighbours, and
Rhys strikes down to the river and
up the hill beyond to the farm on
the crest perfectly satisfied with his
last effort on behalf of the young
couple. The choice of a gwahoddivr
is a matter to which the young folks
for whom he acts have given careful
thought. In their selection they are
guided by an old and excellent maxim,
which I translate from the verna-
cular : " He must be ready and witty
in answer, one gifted of speech when
delivering his message, and a real and
genuine friend of the young couple,
lest he should be doing them mischief
instead of forwarding their interests
among their neighbours." And in
choosing Rhys it is certain they have
not done badly.

On the morning of the wedding
(it was Friday, of course ; everybody
on the mountain gets married on a
Friday ;) I rambled across to Fron-
wen, the home of the bride. The
farm lies just under the ridge and
looks down into the valley as a man
looks out of an attic-window into the
street. Its land is fairly level for all
that, since it lies along some ledges
and a team can always plough one
way ; very few people about the moun-
tain can turn and plough up and
down. The place was quiet, for the
bridegroom and his party had not yet
arrived. I saw a small boy, posted
as if to watch, slide down a bank and
run for the house, and I felt some
delicacy in approaching nearer, for
they might be engaged in packing
away the bride and I had no wish to
spoil sport. A wall of stone and
earth, crested with thick, dry moss,

offered a comfortable seat, and, perch-
ing myself aloft, I filled a pipe.

It was a lovely summer morning,
the landscape already quivering in the
clear, strong heat, the hills veiled in
misty sapphire. Looking to the great
mountains crumpled in jagged peaks,
and fold upon fold of huge knotted
ridges away to the north, I saw a
compact black-blue patch slipping
swiftly southwards. It was a thun-
der-storm travelling down the further
side of the valley, drawn there by the
higher hills. From the height where
I sat the whole storm was seen at
once, the country bright before and
behind it. It moved with wonderful
speed. You fixed your eyes, perhaps,
on a village straggling along a broad
flank of a distant mountain-slope, its
lime-washed cottages shining white
and vivid in the sun. As you looked
they grew dim, dimmer, vanished ;
and you could fancy the roar of the
rain on their roofs as the huge drops
pelted from that inky cloud. The
black, velvety pall flew on, and soon
they reappeared, the wet roofs taking
the sun and sparkling like jewels. On
this side the blue was serene and un-
broken ; scarce a breath of air stirred,
and the nearest thunder-drop was full
five miles away.

The sound of many voices singing
came to my ears, and I looked round.
The bridegroom and a large party of
his friends marched into sight over a
furzy ridge and bore down upon Fron-
wen chanting joyously. I sprang
into the path and went towards the
house, reaching the farmyard as they
poured in by another gate.

The bridegroom, at the head of his
friends, advanced to the door of the
house where the bride's party was
drawn up, and demanded his partner.
They replied that they knew nothing
about her, and mocked at the idea
that they should or would tell him
aught if they did. Upon this he gave

64

Gallant Little Wales.

the word to his friends, and all the
young fellows spread about in eager
search for the missing girl. This is
all part of the ceremony. On the
mountain it is not etiquette for the
lady to exhibit indecent haste to get
married. She must feign coyness if
she does not possess it; she must
appear to dodge the wedding-ring,
and give the lovesick swain all the
trouble she can to get her to the altar.
The first step lies in the hands of her
friends, who hide her as skilfully as
they know how, and great is the scorn
cast upon the hapless bridegroom and
his train when they fail to discover
the spot in which she has been
bestowed, and have to resort to
entreaty and beg for a clue.

Into the house, first of all, poured
the searchers and ransacked every
room from kitchen to garret, then the
dairy, the cowhouse, the stables, the
granary, the barn, the henhouse,
turning over heaps of hay, tossing
aside bundles of straw cunningly dis-
posed to look like hiding-places, hunt-
ing here, hunting there, but all in
vain. Meanwhile the bride's friends
spurred them on with jests and taunts,
made loud sport of their efforts,
laughed, shouted, clapped their hands,
danced with delight as the baffled
seekers ran hither and thither, till the
hillside rang again with the babel of
outcries and merriment.

At last the bridegroom turned at
bay, the sweat pouring down his face,
and his bodyguard drew about him.
" Look here, William," he cried to his
prospective father-in-law ; " she's not
about the place. She's gone away;
that's why we can't find her."

" No, John, my boy, no, no ! "
roared William, beating his hands
together with a mighty laugh, and his
party echoed him. " As sure as we
stand here, she's close to us. She's
looking at you this very minute."

Eyes were darted at every point

from which the yard could be spied
upon, at the windows of the house,
the long slits which admitted air to
the stables and granaries, and the
square openings where hay was pitched
to the lofts. Away they sprang once
more, resolved to avoid the disgrace
of defeat and heartened by William
Fron-wen's assurance.

I stood in the sunshine among the
laughing spectators, but among the
winks and jests I could gather no
clue as to Margaret's nook, and could
only await developments and hope she
had not found too secure a hiding
place as did hapless Meinir, famous
in story. Meinir is one of many a
Ginevra of Welsh legend. She was
a gay, happy young lass who ran to
hide from her lover on her wedding
morn as Margaret had run now, but
told none of the place she had in
mind. At a little distance from her
house stood an aged oak into which
she climbed and fell, for the trunk
was hollow. Many a day passed,
spent by her wretched lover in frenzied
search, until a day came, a day of
dreadful storm, when he could search
no longer but dragged himself weak,
and weary, and dying to the old oak,
their loved trysting-place. Here he
breathed a prayer that he might be
blessed with one glimpse of her before
he died wherever she might be, or
whatever guise she wore. This prayer
was granted. A levin-bolt flashed
from heaven and tore in splinters the
withered oak, and the lovers were
face to face. But what a tryst was
theirs ! He sinking under the light-
ning-stroke, she a ghastly skeleton,
green with mould, the mildewed tat-
ters of her wedding-garments alone
proclaiming her the unhappy Meinir
to those who found them, and laid the
luckless lovers in one grave, their
bones united in death.

Well, well, this is not a very cheer-
ful story to muse over on so glowing

Gallant Little Wales.

65

a morning while half a score of flushed
young fellows are hot on the traces of
to-day's bride. Besides, the sly look
of knowledge on the faces around me
assures her another fate than Meinir's.

Up-stairs, down-stairs, in my lady's
chamber, in and out and round about,
alow and aloft they searched and
searched, and still they found no sign
of Margaret, while louder and shriller
rose the laugh of those who had
baffled them so cleverly. And then
she was found ; by pure accident it
was, and though they secured the
bride, they had no credit for it.

One active youth saw a large round
hole shaped in the wall of the granary.
He fancied it led to a part where
search was impossible since that end
of the building was packed solidly
with hay. " They have put a ladder
up there," he thought, "pulled some
of the hay out, and stuffed her in,
and we could not reach her from the
other end." He did not wait for a
ladder himself for there was a peat-
stack handy to the opening, and from
the top of it he believed he could leap
in. At the peat-stack he went with
a will and began to scramble up it.
It gave way under him at once, and
down he rolled ; a great shower of
peats rolled after him, and his friends
set up a mighty shout of joy for the
bride was found. She had been
within arm's length of them all the
time, and they were compelled to
acknowledge the skill of a device
before unthought of. Two gates had
been brought in from the fields and
leaned against the granary-wall.
They had served to shelter the girl,
and then a score of willing hands
had quickly built her in with peats.
With such deftness do the people of
the mountain handle the brick-shaped
blocks that the stack looked as firm
and rounded and solid as if it had
been peats right through, instead of
a mere skin of them skilfully disposed
No. 493. — VOL. LXXXIII.

over the framework afforded by the
gates.

John Ty'n y Pant sprang forward
and drew the blushing girl from her
concealment, and the whole place
rang with boisterous repartee. Still
it was far from plain sailing with the
bridegroom yet. Margaret drew
away from him, and some of her
friends began to disparage John's
appearance and character and draw
gloomy pictures of the woes of the
married state. His friends came
manfully to his rescue and painted
him as at once an Adonis and a
Bayard ; but the matter was finally
settled by the bard with whom John
had furnished himself. Nothing is
done on the mountain without poetry.
The population are minor poets to a
man, and our stock of hills and lakes
scarcely supplies sufficient bardic
names to go round. For the poet
does not sign his own commonplace
name to his lines, Evan Evans, or
Ebenezer Jenkins, or John Jones ;
no, he takes the name of the crag,
or moor, or lake near which he lives,
and beneath whose shadow or beside
whose shore he walks and shapes his
rolling verse.

John Ty'n y Pant had shown the
sense which lay packed away in his
red head by his choice of a bard.
Craig yr Eryr (Eagle's Crag) was a
tall, handsome lad, young, burning to
distinguish himself in the lists of
poetic fame, and in love himself. For
weeks past he had been hammering
at John's commission, and, but a few
days before, I had heard a scrap of
it, for crossing Rhos yr Hafodglas, a
bleak windswept piece of moorland
folded about a gaunt rib of the moun-
tain, I had met Craig yr Eryr in
search of his father's sheep. He was
swinging along, chanting his verse in
a lofty sing-song, his bright, black
eyes burning, his dark handsome face
aglow, and he passed me at six yards

66

Gallant Little Wales,

and saw me not. Writing, burning,
re-writing, to the peats again, at last
he had shaped his verses to his wish ;
and then, ho for the little shop down
the mountain to purchase a sheet of
fair foolscap, price one halfpenny !
For everything up to now has been
done on blue and red sugar-bags,
neatly opened out with a clasp-knife.
Then the stanzas have been squeezed
in double columns on the sheet, — for
our bards do not let us off with a few
careless twangs of the lyre ; and there
it is, done up in a roll and tucked
into the inner pocket of his jacket
from which the end sticks out proudly
above his collar and proclaims his
lofty errand. He draws it out and
opens the paper with a caressing
touch, running his eye critically over
the lines as if he did not know them
by heart, and obtains at once a re-
spectful silence. He begins to read,
and the attention is profound. Clear,
sonorous, musical, his voice rings out
stanza after stanza, and the verses are
undeniably good. He draws with
minute, delicate touches a picture of
a lonely life on the mountain where
no two houses stand together, where
to live alone is to live in a desert ; he
paints the wild winter-storm which
converts every dwelling into a prison
and wraps the solitary in a double
mantle of dreadful solitude. This it
is to live alone. Then he turns the
shield and shows " y Ewthyn bach
td gwellt ar gesail y Fron (the little
thatched cottage in lee of the hill)"
ringing with cheerful sounds and
laughter, and childish faces pressed
with glee to the window to watch the
tempest which, doubly cruel to the
solitary, shuts them in but to a
pleasant privacy of storm. And so,
with handsome tributes to the prin-
cipal characters of the day, he swings
along through some thirty verses, till
he stops and draws breath in a pro-
found silence, which is not interrupted

and which is to be taken as a great
compliment.

The hard, laughing lines have
smoothed out of the wrinkled, sun-
burned faces of the women : the men
nod critically as the poet makes his
points ; and things fall into serious
order at once. William Fron-wen
steps forward to welcome the com-
pany as if they had just arrived and
refreshments are offered. The next
thing is to form the procession and
set off to the church.

At the head of the bridal proces-
sion walked the bridegroom with a
supporter on each side. Then fol-
lowed a merry train, and at the rear
came the bride under guard of the
groom's two most particular friends.
Their duties will be explained pres-
ently.

The first farm we came upon after
reaching the road was Llidiartmaen-
gwyn (the Gate of the White Stone).
Here they were ready for us, and in
a trice a ladder was run across the
narrow road and braced firmly against
tree-trunks. This brought the pro-
cession up, and there was no passing
until the bridegroom had explained
the importance of his errand that day
and begged leave to proceed to his
happiness. Then the barrier was
withdrawn amid a shower of good
wishes, and on we plodded again.
Every place we passed had its ob-
structions ready, fir-poles, larch-trees,
gates, empty carts, anything that
would block the track according to
immemorial custom. The miller,
coming up the mountain with a load
of sacks, turned his horse across the
way; an old woman, who had nothing
better, stretched a cord between the
hedgerows ; and the bridegroom won
his way almost inch by inch with
fervent entreaty. And what was the
bride doing? She was still under
the influence of invincible coyness,
and every now and again made swift,

Gallant Little Wales,

67

sudden bursts for freedom. To fore-
stall these was the business of the
young fellows who had been detailed
to march with her, and it was their
bounden duty to deliver her safe and
sure at the church. At every place,
where the march was obstructed they
had to be doubly on the alert. The
people there did all they could to
assist the bride to escape. Doors
were opened for her to dart into, and
instantly slammed in the face of the
pursuers and held against them until
they forced their way in and brought
her out again in triumph. Somehow
or other they always manage to bring
her to the church-door and then the
usual ceremony follows.

After this, arm-in-arm for the first,
last, and only time in their lives, the
new-married couple, followed by their
friends, return home to spend the day
in simple revelry.

On the journey from church they
are saluted by feux-de-joie, fired by
young fellows who conceal themselves
behind turf-stacks and hedges and
discharge their guns rapidly as the
happy couple pass.

Often enough the struggles of the
bride to escape from her guardians
are of the faintest, and more that an
ancient tradition may not be shamed
than intended to give real trouble. But
at times it happens that a young lady
of great spirit and strength has to be
led, or rather dragged, to the altar,
and then things are lively. Such a
bride I saw not long since at the tail
of a procession, and she played her
part in a very sportsmanlike fashion.
I came across the train quite by
accident as it wound its way down
the mountain, and for a moment
wondered, for I had not heard there
was a marriage afoot. Indeed when
they came nearer and I began to
recognise many of them, I found them
people from the other side of the
mountain who, for some reason or

other, were coming to the church on
this slope. I stood aside on a little
eminence to watch them pass, and
just as I was cheerfully wishing them
luck, the bride made a splendid burst
for freedom. She was a fine, strapping
wench, as strong as a horse, and in
charge of two lathy lads. They had
spent no easy time with her so far, for
they were hot and red and one had a
great dent in his hat. Her face was
like the rising sun ; her hat hung
over one ear, and her hair was loose.
She made her coy flight just as she
passed the mouth of a steep, stony path
leading to the house of an acquaint-
ance, and began it by driving the
elbow of a thick, muscular arm into
the ribs of her right-hand guardian.
Sending him spinning, she tore away
from the other light-weight and rushed
up the slope, her heavy nailed boots
making the loose stones ring again as
they flew smoking from her wild
charge. At the head of the path a
group of people roared a welcome and
promised a safe asylum. But the
second lad, long and lean, was upon
her in an instant, and grappled with
her ; up came his companion, and a
third who had rushed to their assist-
ance. Numbers won the day, and
with a shrill shriek she gave up the
unequal contest. Two of them took
an arm each, the third pushed at her
shoulders, and away they raced her
back into place.

They had the business entirely to
themselves. The bridegroom, a little
dried-up fellow, marched primly for-
ward, and never dreamed of turning his
head ; that would have been to doubt
his friends. The rest of the procession
followed his example, and were almost
out of sight, dropping down the side
of a steep glen, before she was restored
to her former position.

After every marriage on the moun-
tain a festive meeting is held called
neithior. Its main object is not rejoie-
F 2

68

Gallant Little Wales.

ing, however, but a severely practical
one. It is true that it is very merry,
but if you attend bringing only a
jovial face and a cheery laugh as your
share of the entertainment, you will
be looked on with a trifle more than
coldness. It is intended to give the
young couple a start in life, and the
neighbours and friends crowd in with
gifts in money or kind. It is the one
feature of the ancient form of marriage
which is never neglected. To-day
many creep off to the Registry Office
(that unromantic termination of a
courtship) and cut away at a stroke
the features already described ; but
the neitkior is sacred. No impious
finger is laid upon that, for by it you
get something.

The neithior at Fron-wen after
Margaret's marriage was more than
ordinarily well attended, and achieved
the distinction of being the best
known for many years in the amount
and value of contributions. This is
a matter of great rivalry, and house
vies with house, on occasion of a
wedding, in gathering friends from
near and far and heaping high the
pile to the young folk's credit. You
can find people on the mountain who
have seen sixty years and more of
wedded life, and will still recite
promptly the amount their neithior
yielded, every article which made it
up, and full particulars of the donors.
There are some who exaggerate : the
amount has grown with the years ; but
they are promptly set straight. The
parish is, after all, but one big family.
The people are familiar with each
other's affairs from all time. They
know little, and care less, about the
world outside. They have the dimmest
idea of who the Sirdar may be, or what
he is doing : the name of Dreyfus has
no significance in their ears ; but
what Shinkin Ty'r Bane did fifty
years ago, — pat and precise comes
that story, and the story is never to

Shinkin's credit. The famous adage is
reversed, and if ever he did a good
deed sure it has been writ in the
brown, swift-running water of our
leaping mountain-brook and long ago
washed out of sight and memory ; but
his slips, his failings are graven in his
neighbour's memories as if cut in the
hard, imperishable rock which crops
up everywhere in their lean, scanty
pastures.

" The world's very censorious, old
boy," said Captain Macmurdo to
Rawdon Crawley ; and here moun-
tain and valley kiss each other,
mud- walled cottage and May fair are
one. You listen to the story about
Shinkin Ty'r Bane and wonder a
little ; he seems to you so quiet, so
respectable, his hair touched with
silver, his manner fine with a lofty
and serene gravity, and you say,
" When was that ? " Your informant
scratches among a patch of grey
whisker, and reflects. After a while
he hits the time. " All those years
ago ? " you say. " He's had time
enough to alter." The other man
laughs, a laugh with a snarl in it.
" Not he," he growls ; " he is just as
he always was. He would do it now
if he had a chance. Indeed, I would
not trust him." So do these simple,
kindly hill-folk talk of each other.
Everybody lives in a glasshouse, and
everybody throws stones with the
heartiest relish. Thus it is clear
that to allow a neithiw to loom
larger through the mist of years is
but to invite spirited contradiction
and a swift setting to rights.

When I reached Fron-wen I found
the big, low-roofed kitchen full of the
young folks of the mountain, laugh-
ing, talking, waiting for their turn
to deliver their presents, and keeping
a keen eye on what was given in.

At a small round table set near the
great dresser was Rhys the inviter.
It is part of his duty to be secretary

Gallant Little Wales.

to this meeting, for the gifts are not
handed over with thanks and there
an end. Far from it ; Rhys had a
book before him, and pen and ink.
In the book he wrote, with laborious
scratching, the name, the address, the
amount, of every giver and every gift.
This record serves as a guide, were
guidance needed, to the names of
those who were present and who
expect, in their turn, to be assisted
when their neithior arrives ; it is a
sort of mutual insurance arrange-
ment. Some lay down money and
Rhys counts this carefully, places it
in a blue china bowl at his side, dabs
his pen in his mouth (his writing
is generally done with a pencil
which he sucks to blacken the
stroke), splutters, takes another dip
of ink, and the record is made.
Some bring offerings of tea and
sugar, and already a huge mound
of bags of sugar and packets of tea
has accumulated, piled neatly on the
great table under the little deeply-
set window. I dropped into an
empty corner of the big settle to
observe the scene for awhile.

Just round the corner of the settle
were Margaret's mother and a crony.
They were watching the proceedings
with eyes like gimlets ; there was no
need of a book for them to post
themselves with regard to givers and
gifts.

" Ay," groaned the bride's mother,
"look there, now, at Siani Pen yr
Allt. As sure as I stand here she's
brought six pounds of sugar."

" One and three halfpence," chimes
in the crony.

" A shilling ! " whispers the in-
dignant mother. "You can get it
for a shilling in the town and I

saw her fetching it. And it isn't
twelve months since we gave her a
pound of tea, the very best, two-and-
six it was."

" Och gwae" drags out the other, a
long, hoarse, horrible guttural, as if
such meanness grated upon her very
soul.

After the thrifty Siani came the
carpenter with a chair, the weaver
with a blanket as stiff as a board,
an old woman with an earthenware
water-jar of such shape as Rachel
might have carried to the well, then
tea, and sugar, and money again.
Rhys was a busy man that evening.
Beside him stood the bride, breathless
with repeating thanks, her high-
pitched scream of " Diolch yn faivr
i chwi, 0, diolch yn fawr i chwi,.
(Many thanks to you, oh many thanks
to you), " rattling along as steadily
as water over a mill-wheel; and the
bridegroom looked as useless and
smiled as foolishly as a man in such
a position generally does.

I stayed an hour or more and then
an irresistible desire for the clean,
strong, sweet air of the mountain
outside came over me. But, as I
went, William Tron-wen drew me
aside to whisper proudly that
already his daughter's neithior had
easily beaten anything of recent
years. Up to that moment they
had received thirty-six and a quarter
pounds of tea, a hundred and seven-
teen pounds of sugar, two quilts,
three blankets, a couple of chairs,
a settle, a cupboard, earthenware
and crockery-ware by the pile, five
hens, a little round table, and nearly
twenty-eight pounds in money !

JOHN FINNEMORE.

70

OUR ARMY AND ITS CRITICS,

THE war, we are told, is over.
Organised resistance on the part of
the Boers has ceased ; and there
remain but a few marauding bands,
which it would perhaps be better to
call at once by their right name of
brigands, that require to be suppressed
by force of arms. Military move-
ments have given place in the news-
papers to political manoeuvres, and
casualty- lists to election-returns. The
burning question of yesterday was the
conduct of the war to a successful
issue ; the burning question of to-
day is whether, having brought it to
that issue, we shall or shall not reap
the advantages of the same ; for, as
was seen after the bitter struggles
which came to an end in 1713 and
1762, the British nation, after im-
mense sacrifices of blood and treasure,
ia exceedingly apt to forego all the
fruits of a successful war in a fit of
factious temper. The question of to-
morrow is, for whatever party may
be in power, the reform of the Army.

This sudden and unusual interest
of the nation in military matters is
in many respects matter for congratu-
lation ; but there is at the same
time some danger lest this interest
should be guided in an unprofitable
direction. The war brought to the
front in the daily Press an august
company which dubbed its members
military experts. One at least of
these possessed some right to the title,
for his studious moderation and dis-
claimer of all pretension to omniscience
proved him at once to be a soldier
and a soldier of experience. But the
majority, having never seen troops on
active service in the field, observed no

such modesty. It is the function of
a journalist to be omniscient and
infallible. This is expected of him,
or at any rate he thinks that it is ;
and it may be that he is not far
wrong. Accordingly these gentlemen,
with most imperfect data before them
and with, in many cases, no more
than a theoretical knowledge of war,
took upon themselves to lay down
the law as to the movements that
should be made, the places that should
be occupied, and, in a word, as to the
disposition of the troops and the
conduct of the operations at large.
The early reverses to our troops in
some quarters stimulated them to
harder criticism, and with the aid of
the war-correspondents they passed
sweeping judgments, not only on the
generals, but frequently on the entire
personnel and materiel of the Army.

In the ignorance of military history
which distinguishes our nation, these
experts were accepted at their own
valuation. They gave the public
clearly to understand that in England,
at any rate, civilians and amateurs
could manage military affairs very
much better than soldiers and pro-
fessionals. If this were true of one
amateur, why, argued the public,
should it not be true of many?
Accordingly multitudes, who did not
know the difference between a field-
gun and a flat-iron, indulged in whole-
sale condemnation of our artillery,
while many more asked indignantly
why that idiot General A. did not
march to B., and that hopeless General
X. to Y., having no very clear con-
ception why either movement should
be made, or what would be gained if,

Our Army and its Critics.

71

supposing them to be feasible, they
were executed. It is even to be
feared that there were folks base
enough to address brutal anonymous
letters to the wife of at least one
general who had had the misfortune
to suffer a reverse.

In respect of any other profession
the amateur who dictates to the pro-
fessional is esteemed impertinent ;
and the treatment judged most fitting
for him is silent and amused con-
tempt. If a journalist of no prac-
tical experience in agriculture were
to lecture a farmer who had devoted
the study and practice of a life-
time to making the most of his
land, the obvious comment of every
sensible man would probably contain
some reference to grandmothers and
to eggs. Why should not the same
rule hold good in respect of war,
which is a more uncertain matter
even than English agriculture ? To
myself, a humble student of British
military history, who have traced the
story of many British expeditions
from their inception to their end, the
confident dogmatism of some of these
critics has appeared little short of
amazing. The more deeply I have
burrowed into the subject, the more
have I been impressed with the diffi-
culties that attend the conduct of
even the simplest campaign, and the
not less formidable difficulty, in the
vast majority of cases, of forming a
correct judgment upon it. Above all
I have been awed by the influence,
always powerful, often over-mastering,
of that mysterious and incalculable
element, which is called the fortune
of war. From the sublime to the
ridiculous, as we know, there is but
a step ; but between the brilliant
victory and the abject disaster there
is often but the breadth of a hair.

Even now that the war is over the
process of amateur criticism still con-
tinues. Under the title of PUZZLES

OP THE WAR Mr. Spenser Wilkinson
has published a lecture addressed
to the Secretary of State for War,
but obviously aimed at his military
advisers, on the configuration of the
Natal frontier and the advantages of
pen, ink, and paper towards the clear
ing of the mind for a plan of cam-
paign. To this succeeds instruction
to Sir Redvers Buller on the estab-
lished principles of strategy, and an
admonition to Lord Roberts, with
reference to the leniency shown to
the Boers after the capture of Bloern-
fontein, that it would be well for
English officers to master German
and to study the philosophy of war in
that delectable tongue.

Now Mr. Spenser Wilkinson has,
as we all know, studied the history
and theory of war with a thoroughness
that entitles his opinions to respect ;
but, if a mere student may venture to
say so, those opinions would be more
acceptable if they were not advanced
to the dignity of dogmas, and his
criticisms more enlightening if they
did not take the form of sermons.

Nothing can be more certain than
that mistakes have been made in the
past campaign, great mistakes and
often avoidable mistakes, as they have
been made in every campaign recorded
in the history of the world, and as
they will continue to be made so long
as the world shall last. There was
the first great mistake of the Govern-
ment in reckoning that there would
be no war, a miscalculation which is
not wholly excused by the fact that
it was shared by many of the very
best judges on the spot. Then there
was the under-estimation of the
enemy's fighting power by the general
in command on the Natal frontier.
The consequences of this mistake were
aggravated by the fortune of war ;
for it is of common knowledge that,
but for one officer's misconception of
his duty, the first success at Talana

72

Our Army and its Critics.

Hill might have been converted into
a telling blow which, coming as it
did at the outset of the campaign,
might well have altered the whole
course of the war in Natal. If!
The history of war is made up of ifs.
The name of Wolfe is honoured among
us, but it went perilously near to shar-
ing the fate of Burgoyne's. There is
no need to follow the matter further ;
but it may be added that the English
general who was responsible for this
mistake erred at least in good com-
pany. Frederick the Great, with
James Keith at his elbow to warn
him, undervalued the fighting power
of the Russians. Napoleon, with
Frederick's example before him, made
the same mistake as to the Russians,
repeated it, with Ruvigny's story to
his hand, as to Spain, and repeated
it a third time, despite the cautions
of Soult and Ney, in respect of the
British at Waterloo.

Such constant recurrence of the
same blunder should teach us to deal
gently with the fallibility of soldiers
as with that of other men, and to
keep our hard words, if we must use
them at all, for the infallible only.
The gifted writer of the article to
which I have adverted cannot really
suppose that Lord Wolseley and Sir
Redvers Buller, who have studied
their profession ardently all their
lives, in the field as well as in the
closet, have the least need of his
patronising instruction. If, as occa-
sionally happens, an engineer makes
a miscalculation as to the strain on
a bridge or the stability of a ship, no
journalist would expound to the public
the parallelogram of forces, or hint
that pen, ink, and paper are useful
materials for the calculator, and a table
of logarithms not without its value.
Again, even if Lord Roberts and the
officers of his army do not enjoy the
critic's advantage of having studied
the philosophy of war in the original

German, he might at least be merciful
and tell them where the problem of
leniency or severity to a conquered
country, in circumstances curiously
akin to those which distinguish the
invasion of the South African Re-
publics, may be profitably read in our
native English. I do not know if
the German philosophy of war has
taken any of its examples from the
despatches of Sir Henry Clinton,
Lord Cornwallis, and Lord Rawdon
from Carolina in 1780-81. German
work is generally thorough, so most
probably it has ; but if it has not, I
venture to think that English readers
might study these despatches with
advantage, for it will show them how
extremely complex this policy of
leniency or severity can be. It has
long been a matter of surprise to me
that no military expert should have
been at the pains to write a succinct
story of that campaign in Carolina,
presenting as it does so remarkable a
parallel to that which is just closing
in South Africa. It would have been
more profitable both to writers and
public than lectures to generals on
the principles of their profession.

For it is unfortunately idle in this
country to point to such and such
principles and ask why War Office
and generals have departed from
them, since the truth is that they have
not a free hand, and cannot have a
free hand under a democracy with
long inherited traditions and habits
of faction. If Mr. Spenser Wilkinson
can alter this, he will do good work,
and unless I am very much mistaken,
there is no object which he has more
deeply at heart. But as Lord Salis-
bury said, with perfect truth though
at a time when it was almost criminal
to say it, our constitution is ill-suited
to war.

The question now more immediately
before the nation is how to use the
lessons of the war for the reform of

Our Army and its Critics.

73

the Army. Here again the amateur
has stepped in, and THE SPECTATOR
characteristically recommends the
study of his article on the sub-
ject to all serious readers. I am
one of the very many, I am glad to
say, who need no recommendation to
read any work that bears the name
of Dr. Conan Doyle ; and I may be
allowed to express my respectful grati-
tude and admiration towards one
who, in the pursuit of the nobler of
his two professions, has devoted his
skill to the healing of our soldiers
abroad, while leaving his books to
soothe the weary anxiety of their
friends at home.

Dr. Doyle excuses himself, an
amateur, for giving his own views
on the military lessons of the war,
on the ground that, in the face of
" the manifest blunders and miscal-
culations " of the military authori-
ties, " a civilian need not hesitate
to express his opinion." Certainly,
whether justified or not, he shows
no hesitation. His first lesson of
the war is that the defence of the
Empire is the business not of a
warrior-caste, but of every able-bodied
citizen ; and this position is sound and
unassailable. The principle is one
which has been accepted in France
for more than a century ; and it is
matter for rejoicing to see it supported
by so able a pen. The expression
warrior-caste would perhaps be mis-
leading to a foreigner, for until
recently the British soldier has been
rather a warrior-outcast ; but the
phrase will not be misinterpreted in
England, where there is now ground
for hope that the old prejudice against
the Army is steadily decaying.

The next most certain lesson of the
war is "once for all to reduce the
bugbear of an invasion of Great
Britain to an absurdity." With a
moderate "efficiency with the rifle,
the able-bodied population of this

country could, without its fleet and
without its professional soldiers, defy
the united forces of Europe. The
advantage of the defence over the
attack is so enormous, that the in-
vasion of Kent or Sussex, always a
desperate operation, has now become
an impossible one." Depending there-
fore for the defence of our shores on
a " developed system of militia and
volunteers," we can release for the
defence of the Empire almost all
the professional soldiers. From this
starting-point Dr. Doyle proceeds to
unfold his scheme, or sketch, of the
lines on which the reorganisation of
the Army should proceed.

Here again the idea that the whole
of the regular army should be free for
service outside the British Isles will
commend itself to all ; but it is not
new, for it was originated by the
elder Pitt at the reorganisation of
the militia in 1757. None the less
it is never unprofitable that sound
ideas should be repeated. Further,
there can be no dispute as to the
greater advantage given to the defence
by the latest development of modern
weapons ; indeed military men per-
ceived the bearing of rifle-fire at long
range upon the defence of England as
far back as during the Tirah campaign.
But it must not be forgotten that
foggy England is by no means so ideal
a sphere for the employment of long-
range-fire as the marvellously clear
and lucid air of South Africa. How-
ever, Dr. Doyle allows a sufficient
force for home-defence; and, as he
says, with a million militia and volun-
teers, the Household Cavalry, the
Guards, and "a good proportion of
artillery," the British Isles should
be in absolute safety. The Yeo-
manry, he adds, should be turned
into Mounted Infantry; and so long
as they are trained to the duties
of scouting and reconnaissance,
which are now committed to the

74

Our Army and its Critics.

Cavalry, the change would probably
be for the better.

The only vague portion of this
scheme of home-defence is the " de-
veloped system of militia and volun-
teers ; " a most desirable thing no
doubt, but not to be accomplished
by a stroke of the pen. As is usual
with such schemes, the real difficulties
are left for the professional soldier to
work out without help. Dr. Doyle's
only assistance to him is the sugges-
tion that the militia and volunteers
" should not be plagued with drill
beyond the very simplest require-
ments," and that their shooting should
be sedulously encouraged. No one
will quarrel with the latter recom-
mendation, but what are " the very
simplest requirements " of drill, and
at what points do they begin and end
to be a plague1? Drill is not only an
end in itself for the orderly move-
ment of men in large bodies, but a
means to the still greater end of dis-
cipline. Under Dr. Doyle's scheme,
as will presently be seen, the militia
and volunteers will be called upon in
any emergency to furnish two- thirds
of the strength of the infantry of the
line, or not less than 70,000 men,
at a stroke. Under these conditions
the very simplest requirements may
prove to be not so very simple after
all. Infantry spend a great deal
more of their time in marching than
in fighting. Free play of individual
intelligence and initiative is doubtless
of value in the skirmishing line, but
I have always understood that on the
march it makes for straggling.

After this rather hasty dismissal
of the question of home- defence, Dr.
Doyle passes to discussion of profes-
sional soldiers. It would be better,
in his opinion, that they should be
fewer in number, more highly trained
and more highly paid. By offering
half-a-crown or three shillings a day
you could pick your men carefully,

insist upon every man being a highly
proficient marksman, and make dis-
missal from the service a very real
punishment. " One man who hits
his mark outweighs ten who miss it,
and only asks one tenth of the food
and transport. . . . Eliminate
the useless soldiers and increase the
pay of the useful ones, even if it
reduces the Army to 100,000 men."

Surely here is a warrior-caste with
a vengeance, whereas we thought we
had done with such things. However,
let that pass ; let us ignore the feel-
ings of the warrior-caste and of the
rest of the community, and let us get
on to our 100,000 men. These would
consist, according to Dr. Doyle's
scheme, of 30,000 Mounted Infantry,
picked shots and riders, the dite of our
fighting force; 30,000 artillery, armed
with the best weapons that money
can buy; 30,000 infantry in 100
skeleton battalions of 300 men apiece
(to be raised on emergency by drafts
from the militia and volunteers to
1,000 per battalion if need be) ; 10,000
engineers, Army Service corps, hos-
pital corps, &c. And there are our
100,000 men, which would make us
as formidable by land as by sea.

There can be no doubt that such
a force, in spite of some little draw-
backs which will presently be pointed
out, ready for despatch on foreign
service at a few days' notice from
our shores, would be very formidable
indeed. I pass over the fact that
officers of great knowledge and expe-
rience are extremely doubtful whether
even three shillings a day would
attract the men that Dr. Doyle de-
sires to the ranks. Let me assume
that these officers are wrong ; it is
the right course for an amateur
always to assume that officers are
wrong, and it is well to be in the
fashion. Here we have our 100,000
men, or rather 110,000, for Dr.
Doyle retains the Household Infantry

Our Army and its Critics.

75

and Cavalry, though whether on one
shilling or three shillings a day he
has omitted to mention. However,
100,000 men will suit our purpose,
an expensive force no doubt, but
from its efficiency worth double the
number of less efficient men at half
the rate of wages, and therefore an
economy rather than an extravagance.

Let us now turn to reckon up the
requirements of the Empire. The
garrison of India is over 72,000 men ;
the Mediterranean garrisons bring the
total roughly to 80,000 men; the
rest of the naval stations to, say,
85,000 ; for really a thousand or two
more or less is no great matter. So
there are nearly nine-tenths of our
expensive force needed for garrison
duties, a great part of it in unhealthy
climates, while the remaining tenth
consists of non-combatants. More-
over India demands 53,000 infantry
and 6,000 cavalry, or practically the
whole of the infantry, both mounted
and unmounted, which Dr. Doyle
allots to the service of the Empire,
so that the rest of our possessions
must get on as best they can with
artillery only, that is to say with
17,000 men (for India requires 13,000)
to garrison not only our foreign
stations outside India, but to serve
the guns of all branches in the British
Isles, and to take the field in foreign
expeditions wherever required.

Somehow this does not appear to
be a very satisfactory arrangement.
It is true that Dr. Doyle alludes
cursorily to the Indian Army in the
course of his article ; but he can only
mean the Native Army, for if we
are to provide for a separate Anglo-
Indian Army, so to speak, (a policy
long since condemned) in addition to
his costly 100,000 men, the economy
of his scheme falls at once to the
ground. The whole point of his paper
is to show that a small, very highly
trained and highly paid force is

cheaper than one of twice or thrice
the numbers of inferior status and
training. Then, it will be argued, if
one of Dr. Doyle's men be equal to
two or three or ten of our present
men, the garrison of India, Malta,
and Gibraltar can be reduced by one
half, or one third or one tenth. But
that is just the fallacy against which
we must guard. One superior man,
whatever his worth in numbers of
inferior men, cannot be cut in pieces,
nor can his excellence be distributed
over a large area. A corporal's guard,
be the men paid a pound or a penny
a day, must consist of three men
besides the corporal, or the sentry
cannot be relieved ; a post that can
be held by thirty ordinary men cannot
be held by ten who are thrice as
good ; and the same analogy holds
true not only of thirty men but of
three hundred, three thousand, or
thirty thousand. One man may be
worth three other men, but he cannot
do the work of three, nor be in three
places at once. It seems absurd to have
to dilate on a point so elementary ; but
when it is overlooked by such a man
as Dr. Doyle, and when his sugges-
tions are seriously commended to
public attention, one must needs insist
upon it.

The fact is that Dr. Doyle, in his
zeal to provide a strong and efficient
force ready for immediate service in
the field, has entirely overlooked the
work-a-day duties in garrison. He
is apparently unaware that but for the
necessity for providing foreign garri-
sons the re-organisation of the Army
would be a comparatively simple
matter. This, the question of pro-
viding for foreign garrisons, is the
problem which has perplexed genera-
tions of military administrators and,
unless I am very much mistaken, has
driven scores of them prematurely to
their graves. It was the surrender
of Minorca, a Mediterranean garrison,

76

Our Army mid its Critics.

owing to the insufficiency of the
troops, not in bravery or skill, but
in numbers to man the works, that
lifted the elder Pitt into power and
brought about the reorganisation of
the Militia. But the problem was
still unsolved, and it lay at the root
of the quarrel that culminated in the
war of American Independence. It
has troubled and baffled many wise
heads since then, and it continues to
trouble and baffle them to this day ;
but Dr. Doyle leaves it wholly out
of account. His 100,000 men, which
are to cost as much as our present
army, practically presuppose the exist-
ence of another 100,000 men to do
garrison-duty at home and abroad.
Where they are to come from and
how they are to be paid for, he does
not say. Odd details of that kind
are left to professional soldiers to
deal with. Might it not be wiser
to leave to them the main scheme as
well?

But Dr. Doyle is not content to
make suggestions as to organisation ;
he has also a word to say as to the
training of the troops. Cavalry, he
says boldly, should be utterly swept
away to make room for Mounted
Infantry. Such Mounted Infantry,
fine riders, trained horse-masters, good
skirmishers, and dead shots are more
valuable than any mere cavalry-man
can be. Lances, swords and revolvers
have only one place, — in the museum.
There is only one weapon, — the maga-
zine-rifle.

It is no doubt true that, as Dr.
Doyle points out, our Cavalry has
rarely acted as Cavalry during the
Boer War, and that there has been
little employment for sword or lance.
But the Boers are a unique enemy in
what may be called a unique country;
and is it not a little hasty to make
this sweeping deduction from the
particular to the general? Profes-
sional soldiers are divided, though

perhaps less so now than formerly,
as to the value of Mounted Infantry,
but I do not fancy that they have
the slightest doubt as to the value of
Cavalry. Mounted Infantry are no
new thing. Dragoons was the name
by which they were formerly known,
and a dragoon, as we all know, now
signifies a cavalry-man all the world
over. Mounted Infantry may come
again, and come to stay in England at
any rate ; but that Cavalry will go is
quite another matter. Men of high
military authority, at home and
abroad, believe that Cavalry has a
great future before it, particularly in
these days when Infantry fire away
their ammunition rapidly and cannot
always easily be resupplied. Sir Evelyn
Wood's volume on the ACHIEVEMENTS
OF CAVALRY shows that they have
good ground for their opinion. We
have a right, if we fancy it, to con-
sider our own officers fools ; but it is
discourteous to extend the same con-
tempt to those of foreign nations.

Moreover, even if Dr. Doyle's con-
clusion, that Cavalry can never again
come to close quarters in the attack,
be correct, he entirely ignores the use
of cavalry in pursuit. The lances and
swords did find their way to blood
after Elandslaagte with considerable
effect, both moral and destructive,
though he omits to recall the fact.
It must never be forgotten that a
mounted infantryman on his horse is
practically an unarmed man ; he must
dismount before he can use his weapon.
If he have no bayonet, like the
Boers, and has exhausted his ammu-
nition, he is an unarmed man whether
mounted or afoot. Which would Dr.
Doyle prefer to find in pursuit of
him, if he were one of a crowd of
fugitives, twenty mounted infantry
or a dozen lancers ? I fancy that at
the moment he would give anything
in the world to have those dozen
lances safe in a museum. In a word,

Our Army and its Critics.

77

the whole question would be very
much better left to professional men ;
and Dr. Doyle may feel assured that
if they can see their way to the
reduction of the weight on a troop-
horse's back by seven stone, as he
recommends, no one will be more
thankful than the cavalry-officer.

Dr. Doyle then proceeds to the
Artillery, wherein he criticises practi-
cally the excessive rigidity in the
training of the officers, and their
want of originality in adapting them-
selves to peculiar conditions. The
same criticism has been made in other
quarters, and Dr. Doyle certainly
shows good reason why it should be
accepted as just, on the substantial
ground of hard common-sense. But
it has always been a difficulty in
our service to know on what principle
to train not only the Artillery but
every branch of a force that is called
upon to fight such an amazing variety
of enemies. Excessive rigidity of
training has told against us disas-
trously on many occasions in our
military history ; and yet it is by no
means so easy as it sounds to make
that training elastic. There are new
diseases, or new forms of old disease,
which from time to time baffle the
skill, temporarily at any rate, of the
most devoted and experienced doctors.
English generals are constantly in the
position of doctors called in to com-
bat a new disease. If their treat-
ment is happily successful at once,
they are the greatest geniuses that
the world has ever seen ; if they
take time to unlearn their old lessons
and discover a new treatment, they
are the most useless fools alive.
And thus it is that the members of
the two professions that exceed all
others in bravery, devotion, hard
training, and self-sacrifice, are the
best abused of all.

I come next to Dr. Doyle's remarks
on the Infantry, of which he condemns

the training as " medieval and dan-
gerous." " The infantry-man," he
complains, " is still trained to march
in step as the pikemen did, to go
steadily shoulder to shoulder, and to
rush forward with his pike advanced."
Certainly the modern soldier is trained
to march (which the pikeman, by the
way, was not), and quite apart from
all considerations of unity and dis-
cipline, I have always heard that a
body of men swings along better in
step than out of step. The men are
also trained to move, in certain cir-
cumstances, shoulder to shoulder ; and
this would seem to be necessary, for
it is often imperative to draw them
up and to move them in close forma-
tion, to say nothing of the fact that
there are still enemies, or forms of
attack, that may be best encountered
shoulder to shoulder. Other nations
have not abandoned Cavalry any more
than ourselves. As to " rushing for-
ward with his pike advanced " (a feat
of which I fancy that the heavily
weighted pikeman of old days was
incapable) Dr. Doyle seems to be a
little obscure, for obviously he does
not wish the man to rush backward ;
but the next sentences somewhat clear
up his meaning. " There is only one
thing which wins a modern battle,
and that is straight shooting. To hit
your enemy and avoid being hit your-
self are the two points of the game,
and the one is as important as the
other." In other words, if I under-
stand Dr. Doyle aright, a general
action, for the Infantry at any rate,
must be con verted into a great stalking-
match. No one will question the
importance of good shooting and of
quickness in taking cover; but it is
to be feared that an action on any
scale can hardly be conducted accord-
ing to the principles of Judge Lynch's
famous duel with Mr. Silas Fixings.
If one of the parties be safely ensconced
and concealed on a rocky height, and

78

Our Army and its Critics.

the others, to reach that height, must
cross an open plain, it is difficult to see
how the stalking-match can even begin,
unless the one on the plain rushes
forward at least from cover to cover.
Of course he might crawl, which I
take to be Dr. Doyle's meaning, but
it may be questioned whether the
process can be prolonged indefin-
itely, and endless crawling is, I
am told by officers, apt to lead to
skulking.

In truth, Dr. Doyle is evidently
enamoured of the methods of the
Boers, who, whatever their merits,
have not distinguished themselves in
the matter of attack. Their most
conspicuous failing, apart from indis-
cipline, has been an unwillingness to
take risks and an excessive care for
their own skins. We have had to
do with such characters before. The
Buccaneers of the Caribbean Sea
were just such men. In 1694, when
the French attacked Jamaica, the
greater part of their force was com-
posed of buccaneers. They could
plunder, devastate, and ravish with
incomparable energy, and under the
leadership of French officers they
even stormed a weak entrenchment ;
but they were brought to a stand by
five and twenty resolute men in a
barricaded house, and having lost a
certain number in killed and wounded,
they would risk nothing more and
hastily evacuated the island. They
had the advantage of two to one in
numbers, and their opponents were
no more than raw colonial militia;
but the buccaneers thought it
so important to avoid being hit
themselves that they accomplished
nothing.

Again, it is well known that in
one of the recent wars against native
tribes in South Africa, a few com-
panies of our own Mounted Infantry
worked together with irregular corps
of Colonial Mounted Infantry. There

was no question of the comparative
value of the two for most purposes,
for the Colonials were infinitely better
at shooting the enemy and keeping
themselves unshot. But when the
natives were driven at last into the
strongest of all their fastnesses the
Colonials shook their heads and de-
clined to follow them; whereas the
despised British soldiers " rushed for-
ward with pike advanced " and carried
the position without hesitation. They
have done the like many times in the
course of the war, and will have to
do it again. If the methods of both
schools could be combined I imagine
that the result would be ideal ; but
it seems to me that the profes-
sional officer, who knows the powers
of his men, must be best able to
judge whether they shall continue
to rush forward with pike advanced
or not.

Finally Dr. Doyle complains that
officers do not take their profession
seriously enough, and urges in parti-
cular that junior officers should be
allowed greater latitude in the use
of their own intelligence. Doubtless,
in spite of great progress in recent
times, there is still room for improve-
ment in both of these respects, for
the principle of the Company-system,
introduced by the Rifle Brigade a
century ago, though nominally ex-
tended to every regiment in the army,
has not been accepted as it should be.
But let us note the facilities offered
by Dr. Doyle for the encouragement
of officers. One-third of his ideal
force is to consist of one hundred
skeleton battalions of 300 men each.
As they are liable to be filled up
with 700 raw recruits at the shortest
notice on an emergency, it is obvious
that these skeleton battalions must
have their full complement of officers.
This would allow, on paper, an average
of ten men to each officer, and in
practice of course considerably less.

Our Army and its Critics.

79

Perhaps Dr. Doyle will explain how
under such conditions officers, not
only junior but senior, are to learn
their business and take an interest
in their profession.

Lastly, I may point out that
though quite willing to treble the
pay of the men Dr. Doyle says not
a word about the pay of the officers,
though it is not obvious why that
much abused body should be left
wholly out of account in this respect.
In common justice their wages should
at least be doubled ; and then it
would be very strange if the officers
of the Navy did not also put in their
claim for a similar increase. These
may seem to be small points, but they
cannot be overlooked in handling a
scheme of this kind.

Enough has now perhaps been said
to show that Dr. Doyle's suggestions
should be received at least with
caution. "It is the fresh eye, un-
dimmed by prejudice or tradition
which is most likely to see clearly,"
he says. Very good ; but prejudice
must not be confounded with a
knowledge of present conditions, nor
tradition with the experience of the
past. Such knowledge of present
conditions as I have ventured to put
forward in this present article is no
more than lies within the reach of
any man who can borrow a copy of
WHITAKER'S ALMANAC, yet it is amply
sufficient, unless I am very much
mistaken, to show that Dr. Doyle's
scheme of 100,000 highly paid men,
far from adding to our military
strength, must leave the Empire
either ungarrisoned, or without a
man to spare for any serious service
in the field. We cannot all so master
the principles of strategy and the
philosophy of war as to instruct our
generals ; but at least we can read
WHITAKER'S ALMANAC and ponder the
same.

As to the experience of the past,

I would, as a student of British
military history, ask leave to say a
word on one point. I am not con-
cerned to deny that the administra-
tion of our War Department has never
been efficient, or that it never needed
setting in order more than at the
present moment. But let the civilian
beware of thinking that the military
men who have held the chief offices
at head-quarters for the last century
and a-half have been from generation
to generation blind and incompetent.
On the contrary, they have been
able, far-seeing, resourceful, zealous
and industrious to a degree which
would have earned for many a
Secretary of State a statue in West-
minster Abbey. Rarely indeed have
they been allowed their way; again
and again they have been obliged,
against their judgment, against their
advice, against their entreaties, to
send men on errands which they knew
must end in disaster. I give one
instance, as the briefest and yet the
most telling that I can recall. When
the question arose of coercing the
American Colonies in 1774-5 the
Adjutant-General, Harvey, was asked
to give his opinion. His answer was,
" We are not strong enough to con-
quer America;" and in that pregnant
sentence lies the whole story of our
failure. And as in matters of war,
so in matters of peace their sugges-
tions were slighted, their projects
thwarted, their advice disregarded or
overruled ; and there was nothing for
them but to shrug their shoulders,
await the inevitable consequences,
and make the best that they could of
things as they found them. Often
as one has heard the same story
before, it is not till one sees it
repeated over and over again in our
military records that one realises its
full significance.

With a succession of such men at
the Horse-Guards, civilians should

80

Our Army and its Critics.

be extremely shy of putting forward
their own schemes of reforming the
Army, for they have no conception of
the difficulty of being original in such
matters. If they will but think the
matter over, it is extremely unlikely
that they in their leisure hours will
happen upon ideas which will be new
to men who have for years given
uninterrupted thought to the subject,
and have the written thoughts of their
predecessors to guide them. Nothing
in the course of my own studies
(which I do not for a moment claim
to be exhaustive) has impressed me
more than the venerable age of many
projects that are put forward as new.
Early this year, by a strange coinci-
dence, I read a very pretty little
suggestion in the morning's newspaper,
and within two hours found before
me a memorandum, written over a
century before, which disposed of it
completely and for ever. I do not
urge that our officers at head-quarters
have been faultless, or that they have
never made mistakes, or never shown
themselves impervious to useful ideas
from without or indeed from within

the army.1 They have been and
are fallible men with the faults of
their own natures and with the pecu-
liar failings of their own profession,
even as other men are ; but beyond
all Englishmen they are alive to the
needs of the Army, anxious for its
efficiency and jealous of its honour.
They have, as the despatch of the
present field-force to South Africa
proves, wrought marvels for us in
the past thirty years without the
advice of amateurs. Let us, then,
instead of giving them our crude
schemes, wait for them to give us
theirs, from all the fulness of their
knowledge and experience ; and hav-
ing got it let us insist that it shall
be carried out. Then, if they fail us,
we can hang them if we will.

J. W. FOETESCUE.

1 " Public trials, after unfortunate affairs,
of commanding officers are as necessary to
the military as to the naval service, and
might in some instances be highly beneficial
to the military profession." This is not a
quotation from a leading article in the
newspapers of this year, but from the
memoirs of an officer (who commanded at
an " unfortunate affair ") which were pub-
lished in 1786.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER, 1900.

THE SINNER AND THE PROBLEM.

BY ERIC PARKER.

CHAPTER IV.

A CERTAIN sadness had come upon
the Sinner. Indefinable it might be,
and capricious ; for there were times
when I found him no whit the more
melancholy than he was on the day
when I first saw him. But without
doubt there was a change, and now
and then, as the pair of them left
me at the sound of the bell, espe-
cially in the half-hour before evening-
prayer, I fancied I saw an anxious
look flit across the Sinner's face, and
uneasy glances exchanged between
him and the Problem. Of course,
there were certain hours of each after-
noon set aside for games in which
the whole school, and sometimes mine
host himself, joined ; and during these
games I saw nothing of either boy.
But in the odd half-hours sprinkled
throughout the day they came with
marvellous regularity; and with the
one standing behind me and the other
prone on the grass I must have
painted, I suppose, long enough to
have finished a good half-dozen
pictures.

But it seemed to me that some
depression had clouded the gay spirit
of the smaller boy, which communi-
cated itself in turn to the Problem ;
for the Sinner was a being of the
merriest moods, and I declare I have
laughed in his company at things
No. 494. — VOL. LXXXIII.

over which I would not have supposed
even a conventional smile possible.
I thought, too, that I detected a
certain difference in the manner in
which they were wont to seek out the
place where the white of my easel and
board showed through the trees. I
had bethought me of painting a set
of sketches to present to mine host on
leaving him (a matter I would have
wished to postpone indefinitely, so
kindly did he and his lady put up
with my presence), and I was busy
in drawing the house from whatever
points framed best the old turret and
the ivy on the walls. Before this
uneasy mood carne upon them they
would search me out with laughter
I could hear long before I caught
sight of the Problem's tattered straw
hat and the small frayed knicker-
bockers ; but now they came silently,
running as often as not, and glancing
behind them as though they feared a
following, though as a matter of fact
few of the others had given my box
and me more than a passing criticism.
Nor was this owing to any prohibi-
tion of their presence ; for mine host,
when once I had convinced him that
I was not annoyed by such graceless
companions, had expressed himself
mightily pleased that the Sinner had
found so harmless an occupation as
staring at my paints, and hoped (he
was a broad-minded man) that there
G

82

The Sinner and the Problem,

might be made an artist of him,
knowing the boy's propensities for
the decoration of things great and
small : as to the Problem, he assured
me that there was something of
genius in that towzled head, could
one but get it out of him ; so I
allowed the younger boy to make use
of my box and brushes and any odd
scraps of paper he could find, the
while the other lay beside us both,
concerned with I know not what odd
imaginings.

Now I fancied I might have dis-
covered the key to this mystery when
One day I noticed among the trees
the figure of another boy, taller than
either of these, who shifted his glance
as I turned, and occupied himself
with carving on the bark of a large
ash. True, had it not been for the
Sinner's unwonted silence and the
anxious gaze which the Problem sent
in that direction, I might have de-
cided that some one, too shy to satisfy
his curiosity by a nearer inspection,
was still interested enough in the
fact of a painter making a picture
of his familiar school-house. But it
seemed possible that here was some
big person owing an impertinent
youngster a grudge, and cowardly
enough to wreak his vengeance in
odd corners unseen of mine host and
his myrmidons. However, I had
gained sufficient knowledge of the
character of both of these other boys
to believe that neither had fear of
any man living, much less of a school-
fellow possessing a face the Sinnercould
reach up to. And then it was that the
Sinner put me on the right scent.

One evening the figure had fol-
lowed them as far as the ash- tree,
and then stopped and out with his
knife as usual. The Sinner stood in
silence, watching me and drawing his
breath rather quickly. I wondered
what might be coming. Then he
spoke, and the Problem plucked at

a primrose. " Could you lend me
threepence 1 "

Now may my money-pot ever have
a hole in it, but I stared at him !
Something in his face, however, sent
my hand to my waistcoat-pocket in a
hurry ; I believe he thought I might
refuse. Luckily I found coppers
there, and dropped three into a small
palm I found somewhere near me ;
and the Problem stopped eating his
primrose. The Sinner stood behind
me still, but he did not say anything.
I should think it was a minute
(during which I busied myself with
some strange mixture of Hooker and
Vandyck that never found its way to
paper) before he turned and walked
quickly to the school. Then a tall
figure slid out from behind the ash-
tree and slowly followed him.

The Problem remained with me.
After a little he looked up. " He
didn't thank you, did he 1 "

I said that no doubt he was grate-
ful in reality.

" He meant to, though ; he was
very grateful. He was waiting, you
see, and then I suppose he forgot."

" Waiting for what ? " I asked.

"He thought you would ask him
what he wanted it for ; that was why
he went away so soon."

" I see," said I, and took up my
brushes. When I looked round, I
was alone, and the Problem half way
to the school, running as fast as his
legs could carry him. And all this
pother about threepence ! However
I determined to question him when
he came on the morrow, and get to
the bottom of things.

But the Sinner did not come the
next day after all, nor the day after,
no, nor till near a week later, and
only then after certain happenings.
At first I imagined him ill, but if so
it was strange that I saw nothing
of the Problem. Besides, I was soon
shown to be wrong on that point, for

The Sinner and the Problem.

83

mine hostess over the teacups asked
me to congratulate her on the
cleanest bill of health she had been
able to show these three years, — not
a boy with so much as a surfeit for
six weeks past ! Wherefore I could
only set down their absence as volun-
tary, and was the more perplexed.
And verily the pair might have de-
serted me from that day onward, for
all I know to the contrary, had it
not been that the merest chance put
me in possession of the key to all
this riddling and mystification. It
fell out in this way.

The primroses were not yet over,
and I had discovered a convenient
little corner among some birch and
chestnut trees, which gave me a hill
of pale flowers for a foreground and
the school-house in the middle dis-
tance. I was wending my way
thither one morning, and was look-
ing for the marks of my camp-stool,
when I spied alongside the trunk of
a felled oak a small book, open, and
intended apparently for the pocket.
As I picked it up I noticed that it
seemed to contain records of various
money-transactions, and absently ran
my eye along a few lines of the page
before me. This was headed with
the name of a boy, in the upper part
of the school, with whom I had, as
with many, a nodding acquaintance,
and from what I made out he had
borrowed a couple of shillings a week
ago, the debt now standing at the
sum of two-and-fourpence. That was
a pleasant rate of interest ! I turned
over a few more pages, idly curious,
and found that this was no solitary
instance of indebtedness, but that the
owner seemed to have carried on a
regular system of lending out small
moneys at interest, the debts mostly,
as I saw, unpaid. And then I sud-
denly bethought me to look for the
name of the Sinner ; sure enough,
there it was.

He had borrowed a shilling five
weeks ago. By this usurer's system
it now amounted to one-and-tenpence,
but somehow that had become reduced
to one-and-seven, by reason of a pay-
ment on account. And when I
found the entry First instalment, 3d.,
and noted that it coincided with the
date on which I had lent the Sinner
his three coppers, I began to believe
I had found some sort of a solution
for the difficulty, for of course this
publican could be no other than my
tall friend of the ash-tree and con-
venient pocket-knife.

I put that book in my pocket and
set up my easel. I suppose I must
have painted for more than an hour,
perhaps, when the Publican came
into the distance. He seemed a little
overset at sight of me, I thought,
but presently approached his oak-
trunk by a circuitous route, wasting
time (so far as I was concerned) for I
had made up my mind how I should
deal with him. When he had satis-
fied himself that the book was not
there, he looked at me inquiringly for
a moment, but was for moving off.
" Have you lost anything ? " I in-
quired politely.

The Publican turned in mid-stride.
" A small book," he said ; " nothing
of any consequence. I thought I
might have left it here."

"Is this it?" said I, holding it up.

His face lit in recognition. " Yes ;
where did you find it 1 "

" On the ground, there ; " but I
did not offer to return it.

He took a few paces forward, a
little uncertainly. " Thank you very
much. It's of no consequence, of
course, only it's awkward losing
things, isn't it 1 "

" Very," said I. " Do you want it
back?"

" Thank you. It has some — dates
in it."

Still I did not do more than hold it
O 2

The Sinner and the Problem.

in my left hand, the further from him.
He had no choice but to come nearer,
and I added a few touches to the
greens in my foreground.

" That's very good," he said, point-
ing at my picture. " Any one would
know the school from that."

A critic ! It enraged me almost
more than his note-book. I painted
on for a little, and leant back to judge
effects. " Don't you think the finder
of a valuable work like this deserves
a reward 1 " I asked slowly.

I think he became suspicious then.
At least he began to weigh his words.
" A reward 1 I — I don't quite under-
stand. If I could oblige you in any
way, you know."

" Yes, oh yes," said I ; " I think
you could. For instance," I went on,
"you might answer me some ques-
tions."

"About the school?" he asked
tentatively.

"In a way ; yes, about — about
the school." I believe I must have
painted for five minutes without
speaking. I was enjoying myself
immensely ; to be sure, it was pure
bullying, but I meant it to be. He
was a slouching, thick-mouthed person,
of a large, cat-like gait as he walked.
" Come," I said at last, " are you not
going to tell me anything ? "

" Why don't you give me my
book ? " he answered, .but without
much spirit.

"I was thinking of handing it
over to the authorities." At this he
started slightly, and I let him think
it over. " Now this money, I sup-
pose, was lent fairly and squarely 1 "

" It was my own money. I don't
suppose I shall get it all back."

" You haven't the book yet. Don't
you think that twopence per shilling
per week is — going it a little
strong ? "

" They agreed to pay it," he said
sulkily, rubbing a leg.

" It isn't allowed to lend or borrow
money at all, is it?" I asked. This
was a bow at a venture. He did not
answer, and I made a rough calcula-
tion. " Those left-hand pages show
the original amount lent ? " He
nodded. " Supposing that some one
were to pay you the sum of the left-
hand pages' account, would you con-
sider it satisfactory ? "

He hesitated. " I don't see what
it has to do with you."

" I've got the book," said I grimly.
And I began again on my primroses.

" You've no right to keep it," he
said at last. " If I were to complain
about it — "

" Oh, very well," I answered, re-
placing the book in my pocket ; " then
we need not discuss the matter fur-
ther."

He saw that he had made a false
move, and hastened to repair damages.
" I didn't mean exactly that," he
stammered.

" I thought not," replied I. "Come,
what do you say ? Money down and
no more lending, or — " I guessed a
probable effect.

" All right," he interposed, not
unwillingly now.

" Of course I must have a written
receipt, with names and amounts."
I handed him a paper and pencil.
" Now I will dictate," I said some-
what unsteadily, for the situation was
getting too much for me, who love to
laugh, the oftener the better.

Presently he held out the paper,
signed for the full amount, and I paid
him the money. " Of course I keep
the book," I said. But he stood
jingling the coins from one hand to
the other. I am sure he was pleased
to see the colour of them ; he smiled
in the contemplation. " You've no
idea how difficult it was to get that
twopence a week," he remarked con-
fidentially.

Heavens ! I believe I stood and

The Sinner and the Problem.

85

shouted at him. And he was off at
a hand-gallop, and I in a roar of wrath
and laughter.

In the evening I saw the Problem
in the distance, and called to him.
" Problem," I said, " what does this
mean ? Where is the Sinner ? "

He thought for a minute. "Do
you want him ? " he asked.

" I do," said I. " Why has he not
come before ? "

He hesitated. " He will come if I
tell him he must."

" Tell him that I wish to see him
upon a matter of business," I said
solemnly. He walked away slowly,
and soon I saw them both coming
towards me.

The Sinner came up behind me,
and I turned and looked at him.
" Where have you been all this time,
I should like to know ? " I asked.
But the Sinner was silent, and the
Problem took up the tale. " He
wanted to come : we both did ; but
he hadn't got the threepence for you,
and he thought you would ask for it.
You see, he has threepence a week
pocket-money, and he meant to bring
you it at the end of the week, only
he broke a window that evening, and
that was a month's pocket-money gone,
so he knew he could never bring it."

"I see," said I. "It is a serious
matter to get into debt, isn't it 1 "
But just then the Sinner was looking
so earnestly at the hills in the dis-
tance that I turned to the Problem
without appearing to notice that I
got no answer. The effect when I
produced the book was extraordinary.
The Problem stood wide-eyed and
breathless. " Did you find it ? "

" I bought it," said I, and handed
him the receipt.

He only half understood it. " Will
the boys owe it to you, then? And
you won't charge interest ? "

I disclaimed any intention of
applying for payment. The magnifi-

cence of this action almost dumb-
founded the Problem, but he recovered
himself after a prolonged examination
of the receipt, and hinted that when
this became known there would pro-
bably be sent a deputation to thank
me. This I said I must courteously
but firmly refuse to receive ; and he
stood there looking from the paper at
me and back again.

Still I did not understand every-
thing. For instance, why had the
Sinner borrowed only threepence?
The other hastened to explain. " You
see, the pocket-money for the week
before ought to have been paid, only
he bought a little knife with it from
a shop. And he wouldn't believe that,
so he followed us about, so we thought
perhaps you would lend it till the
end of the week."

"But then, I suppose the next
week's pocket-money was due in the
same way ? "

" Yes ; he would have begun to
follow us again on Monday."

" And what would you have done
then ? "

"Well, you see, we thought you
might be going before long, and he
couldn't have begun again till the
next threepence was due, so we
thought that just for that time he
would let us alone."

" And when the money went for
the window ? "

" We didn't know what to do then.
Of course, some boys could write
home, but we haven't either of us got
any parents, — at least, the Sinner's
got an aunt, but she hardly counts,
I should think, because I've seen her,
and she doesn't tip you and that sort
of thing. Then, you see, he said he
couldn't come and see you paint, be-
cause you might ask when he was going
to pay you the threepence, and he
knew he couldn't pay it. I don't
get any pocket-money, of course," he
added.

86

The Sinner and the Problem.

" And if I had gone away before
now 1 "

" Well, we hoped you wouldn't ;
we used to look in at the dining-room
windows to see if your place was laid
for lunch ; and then you can tell if
anyone is going in the afternoon by
going round to the stables."

" But then, if you were to pay
threepence a week, and the interest
was twopence in the shilling, you
could really only knock off a penny."

The Problem thought for a minute.
" I suppose so," he said. " He never
borrowed any money before, though,
so he didn't know that."

" Wouldn't it have been better to
have told all about it to begin with ? "

He looked doubtful. " You see,
he thought you might have told the
masters. And then he would have
said — "

" I see," said I.

Just then the bell gave a prelimi-
nary tinkle, and I held out a hand
to the Sinner, to wish him good-night ;
but he was still blinking at the sun-
set, and I turned again to my easel.
When I looked up they had vanished.

CHAPTEB V.

WHEN mine host bought the old
manor-house to make it into a school
for such as the Sinner and the Pro-
blem, with the Publican to bully
them, and the Chief Butler and the
Other Man to help him drill empty
heads into an understanding of algebra
and Cicero, he took the park with
it, under his deed of conveyance, or
whatever be the name these lawyers
set to that in language not under-
standed of the people. Part of this
park he turned into a level field for
cricket and football in season, and
fenced off a part for hay ; and the
deer he sold in a pack to a retired
soap-boiler, who looked on their
dappled flanks with pride from a

brand-new French window, having
carted them in couples under a net
twenty miles away for the greater
part of a week.

By one side of the cricket-field ran
a path bordering the park. It was
long and winding, narrowed to half
its original width by encroaching
laurels and rhododendrons, and unless
the sun was in the zenith little warmth
came to the moss-coated gravel with
which it was covered, though here
and there at evening were mellow
green patches of light that found
passage through the branches. At
intervals tall oaks and ashes stood up
from the even mass of leaves, and
beneath these were wooden seats to
fit the tree-trunks, grey and lichen-
spotted.

Once or twice, because I was lazier
than I should have been, I lighted
my pipe and strolled along this walk,
resolutely dismissing the subject of
idle brushes and empty paper. For
I am one who finds no truer summary
of the nature that is in many of us
than this confession of a great writer,
that whenever anything assumed the
form of a duty, he found himself
incapable of discharging it ; and I
have felt my only plan on these
occasions of rebellion to be voluntary
laziness, a kind of truantry. Nor
does my art pursue me with cries of
Come back, nor with any shout that
she has a tawse for me behind the
easel : she comes to me wooing, and
I run back to kiss her ; but she
comes to me silent, and looks in my
face, and perforce I am her lover
again and no truant any more. That
is a true love, after all ; and as for
those who do set themselves to the
chase, driving un unwilling pencil
where it would not go, rather than
work as who must because of the love
that calls, — to Jericho with them !

And twice as I walked alone, with
no company but my pipe, and a

The Sinner and the Problem.

87

cuckoo in the tree, perhaps, and the
noises of the cricket-field coming
through the laurels, I met there the
figure of a lady : grey-haired she was,
but upright and tall, and with a
frightened look on her face as she
met me; yet I thought I spied dis-
appointment in her eyes, as if I might
have been another. Twice I turned
a corner and met her thus, and twice
with some apology (I know not what)
she turned back again, and I also,
for the path was narrow as I have
said. One thing I noticed, and that
was a small basket on her arm (much
as Red Riding- Hood carries her
basket of butter and eggs and what
not in the pictures), and I guessed
at some shopping in the town, for
the path led through a gate to the
high-road, and there was a town some
miles distant where mine hostess had
her custom ; but it must have been
a long walk, and dusty too, to look
at her, poor lady. I was wrong ; she
never came from the town, but she
had walked far notwithstanding, as
I found out later.

One hot day in June I met her
again and heard all about her. It
was perhaps a fortnight after my first
meeting with the Lady of the Lake,
and that had been an unsettled fort-
night for me, who ought to have known
better ; but I had dragged my easel
and all else I needed three times down
to the lake and had set eyes on nothing
but the water and the trees. Once,
indeed, I saw (or fancied I saw) the
flutter of a straw hat and flowers by
the house door, but I may have been
mistaken; and at least the Lady of
the Lake seemed little anxious to
extend her acquaintance with me, if
she knew I was there and painting.
Three sketches I made, and slapped
my thigh for two of them, because
I had meant her this time to praise, if
she saw my work, and wanted no more
references to a lake fit only to drown in.

And then, on an afternoon when
the sun was dipping to the trees and
the boys were merry over some game
of cricket in the field, I saw the poor
lady again. . Again the dust was heavy
on her dress, and still she carried her
little basket with care, and again she
started and turned back as I met her.
And this time, because she walked as
if she were tired, and there were lines
on her face and the same disappoint-
ment in her eyes, I made so bold as
to follow her quickly and ask if I
could do anything for her. Perhaps,
I hazarded, she wished to see some
one, or to make an inquiry ; but she
hardly looked at me as she answered.
" I do not think so," she said, " thank
you." She was walking away quickly,
when suddenly she stopped. " Are
you one of the masters *? " she asked.

I, the laziest of men ! I hastened
to explain that I was not. She looked
disappointed again, and I added that
I knew both the masters, for that
matter ; did she wish to see either ?

" No," she said ; "it was one of the
boys I wished to see. I wrote to him
a short time ago that I should be here
to-day ; I had something to give him.
He is sure to come, though ; I would
not have mentioned it, — I am his
mother," she added inconsequently.

" But it is getting late," I suggested.
I explained that I knew some of the
boys and could send her son to her.
And I asked her to give me his
name. When I discovered that it was
the Publican, my friend of the usury-
system and the note-book, I began to
see daylight ; and I began to be much
interested in his mother.

The Sinner and the Problem I had
noticed a while ago setting in my
direction, — one, I doubted not, with
a plausible explanation for the end
of his innings, and the other without
it — and just then I heard their voices
beyond the turn of the walk. For a
moment I thought of sending on- of

88

The Sinner and the Problem,

them in search of the Publican, but
decided to reserve the business for
myself, because I wished to make sure
of a meeting. They stopped when
they saw I was not alone, and would
have made off, I fancy ; but I needed
them to carry out other plans of mine.
" Here are two of the boys," I said ;
" they will wait with you while I am
away."

I saw a glance of recognition pass
between the pair, which was ex-
plained to me afterwards. Then the
Sinner advanced with outstretched
hand.

" You are one of my son's friends, I
expect," she said, and smiled at him
in a way that made me haste to be
off; I was fairly itching to get at this
usurer.

"Yes," said the Sinner; and so I
left them.

I found my quarry seated on a
bench, attentively regarding a good-
looking bat ; he had picked it up a
bargain. "New?" I asked.

" Yes ; that is, I've just bought it.
I think it's worth what I gave for
it, too." He was a lusty hitter, this
Publican, which perhaps accounted for
his unquestioned position among his
school-fellows.

" Let me look at it," said I ; and, as
he rose and began walking by me, I
set away from the laurel-walk.

" Five-and -three-pence, I gave," he
explained. "He wanted seven-and-six,
but it isn't worth that, — second-hand,
of course ; it wants pegging here and
there, too. I shouldn't wonder if it
cost another two shillings to have it
done up."

I demurred at this, and entered
upon an estimate of the business,
involving possible outlays of twopence
and threepence, till he noticed no
longer the direction I was taking. I
made a final and comprehensive survey
of the wood. " Do you know," said I at
last, " I have some good news for you 1 "

" Won't it cost so much as that 1 "
he asked unsuspiciously.

" Your mother is waiting for you in
the shrubbery," I went on.

" Oh," said he, and had the grace
to check himself on the point of
stopping where he was. He began to
fathom my unusual interest in his
belongings, and I think determined
to make the best of matters. "Is
she really ? " he asked with an air of
surprise. " I had no idea of that."

" But she wrote and told you she
would be there," said I.

" So she did," he replied, as if con-
fused by the sudden recollection. " I
had quite forgotten it ; very stupid of
me, wasn't it ? "

"Very," I said. I remembered tak-
ing much the same advantage of this
mealy-mouthed creature once before,
and that set me drawing another bow
at a venture. " She has written more
than once," I went on slowly.

He began to look less at ease. " Of
course, she doesn't quite understand
how much time cricket takes up, and
that sort of thing."

" It is a long walk here, though.
Had you thought of that ! "

He coloured. " I can't think why
she does it," he grumbled. "If I were
always going to meet her, I should be
humbugged to death. I used to be
called Apron-strings once, for that
reason." That, then, was why the
Sinner and the Problem recognised the
Dusty Lady. " And now that I'm old
enough to look after myself one would
think — "

" She has brought a basket of
things for you." I did not care if
she had not, after all ; but I declare
he began to walk quite quickly.
" Ah, that's from my brother, I
expect; he's lame, you know."

" Lame ? " asked I. Poor lady
with the dusty dress !

"Yes; he had a fall when he was
a baby. I'm glad I came," he went

The Sinner and the Problem.

on ; "I should like to know how
he is."

" And does he send the basket ? "

"Well, he makes up the things
into packets. It amuses him, you
see ; he hasn't much to do, of course."

" Does he often send them ? "

" He hasn't for some time ; that
is, I don't think so. They're nothing
very much, of course, only chocolates
and that kind of stuff; but some-
times he sticks a shilling or some-
thing of that sort in them, just as
a surprise, you know. I sent six-
pence of it back, once."

" Did you, though ? " said I. "I
suppose you were pretty well off at
the time." This was lost on him.

" Yes, that was the reason. But
just now, — I wish I had known
before," he said. " Usually he writes
to say when he is sending a basket;
I expect this was meant as a
surprise."

"It is a long way for a walk," I
remarked again. I did not know
where he lived, but I remembered
the look of the dust.

" She doesn't seem to think it so,"
he replied, and saw that he had gone
too far. I had let him go, for that
matter, but though I am the most
peaceful of men, I was glad we were
at the turn of the walk where I
could hear the Sinner talking.

"Of course, letters do go wrong
sometimes," he was saying. " My
aunt once wrote a letter — "

But just then she caught sight of
the Publican, and the Sinner and
the Problem followed my eye and
retreated rapidly in my direction.

" Oh my son, my son ! " she cried.
I could not help hearing it before
we turned the corner.

CHAPTER VI.

THE Editors of this little book wish
to first assure the reader that they have
great sympathy with all the victims

whose names are inscribed within.- But
we think that in nine cases out of ten it
has been thoroughly deserved. To pre-
vent this little book from falling into
the hands of unscrupulus persons we
have refered to the victims by the use
of numbers, the key of which can only
be obtained from the Editors.
We are,

Yours faithfully,

THE EDITORS.

The boys had left some scraps of
paper on which the Sinner had de-
picted some stirring scenes in the
life of a Scots soldier, a person he
was never tired of putting through
his paces. I had lifted one of these
studies (its kilted hero was engaged in
piercing a Red Indian with a spear,
the while he discharged countless
bullets at a distant host of warriors),
and underneath it lay a small book ;
there was no name on the cover,
and I opened it supposing I had lit
on a note-book, — Virgil made easy
or Cicero simplified. The first page
interested its reader, as an " un-
scrupulus person," sufficiently to court
further exploration.

At 12.45 on February 17th no. 1 re-
ceived a summons to the study. Upon
knocking at the door he was told to
come in and sit down on a chair. It
appears he had been complained of by
his formaster for being a thoroughly idle
and good-for-nothing fellow and what
had he to say for himself. As he could
not think he was told to kneel upon the
chair and was immediately aware of an
excrushating pain which was caused by
the collision of something he could not
see. When this had been repeated four
times he was told he might go and he
hoped this would not occur again.

No. 14 on February 20th received four
strokes of the bat. As this is the first
time that a bat has been used in these
painful scenes we wish to explain that
the bat is a flat piece of wood some-
what like unto a brush. He was told
that his form-master had reported him
for thoroughly idle work in Euclid and
he had no doubt from what he herd
that this was true he departed much
relieved as it was a coald day. Before

90

The Sinner and the Problem.

he left he heard the headmaster say he
thought that would do meaning the bat
this he did not deny.

Fiat experimentum, commented the
Unscrupulus Person.

On March 3rd no. 8 was told to pre-
sent himself at the head-master's door.
This boy had placed a duck in a school-
fellow's desk which flew out in school
causing much merriment. He was told
that this sort of thing must be put a
stop to for it could not be allowed to go
on as it upset the work of the class and
must be put a stop to. The headmaster
then rendered him five strokes of the bat.

No. 8 on March 14th was sent up to
the headmaster and soundly breeched.
He had been thoroughly idle and in-
attentive and if things went on in this
way matters would come to a crisis as
this could not go on.

On March 3rd no. 3 received six
strokes. This fellow had been most
unruly and insubordinate and had said
to his formaster Speak up will yer
when he was making a speech. As this
was not the first time such things had
occured he was told he had better be
careful as this was not at all the sort of
thing that ought to occur as he was
expected to do better than this.

No. 8 on April 1st was sent for at
10.45 as was expected considering he
had peppered the headmaster's desk.
This headmaster told him to wait as he
was busy and when he had waited half-
an-hour he came in and said Now sir
what is the meaning of this ? he was
told to kneel upon the sofa and the
headmaster took his dred instrument hi
hand but suddenly he said he might go
this time and this must not occur again
he departed thinking he was a decent
chap the headmaster was laughing so
he felt a fool.

Here there was a gap seemingly
accounted for by the holidays.

" On May the forth no. 8."

The Sinner was running across
the cricket-field as fast as his legs
could carry him. The Unscrupulus
Person laid the book on the ground
by his side.

"Does a Scotchman — oh, have
you read it ? "

" I was wondering how you caught
the duck, Sinner."

" Oh well, that was a long time
ago. Does a Scotchman have a
busby?"

"As a general rule," said the
Unscrupulus Person, " a Scotchman
does not have a busby, unless he
happens to be a hussar or a horse-
artillery man. The hairy thing he
wears on his head is known as a
feather- bonnet."

CHAPTER VII.

THE garden-boy's jackdaw had
fallen ill of an inscrutable disease,
and the Problem was called into con-
sultation. He had something of a
name as a physician, having bound
up the coachman's canary's broken
leg, so that it lived a happy one-
footed existence for six months after,
and died on a frosty night full of
hempseed and honour. There was a
story, too, of a poulticed cat, which
did him infinite credit, and it was
hoped he might find something worth
trying on this jackdaw, to set a crown
on past triumphs. But he was called
in too late, it was thought; for in
the afternoon news came to me that
the miserable bird had given up the
ghost in a sudden fit at the bottom
of its cage. Apoplexy caused by a
surfeit was the verdict, and from
what I knew of the creature it was
as likely as any other.

" Did you see it die ? " the Sinner
asked with morbid interest.

"Of course I did," answered the
Problem, professionally curt.

" Did it die just ordinarily ? "

" What do you mean 1 " asked the
Problem.

" I mean, what did it look like ?
Did it just lie down and stop moving,
or did it fly on to its back, and kick

The Sinner and the Problem.

91

its legs in the air, and caw till it was
dead ? "

"It just humped itself up and fell
off its perch," said the Problem. " It
opened its beak two or three times ;
they usually do that."

" Oh," said the Sinner, manifestly
disappointed, " I thought perhaps it
would have done more than that. I
thought it would have flown about.
My aunt's parrot, you know, was
dying once, only it got well ; and it
lay on its back and said all the words
it knew as fast as it could, and then
it shut its eyes and we thought it
was dead, but it bit the servant, so
we knew it wasn't. Oh, and did you
ask him 1 " he concluded irrelevantly.

"Yes," said the Problem; "he
said you could have it. He didn't
see any use in things when they were
dead, he said."

" You can bury them," said the
Sinner.

Later in the day I was called to
inspect the tomb. It appeared to be
the latest addition to a cemetery
situated in some waste ground beyond
the laurels of the side-walk where the
Dusty Lady met her son. There was
a considerable hillock of freshly-dug
earth. " It must have been a very
large jackdaw," I ventured.

" We buried it in a box," explained
the Sinner ; " at least, a tin, a biscuit-
tin. You see, when there is a good
deal of earth left over you can make
a better grave. Sometimes it's quite
difficult to make a grave, when it's
only a robin or a mouse, or some-
thing like that."

The bigger mound, the better
grave, it seemed. I remarked on the
number of tombs, of which there
must have been at least thirty. The
Problem supplied an answer. " He
buries everything ; whenever any-
thing dies, he goes and asks if he can
have it. Sometimes he gets things
from the village, because the servants

know about it. They bring the
bodies in boxes."

" Are they all pets, then 1 "

"No, not all. Some of them he
picks up, you know, if they haven't
been dead very long. It's a sort of
collection really."

The majority of the graves were
heaps of earth, beaten into church-
yard shape, and here and there (I
thought) renewed or supplemented
where the mound had sunk level. A
few were decorated with the com-
moner sorts of flowers; pansies and
forget-me-nots mostly, but there were
straggling clumps of primroses and
violets over the larger barrows. In
one corner were three mounds side by
side, of a larger size than the rest
and with headstones of slate. On
these were painted suitable inscrip-
tions. I pointed to one bearing the
legend, Joe, faithful unto death.
" What was this ? " I asked.

" Those are cats' graves," replied
the Sinner, surveying his handiwork
with pride. " That one was the odd
man's cat, at least it used to follow
him about. Only one day the post-
man's dog worried it and it died."

" And did the odd man ask you to
bury it ? "

"No; I asked him. I think he
was glad, because I said it could have
an epistle."

" An epistle 1 "

" Written on the tombstone. That
was what he asked me to put, —
Faithful unto death. He was very
fond indeed of that cat."

" Was it a pretty cat ? "

"Yes, I think so, all except his
ears; it had hardly any ears. He
used to give it bread and beer ; and
after it was killed, — oh, I forgot,
you can see its grave." The Sinner
pointed to a somewhat larger heap
in the background, made conspicuous
by a solitary gentian but without a
slate at head or foot.

92

The Sinner and the Problem.

" But I thought you said this one
with Joe on it, — I don't understand ;
has it got two graves 1 "

" Oh no," said the Sinner ; " that's
a dog's grave, the postman's dog. The
odd man killed it, you see."

" Good gracious ! On purpose 1 "

" Oh yes. He was leaving at the
end of the week, and he wanted to
be even with the postman, he said,
for killing his cat. He gave me the
body."

" And can't it have a tombstone, —
the dog, I mean ? "

" Well, the odd man didn't want
it to have one. Of course, the post-
man didn't know it was buried here,
and I think he thought if we put a
tombstone he would find out."

" And did he never find out ? "

" No. He's gone now, though,
that postman ; he married the cook.
I was sorry that cook went," said the
Sinner thoughtfully.

" Why ? "

"Oh, well, she used to give you
things."

" Bodies, do you mean ? "

" No, biscuits and things. She did
give me a kitten, though, once." He
pointed to the grave next to Joe's.

" Was Jimmy a kitten, then ? "

" Yes, it was drowned."

" But if it was drowned — "

" It fell into the cistern. I had to
dry it, because I only had a cardboard
box for it."

"If it was only a kitten, how
does its grave come to be as big as
Joe's?"

The Sinner looked puzzled. "I
don't know," he said eventually. " At
least, I think — "

"I remember," said the Problem.
" You got some extra earth because
you said there wasn't enough ; you
wanted it to match the other two."

A little beyond the last resting-
places of Joe and Jimmy another
grave attracted my attention. It

appeared to be a twin grave, if one
might call it so, only instead of the
two barrows lying side by side, they
were placed lengthwise, in a kind of
tandem. A wooden cross was planted
at the head of the leader, so to
speak.

"Oh, that one? That was a
guinea-pig; Prince, its name was,
only it's faded."

" And what was the name of the
other one ? "

"The other one? There isn't
another one," said the Sinner.

"This," I said, tapping the mound
above the body of the tandem's
wheeler.

" That's Prince," said the Sinner.

"Good heavens!" said I. "Do
you mean it's all the same animal,
this and that ? "

"Yes," said the Sinner seriously.
" It — that one was buried in two
parts."

" Mercy on us ! So as to make
more graves, I suppose."

"We couldn't help it. We only
found half of it at first, you see. It
was a fox took it, the gardener said.
It was in the winter, and we found
its body in the hutch because the
door was open; and then about
week afterwards a boy found its head
under a bush. We couldn't dig up
its body again, you see, so we made
an extra grave for its head."

A medium-sized mound next to
the tomb of a canary attracted me.
The inscription Fido was painted in
white on a tarred cross. "This, I
suppose, was a dog, was it not ? "

"Oh no ; that was a duck."

" A duck ? A duck named Fido ? "
And then I knew I ought not to
have laughed. The Sinner looked
ashamed ; he was very proud of his
cemetery, and had not thought
ridicule possible.

" Well," he admitted after a little,
" it hadn't got a name you see. It

The Sinner and the Problem.

93

died very suddenly and, — and the
gardener gave it me. I had to put
something on the cross, of course,
and I couldn't think of any other
name. Do you think it had better
be altered ? " he asked respectfully.

" No, Sinner, no ; certainly not ; it
does beautifully." He looked at me
with uncertainty. I tried to make
amends. " I suppose you have to
name them, or else you wouldn't know
which was which, — isn't that it?"

" Yes," said the Sinner brighten-
ing ; " that's it ; and besides, you
wouldn't know where they were. At
first, you see, I didn't have names.
Only one day I dug up the cat again
because I had forgotten where it was.
That was before I put mounds, too ;
I used to stamp it down level instead.
I think it looks better like this, don't
you ? "

"Much better," said I. "These
are all birds, in this part, are they ? "

" Yes. There's another one I had
to name in the corner ; that one with
Lucy on it."

" And who was Lucy 1 "

" That was the name I put. It
wasn't a pet exactly ; at least, one
day there was a chicken for dinner,
and it wasn't quite good or something,
so the masters left it and the cook
gave it me."

"But she is in her grave," I
found myself murmuring. The Sinner
looked at me quickly; but I was
more successful in keeping my coun-
tenance over Lucy's fate than I had
been over that of Fido. A question
occurred to me. " You never tried
to cremate any of them, I suppose ?
Burn them, I mean."

The Problem became interested.
" Oh yes, don't you remember ? That
was one of the public ones."

" Public ? " asked I.

" He didn't tell you that ; he has
two kinds of burials, you know.
Private ones are when no one is there

except him and the person to whom
it belongs."

" And the others ? "

"Well, anybody can come to the
public ones ; there were quite a lot of
boys when we had the burning one."

" What did you burn 1 "

" It was a rat," said the Sinner ;
" rather a pretty one, piebald — it had
been trodden on."

" And what did you do ? I mean,
how did you manage it all 1 "

The Sinner hesitated. " That's the
place," he said, indicating a very
small mound under a nettle. " At
least — well, you see, we made a little
pile of sticks and things and put the
rat on it, only just after we had set
fire to it the school-bell rang, so we
had to leave it. The wind blew it
about rather, I think, because the
ashes were all scattered over the
grass. We couldn't find the rat
exactly. We put the ashes in a tin
and buried them there."

"Tell me about a burial. What
do you do 1 "

The Problem volunteered a descrip-
tion. " Well, they bring the body to
just outside the laurels. Then the
person who is helping bury it puts
the box on the wheel-barrow and
wheels it to where the Sinner has
dug the grave, and the Sinner takes
it off the barrow and puts it in.
Then he asks the person if he is going
to say anything, because he won't see
it again. So the person says good-
bye, and then the Sinner shovels in
the earth and asks if they would like
a cross or a slate."

" And which do they choose gene-
rally 1 "

" A slate," said the Sinner.

I looked round involuntarily ; there
were only three slates, — over the cats.
As soon as I had done so I mentally
objurgated my thoughtlessness, for
the Sinner caught my eye and be-
came confused. "Of course," he ex-

The Sinner and the Problem.

plained, looking at me doubtfully,
"it's rather difficult to get slates, so
very often there has to be a cross
instead."

" You keep the slates for the more
important animals, I suppose ? "

" Yes ; the dog, you see, was really
the biggest, but that mightn't have
one, the odd man said."

I seemed to recollect the death of
a goat which belonged to the place,
and said so.

" I wasn't allowed to have that,"
the Sinner explained. " I did ask.
But the gardener was making some-
thing by one of the greenhouses, and
he wanted it for that," he said. " I
don't know what it was. I've never
buried anything as big as a goat," he
added rather wistfully, and relapsed
into meditation over the picture of
a goat on a wheel-barrow and a very
large grave.

I could not help wondering what
he would consider a fit name to place
on the sepulchre of a goat ; but I was
saved from further committing myself
by the sound of the school-bell. The
two boys trotted off, the Sinner still
absorbed in contemplation.

It happened that later in the year
I was present at one of these burials ;
it was a private one, and the hero
was a rabbit. Along the edge of
the cemetery ran a fence, and I was
sitting with my easel on the far side
when I heard the sound of voices
close at hand. I was so placed that
I could see absolutely nothing, and I
could only make guesses as to what
was happening with the wheel-barrow.
I heard it creaking over the heavy
ground, and a jolt now and then
followed by silence.

"That's enough," said the Sinner.

There was a pause ; I imagined that
the body was being lowered into the
grave. " It's a pity we couldn't get a
box," came the Sinner's voice. " I've
had such a lot of burials lately, of
course. The matron said she hadn't
one left."

A further pause suggested that
they were probably gazing at the
body.

"Do you want to say anything?"
asked the Sinner. I heard afterwards
that the owner of this rabbit was a
child of seven or so, quite the smallest
boy in the school. I fancy the whole
affair was as solemn as the Sinner
could make it.

There was silence, and then a small
voice said, " What ought I to say ? "

The Sinner was thinking. " Say,
' Oh Lord, this is my rabbit.' You
had better say good-bye too," he
added after a minute or two. There
was a faint murmur indicative of an
attempt to say farewell. I heard the
shovel grate as the Sinner filled it.
Then came a resounding thump, as a
large clod fell upon the rabbit's body,
followed by an exclamation of dismay.
" I say, I do believe it moved ! "

The clod, I thought, was lifted and
probably the temperature of the rabbit
taken. "No, it is dead," was the
assurance ; and once more the shovel
grated in the heap. Soon there were
sounds as of loose earth beaten into
shape, and I imagined the formation
of a new mound, — the forty-first, if I
remembered right. Then came a sub-
dued sigh.

" And would you like a slate or a
cross over it 1 " But I think from the
tone in which he asked the question,
the Sinner knew that the wrong
answer was inevitable.

(To be continued.)

95

THE MISSIONARY IN CHINA.

WHEN the skilled physician is
called in to attend a sick man, he
first diagnoses the case and then, be-
fore administering medicines, he takes
into consideration the constitution,
the habits of life and thought, the
age, temperament, and recuperative
power of the patient, and many other
matters. It is open to doubt whether
in the field of religion, as regards
mission-work among the Chinese, this
wise method has been adopted.

In the first place, — who are the
Chinese ? The question is easier put
than answered. Their exact origin
dates back beyond any record known
to history ; it is now, however,
generally agreed that they were not
the earliest inhabitants of the country,
but swept down upon it from the
north and north-west, pushing before
them the older inhabitants and ex-
terminating or absorbing them. The
chronology of China is made by
Chinese historians to commence with
the sixtieth year of Hwang Ti, in
2637 B.C., but there were Chinese
in China before that date. From
their first appearance we find them
possessed of a written or picture-
alphabet, and of certain elements of
intellectual and moral culture and
religious beliefs. In other words,
they emerge some five thousand years
ago from a dim and impenetrable
antiquity, already equipped with the
elements of what is now known to
I Europeans as civilisation. From
i what country they came is still a
1 matter of conjecture and will probably
j always remain so ; but that they
I came bearing with them the elements
of religion, of the arts, and of govern-

ment, is as certain as any fact in
history can be.

Eighteen hundred years before the
Christian era an old Chinese philo-
sopher writing on the world and its
government as it appeared to his
mind, penned the following sentence :
" Heaven gives birth to the people
with such desires that without a ruler
they will fall into all disorders, and
Heaven again gives birth to the man
of intelligence to regulate them." It
may seem fanciful to suggest that in
these words the sage was formulating
the doctrine of a king by Divine
Right, with a councillor or prime-
minister to assist him ; but the his-
tory of that time and the subsequent
course of Chinese history leave no
reasonable doubt that this was what
was in the writer's mind. The plain
truth is, of course, that the Chinese
solved the problem of government, as
they solved a great many other pro-
blems, at a period in the history of
the world when that of Europe had
not yet begun.

They appear to have passed rapidly
through the nomad, feudal, and kingly
forms of government to the imperial.
In the year 403 B.C. we find a Hep-
tarchy of seven great States all con-
tending for the kingdom, until one
Ts'in, or Chin, relieved his brother
kings of further trouble by proclaim-
ing himself Emperor, finding it more
convenient that " as there is but one
sun in the sky, there should be but
one ruler in the nation." For up-
wards of two thousand years the land
has thus been united under imperial
rule, which derives its main strength
from the divine origin attributed to

96

The Missionary in China.

it, its wielder being, in the pious
language of his subjects, the Son of
Heaven.

The divinity that hedges a king
has in no country been given a more
living embodiment than in China.
The Emperor is to his people the
great high priest and direct mediator
between them and Heaven, and he
passes his life in an endless round
of prayers and ceremonial observances
on their behalf, in an almost sacred
seclusion. He himself bases his claim
to dominion on the fact of his being
ruler " by the grace of God ; " and
changes of dynasty are always re-
ferred to as " the will of Heaven."

The three religions of China are
Confucianism, Tao-ism, and Buddhism.
Confucius is the great philosopher
and moral teacher of China, and his
system may be briefly described as an
exalted code of social morality based
upon a recognition of the existence
of a Supreme Power in the universe.
If he does not advocate the assistance
of direct prayer to the Deity, that is
because to this day in China the
Emperor is, as I have said, regarded
as the sole direct mediator between
his people and God. The estimation
in which Confucius is held by his
countrymen is very great. The law
requires that there shall be a temple
to him in every prefecture, sub-pre-
fecture, district, and market-town in
China. The sage was of noble birth,
being a descendant of the dukes of
Sung, and his lineage being traceable
through them to the sovereign Hwang
Ti, already mentioned. His name is
a latinised form of his Chinese name
K'ung Fu-tze, and his lineal repre-
sentative has the title of kung, or
duke, holds large landed estates by
imperial grant, and is considered to
be next in rank to the members of
the Imperial House itself. Twice a
year, in spring and autumn, the
Emperor himself goes to the imperial

college in Pekin and does homage to
Confucius in these words : "On this
month of the year, I, the Emperor,
offer sacrifice to the philosopher
K'ung, the ancient Teacher, the Per-
fect Sage, and say, oh Teacher, in
virtue equal to heaven and earth,
whose doctrines embrace both time
past and present, thou didst digest
and transmit the Six Classics and didst
hand down lessons for all generations !
Now in the second month of spring
[or autumn] in reverent observance of
the old statutes, with victims, silks,
spirits, and fruits I offer sacrifice to
thee."

Ifc must not be imagined, however,
from the above reverential tribute that
Confucius has been deified, for this is
not the case. His memory is revered
and worshipped in something like the
sense in which all Chinese worship
their ancestors ; only in his case the
cult is a national one based on the
imperial decree ordaining it. One
precept of Confucius, often repeated in
his writings, and known as the Golden
Rule, has a strangely familiar sound :
" What ye would not that men should
do to you, do not do to them ; " and so
also has the great principle laid down
by his contemporary Lao-tsze, the
founder of Tao-ism, that " Good will
overcome evil and should be returned
for it."

Lao-tsze's treatise is called THE TAO,
(or Way) AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS.
The Way is the quiet, passionless dis-
charge of all which our nature and
relations prompt or require us to do,
without striving or crying, and the
method of maintaining and preserving
life. Heaven in this Way is not a
ruler or legislator, as in Confucianism,
but only a pattern.

Buddhism is based upon the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls to a
higher or a lower, a more, or a less,
pleasurable form of existence, accord-
ing to the merit or demerit of each

The Missionary in China.

97

present existence. It has flourished
for some two thousand four hundred
years, it claims a larger number of
adherents than any other religion, it is
widely spread over the whole of China,
as over the rest of Asia, but in China
it co-exists with Confucianism and
Tao-ism ; just as in Japan the Buddhist
temples stand alongside those of the
older religion of the country Shinto-
ism, and the Japanese worship at the
shrines of both religions and combine
the two.

It will be gathered from the above
statement of the condition of religious
thought in China that Confucianism is
the official or state religion of the
country, that it is not antagonistic to
Tao-ism, which exists alongside of it,
and that it tolerates Buddhism, which
apparently is more the religion of the
lower orders. The best men in China
are undoubtedly good and earnest
followers of Confucius. There is some
reason for the belief that the Chinese
government would give Christianity a
niche in their religious system if its
followers would accept a position of
subordination and inferiority.

In connection with the religious
state of China I can hardly do better
than quote from a little work entitled
THE CHINESE PAINTED BY THEMSELVES,
being a translation from the French
of Colonel Tscheng-Ki-Tong, then
Chinese Military Attache at Paris.

After quoting the principal doctrines
of Confucius, the writer proceeds :

But I must stop short : it is unnecessary
to further develope this magnificent
doctrine, which constitutes one of the
most splendid tributes made by man to
his Creator.

The ancient worship sanctioned by
Confucius admitted neither images nor
priests, but merely certain ceremonies
forming the rules of a cultus. These
ceremonies are but little noticed by
minds occupied by the principles.

Religious unity does not exist in China.
Where does it exist ? Unity is a state
No. 494. — VOL. LXXXIII.

of perfection nowhere to be found. But
if China has several leading religions, I
hasten to state that she has but three.
That is moderate enough.

Besides the religion of Confucius, there
is that of Lao-Tse, which is now only
practised by the lower class and admits
of metempsychosis ; and the religion of
Fo, or Buddhism, a doctrine appertaining
to metaphysics, in which admirable points
of view are to be found.

After giving a brief account of
the theory of Buddhism, the writer
continues :

The aim of this ideal life is to produce
ecstasy ; then the divine principle takes
possession of the soul, penetrates it, and
death consummates the mystic union.
Such is the abstract principle of that
religion which has its temples, altars and
a pompous ritual.

He then adds, with a certain cynical
significance : "I may add that the
Buddhist monks, who live in vast
monasteries, possess great riches ; " and
after dismissing religious indifference
with the remark that it is "a disease
which receives no medical treatment,
wherever there are men, there will
be some who are indifferent," he
concludes as follows :

Religious hatred, however, has no place
among our national customs ; to me it is
a source of amazement. I can understand
that one may hate — a person for instance ;
but a religious idea — a religion !

As to Atheism, it has been called a
product of modern civilisation. We are
not yet sufficiently civilised to have no
belief.

I have quoted at some length from
this accomplished writer, whose sin-
cerity and religious toleration are
transparent, because I believe his
attitude towards religion generally,
and towards religions other than that
which he himself professes, to be
eminently characteristic of the edu-
cated and enlightened class of Chinese
to which he obviously belongs. It

98

The Missionary in China.

must be remembered, however, that
all missionary effort begins, as a rule,
among the poor and humble, among
what is roughly termed the lower
classes. This was the experience of
the Founder of Christianity Himself,
and those who spread His doctrine in
distant lands find that their lot is,
in that respect, not dissimilar to His.
Before approaching directly the
problem of missionary effort among
the Chinese it may, however, be well
to resume a brief study of the civili-
sation which they had evolved for
themselves centuries before the first
Europeans visited their shores. They
early solved the problem of govern-
ment, as we have seen, and they
evolved an elaborate official hierarchy,
with a cabinet and departments of
state at the capital, while the country
at large has been placed under the
rule of viceroys, governors of pro-
vinces, magistrates, and prefects.
They invented gunpowder and dis-
covered the art of printing. They
are skilled in agriculture, and in
many arts and industries. Their
merchants are second to none in
probity and enterprise ; it is a com-
mon saying all over the Far East that
their word is as good as their bond.
The Chinese system of competitive
examination, again, is the oldest in
the world. One of the most curious
sights in the city of Canton is the
building in which the competitive
examinations for the Kwang-Tung
province take place. It consists of a
series of cells in which the competi-
tors, isolated from each other, write
their themes and treatises on the
Four Books and the Six Classics.
There is no limit as to age, and any
competitor can present himself for
examination as often as he pleases ;
some indeed do continue to compete
till well on into grey-haired old age.
From these learned and accomplished
gentlemen the Civil Service of the

Empire is recruited. So far back as
the seventh century we find an order
excluding, in somewhat quaint juxta-
position, from the benefits of the
competitive system, all " monks, play-
actors, and menial servants." To this
day the scholar takes the first rank
among the four classes into which
Chinese society is divided.

The Chinese system of justice is
not our system, but its penal code is
based upon reasoning which commends
itself to them, and they justify its
provisions from a study of their
ancient philosophic books.

Missionary efforts among so old
and conservative a race, which for
centuries has distrusted and disliked
the idea of interference from the
outside world, must of necessity be
attended with difficulties well nigh
insurmountable. The Chinese regard
the whole of the rest of the world as
barbarians or Foreign Devils. They
are proud to a degree of their ancient
civilisation. They are perfectly well
aware, and never forget, that the
modern civilised life of Europe is, as
compared with theirs, a mushroom
growth. They dislike extremely the
idea of any modern innovation of
which they have not satisfied them-
selves (as in the case of quick-firing
guns in the recent war) that it is to
their true advantage to adopt it. The
Chinese belong to the class which Sir
Henry Maine termed the "non-pro-
gressive " nations and have, to use
his words, to a large extent "ex-
hausted all the ideas of which they
are capable." In trade and commerce
they are still open to new develop-
ments, for they are born traders, but
on most other subjects their minds
are as sealed books and will receive
no new impressions. To take a recent
example, they will on an emergency
raise an armed force and buy quick-
firing guns, but, the emergency past,
they will lapse back into their old

The Missionary in China.

90

habit of mind. There will never be
a standing army (in our sense of the
term) in China, or modern fortifica-
tions. The military instinct forms no
part of the Chinese nature. It did
once, but the lapse of hundreds of
years of peace has caused it, among
the vast bulk of the population, to
die out, never to revive again. Their
attitude towards new mechanical in-
ventions is shown by the ingenious
persistency with which, on every
favourable opportunity, they tear up
the railways.

As in the material world, so it is
in the spiritual. To such a people
the doctrines of Christianity, its mys-
teries, its metaphysical inconsistencies
(requiring even from an educated
Englishman a large element of faith
to supplement his defective human
reason) are unintelligible. Their
minds have absorbed as much philo-
sophy and religion as they are capable
of, and these new-fangled doctrines
(as they regard them) unsettle and
alarm them beyond words. One
reason for this is, of course, that they
do not distinguish between religion
and politics. The two, to their
minds, are closely connected. They
owe veneration and obedience to the
distant Emperor at Pekin not so
much because he is Head of the State,
as because he is the Son of Heaven.
They suffer much in silence, and in-
exhaustible patience, from the ex-
actions of provincial governors and
satraps, because it was the Son of
Heaven who sent them the commis-
sions from which they derive their
power.

They have learned to regard the
introduction of Christianity as a
cloak, first for special political privi-
leges in favour of the missionaries
and their converts, and then for the
acquisition of territory. They have
noticed that missionaries and Chinese
converts enjoy special protection and

many immunities from the operations
of the ordinary law, and that wher-
ever Christians come in any numbers,
no matter from what nation, there
the alienation of Chinese territory is
sure, upon one ground or another, to
follow. They have seen the Russians
take Port Arthur, the Germans Kiao-
Chao, the English Wei-hai-Wei. The
reasoning of the Chinese mind in this
matter is therefore logical enough.
"First the missionary, then the con-
sul, then the general," exactly ex-
presses the attitude of the ordinary
Chinaman towards the Christian
religion in this connection. It is
only necessary for us to consider the
social effect caused in England by a
member of a Protestant family going
over, as the saying is, to the Church
of Rome, and all the unhappiness
caused thereby to the family and to
the convert as he would call himself,
to the pervert as his family would call
him, to gain some idea of the social
complications caused by conversions
of individual Chinese. With them,
indeed, the feeling is more bitter
because of the political element in
the case. They regard their kins-
man as having played the traitor to
his faith, and to his kin, in order
to join a powerful, foreign, religious
Secret Society, which aims at the
subversion of their liberties and the
conquest of their land.

Another difficulty, and one by no
means to be under-rated or left out of
account, is that in many respects our
manners and social habits are opposed
to everything that the Chinese have
been taught for hundreds of genera-
tions. To take some trivial instances :
we cover our tables with white, which
to the Chinese is the colour of mourn-
ing ; we place our guest on the right
hand, they would place him on the
left. Our ordinary social amenities,
again, fill the Chinese with astonish-
ment and contempt. Though they
H 2

100

The Missionary in China.

allow their own womankind a fair
measure of personal freedom, it is the
custom of the country for married
women to keep very much to their
own houses ; and an unmarried girl
•would certainly not be allowed to go
far by herself. To see an unmarried
English lady walking with English-
men in the public street strikes them
therefore as contrary to every social
safeguard ; while to see an English
wife or sister publicly embracing her
husband or brother is to them some-
thing verging upon immorality ; for
among themselves kissing is unknown
and is regarded as an unpleasant, if
not an actually unclean act. It is
perhaps better not to say what the
Chinese think about the European
custom of men and women joining
together in the dance.

The Chinese mind having been thus
rudely shaken and disturbed by these
and other foreign practices, which to
us are innocent enough, the missionary
has now to proceed to win him over
to the doctrines of a religion strange
to him and which cause differences
of opinion, if not dissensions, among
English divines themselves. To put
the matter plainly, some of the car-
dinal doctrines of the Christian reli-
gion are far too abstruse and con-
trary to the laws of nature as he
sees it, and to the ordinary ways
of the everyday world around him
for the ordinary Chinaman to believe
them even if he understood them.
No doubt a highly educated, intel-
lectual Chinaman is perfectly able
to grasp the more abstruse doctrines
of Christianity as intellectual propo-
sitions, which he can appreciate as
matters of reason, though he may
reject them as matters of faith. But
missionary effort among the Chinese
lies among the masses, and these
have already grasped all the ideas
of which they are capable in such
matters, and they will not digest the

new doctrines, not for want of will,
but for want of capacity to do so.

The intelligent Chinaman will
also not fail to notice that Roman
Catholics, Protestants, and Christians
of various denominations differ among
themselves, and he will draw his own
conclusions. And, then, with what
medium of thought has the missionary
to convey these mystical and awe-
inspiring doctrines to the Chinese
mind ? With the most complicated,
subtle, and difficult form of language
in the whole world. He has to con-
vey abstruse and metaphysical concep-
tions by a medium never designed for
this use, for the ideas are foreign to
the Chinese mind, and it is only by
the utmost ingenuity that the mis-
sionary can twist the language even
approximately to the idea he wishes
to convey.

It is to be remembered also that
the Chinese spoken language consists
not of words, as we understand the
term, but of monosyllables differen-
tiated by tones. In Cantonese one
written character is capable of being
pronounced in eight different tones,
or intonations, each tone giving it
an entirely different meaning. The
variations between the tones is ex-
tremely subtle, and requires a fine
ear, and in the case of a foreigner
long and careful practice to acquire
anything like certainty in their man-
agement ; even a Chinaman has been
known to go wrong sometimes in his
tones. It is only necessary to men-
tion these facts to show what terrible
pitfalls attend a man, however pious,
however devoted, who endeavours to
preach in Chinese to a Chinese con-
gregation on the doctrines of the
New Testament.

It is partly due to this cause,
partly to some others mentioned
above, and partly to the ignorance
and fanaticism of the Chinese masses,
fanned by the yet greater fanaticism

The Missionary in China.

101

of their Mandarin rulers, that such
hideous stories of Christian immorality
and malpractices have been spread
abroad and become firmly embedded
in the Chinese mind.

It cannot be too often repeated
that the more mysterious doctrines
of Christianity are unintelligible to
the mind of the ordinary Chinaman.
The broad tenets of honesty, charity,
and an upright life they find in their
own books. To see Christians prac-
tising these virtues in a higher degree
than themselves, and adding others
thereto, will influence the Chinese,
for a high standard of conduct never
fails to carry influence. All else, it
would seem, on the evidence of all
who know the Chinese best, is to
a great extent labour and life guided
into a mistaken channel ; life and
labour that can surely find ample
scope for energy at home. Is Eng-
land so virtuous, so sober, so truly
religious that we can afford to travel
seven thousand miles to clean other
people's houses and leave our own
unswept ?

Many good and pious men have
believed that there is more than one
path that leads towards Heaven. Be
that as it may, the Chinese, or at
least the great majority of them, are
following theirs. There are too many
of our own countrymen who, for lack
of guides, are following none.

Our missionaries will doubtless con-
tinue to work in China, voluntarily
facing exile, an unhealthy climate,
and the chance of a violent death.
The large majority of them are
actuated by the purest of motives.
Many of them have given up wealth
and position in obedience to what
they deem a call of duty over-riding
all other considerations. Yet more
than all this is required. The conver-
sion, or attempted, conversion of the
Chinese is a delicate and a danger-
ous task. Only picked men, specially

trained, men of high culture and large
minds should be allowed to attempt
it. In so far as the various missionary
societies can exercise a veto, none but
men such as these should be allowed
to enter the field. For reasons given
above none but celibates and men
prepared to lead a life of ascetiscism
and constant self-denial can hope to
wield much influence. Missionaries
to the Chinese must be prepared to
face the fact that they will influence
them, if they influence them at all,
by their life rather than by their
doctrine ; that they are going to
labour among an ignorant, bigoted,
poor, hard-working, thrifty population
of simple life and habits, possessing
many social virtues, given to early
marriage, and strongly influenced by
the claims of family ties. Above all
may perhaps be commended, as applied
to China, that which the late Pro-
fessor Max Miiller was never tired of
impressing on the young Civil Servant
about to proceed to India, — that we
have far more to learn from the people
of India than to teach them.

I have already indicated that the
mission-field in China is no place for
married women ; it seems to follow
that it is still less suited to unmarried
women. The whole mental attitude
of the Oriental towards women is one
hardly suitable for treatment here,
but it is sufficiently well known to
all conversant with the East. Un-
married female missionaries can do
no good ; they may do much harm
by lowering themselves and their
countrywomen in the estimation of
the Chinese, whose ideas on such
subjects are crystallised and immut-
able.

It is a fact agreed upon by the vast
majority of English Civil Servants all
over the East that as a rule the
native Christian convert (of whatever
race) is less admirable than the native
heathen. It may be that Civil Ser-

102

The Missionary in China.

vants are prejudiced, as men of other
professions and classes are prejudiced;
but, after all, they are the governing
class, from Simla to Singapore, from
Borneo to Hong-Kong, and it may be
presumed that they know something
about their own business. We should
not hold India, or indeed any Asiatic
dependency, for very long, were the
Civil Servants not in close touch with
native sentiment, feeling, and char-
acter, and constantly exercising the
qualities of tact, sympathy, and judg-
ment. The consensus of opinion among
them is almost unanimous that a
native convert is a damaged article.
He seems to lose the virtues of his
own religion, while the cloak of his
new religion sits ungracefully upon
him. The truth is, of course, that in
the conservative East men do not
lightly change their faith, any more
than they do any other inherited and
long continued habit, custom, or belief.
If they do, they become among their
own class and their own people as
pariahs and outcasts, and this penalty
can in Eastern countries be visited
upon a man with a severity which
makes his life well-nigh unendurable.
If, then, a man in a humble station
in life has in the East renounced his
faith, the suspicion at once arises that

he has done so for good consideration,
in other words from self-seeking and
insincere motives, to obtain employ-
ment, or a favour, or generally to
ingratiate himself with a view to
profit or advancement. In Ceylon,
where there are a good many native
Christians, it is quite a common event
for such a one, in search of work, to
introduce himself to favour by the
words " Me Christian, Master, me
Christian ! " Whereupon the wise
civilian will at once sternly send him
about his business.

Perhaps it is better not to pursue
the subject further. The friends of
China are many, and they can see
only too plainly that, while China
as a geographical and commercial
power may yet have much to say in
the world, yet as a political entity
she is breaking up with lightning
rapidity. The Boxer movement and
the general rising against the foreign
Christians was a desperate attempt
to ward off the inevitable end. As a
sympathetic clergyman at Pekin well
observed : " The Eastern mind seems
to feel that when all is lost it is
better to die dramatically than to live
tamely."

F. THOROLD DICKSON.

103

UNION AND ANNEXATION.

(Being the Introductory Lecture delivered to the History Class in Edinburgh
University on October 16th, 1900.)

THE subject which I have chosen
for my introductory address has a
double interest for us : firstly, because
the most successful of political unions
is that between England and Scotland
which created the State of Great
Britain ; and secondly because one of
the most memorable of recent events
has been the annexation of two Re-
publics in South Africa, and the
statesmanship of our political leaders
is still to be tested by the success or
failure of this measure.

Various classifications have been
made of the kinds of union that may
exist between States, and, if very
minute differences be emphasised, a
large number of distinctions may be
drawn. But for our purposes it will
be sufficient to take a very simple
division under three heads : (1) Federa-
tion; (2) Dynastic or Personal Union;
(3) Real or Complete Union.

Federation I must dismiss very
briefly. It is one of the most fascinat-
ing chapters of political science ; but
to discuss it with any fulness would
take me far beyond the limits of a
single lecture. The essence of a
federation is that it is not a mere
alliance of separate States for certain
common purposes, but that it involves
the creation of a single central State,
while leaving a considerable measure
of independence and self-government
to the separate States which are
federated together. The greater is
this territorial independence, the
looser, and as a rule the more ineffi-
cient, is the federation. The wider

the functions of the central authority,
the closer the federation approximates
to a single individual State. It is
obvious that between the two ex-
tremes of centralisation and decen-
tralisation there is room for endless
variations in federal constitutions.
But in all these variations there must
always be one primary difficulty in
such a constitution, namely, to draw
the precise line of demarcation be-
tween the functions of the central
government and those of the separate
States. The decision of this nice
point must be made by some judicial
body, which shall command general
and unquestioned respect; otherwise
there will be constant disputes and
friction, which may at any time lead
to open war, like that between the
northern and southern States in
America. Hence the primary re-
quisite of a successful federation is
a supreme court of justice to decide
these questions of competence, and in
drafting a federal constitution the
composition of this court must always
engage the most anxious and careful
attention of the authors. The great
modern federations are the United
States of America, the German Empire
as constituted in 1871, the British
colonies in North America which are
collectively known as Canada, and we
may now add to the list that most
interesting of modern experiments,
the new Commonwealth of Australia,
in which the mother-country is to be
represented by a Scottish peer, who
has recently set out to undertake his

101

Union and Annexation.

duties amid the general congratula-
tions and good wishes of his fellow-
countrymen.

I may just note in passing that
there is a superficial, though not a
very profound, distinction between
the federation of monarchical States
under a federal monarchy, and the
federation of Republics. The German
Empire may serve as an illustration
of the former, and the United States
of the latter. It is obvious that a
monarchical federation is the more
difficult both to create and to main-
tain, because to the jealousy and
separate interests of the peoples must
be added the jarring pretensions of
rival dynasties and the reluctance of
kings to acknowledge the primacy of
one of their own number, which must
to some extent abase the dignity of
their own thrones. In fact such a
federation can hardly be formed
unless the supreme dignity be elective,
as was the case in the old German
or Holy Roman Empire which ex-
pired in 1806, because this flatters
the sense of royal equality ; or unless,
as in modern Germany, one State
possesses such immense superiority in
territory and resources that the
acknowledgment of the supremacy of
its ruler is only in accordance with
incontestable facts. In the case of
republican States, the only parallel
difficulty concerns the choice of a
capital. There is always a reluctance
to give to any one State the pre-
ponderance which may result from
having the seat of government within
its borders. This difficulty has more
than once been solved by choosing for
the capital a place which would other-
wise be of little or no importance.
Thus in the Dutch United Provinces
the federal government was estab-
lished, not in Amsterdam, or any
other flourishing town, but in the
Hague, which was then an unwalled
and obscure village. And so in the

United States the capital was not
New York or Boston but Washing-
ton, which may be said to have been
created to serve as the seat of the
federal authority.

A personal or dynastic union, in
which two or more States are bound
together by the mere accident that a
single ruler wears the crown in all of
them, is the slightest of all links from
the legal point of view, though in
practice it may constitute a very
strong tie, if the monarch possesses
anything like despotic power in one
or more of the countries which he
rules. But in such a union there are
two or more distinct States : there is
no creation of a new central State, as
in the case of a federation : though in
time a personal union may prove the
foundation of a more real and per-
manent amalgamation. Such a union
may be created by treaty, as in the
case of Sweden and Norway, which
have been subject to a single king
since 1814 by virtue of a decision of
the Allied Powers of Europe. More fre-
quently it is the result of the chance
or the laws of succession, as in the
case of Great Britain and Hanover
between 1714 and 1837, or in the
more important case of England and
Scotland between 1603 and 1707.
The most prominent of many diffi-
culties which attend so imperfect a
form of union is connected with
foreign politics. The interests of two
distinct States can hardly ever be
identical, and yet it is very difficult
for a single ruler to maintain two
different sets of relations with foreign
States. Even if he endeavours to
keep them perfectly distinct, — for
example, to carry on war on behalf of
one State, while the other is at peace
— some at any rate of his subjects are
likely to grumble ; and hostile Powers
cannot be trusted to respect his
wishes. In the eighteenth century,
if France was at war with England,

Union and Annexation.

105

the French could strike at Hanover
more easily than at the insular king-
dom, and were not to be deprived of
their advantage by any professions of
studied neutrality on the part of the
Hanoverian Elector and his ministers.
And if a king abandons the hopeless
attempt to carry on two foreign
policies in his two distinct capacities,
he must regulate his action by the
interests of either one State or the
other, and will hardly escape in one
of them the charge of prejudice or
partiality. Such difficulties were of
frequent occurrence between England
and Hanover, and they contributed
very notably to the unpopularity of
the two first Hanoverian rulers in
this country. That similar difficulties
were less prominent in the relations
between England and Scotland during
the seventeenth century is due to the
fact that, before the Revolution of
1689, Scotland had little power to
assert its own wishes or to overrule
the policy of its monarchs, whose
action was dictated by a single regard
to the interests of England. When
at last the foundations of Stuart
despotism were overthrown by the
Revolution, the question of foreign
policy became at once a source of
discord between the two countries,
both in the Darien expedition and at
the beginning of the war of the
Spanish Succession. In fact this
supplied the strongest motive to the
Whig statesmen for urging on the
Union ; and it is doubtful whether
any alternative could have been found
between union and separation : though
it is conceivable that if negotiations
had fallen into less capable hands
than those of Lord Somers open war
might have preceded the decision
between the two.

A sort of half-way house between
personal and complete .union has been
devised in the present century in the
case of what is called the dual

monarchy of Austria and Hungary.
Since the sixteenth century the two
countries had been held together
merely by their subjection to a single
dynasty, and as this dynasty was
primarily Austrian and ruled in the
interests of its German provinces,
Hungary was always struggling to
assert its independence. In the end
the agreement (Ausgleich) of 1867
gave to Hungary a separate legisla-
ture and a separate ministry, on the
same lines as those of Austria. But
a complete subdivision into two
separate States under one ruler was
avoided by a rather clumsy compro-
mise. In addition to the purely
Austrian ministry and diet and to
the purely Hungarian ministry and
diet, there are joint ministers of
foreign affairs and finance, and for
the consideration of matters common
to the two States provision is made
for a meeting of delegations of the
two diets. This gets rid, at any rate
formally, of the difficulty about foreign
policy, and the consciousness that
union is necessary in order to main-
tain anything like equality with the
great neighbouring Powers of Germany
and Russia helps to keep Austria and
Hungary together. But the strongest
link between them is still the personal
influence of the reigning Emperor,
and the two States themselves are
so ill-compacted that it is more than
doubtful whether the disruption of
the Austrian empire can be long de-
layed when that influence shall be
removed.

Another union which may be re-
garded as in a transitional stage, and
therefore not belonging completely to
either subdivision, is that between
Russia and Finland. In theory the
union is a personal one. The Russian
Czar, Alexander the First, succeeded
in 1809 to the position previously
held by the Kings of Sweden, and
became Grand Duke of Finland. For

106

Union and Annexation.

a long time, in fact till quite recently,
Finland was allowed the same auto-
nomy as it had enjoyed during its
union with Sweden. But the mere
disproportion of power and resources
between the two States has proved
fatal to the maintenance of this
independence. Naturally Finland
could have no separate foreign policy,
and in this and in all matters in
which the two States were concerned,
the will and the interests of Russia
were bound to prevail. But here
arose an inevitable difficulty. Who
was to decide what are common
matters and what are local or pro-
vincial ? The Czar and his ministers,
accustomed to arbitrary rule in Russia,
may well be forgetful or neglectful
of the restrictions which limit the
authority of the Grand Duke of Fin-
land. If it be decided to increase
or to regulate the military service of
the Fins without consulting the four
estates of the Finnish Diet, it may be
argued that this is a matter which
concerns, not Finland alone, but the
whole empire. And there is no court
to which the question can be carried
for decision ; there is no legal appeal
against the edict of the Czar, who is
both judge and party to the suit.
The Fins have protested at the risk
of incurring punishment for disloyalty.
Their protest has been supported by
an appeal from eminent private
persons in Europe, who are disinter-
ested though perhaps imperfectly
informed in the matter, but the Czar
has not unnaturally refused to allow
foreigners to interfere between him-
self and his subjects. And so the
change, once begun, seems bound to
go on ; the original personal union
tends to become more and more a
complete union, and the lesser State
must almost inevitably be absorbed
in the larger. Our sympathies are
with the Fins, who have shown no
disloyalty to their Grand Duke, and

have done absolutely nothing to de-
serve the extinction of their inde-
pendence. We may even hold that
it is impolitic on the part of Russia
to excite friction and discontent by
disturbing a settlement which has on
the whole worked extremely well for
nearly a hundred years. But it is
impossible to deny that the process
is one which has often gone on be-
fore, and that many States have
been formed, and have become power-
ful, by absorbing elements which at
one time seemed so different as to be
almost irreconcilable. In fact a sur-
vey of history seems in this matter to
justify a sort of fatalism in politics,
and to admit, if not to establish, the
proposition that good may come in
the end out of measures which are
in themselves odious and even cruel.
But this is an argument which the
historian should keep to himself, and
the politician, who has not his powers
of foresight, has no right to employ
it, though he often seeks to justify
himself by its means.

We now come to the last of our
three divisions, that of complete
union, in which the States combined
together lose their separate political
identity and become merged into one.
Such a union may be effected by a
more or less voluntary agreement or
treaty, as in the case of England and
Scotland, but in the vast majority of
cases it is the result of conquest, and
is called annexation. Ireland may
be regarded as belonging to both
classes. It had more than once been
conquered by England, and though
the Act of Union in 1800 was in
form just as much a treaty as that
of 1707, it was in reality dictated
by the stronger Power, and was only
accepted, and that not very willingly,
by a minority of the population.

I need not here labour the com-
parison or the contrast between the
Scottish and Irish unions. The one

Union and Annexation.

107

has been in many ways the most
successful measure of its kind recorded
in history, though at the time it was
almost as unpopular in Scotland as
was the later union in Ireland. The
other has so far failed to obtain
such general approval or acquiescence,
and in that sense may be regarded as
a comparative failure, though it is
possible to contend, even from the
point of view of a Nationalist or
Home-Ruler, that it is not much
worse than the relations between the
two countries which existed before-
hand.

Innumerable explanations may be,
and have been, advanced to account
for the different fate of two measures
which, in detail and in general char-
acter, seem to be so much alike;
and most of these explanations are
probably partially correct, though
observers may differ as to the relative
importance to be attached to each.
It is certain that the balance of races
was different in the two countries,
and that in Ireland it was less favour-
able to amalgamation with England.
In Ireland the majority of the popula-
tion were Celts, whereas in Scotland
the dominant majority were Low-
landers of Teutonic race, in fact to
all intents and purposes as English
in origin and characteristics as the
English themselves. It is equally
certain that difficulties as to religion
and the tenure of land have com-
plicated and accentuated racial dif-
ferences in Ireland, while there have
been comparatively few problems
of the same kind in Scotland. It
is probable that the union brought
to Scotland greater material advan-
tages and the redress of more obvious
grievances than was the case in
Ireland, which had been longer and
more closely connected with England
before the complete union. It is
possible that, while the military and
naval services rendered to the empire

by the two peoples may fairly be
balanced against each other, the
administrative services of Scotsmen,
notably in India, have been greater
than those of Irishmen, and that the
former have thus a larger and more
widely diffused interest in the common
welfare of the united State. But I
take it that the essential distinction
is to be found in some such considera-
tion as this : Scotland has retained
a separate Church and a separate
system of law, and these apparent
badges of a distinct nationality have
proved the strongest aids towards
substantial unity. Purely Scottish
questions have never appealed very
strongly to Englishmen : possibly they
have never been much understood by
them ; but this indifference, or ignor-
ance, though perhaps not very flatter-
ing, has served a useful purpose in its
time. It kept Scottish matters out
of the purview of English parties, and
thus averted the danger of legislation
by an alien majority on questions in
which Scotland alone was interested.
This was the obvious danger on which
so much stress was laid in the Scottish
debates at the time of the union, and
it has providentially proved of very
small proportions. On the other hand,
the great Irish questions of the
Church and the land have profoundly
interested both England and Scotland,
and have more than once in the cen-
tury been among the great questions
on which parties have grouped them-
selves in parliament and in the
country. Hence the apparent griev-
ance that matters which concern
Ireland alone have been discussed and
decided, not by Irish opinion, but by
English and Scottish opinion, which
may be, or may be said to be, both
ignorant and prejudiced. From this
difference between the two countries
have flowed very important conse-
quences. Scotland has fitted itself
into a parliament and a party-system,

108

Union and Annexation.

both essentially English in their
origin, in a way which has proved
impossible for Ireland. If you look
at the records of the recent election
in the newspapers, you will find the
same party names and symbols em-
ployed in Scotland as in England,
whereas a new set has to be devised
for Ireland. The difference may be
put in a concrete and even a personal
form. At the present moment the
leaders of the two great parties in the
House of Commons are both Scots-
men, though one of them sits for an
English constituency. This is a signi-
ficant fact, though I think it attracts
very little attention, and certainly
excites no jealousy, on the other side
of the Border. But I fear that, as
things stand, it is quite impossible
for two Irishmen to fill these positions
with the same general accepatnce.
When such a thing does become
possible, when you can have, and
cheerfully accept, an Irish leader of
the Conservatives and an Irish leader
of the Liberals ; then, and not till
then, the Irish union may be admitted
to rank with that of Scotland as
constituting a real and complete
union in the wider and not in the
merely technical use of the term.

So far I have spoken of unions
which are not, or at any rate should
not be described as, annexations. But
my subject was purposely worded so
as to include the latter, and I am
afraid that I have left myself little
time to treat of that division which
may seem to have most interest and
actuality at the present moment. I
am not concerned with any nice
distinctions which belong to Inter-
national Law and lie somewhat out-
side my province, and I take it that
annexation implies the compulsory
extinction of the independence of a
State against the will of its rulers and
of the majority of its people. Etymo-
logically the word may mean little

more than union, but in practice it
has obtained the further connotation
which serves to distinguish it from
the wider term of union, which in-
cludes annexation.

I do not propose to trace the
history of annexations, which would
carry me a long way over the history
of the world. Wars and conquest
play a large part in the history of
every considerable State. West-Saxon
kings conquered Mercia and North-
umbria, and thus laid the foundations
of the kingdom of England. A
Celtic king of Scots, whose power
was roughly limited by the Forth and
the Clyde, conquered the Anglian
district of Lothian from the Forth
to the Tweed, and thus created the
historic State of Scotland. It would
be impossible to draw any lessons
from such distant annexations, of
which indeed we know little beyond
the fact that they took place. As
far as we can judge, they were
successful annexations, in that the
State thus formed was stronger and
probably more prosperous than that
which had existed before. In fact
the criterion of the success or failure
of an annexation is much the same
as that of the success or failure of
a more voluntary union. If the con-
quered province becomes a source of
strength, rather than of weakness ; if
within a reasonable time the people
accept the new government with
complacency, or at any rate with
resignation ; if the conqueror is not
always being compelled to use force
in order to put down rebellion or to
intimidate malcontents, then we may
say that the annexation is successful.
Of course this success will be the
greater if the conquered or annexed
people become not only submissive
but eagerly loyal, or if they become
so identified by interest or perhaps
by intermarriage with their con-
querors that they constitute not only

Union and Annexation.

109

one State but one nation. Two
illustrations will suffice to show the
nature of a successful annexation.
Canada was conquered by Great
Britain in the Seven Years' War,
and was formally ceded by France
in the Treaty of Paris. The popu-
lation was for the most part not
only French but also Roman Catholic ;
that is to say, it was separated from
Englishmen by blood, traditions,
language, and religion. Within a
very few years afterwards the North
American colonies were in open
revolt against the mother - country,
and France not only recognised
their independence, but gave them
active assistance of the most valuable
kind. It would appear at first sight
that the French Canadians could
hardly resist such a tempting oppor-
tunity to throw off the foreign yoke
that had so recently been imposed
upon them. Yet the loyalty of
Canada was one of the few advan-
tages which Great Britain possessed
during that disastrous war; and all
attempts to invade Canada by the
colonial rebels were repulsed with
loss. The tradition thus nobly begun
has been maintained since. Many
Canadians of French birth and lan-
guage joined the colonial contingent
which on more than one occasion
rendered such magnificent service in
the South African war, and of all
colonial statesmen who have given
expression to the imperial sentiment
in the recent crisis, it is a French
Canadian, Sir Wilfred Laurier, who
has sounded the clearest and the most
impressive note. My second illus-
tration is taken from the history of
a neighbouring country. Alsace and
Lorraine were German provinces, and
were annexed to France by conquest,
the former in the seventeenth, and
the latter in the eighteenth century.
After the great war of 1870-1 the
greater part of these provinces was

restored to Germany. It is notorious
that the recovery of these German
territories was quite as much a foreign
conquest, a compulsory annexation,
as their first acquisition by France.
The people had become so thoroughly
identified with France, so thoroughly
French in sentiment and tradition,
that they bitterly resented the change
which once more united them with
men of their own race. What it
was that had extinguished all German
sentiment in Alsace and Lorraine it
is not easy to say. They were severed
from Germany before the idea of
German nationality had developed
to its present strength : they were
undoubtedly better off under French
rule than they had been under their
former princes ; and France has over
and over again shown a magnetic
power in dealing with other peoples
and races which this country, in spite
of its great colonising experience, has
never been able to boast. No doubt
the French Revolution, and the
extraordinary achievements of the
Napoleonic time, served as a strong
link between the peoples who had
stood together in such a stormy
period. But whatever the explana-
tion, the fact remains that these
German provinces were absorbed into
France with a completeness that is
still extraordinary.

And now it is natural to ask the
question whether history offers any
definite rules for the guidance of
statesmen so that they can ensure the
success of any union or annexation,
or that they may at any rate avoid
the danger and disgrace of complete
failure. The answer must be in the
negative. The exact conditions of
one time and one country are never
reproduced with such complete identity
that a precedent may serve as an
absolute guide to future action. The
failure to allow for some difference in
the general balance of forces may put

110

Union and Annexation.

out the whole calculation and wreck
the pedantic forecast of the most
learned politician. All that history
can claim to do is to offer suggestions
for the guidance of statesmen. It is
as fatuous to disregard the past as it
would be to take it as an infallible
guide. A statesman must always
suit his conduct to the present ; but
he may find in history many warnings
which should indicate the right road
and many which should serve to keep
him from the wrong.

Machiavelli, the most acute and
perhaps the least sentimental of poli-
tical analysts, has discussed this
question of annexation in the third
chapter of THE PRINCE. Of course
it must be remembered that he is
speaking primarily of his own times,
and that he is concerned with Princi-
palities and not with Republics. But
if we allow for this, his words are
not without weight even in our own
day. I have translated the passage
with some freedom.

States which are acquired and annexed,
are either connected with the conqueror
by contiguity, race and language, or they
are not. If they are so connected, it is
extremely easy to retain them, and all
that is necessary is to destroy the line of
their former rulers and to avoid any need-
less change of customs, laws, and taxes.
Under such conditions they are readily
absorbed, as France has absorbed Brit-
tany, Burgundy, Gascony, and Normandy.
But when the acquired States are wholly
different in language, customs, and
organisation, the difficulties are so great
that good fortune as well as great
energy and ability are needed for their
secure retention. One of the best ex-
pedients is that the Prince should go in
person to dwell in the new provinces, as
the Turkish Sultan has done in Greece,
and this has been the secret of his suc-
cessful rule there. When a Prince is on
the spot, he sees disorders as they arise,
and can apply a prompt remedy ; whereas
if he is at a distance, he only hears of
them when they have become incurable.
Moreover, he can save the inhabitants
from being pillaged by venal officials,

and the new subjects are conciliated by
the close intercourse with their Prince.
Foreign Powers are more cautious about
attacking the State, which is altogether
rendered more stable by the Prince's
presence. Another very excellent ex-
pedient is to send colonies to those places
that may be regarded as the keys of the
State ; because this is the only alterna-
tive to tbe maintenance of a large armed
garrison there. Now colonies cost the
Prince very little : they only injure those
of the former inhabitants who are dis-
placed in order to give lands and houses
to the new settlers ; and these men,
being poor and dispersed, can do no
great harm, While their fate serves as a
warning to the others, who have no
grievance so long as they retain their
possessions, and have good reason to fear
similar confiscation if they incur the dis-
pleasure of their ruler. This points to
the great maxim that men must either
be conciliated or destroyed : they can
exact vengeance for slight wrongs but
not for such injury as reduces them to
ruin ; hence if you are compelled to
injure a man, you should inflict such an
injury that you have no reason to fear
his vengeance. But if you do not send
colonies, you must send troops. They
are much more expensive and may well
absorb the whole revenue of the country,
so that tbe acquisition brings loss rather
than gain. And the injury inflicted on
the people by taxation, and by the
quartering of troops and moving them
from place to place, is an injury which
all feel and all resent ; and yet it is not
an injury which deprives them of the
power to become formidable rebels.
From every point of view, therefore, this
method of keeping a conquest is as use-
less and harmful as that of sending
colonies is beneficial.

If we analyse this very charac-
teristic extract, we may cull from
it three maxims : (1) the prince or
sovereign should if possible reside in
the State which has been annexed ;

(2) colonists should be encouraged
to settle in it, especially in those
places or districts which are most
important from the military point of
view, near the railway, for example ;

(3) do not maintain a large per-
manent military force, and so irritate
the inhabitants by flaunting before

Union and Annexation.

Ill

their eyes the means by which their
submission has been extorted. Fear
is not likely to be the foundation of
a permanently successful and satis-
factory annexation.

The first of these maxims is of
little value to us. Princes and
dynasties have ceased to be as all-
important and all-powerful, at any
rate in the British empire, as they
were in most parts of Europe in the
days of Machiavelli. Constitutional
government has taken the place of
personal government ; although per-
sonal loyalty is still a genuine and a
valuable sentiment, whose force in a
scattered empire like our own it would
be fatal to under-estimate. But at
any rate, we are not likely to witness
a transference of queen and court
from Windsor and Balmoral to Pre-
toria ; nor if a royal prince held the
offices of Governor of the Cape and
High Commissioner, would his pre-
sence have quite the same results as
those to which Machiavelli alludes.

But the other two maxims are by
no means inapplicable to present cir-
cumstances, and there is reason to
believe that they will not be lost
sight of in the approaching settlement
of the newly annexed provinces in
South Africa. The period of purely
military occupation and administra-
tion will doubtless be brought to an
end as soon as it is possible and safe
to do so. And although a large
garrison will be needed for some time,
it may be gradually diminished if a
considerable number of our volunteer
troops, whether from the other colonies
or from home, can be induced to be-
come settlers in South Africa. Such
men, accustomed to and knowing the
country, trained to ride and shoot
like their opponents in the present
war, will not only be an element of
political stability, but might in certain

circumstances and under certain con-
ditions serve the purpose of regular
troops.

But after all the general survey
of unions and annexations leads us to
something wider and loftier than any
particular maxim or any isolated pre-
caution. The bitterness of subjection
must be gradually purged from the
minds of the conquered. They must
be gained over to a sense of common
interests, of common work, of a
common weal. They must learn to
be proud of the great and, we would
fain believe, the beneficent empire of
which they are to form a part. They
must be convinced that under the
altered conditions not only their
material welfare, but their real and
essential freedom are as secure as in
the days of forfeited independence and
ascendency. After all the ultimate
annexation must be, not so much to
Great Britain as to the self-governing
colonies in South Africa which they
adjoin. It has been a source of diffi-
culty and danger in the past that
these colonies contain a large propor-
tion of Dutch inhabitants ; but it
may prove an advantage in the long
run. Self-government was granted to
Cape Colony and Natal in spite of
the numerical preponderance of Dutch-
men ; and in spite of the difficulties
caused by the anomalous position of
the Transvaal, this self-government
has not proved unworkable. This
encourages us to hope that the same
system may be extended to the
annexed provinces, and that at no
very distant date South Africa, like
Australia and like Canada, may form
a federation of self-governing colonies,
in which not the weakest link in the
chain which binds them together may
be loyalty to the British crown and
empire.

R. LODGE.

112

NOTES FROM A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.

THE sentiment of the journey began
at Genoa, or rather it may be said to
have begun in France ; for it was in
the little French steamer, as it lay in
the bay, leisurely loading its cargo,
long hours after the time announced
for its departure, that tedium took
wing, that crowds and custom houses,
noise and dirt, and all the ills of
travelling passed into the far back-
ground of my consciousness, and the
weary journey changed into a voyage
of adventure.

The extreme unpunctuality, I
believe, worked the spell, but it
worked only gradually. I was as
impatient for the first few hours as
if I had been in the Paris express ;
the desirability of reaching Toulouse
by the day I had calculated grew and
grew in my eyes ; every fixed point in
my journey, though I knew them to
be only matters of whim, assumed a
fictitious importance ; until at last, as
the sun dropped and the hour drew on
when the evening train should start, I
stormed to the captain, demanding to
be set on shore immediately that I
might take to the railway and some
day arrive at my destination. The
civil alacrity with which he acceded
to my request, and the promptness of
his order to bring up Madame's box
and bicycle (that bicycle on whose
bringing out of Italy I had wasted the
morning hours) gave a chill to my
ardour. I added more meekly, unless,
indeed, Monsieur could assure me I
should reach Marseilles next day in
time for the midnight train to
Toulouse ; the midday one had seemed

imperative a moment before. So
much Monsieur le Capitaine thought
he could safely assure me, though
cargo remained to be shipped, and, as
he gave me, with the utmost politeness,
to understand very clearly, the desires
of a passenger were on his boat of no
straw's weight in comparison with the
cocks and hens, or even the boxes
and barrels, that travelled as uncom-
plaining cargo, — a wholesome dose this
for the self-important human being
accustomed to regard all means of loco-
motion as made for his convenience,
and failing in their final end as they
fail to secure that ! At once the need
of getting anywhere, at any definite
hour or day, dwindled and vanished,
and I acquiesced, not unwillingly, in
the captain's opinion that, since I had
come on board, the best thing I could
do was to remain there. " We'll dine
first, and then think about starting,"
was his final encouragement, — another,
but this time a pleasant, shock to my
traveller's soul, hardened to meals
snatched at stations or shaken down
in a restaurant-car.

I returned to the upper deck to
nurse a fresh mood in the growing
dusk. By the time the bell rang for
dinner I was priding myself on my
newly acquired philosophy, and I pre-
pared, with an introductory remark as
to the deceitfulness of shipping-agents,
to air it upon my neighbour at table.

"Yes," he replied with a placid
smile, " they promised me I should be
in time for a business appointment in
London ten days ago [I put my
pride in my pocket]. I've been with
this vessel just three weeks," he added.
The salutary discipline of playing

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

113

second fiddle to the cargo had brought
my neighbour to these heights of
philosophy. He looked a prosaic
individual enough ; intellectual con-
verse had not shortened the way for
him ; the only English-speaking per-
son on board, he could use no other
language save a little Turkish and a
little modern Greek. My advent
loosed what seemed to be a natural
loquacity. He had been much, he
told me, among the Turks, and he
himself attributed his ease of mind to
intercourse with them. " I've learned
to be a bit of a fatalist," he observed.
"What will be, will be; and we
sha'n't quicken the machinery by
crying out." As the dinner advanced
I fancied, however, that the excellence
of the cooking had helped, in his case,
to fix the fates and keep him on board
at the successive ports ; and indeed he
confided that though, having paid the
whole fare, he had to have the full
voyage, he must have eaten his money's
worth long ago. The thought gave
him evident pleasure. Gladly, 1 think,
would he have talked the night out,
paying the arrears of so long a silence.
Having travelled much, in the East
and over ground quite unknown to me,
he had seen, and readily recounted,
many marvels both of Nature and
of Man. But as the occasion of his
wanderings had been material cares
(I forget, or did not gather, his actual
business) so it was the more material
aspects of these marvels that had
struck him. Immensity was for him
mere size, and he wondered mainly
over the vast monuments of expendi-
ture, of outlay of time and trouble,
dotted over the world's surface. The
borrowed comment with which I
wished him good-night was new to
him.

" The world is so full of a number of

things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as

kings,"

No. 494. — VOL. LXXXIII.

he murmured in meditative but
dubious echo.

II.

For my part, I was left to no chance
companionship, of my own or other
nationality. The best of company,
most excellent of comrades, I had
with me in my travelling-bag. And
he, and not I, had determined the
route ; he, and not I, whose inclina-
tions indeed were quite contrary, had
resolved that Aries, that Avignon,
Nimes and Carcasonne, — those places
of great monuments and historic fame
— should all be passed on the road and
left to the conscientious sightseer.
" Any Cook's tourist," he said, " can
give you news of Aries or Avignon ; "
nor, readily though he welcomed all
opinion contrary to his own, did I care
to dispute the point. My eyes had
been satiated through the winter with
the great places and elaborate works
of another land, and I gladly forewent
now the prospect of big sensations for
his promise of opening my mind and
heart to the little incidents of every-
day life. And he — the Essayist, the
Sieur de Montaigne — became himself
the chief sentiment of my journey.
Through all my roundabout route I
was travelling to his home in the
Perigord, hoping to be welcomed and
received, like a humbler Mile, de
Gournay, as an adopted great-great-
granddaughter.

At Toulouse he permitted a halt.
The town was familiar to him from his
youth ; I believe he had studied there
for the law. Yet it was not of him I
was thinking as the train drew up in
the early morning. I had dreamt of
Vanini, " bellowing," says an eye-wit-
ness, "like an ox getting slaughtered,"
as the executioner tore out his tongue,
previous to burning him ; of Galas,
broken on the wheel for an imaginary
crime, of the settled persecution of
I

114

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

his whole unhappy Huguenot family.
I had recalled to mind the ugly pre-
eminence of Toulouse in fanaticism, —
how even in our own century she had
proposed to commemorate her most
blood-thirsty massacre ; how in the
sixteenth a Huguenot was hanged
out of hand wherever caught. And
my thoughts had rested finally on
the Essayist's tale (touched as was his
wont with the sense of human vanity)
of the student of Toulouse and his
faithful servant. The valet had no
better ground for his heresy than
that his young master could not be
wrong.

A drizzling rain was falling, and
the town still fast asleep as I arrived.
It was five o'clock, but that, as my
double cab-fare taught me, was still
night at Toulouse, just as in Paris or
in London. I had expected to find
the stir of early morning at an hour
when I myself had recently been
breakfasting among the lilies, bathed
and fragrant with the night-dew, of
an Italian garden. Here was none
of that freshened brightness, but the
dreary unwilling air of a town about
to be recalled to the day's toil.

At my hotel (I had chosen it hap-
hazard for its name, the proprietor's,
which had promised me local colour
and lack of fellow-tourists) a drowsy
porter escorted me through dismal
corridors to the room furthest re-
moved, as I demanded, from the
paved street. To my request for
coffee, he promised me fervently a
rrechaufffa. The word rolled out of
his lips so richly that only after his
back was turned did the poor meaning
penetrate to my understanding. The
beverage was as unpalatable in the
drinking as it had been gustable in
the promise ; but even as I swallowed
it the word reverberated in my ear,
and I realised from it alone that I
was truly in the Midi. What a
temperament of the race, I reflected,

to persist and make itself felt in such
surroundings ! For alas, I was in no
comfortable old-world inn, but in a
third-rate commercial hotel. I had
avoided the tourist to fall into the
arms (metaphorically, oh shade of
Yorick !) of the commis-voyageur.

Commerce has laid its effacing hand
upon Toulouse. When at length the
town awoke, I left my dingy room
for the broad streets ; and there,
wandering along the Alices Lafayette,
through the Boulevard Carnot, I
found myself in a sort of provincial
Paris, in a town that might have
sprung of Paris wedded to Man-
chester. Rows of huge shops, each
more Bon March6 than the last, long
lines of tramway, trees certainly and
planted squares, but, as it appeared
to me, not of indigenous growth but
conceded in servile imitation of the
metropolis. The Sentimental Journey
changed in my eyes to a Fool's
Errand. Not Death but Commerce,
I meditated, is the great destroyer ;
doubtless through all the south of
France I shall find local colour washed
out and every trace of the past
obliterated.

With such sad thoughts, I turned
a corner, and came full on the church
of St. Saturnin. If the path of the
Sentimentalist be closed, it reminded
me, the way of the Sightseer is still
open. "St. Sernin, or Saturnin,"
says Freeman, "is unique in its in-
terest,"— the intelligent reader may
refer to his essay. I studied the
exterior carefully, resolved to have
something at least for my journey.
It was a huge edifice, recalling with
its dominant air of proprietorship (as
though the town belonged to it, not
it to the town) the church of St.
Anthony at Padua. Surely once St.
Saturnin was at Toulouse le Saint,
as St. Antony still at Padua is il
Santo. Now that dominating air
seemed to me one of the ironies of

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

115

things — the persistence, as in a dead
man's face, of an habitual expression
after the spirit that it expressed has
fled. The town I had been wandering
through boasted assuredly other saints
and worshipped another god. And
yet, despite my conviction that here
was a mere dead bulk, the air of the
building began to impose on me. If
it no longer dominated, it was at
least indomitable, here, in the very
thick of opposing forces, holding them
at bay and remaining, if only as a
monument, untouched by the modern
spirit.

I entered reluctantly, fearing a
fresh disillusion. Inside, should I
find whitewash, scraped walls, the
church perhaps made a monument
national ? Behold, the delusion was
not in the church but in the town.
All that modern air, that cheap traf-
ficking, that worship of the gods
Mammon and Opinion of the World,
was mere outside show. Commerce
was an intruder that had taken no
real foothold. Here, in the church
of St. Saturnin, was the real, the
ancient, and, it would seem, the un-
dying spirit of Toulouse. And it was
here, not as a spirit in exile, or hold-
ing at bay victorious forces, but at
home, impugnable in its stronghold,
untouched and scornful of the idle
clamour of the modern town. The
modern spirit might go air itself upon
the boulevards, aye, and take with
it Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, poor
spectres that could not pass the sacred
threshold.

The church is one unbroken nave,

of extraordinary length. The Roman

vaulting is unique in structure, and

unique, surely, in its effect of sombre,

suspended awe. The moment that I

entered too was one of suspense. A

closely packed crowd of kneeling

worshippers, so dense and motionless

i as to seem a dark raised pavement,

! awaited the elevation of the Host.

My eye travelled over them, — not
one had stirred at my entrance —
and rested on the high altar, so far
away that the figures of the priests
were pigmy and their actions indis-
cernible. What ceremony were they
enacting, what victim sacrificing ?
What jealous god were they evoking ?
A God of War, of Pestilence and
Famine, — no God of Love, no Father
of Humanity.

The congregation remained bent in
worship long after the suspense was
broken and the mass ended. But I
shook off my sense of dread, and
walked the length of the church to
the back of the high altar. I was
reading a notice that promised to the
faithful a certain remission of the
pains of purgatory if they would visit
the relics, for which the charge was
fifty centimes, when the verger ap-
proached with the key. I expressed
my regret that I was not one of the
faithful and could not, even if I paid
my sixpence, hope for that solace of
my future pains. His devout air
changed of a sudden, and with the
urbanity of a man of the world, he
assured me the relics (like all else in
this church) were unique, and offered
much interest also to the tourist. I
was a sightseer, I remembered, and
accepted his escort. The collection, I
am bound to believe, is unique. The
verger's urbanity, — it gave place,
moreover, to his wonted, if skin-deep,
devotion, as he displayed the relics
and retailed their virtues — could not
however betray me to any expression
of disrespect or incredulity. I had
not forgotten the fate of a certain
lawyer of Toulouse, who rashly noted
the likeness between the bones of St.
Amadour (preserved at Rocamadour)
and a shoulder of mutton. The
verger, for his part, felt he owed me
an apology as he pointed out another
object of interest, an unkind skit
upon Calvin, carved preaching with
i 2

116

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

an ass's head. "Madame must not
take it amiss," he said, " since it was
carved long ago, when party spirit
ran high."

III.

I settled into my corner of the
Bordeaux express with the sense of
pleasant expectancy and the purpose
of journeying into the past ; of living,
for these few hours of swift transit,
in the actual days of my comrade the
Essayist. Was not all this the region
committed to Monluc to be pacified ?
Was it not here that he made his
grim progress, with the two hang-
men, his lacqueys, leaving bodies of
Huguenots on the trees where he
passed 1 One man hanged frightens
folks more than a hundred killed,
was his experience. To the Essay-
ist, then magistrate at Bordeaux,
he confided a different experience
of life, an experience of the vanity
and bitterness of regret after the
death of his son. I remembered
the deacon, whose extreme youth
caused the penalty of death to be
changed to a whipping ; but the boy
died under the alternative punish-
ment.

Montauban, the first stopping-
place, resisted even Monluc. It held
out for three several sieges and, how-
ever reduced to extremities, remained
to the end a Protestant stronghold.
It is now a thriving centre of com-
merce. Moissac, a little town that
Monluc fell back on from Montauban,
is sustained in the world by the ex-
cellence, I believe, of its grape-juice.
Agen, where Jules-Cesar Scaliger once
wielded the sceptre of the empire of
letters, is distinguished now by its
prunes. They have risen or dwindled,
these and other more diminutive towns,
not in proportion to their valour and
strength under arn;s, but as their
soil is productive or barren. Com-

merce, not creed, has determined their
fate.

An incident of the journey opened
conversation with the one other occu-
pant of the carriage. I had taken
summary stock of him at an earlier
stage ; a rough-hewn man he had
seemed to me, brusque in address,
careless and country-made in his
clothes. I had set him down in my
mind as a successful tradesman in
some form ; a certain air of self-
consequence fitted not ill, I thought,
with that character ; he chanced
besides to allude to his workpeople.
So, calling to mind the Essayist's
advice to converse with each new
acquaintance upon that in which he
is conversant, I spoke presently of
the trade of Toulousd His face
puckered and flushed. " Toulouse,"
he answered with acrimony, " was no
city of commerce, a city rather of
the old nobility." Surprised, I re-
membered one part of the town, the
Del bade, I had especially noticed,
and one house in particular ; this
time I had struck the right vein.
" Madame spoke perhaps of No.
— , the Hotel de — 1" I assented,
though not sure of the fact. " It
was the hotel of his grandmother,
the Duchess of — ." I studied
his rugged face more attentively.
The lines, I now noted, as they
pleasantly expanded, were not those
of an astute and successful man
of business, but rather of a knight
of La Mancha. And a very Don
Quixote he approved himself, as ill-
adjusted to the times he lived in,
as old-fashioned in views and senti-
ments, and as ready if need were to
die for them. The fates were leading
him, I believe, to fight against water-
ing-hose, in place of his prototype's
windmills. The Republic served him
for a dragon, — for all dragons and
giants rolled into one. Its days, he
hinted, were numbered, — he was

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

117

going to Paris. Childlike and con-
fiding conspirator ! I might have
had all his secrets for an ounce of
diplomacy; but I had not the cue,
and my interest, besides, was in him
and not in his doings.

We walk truly, we human beings,
each in our own self-made universe.
To the Briton I had met on the boat
the world was in the main a vast
workshop ; the world of this loyalist
had the King as its sun, and was
solely lit up in his eyes as it chanced
to impinge on the fate of some one
or other of the legitimate rulers of
France. He also had travelled, he
assured me, had been to England (to
attend the funeral of Monseigneur
— ), to Monte Carlo (at the bid-
ding of Monseigneur — ). A reflex
light was cast also, by sympathetic
extension, on the homes or resorts of
scions of other unhappy royal stocks.
He knew Florence as the abode of
the Countess of Albany (a strange
woman's caprice, to give two suc-
cessors to a husband of the blood-
royal !). He was moved to real anger
as his eye fell on my newspaper. The
insolent push of the editor came to
his mind, — how, on the great day of
" the late King's " funeral, he had
tried to gain entrance over the heads
of men of good birth excluded by the
smallness of space. Yet conspiracy
put a check upon feeling : the editor
was of the Party ; " His sentiments,
however, are excellent," he pulled
himself up with. It distressed him
that I should visit the Chateau of
Montaigne, in the hands, he was sure,
of some parvenu. Was there not the
Chateau de Chambord ? I was not
turned from my route; but I accepted
instead his advice as to an inn, a
quiet hostelry, so it sounded, and
highly respectable ; he and his wife,
and all the country nobility, put up
there when they went to Bordeaux ;
the cuisine also was famous.

IV.

Here was Bordeaux. With my
modest luggage on a lumbering om-
nibus, I followed on my bicycle in
quest of this pearl of hotels. We
turned up a side street, — that's as it
should be — but a paved one, I noted
regretfully. I seemed a whole caval-
cade as I drew up at the modest
entrance, and the Boots hastened out
to fling open the door of the omnibus
with a civil air of welcome that fell
strangely flat as he discovered it
empty. He transferred his attentions
to me, and in a twinkling, — no, in a
measured, quiet moment — I was con-
veyed to my room. The handiest of
porters had unstrapped my luggage,
the trimmest of maidens had brought
me hot water, — and I looked round
on immaculate cleanliness, on daintiest
furniture of the last century, on a bed
— " The linen looks white and smells
of lavender," quoth Venator, " and I
long to lie in a pair of sheets that
smells so." Even so longed I, though
the scent was not that of the laven-
der but of the luscious flower of the
lime. The merits of the cook, let me
add, had not been exaggerated, and it
was evident that they were appreciated
not only by the provincial visitor, but
also in the town itself of Bordeaux.

How good a thing was life as I
turned in, at last, to my lime-scented
sheets ! The street truly was paved,
but traffic was small, and an occa-
sional rumble served only to rouse me
from blessed oblivion to a fleeting
sense of the joys of existence.

In the morning, what nectar of
coffee, what daintiness of china and
silver ! I felt all expanding with
charity as I sallied forth into the
streets, those streets, my dear Essayist,
that thy feet once trod. " No in-
deed," answered the Essayist, " they
trod something quite different. I
know now, more than ever, that

118

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

change is the one constant element."
" But this," I objected, " is not
change but development. Bordeaux
was made by its commerce long before
your day, and you know your own
ancestors, that family famous for their
honesty, made their money in com-
merce." " Then sameness is differ-
ence," he retorted ; " Commerce now
is not what commerce was then."
The little brown volume had taken
that morning a bodily form, and the
ghost of the Essayist walked by my
side, wrapped, as I thought, in the
ancient black cloak that had once
been his father's. I noted the satiri-
cal point to his lips, a whimsical line
from the nostrils, the kindly eyes so
full of feeling behind their light air
of scoffing. Only his words, as he
commented on this modern world,
were but pale and colourless echoes of
the living phrases he had applied to
the world that he knew. So per-
chance is it ever with ghosts. "Here
at least is identity, the actual stones,"
I turned to observe as we stood in
the ancient gateway, all that remains
of the Palais de Justice. "With a
difference," — he had the last word.

The ghost I had conjured up was
too impalpable and pale ; I longed for
the Essayist in person, to discuss with
him modern ideas. Would evolution,
development, continuity, be thoughts
too alien to find a place in his mind ;
or how would he resolve them into
his disjointed view of life ? A better
use of so unique an opportunity
would it be to wile from him tales,
more tales, of those fellow-magistrates
in whose company he must so often
have passed through this portal.
Under how keen an eye they aired
their self-sufficiency, gave their judg-
ments for a friend, condemned for
crimes they were ready next instant
to commit ! Through this gate he
must have passed, in more genial
converse, with La Boe'tie. I remem-

bered that he had just returned,
through this gate, from the law-courts
when, sending to ask La Boe'tie to
dine, he learned first of his friend's
illness, I called to mind the details
of that grave death-bed.

But these are sad thoughts. I
roused my shadowy comrade from the
painful reverie into which he had
fallen, as once before in Rome when
thinking on La Boe'tie, and bade him
show me the point, on the adjacent
quays, where, as mayor in his mature
age, of Bordeaux, he had watched all
night for a rumoured boat-load of
rebels. " I was not so bad a mayor,"
he said, " though Biron, in my place,
would have had the whole town
up in arms. And the event," he
added, " would very likely have
justified his precautions, for his pre-
cautions would have produced the
event."

My idle musings, my imaginary
comrade, were sent rudely flying by
an itinerant vendor, who jostled
against me with his basket. It was
mere inadvertence, and the offender's
meek apology would have disarmed
anger, had I been in a humour to
feel it. Truly whatever it be that
produces events, our own individual
mood it is that fashions the world's
manners to us. Only the rose-coloured
optimism in which I was walking
could have made all men that day so
cordial and so kind. I had passed a
whole morning (the chance encounter
roused me to realise) idling, without
ostensible purpose, in the bus
quarter of a great sea-port, and I had
met with no single rude comment,
with not one offensive stare or inquisi-
tive gesture. All faces were friendly ;
I was a welcome guest, no intrush
foreigner.

But time was escaping me, ar
to-morrow I must take to the
I gathered my wits together wit
diligence, and finished the day i

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

119

methodical search for the Essayist's
traces, the site of his school, of the
Eyquem's town-house. I visited his
tomb, the statue raised to his honour,
studied his hand-writing, the anno-
tated essays in the library — and
only the gateway, that I had lit on
by chance, is seasoned in my remem-
brance with sentiment.

V.

Je vois bien, uia Dordoigne, encore

humble tu vas
De te montrer Gascomie, en France,

tu as honte.

Vois tu le petit Loir coimne il hate le

pas,
Comme dej& panni les plus grands il

se conte ?

At Castillon-sur-Dordoigne the river
flows leisurely, and makes truly no
effort at hastening its steps ; but its
full, broad, rolling bosom shows no
token of humility or shame. The
lines of La Boetie had roused a quite
different image. Where was the thin
trickling stream, that could not com-
pete with the gay little Loir? "Is
the river as big at Sarlet as here 1 " I
asked of a woman who, like me, was
leaning over the bridge. She had
never, she said, been beyond her own
parish, but she believed the river was
still greater in other parts of its
course. How had I come to imagine
it small, the Dordoigne? She was
piqued on behalf of her river ; the
name left her lips as the name of a
person beloved.

Rivers in France have indeed a
great personality. They seem to
gather up, and embody, the tracts
that they water. Or they are them-
selves regions, not boundary lines,
regions with their own specific in-
habitants? Goujon de Dronne, gremille
de Seine — but I forget the various
races. No Frenchman, by the way,

would ever have asked, " What's in
a name ? " He knows all its magic.

The woman by my side was silently
watching the lapse of the river.

" There was a woman once, in my
day," said the Essayist, " whose cross-
grained and sorry-faced husband had
beaten her. And she, resolved to be
rid of his tyranny even at the cost of
her life, rose in the morning, accosted
the neighbours as usual, dropping a
word that they might see to her
household, and, taking a sister she
had by the hand, she came to this
river," — the Dordoigne — "took leave
of her sister as in jest, and plunged
headlong from the bridge [but it was
not this bridge] into the stream, where
she perished. And," added the
Essayist, "what was more consider-
able, she had ripened this project a
whole night in her head."

But that was at Bergerac, and
happened three centuries since. This
woman watching the stream might
well be of as heroic a race, but she
was not wont to be beaten. The
pride of her carriage made the notion
ridiculous. She was drinking in the
beauty of the evening, enjoying the
landscape, as any modern traveller,
as I, might, though she had seen it,
and no other, every day of her life.
Use had endeared and not staled it.

I was in the happy serenity, that
particular evening, of a purpose
accomplished, my mind unresisting
to the pleasant bodily lassitude that
follows a first day on the wheel.

Scarce arrived at Castillon-sur-
Dordoigne, my night-quarters, the
proximity of the Essayist's chdteau
had lured me again to the road.
The heat of the day was over already
as I rode down the valley. A benefi-
cent valley ! The rich soil was as
eager to yield, as the glowing sun to
call forth, all culture's produce. And
the acres of yellow corn, in tall and
serried ranks, the trailing vines in

120

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

their brightest green, — these fruits
of man's labour, while covering the
first face of Nature, did but embellish
and not spoil her. Cornfields and
vineyards went all up the sides and
over the crest of that long ridge on
one of whose brows I was to look for
the home of Montaigne.

Montagne, a peasant corrected me,
and bade me ride farther. Corrected,
I asked again for Montagne. Mon-
taigne, this time I was told, might be
reached up the next lane to the left.
This disaccord of the peasants, echoing
the disputes of the philologists, gave
me my first real assurance that the
chdteau I was aiming at was really
that of the Essayist. I had forgotten
the present proprietor's name, which
all the world would have known, and
at Castillon, neither mine host, nor
the friends he called to consult, could
tell me for certain whether this was
the only Montaigne in the district.
Nor did they know if there was a
tower, and, so far as they knew, no
great author ever had lived there.
And why in the world should not a
dozen chateaux be called by a name
derived from the hill-side they stood
on ? But no two could be called
sometimes Montaigne and sometimes
Montagne. Why not, in the name of
all common sense ? I could not see
why, but I felt sure, all the same, of
my quarry.

I prepared to ride on ; but this
second peasant arrested me. He was
full of curiosity about my bicycle,
wanting to know how much ground I
could cover, and how quickly. He
had seen these machines, but not close
at hand. Bent double with age and
the weight of the sticks he was carry-
ing (he had rested them now in the
hedge) he looked decrepid and toil-
worn as any tiller of the ungrateful
North. Has the beneficent valley no
blessing, then, for her nearer sons,
for those in daily touch with her

surface ? Must even her teeming soil
be tilled with such sweat ? Has the
peasant still need of his proof -armour
of insensibility, as in the days when
troops carried off the herds and
ravaged the homesteads, and pesti-
lence stalked through the land ?
" What examples of resolution," says
the Essayist, "saw we not then in
all this people's simplicity 1 Each one
generally renounced all care of life ;
the grapes (which are the country's
chief commodity) hung still and rotted
upon the vines untouched ; all indif-
ferently preparing themselves, and
expecting death, either that night or
the next morrow, with countenance
and voice so little daunted, that they
seemed to have compromitted to this
necessity, and that it was a universal
and inevitable condemnation." Their
sole care then was for graves. It
distressed them to see the dead
carcasses scattered over the fields and
at the mercy of wild beasts, which
presently began to flock hither. " And
even in everyday life," he goes on,
" from these poor people we see
scattered over the earth, their heads
bent over their task, from them nature
draws daily instances of patience and
constancy, more pure and unbending
than any we learn in the schools.
How many do I ordinarily see that
mis-acknowledge poverty ; how many
that wish for death, or that pass it
without any alarm or affliction ? That
fellow who turns up my garden, has
this morning perchance buried his son
or his father."

Alas, my dear Essayist, insensi-
bility to pain, — is it not also dulness
to pleasure 1 How shall we improve
the state of the masses, if we cannot
instil discontent? How raise their
standard of comfort ? " What use,"
quoth the Essayist, " to bring comfort
of body with discomfort of mind 1 "

There was no discontent in the
interest this peasant took in my

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

121

wheel. He no more aspired after
my easy running than after a bird's
flight, and thought as little of com-
paring with either his own enforced
snail's-pace.

It was a rough lane that the
peasant had pointed to. I wheeled my
bicycle up it slowly enough. Steep
and rough the Essayist reported the
road to his house, remembering how
he was carried home once in a swoon,
after a chance skirmish and a fall
with his horse. This scene of smiling
prosperity was then in the very heart
of the civil disorders ; now the only
possible danger was thorns on the
path. The cool-headed Essayist could
make use of his mishap, of his first
taste of a swoon, to muse on the easy
approaches of death. What moral,
I wondered, should I draw from a
puncture ?

Out on the crest of the hill ran a
light, well-laid gravel road, with vine-
yards and cornfields on either hand,
and the barest dry ditch to keep their
edges. Open to all the world lay
the rich land. I rode through the
outlying property, past the church
and the village, — houses which even
a savage could count, for one set
of five fingers would suffice — up the
drive, and dismounted at the very
door of the chdteatt.

Neither guard nor sentinel, " save
the stars," had the Essayist, in those
days when every other house was
armed for defence ; and in these, so
far as I can bear witness, neither
gate nor boundary -line marks off
Montaigne from the universe.

I had already passed the tower,
that one piece of the ancient house
spared by a fire, — owing its safety,
presumably, more to its place over-
looking the entrance, than to any
selective sense in the elements ; only
a line, now, of outbuilding, forming,
as it were, one side of a quadrangle,
links it on with the chdteau. The

Essayist, too, I remembered, had to
cross over a courtyard, if a happy
thought struck him, to be noted down
in his library. Successive rebuild-
ings, since his day, may still have
preserved, as is claimed, the ancient
outline. And the tower, now as then,
has three views of rich prospect ; now
as then, an inhabitant might overlook
a large part, at least, of the home-
stead.

Man is truly a thing of perversity !
What more could one ask of any
proprietor than to keep an old relic
just as it was, to make it freely acces-
sible to every enquirer, to student
or idle tourist, antiquarian or mere
traveller in the by-path of senti-
ment ? How had I not grumbled,
had I been told that I could not see
the library because Monsieur was
reading there, or that the stores were
kept in the wardrobe, and the house-
keeper was away with the key, or —
any other of the hindrances that
might have arisen had the tower been
still put to its original uses? As it
was, I could study at leisure what
had once been the library, the private
sanctuary of the Essayist, reserved,
even as a corner was reserved in his
soul, from cares civil, paternal, or
conjugal. I could mount to what had
once been his wardrobe, descend to
what had once been the room where
he had slept when he wished to be
alone, to what had once been his
chapel on the ground-floor. Why did a
cold chill strike at my sentiment ? No
greater sacrilege, surely, than to leave
this monument just as it was. Cold
sepulchre to how warm a spirit ! Let
them lodge the gardener there, stack
wood in it, — anything to link it on
with the present life of humanity !
Only the survivals perforce, in the
face of neglect and misusage, are the
true survivals to sentiment. The
ancient spirit clings closer, the more
mutilated the shrine.

122

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

What image of the Essayist, I
wondered, survived in the mind of
the woman who was showing his
tower ? A curious compound, it
appeared. He was the ancient pro-
prietor, the original family (she knew
nothing of Eyquems, or of any still
earlier race of Montaignes), but surely
also a species of ogre, to lodge by
choice in a tower ! " He kept his
wife [so she informed me, in gratui-
tous addition, I trust, to her other
knowledge by rote] in the smaller
tower [a species of buttress in the
old wall] where we keep a few
gardening tools."

"The passing of man is as the
wind's passing." Pointest thou also
a moral, poor ghost, to the sentence
writ on thy ceiling ?

The glamour of evening light was
upon the country as I rode slowly
homeward. I sat awhile, before leav-
ing the high ground, at the edge of
a cornfield, to watch the sun sink
behind the opposite ridge. A beauti-
ful landscape it was, blue and purple
distance to infinity where the line
of low hills breaks to let the eye
through. And yet, — it was not the
landscape I had looked for. A more
broken, varied, and changeable scene,
abrupter hills, more capricious twists
in the valley, had made surely a more
suitable setting to the winding path
of the Essayist's spirit. These orderly
lines might well have induced a more
measured march of his pen. What
had Nature here to set his mind so
constantly dwelling on the shapeless
and diverse contexture of Man 1 Per-
haps the scenery, as the language,
more to his mind was that up in the
mountains, — more hardy and venture-
some, as the tongue was more pithy
and virile.

VI.

I mused while the sun sank. That
philosophy of the Essayist, — he scarce

would have given it so high-sounding
a name — that humour of his then;
it also has its reverse side.

The constant dwelling on the
doubtful faces of things did not im-
pair his own buoyant vitality. The
disclosure of petty springs under far-
reaching actions, of the strait links
that tie to earth our wide-soaring
intellect, of the mingled ineptitude
and arrogance of mankind, did not
deaden the zest with which he re-
garded life's spectacle. But a new
generation, looking, or professing to
look, with the Essayist's eyes, saw life
dwindled already and impoverished,
the smallness of the actual diminish-
ing also the possible. A humorous
recognition of vanity leads by one
step to dry withering cynicism.

In those hard-and-fast times, with
faith pinned to contrary banners,
zeal flung headlong into irreconcilable
camps, what better corrective and
solvent could there have been than
the sense of man's littleness, of the
limited reach of his intellect and the
low range of his purpose ? Tolerance
among men, honour among thieves !
Yet tolerance is divided by but a hair's
breadth from indifference. A more
effete age, losing its hold on illusions,
its confidence in its own power of
grasping, may lose also its hold on
existence. A fanatic age is at least
more alive than a decadent.

As the valley lengthened out in
the evening light, and as I sat in the
silent air, the placable soul of the
Essayist showed itself to me again,
in larger shape than of wont, — less
familiar and intimate, but more con-
sonant now with the broad lines of
the landscape. I saw no longer the
laughing philosopher, laying bare the
paltry machinery beneath the fine
show, but a sage brushing cobwebs
aside to disclose a fair region beyond.
I felt no longer a dead weight of
doubt, inhibiting action ; but a cool

Notes from a Sentimental Journey.

123

hand passed over the fevered face of
humanity, stilling delirium but restor-
ing vitality, no longer a drag upon
motive-power but a resetting to new
springs of action.

Is this, then, the mind's legitimate
circle 1 Life has us at first in her hold,
buffets us perhaps with hard circum-
stance, teases us oftener with fruitless
expectation, or chagrins us with the
inadequacy of her favours. Her hold
shaken off, she may be viewed in
peaceful detachment from the opposite
side, from the refuge of philosophy.
What if the return to life be possible?
Without looking back, but completing
the circle, may one arrive with for-
ward face and eyes open, to embrace
her again, though not again to attend
her caprices ? Not merely by the gift
of illogical nature, but by deliberate
choice, may life be accepted even after
the complete view of her vanity ? Vain
circumstance, even poor human nature,
would wear a different complexion if
actively welcomed whatever it bring,
— food in all forms for the mind's
power of energy — than when waited
upon in passive expectancy. That

tower of philosophy, fled to on the
one side as a refuge, might then com-
mand the country on the other as a
stronghold, might become in very
truth a citadel in the soul.

At least the first step is reasonable,
— to choose energy, which is life, since
life is all that is offered us, and nega-
tion the only alternative. And that
first choice grounded in the logic of
reason, one is left perhaps afterwards
to life's logic, that moves not in syl-
logisms, to an inversion of the logical
order, energy bringing faith in its
train. It brings at least hope, the
forerunner of faith, and trust, her
attendant, — trust no longer in appear-
ance or circumstance, but in a some-
thing underlying them and giving
them worth.

As the peace of the evening stole
over me, so a new vision of life entered
my soul. I conceived it magnified in
its smallness, a vast possibility casting
its cloak over the poor actual. An
illusion ] An illusion, if it were one,
whose feet were in reality and the
border of whose garment shed fra-
grance upon life.

124

THE SUFFERINGS OF AN HONORARY SECRETARY.

THOUGH always pleased to hope that
I possess ordinarily good abilities, I
have to admit that I am not quick
at figures. I can keeps accounts, after
a fashion of my own, but I take longer
over them than most people. That
fashion has never yet failed me, and
it has enabled me, in my capacity of
Secretary of the Westholt Division
of the Soldiers and Sailors' Families'
Association, to furnish correct monthly
and quarterly returns of the expendi-
ture in our division. The annual
report is a horror I have not yet
undergone, but I hope to come through
it unscathed.

That I should have the keeping of
the accounts is rather a grievance
of mine against the Association. We
have a full-blown Treasurer, a man
of business, Something in the city.
I thought the accounts would fall to
his lot, and nominally they do so, but
it is my duty as Secretary to prepare
them for the Treasurer. The prepara-
tion consists in filling in every detail
of the expenditure, financial and sta-
tistical, but omitting the signature at
the foot of the paper. The Treasurer,
perhaps because he is a man of busi-
ness, declines to affix his signature.
As at present arranged, I prepare
the accounts, he goes through them,
vouches for their accuracy, and for-
wards them to the President for her
signature. She signs cheerfully, and
he (wise man) is free of all responsi-
bility.

The quarterly accounts I send in
to our Divisional Treasurer, the
monthly paper to the County-Secretary.
The first intimation that any accounts
would be required of me I had from

my President. There are four office-
bearers in each division, President,
Vice-President, Treasurer, and Secre-
tary. The Secretary comes last, and
is the bond-slave of the President, also
her whipping-boy. The President is
the great lady of the division; she
holds the committee-meetings, takes
command generally, and gets all the
credit. The Secretary does all the
work, and gets, when necessary, the
abuse of the County-Secretary. There
is also a representative of the Associa-
tion in each parish.

It was towards the end of January,
our first month of office, that my
President bore down upon me, with
a lap-full of papers and " a dear little
case- register." In the case-register
I was to enter every case, every
soldier's family, that is to say, in the
division. Besides the name and
address of the family there are a
number of particulars to be filled in,
such as husband's rank and name,
regiment, date and place of marriage
and by whom solemnised, children's
names and dates of birth, also details
of the family's weekly income. All
these particulars I was to find in the
bundle of forms presented to me.
Each form had been filled in by one
or other of our representatives, in
whose parish the case occurred and
who was therefore in a position to
vouch for the accuracy of the infor-
mation supplied. The Association is
extremely business-like and very well
organised.

I was to bring my case-register,
fully written up, to our committee-
meeting of the next week. There is
not much martial ardour in our

The Sufferings of an Honorary Secretary.

125

division, — since the war we are proud
of our soldier-sons ; formerly we were
rather ashamed of them — therefore
I had not more than thirty or forty
cases to enter. They had all been
dealt with by the President, and
their allowances from the Association
decided. The whole thing, in our
division at least, was new and there-
fore amusing. Since the first month
the dealing with the cases has been
handed over to the Secretary.

My first paper was Mrs. Alice
Brooks's. The questions, husband's
rank and regiment were answered
Gunner and West Yorkshire Regiment.
This of course was impossible, nor
would I defile the first page of my
case-register with such an entry.
Should I put him down Gunner, Royal
Artillery, or Private, West Yorkshire ?
Fortunately the woman had moved
into our division, and I was thus
able to refer to her transfer-paper,
and could let that decide. On this
I found Army Service Corps. It
was manifestly out of the question
that Brooks should be simultaneously
in three branches of the Service ; but
it was conceivable that Mrs. Brooks
might have provided herself, in case
of emergency, with three husbands.
I glanced down to date, place of
marriage, &c., and found, Married at
the registry- office at Maxted, my hus-
band knows all about her. I entered
Mrs. Brooks's name and address,
leaving other particulars to the day of
the committee-meeting, when I could
cross- question her representative.

CASE No. 2. — Mrs. Kind ; relation-
ship, mother; son's name, Private A.
Brown. Mrs. Kind had evidently
been married twice, her first husband's
name being Brown. No difficulties
presented themselves till I came to the
children's names and dates of birth :
Edith Brown (sixteen), John Kind
(four}, Jane Kind (two], and a Brown
baby. How on earth did the Brown

baby get there 1 I thought the
remarks on the back of the form
might help me. From these, appa-
rently, Private Brown was alternately
son and husband to his mother. Name
and address were accordingly entered,
details to stand over till committee-
meeting.

To make a long story short, I
finally entered the name and address
of each case, intending to call the
names over at the committee-meeting,
letting each representative answer,
for her own case, the printed questions
in the register.

Nothing could have been better
than the arrangement of our com-
mittee-room. The President, as was
fitting, presided at a table. I was
seated at her side, and furnished with
pens, ink, &c. Thirty chairs were
ranged in a semicircle round the room,
and punctually at the hour named the
representatives of the various parishes
filed in. Each took her seat, with
the air of a martyr going to the stake
for her faith.

We take the villages in alphabetical
order, so Mrs. Brooks, of Alshanger,
comes first. Husband's rank and
regiment? Gunner, Royal Artillery,
comes promptly from her representa-
tive Mrs. Tomkins.

" Her husband is also given as in
the West Yorkshire Regiment, and
the Army Service Corps ; do you
think there can be three of him ? " I
ask.

Mrs. Tomkins is a clergyman's
wife. She looks very straight down
her nose and says severely : " Mrs.
Brooks is a most respectable person."

" Still she is not entitled to the
three husbands here described," I
suggest benignly. Mrs. Tomkins would
like to see the papers, and does so.
She gazes steadfastly at them, held
at arm's length (the three husbands
must not come too near her) and says
she would like to have the papers to

126

The Sufferings of an Honorary Secretary.

take home to Mr. Tomkins. She has
them, and eventually " returns them,
as desired," without comment ; so I
am no wiser, but as Mrs. Brooks gets
no allowance from us, being well pro-
vided for, it is perhaps no affair of
ours.

We went through all our cases,
with more, or less, success. The
Brown baby's representative was
absent, so that mystery remained un-
solved. Several ladies were unable
to answer the printed questions, but
the President kindly simplified mat-
ters by saying they were unsuitable,
and I could substitute others. None
of us were clear as to the difference
between husband's pay or allotment
so we settled that it did not matter,
and considered the case-register written
up.

I need not go into the other subjects
discussed at the meeting, as after the
first five minutes they were unknown
to those present. The President
spoke, asking now and then for an
expression of opinion from the meet-
ing. Everyone looked self-conscious,
and dead silence reigned. Suddenly
something loosened all tongues. I
think it was some question of medical
attendance, on which fertile subject
everyone had some experience of her
own doctor to relate. Unfortunately
each was so anxious to get her word
in, that instead of speaking singly
to the meeting, each lady spoke to
her neighbour. Thirty ladies all talk-
ing together, and no one over to do
the listening ! Once started there
was no holding them. The President
and I discussed the subject, and settled
it. Turning to the room, she began,
" We have decided," — but she got no
further. She has a powerful voice of
long range, but she was numerically
out-classed and immediately silenced.
She and I then settled various matters.
After several ineffectual attempts to
record our decisions, she succeeded in

effecting a lull in the conversation,
and in the comparative quiet that
prevailed (sufficient to enable her to
be heard through the room) she com-
manded the representatives to send in
their accounts at the end of every
month to the Secretary.

"By the 28th, please," I inter-
polated, repeating the date several
times that there might be no mistake ;
"by the 28th, as I have to forward
your papers to the County-Secretary
before the end of the month." That
would allow them to be one day late,
and me to have a headache (if I
wished it) and yet get the accounts
off in time.

On February 1st I received my first
report, accompanied by a note begin-
ning, " As you said you wished the
account sent in early in the month."
In the course of the week I received
all the papers due, and forwarded
them to the County-Secretary. He
returned them, as is customary, with
a note of thanks, adding that he had
absolutely failed to understand them.
For the future, he begged me, instead
of forwarding the various papers sent
to me, to make a copy of their con-
tents, on one form, that he might
more easily see the expenditure in
our division. He ended with, " Get
your representatives to date and sign
their papers."

Some of the reports were unsigned,
all but one were undated, very few
contained the name of the parish.
I bore meekly the unsigned January
forms. In February, fortified by the
reproof of the County-Secretary, I
sternly sent back all unsigned reports,
begging each representative to sign
her name " in the space left for the
purpose at the foot of the paper, on
the right, marked signature of dis-
tributor, and to put the date in the
space marked date to the left." The
papers were returned, with notes of
apology, signed but undated. Months

The Sufferings of an Honorary Secretary.

127

of prayers and entreaties have induced
one representative once to make use
of the space marked date. The
majority would rather die than date
in the spot indicated, — if they date at
all, which is rare. They have also a
rooted objection to showing the period
during which the case was relieved.
I copied the February reports for the
County-Secretary, and received the
cheering comment that I might as
well not have sent them, as, without
any dates to show the period covered
by the payments, the paper was use-
less for statistical purposes. I be-
lieved I had had endless trouble so
far, but the full terror that the Asso-
ciation-accounts may contain was not
revealed till the end of the quarter.

Each account was accompanied by
a note. " I have spent as you will
see 20s. this month, which with the
30s. (i.e., Jan. 15s., Feb. 16s.) makes
just the £2 I received from you."
The enclosed form showed an expendi-
ture of 18s., reference to January and
February showed 14s. and 15s. I
returned the three account- forms,
with a copy of the items, as they
should have been, and received an
entirely new edition for each month,
the receipts and expenditure balanc-
ing as they had not done before.

Another representative wrote : " I
have received in all from you £4 10s.,
have spent £4 6s., and have in hand
4s." I explained to the good lady
that she had received from me £5 10s.,
and if her women had received their
proper payments, as shown by her
monthly papers, she had spent £5 4s.;
balance 6s. I gave her every item,
and prayed her to induce her figures
and mine to agree. The answer was
as follows : "I quite forgot to men-
tion that I had kept back 2s. 6d. to
pay Mrs. Almond with on the 30th.
This will make our figures tally."

Yet another lady entered the
money received from me and the

money paid to the soldier's wife in
the same column. I sent her a fresh
form, filled in, to save her trouble,
with all details except her expendi-
ture, and explaining her mistake. She
made exactly the same financial entry
a second time.

In some cases the February accounts
would end with a balance in hand of
10s., but March would begin, Balance
in hand 7s. 6d. A hint that this was
incorrect produced the bland remark :
"It is so entered in my account- book."
Some of the papers had to be sent
back again and again, with the result
that the accounts were not sent in at
the proper date, and I spent two days
in bed recovering from them.

I had thus ample leisure to think
over the situation. Several ladies had
been most obliging in altering their
accounts to meet my requirements.
It occurred to me to wonder whether
the soldiers' wives ever received the
sums so willingly re-adjusted. I have
learned in sorrow that the soldier's
wife does not silently endure neglect ;
but that was later. Recognising that
it was useless for me to wrestle for
dates of payment, and other entries
that I desired, I evolved a plan,
which I rashly foretold would make
me independent of the representa-
tives' vagaries. At the beginning
of the month, when it is my duty
to send out the money required for
the month, I also sent a small sheaf
of receipt-forms, begging each repre-
sentative, for every payment made,
to obtain a signed and dated receipt,
such receipts to be sent in to me
with the accounts at the end of the
month.

April was a period of joy to me.
My monthly paper was correctly filled
in ; I sent it to the County-Secretary
without my usual apology for short-
comings, and I was happy in the
certainty that the women had re-
ceived their allowances. I even let

128

The Sufferings of an Honorary Secretary.

fall some triumphant expressions
about circumventing the rejiresenta-
tives. I lived in a fool's paradise of
pride and content till the quarterly
accounts for June were made up.

As I anticipated considerable delay
from the necessary return of faulty
papers I asked for the accounts by
the 25th. I got them all, made up
to the end of the month, one of the
•women's receipts dated June 30th.

" Has Mrs. Ball had her Is. 6d. of
June 30th ? " I asked.

" Oh no," said her representative
pityingly. " You see this is only the
25th ; I never pay before the time."

"How," I asked, "has she signed
a receipt for money she has not
received 1 "

" You asked for the accounts, and
of course I have to send you the
receipts too. You said the women
were to sign receipts."

At that moment there recurred to
my mind the contemptuous remark
hurled at me by my small nephew :
" You are younger than Mum, and
you're not even married." I felt
my contemptible unmarried condition
acutely. It was not easy to set right
an elderly married personage, so I
said, as though it were an open ques-
tion : " I hardly think they should
sign receipts for money they have
not had ; " and I came away with a
great despair at my heart.

Since then I walk humbly. I
shall never circumvent the represen-
tatives. Their ingenuity in devising
fresh eccentricities is beyond my under-
standing.

Minor troubles I have without
number. I protest against a man
being described one month as Scots
Greys, the next as Scots Guards,
especially as he also figures as Scots
Fusiliers. I write, by request, to the
War-Office about a woman belonging
to the Warwickshire Regiment, to be
told next week incidentally that her

husband is in the Worcesters. I ask
for a distinction between Militia and
Reserves, and am murmured against
for making new rules. I decline to
make an allowance to an aged parent
upon the sole information, as to her
income, that her children allow what
they can ; nor will I accept as suffi-
cient explanation, in answer to my
request for figures, that they allow
what they are able to. I nip in the
bud the underbred representative who
tries to quarrel with me, and know
that she goes sorrowing all her days
with disappointment over her frus-
trated attempt. I am the most un-
popular person in the division.

Of impostors I am glad to say I
have no experience. One or two
women, hoping to get more help
where they are not known, have
applied to the Lord Mayor for relief
from the War-Fund. All such letters
are sent to Colonel Gildea, who for-
wards them to the County-Secretary,
who in turn passes them on to the
secretary of the division in which the
woman lives. The remarkable thing
about these letters is their cleverness.
They are ill-spelt and ungrammatical,
yet the case is always advantageously
stated and the facts skilfully mar-
shalled. The first letter submitted to
me struck me as altogether too clever
to be the work of a simple soldier's
mother, and I suspected imposture till
I came to the following sentence : " I
was born in 1838, so I miss him very
much. It has made me feel such an
old woman being so constantly re-
minded of their Heroic actions and
their privations." Then I knew she
had a son " at the Boar war." I too
have someone that I care for at the
front, and her words found a ready
echo in my heart. Poor thing ! her
son died and was buried at Wynberg
some weeks back ; and the one I
care for 1 — The troops are not home
yet.

129

WEATHERING AN EARTHQUAKE.

IT had been a lovely, if singularly
airless, evening, even on the old
battery, jutting as it did into the
bay, shady with palmettoes and live-
oaks, and green with a smooth turf
ancient for America. Scarcely a
whiff of the salt breeze came up from
the sea, which lay gleaming to the
eastward between the brown penin-
sulas on either hand, and we, who
had come for coolness out of the great
new hotel in the city, turned to go
slowly back.

All round the battery lay the old
quarter of Charleston, the aristocratic
city of the South. I could count by
the half-dozen at a time the fine old
houses of a hundred and more years
ago, with their stately pediments and
porticoes, their cornices and light
balustrades, — the homes of the great
planters in the days after (and,
indeed, a while before) the ever-
memorable Revolution. They were
spacious times, and these men
flourished more exceedingly than the
green baytree, and would come to
town here for the season and spend
their large revenues on dignified jun-
keting and, if the truth must be told,
on carouses where dignity was not.
For although the ladies looked beauti-
ful in their white muslins festooned
with lilac ribbons, and wore treble
lace ruffles and the daintiest caps
with long lace lappets, they did not
hesitate to stake their hundreds of
dollars in the course of a night's play
nor, even in the morning, did they
object to drink each other's health
in punch out of silver tankards. And
the men excelled in all feats of hazard
and gallantry, wearing over their
No. 494. — VOL. LXXXIII.

powdered wigs cocked-hats which
were laced with gold and silver, and
clad their fine persons in scarlet
coats, satin breeches, and hose of silk.
With these quiet old-world houses
about me, it is easy to bring back
the spirit of those far-off days. These
entrances, — where on either hand the
steps curve gently upward in double
flight and meet above in a platform
screened by the stately columns of
the portico — how leisurely they take
one up to the double doors, and how
easy even now to hear the clacking
of the high heels which passed up
and down. These rows of high nar-
row windows (screened with green
louvres) how just in their proportion
to the whole facade and how full of
suggestion they are, — of those gay
nights when country-dances were held
within, and the host assigned the
ladies, willy-nilly, to their partners,
and strong waters flowed in rich
vessels and everything was sumptuous
and exclusive, — for Talleyrand might
have written of them as he did of the
Philadelphians of that day, "Their
luxuriousness is something frightful."
The very windows mirror the age ;
lofty for the ampler dignity of the
room within, and narrow for the ex-
clusion of the prying world without.
The symmetry of these houses, so
perfect and reposeful, bears witness
to the self-sufficiency of the people
who built and lived in them ; and the
old plane-trees and live-oaks still fence
them from the rude winds and, I am
glad to think, from the ruder person
of Chicago. They stand apart in
their own courts, retiring but never
humble, for the people of the Carolinas

130

Weathering an Earthquake.

held their heads high above the New
Englanders, and never forgot that
they were sprung from the cavaliers
of England and the best Huguenot
blood of France.

Thus did the old days flicker before
my mind's eye as I walked back to
the hotel, a great caravanserai built
foursquare and stable, and as vehe-
mently white as paint could make it.
Passing out on to one of the piazzas,
I drew a comfortable rocking-chair
to the edge and lighted a genuine
Havana of Virginian origin, — one
of the things you cannot escape in
America. The blue smoke curled
away up under the eaves of the
verandah, then suddenly swirled
round the edge and was lost against
the sky ; the glow in the west died
down, and the stars grew twice as
large, and the humming of a careen-
ing mosquito made the only music
that broke the stillness of that
southern night. For Charleston goes
to bed early in these summer days,
and the lamps, which had been burn-
ing under verandahs or on tables in
the gardens which I could overlook,
one by one disappeared. Another
night had come at last, hot, lifelessly
still, making clothes unbearable, while
the general languor scarce promised
sleep. Though it was early, within
a few minutes of ten, I, too, had
risen from the chair and standing be-
tween the columns of the piazza was
drawing in a supply of scent-laden
air to serve me for a while within
doors, when — this marvel happened.

There came up from the direction
of the sea a sudden growl, — a growl
which might have come from a tiger
as I have heard him in the sugar-
canes in Malaya ; and the whole
ground rose below me and at the same
moment I fell back or, as it seemed
to me, was blown back two or three
feet. The growl grew deeper but
sharper, and then, just as plainly as

if it were turning the corner of the
street near by, it sprang into the
most appalling roar I could have
imagined. At the same moment
came the great tremor. The floor,
columns, and roof of the piazza, and
the solid walls of the house waved
before me as a flag waves in the wind.
Floor and ceiling rose and fell like
the sea. I did not count, but for a
while there was not the slightest sign
of ceasing ; rather did the roar grow
and, rising, shattered its volumes of
sound as if it had been thunder under
foot. The noise had an awful grind-
ing sound, as if the solid earth were
crumbling and the rocks were being
broken into dust. Then followed the
snap and crash, avalanche, volley, and
thud of thousands of tons of masonry
hurled from the roofs, towers, cupolas,
cornices, gables, and broken away
from the walls of the buildings and
poured down into the streets. Snap
and crash it rattled round like
Maxims ; in that moment, had I
known it, of the fourteen thousand
chimneys in Charleston all had
crumpled up and fallen save a
remnant not a hundred in number.
Great wooden beams warped and
twisted with rapid reports like rifle-
shots, and the noises became more
and more complex as they also became
more and more overwhelming.

As to what happened just then, I
can only say that it is not easy to
recall the feelings of a moment of such
dismay ; but I know that I was, or felt
that I was, lifted about two feet in the
air, and then thrown backward and
then forward some seven or eight feet.
With great difficulty I recovered my
footing and stood with legs wide apart
as if to steady myself on the deck of
a rolling ship. Still more did I seem
to be doing this, as the combined
vertical upthrust and horizontal wave
brought just that feeling of nausea
which similar motions at sea only too

Weathering an Earthquake.

131

surely produce. Of course I had not
been in doubt for a moment, after
the first tremor, as to what it was ;
but the loud crackling roar and the
extremely violent waves of invisible
power, with only too visible conse-
quences, produced for the moment so
stupefying a feeling that all I tried
to do was to keep my feet and wait.

But when this first shock had
almost spent its vigour, the crashing
and falling of masonry, together with
the shrieks and screams which rent
the air in a chorus of terror, sent me
rushing out into the street, there to
seek shelter beyond what I fondly
imagined would be the range of falling
buildings. I arrived there, however,
to discover that so far from doing
this, I had exchanged one danger
for another. The momentum of the
great wave was such that a space,
equal to the height of the buildings,
measured on the flat by no means
covered or included the area in which
the debris would fall. To give an
example of this, I noticed a stone
gate-pillar, some eight feet in height,
snapped off a few inches from the
ground and thrown a distance of
fifteen feet. And so it happened
that even in the very middle of the
widest streets a great mass of masonry
was piled up in every stage of ruin,
and the pile was continually growing.
Nor was this all ; in addition to the
danger of destruction being almost as
great without as within doors, I had
rushed forth into a new one. From
all this great mass of masonry along
every street there was rising a thick
impenetrable and almost suffocating
fog of dirty white dust, so thick that,
as with us in November, one scarcely
i saw the path until one placed foot
; upon it. Shrieking women, cursing
I men, and screaming children were
about me everywhere; that I could
; hear well enough, but it was only
! now and again as I stumbled along,

painfully falling again and again over
heaps of masonry, that I could see
my fellow-creatures and appreciate
their terror and their hapless plight.
Here came into sight and then
vanished as he passed, a man with
blood streaming down his face, clasp-
ing in his arms a woman who had
swooned, and followed by two little
children crying loudly with fear.
They were all in their nightdresses
and had just rushed out of a neigh-
bouring house. Here, flat on his
back, I stumbled over a negro, with
a fearful gash from skull to neck,
clearly dead, though, as I was trying
to assure myself of this, no one of
those who hurried by stayed to see
whether he were or not. All was
clamour and the confusion of dark-
ness and mist, and though all were
shouting directions or appealing for
guidance, none seemed to know
whither he went or why. But by
one of those instincts for open spaces
which seem to characterise mobs at
all times, there was a steady current
setting in towards the nearest square
(it was Marion Square) and in that
direction I was following when
screams of " Fire ! " and the sudden
bursting forth of flames from two
houses on the right again made me
pause.

It was lucky for me that I did :
for just at that moment there came
again from the sea that awful growl
rapidly rushing up to where one
stood and swelling into a great grind-
ing roar, and, with it, the rocking
and the upheaving of the earth, and
down came some fifty tons of masonry
right before my path. My watch
told me that it was eight minutes
after the first great shock, but in
those eight minutes there were people
in Charleston who had added years to
their age. Fires were springing up
on all sides, caused chiefly by the
explosion of lamps and escape of gas,
K 2

132

Weathering an Earthquake.

but the waterpipes had become choked
and the engine-houses so badly
damaged that a long delay ensued.
Seeing that so many houses were of
wood, the chief reason why the rem-
nant of Charleston was not burned
to the ground may be attributed to
the calmness of the night. Nothing
else was calm.

Even to this day, a negro camp-
meeting will supply some really
marvellous phenomena of human
frenzy and emotion; but although I
have often attended such meetings I
have never seen anything approaching
the expansion of emotion reached by
the negroes of Charleston on this
occasion. Marion Square, Washing-
ton Square, and, indeed, all the open
spaces in the city, were crowded with
them — raving, shrieking, praying, now
flinging themselves upon the ground,
and now leaping up into the air, now
laughing like men gone mad, now
weeping as if overcome with pain,
calling upon "deLord" to have mercy
upon them and indeed to do anything
but to come to judgment this very
night ! The way these poor wretches
were tortured by their religious
feelings made me think but little of
the character they had bestowed on
their God; and to anyone interested
in human nature it was really a pain-
ful sight to note the abject fear with
which they anticipated the advent of
Him whom they acknowledged as
their Heavenly Father, or the awful
earnestness of their agonised appeals
that He would deign, for at least this
last time, to stay away from them
and have mercy ! It was almost
curious to notice their whole bodies
shivering and quivering with fear,
just as one sometimes sees it in an
animal. Indeed, the display of
absolute despair made by the negroes
exerted on the whole an influence for
good among the whites generally, —
though the demoniacal shrieks and

groans by which it was accompanied
helped to aggravate the terror of the
white women and children. For
while these would rush into the
square, scantily clad in their night-
dresses and evidently in the greatest
alarm, no sooner did they find them-
selves in the midst of the negroes
than, partly from contempt for these
unhappy Hamites and partly from a
renewed sense of dignity, they assumed
an attitude of quiet and reserve very
far indeed removed from their real
feelings, and thus, in a large measure,
protected themselves and the dense
crowds about them from a headlong
panic. Had the negroes not been so
absolutely terrified they might have
run amok with a vengeance, but it
was a touching sight to notice how
here or anywhere, — for you might
see it happen all over the city — the
blacks in their terror turned to the
whites. Many a negro girl I saw
holding on to the dress of some white
woman and imploring her protection.
It was not long before the dust-fog
began to settle, and after an hour one
could see the stars shining brightly
overhead in the deep blue sky. The
coming of the great earthquake, —
though it had laid the city low and
swept hundreds and thousands of
homes out of existence (marvellously
enough, not more than ninety lives
in all were lost) — had apparently
created no meteorological effect. Still,
hot, airless, and languorous the atmo-
sphere had been an hour before, and
now an hour afterwards it had not
changed in the least. Some of the
more adventurous had sought for
lamps in their ruined homes, and
here and there in the squares and
open spaces about the public build-
ings there were to be seen groups of
people sitting dismally round a lamp
which burned without so much as a
flicker. But the great mass remained
huddled together in the darkness,

Weathering an Earthquake.

133

some vociferous and others silent
with a common fear.

Two more severe shocks came to
us before midnight, and between that
hour and sunrise there were two
more ; while just as people had begun
to brace their nerves with the delight
of the risen sun there was another
heavy shock. Though none of these
was equal in rapidity of approach or
in severity of motion to the first
shock, yet they were all serious and
brought down hundreds of tons of
tottering cornices and bulging walls,
and again raised the cry of human
terror which throughout the night
rang from street to street and square
to square. Every new shock added
to the panic, and came with an extra
strain upon nerves already hopelessly
shattered. And through the whole
night thousands expected the sea to
burst its bounds and come rolling in
a great tidal wave over the whole of
the city lying flat on the bay- shore,
and blot it and us out of the world
once for all.

To show still more clearly the
exact sensation of an earthquake-
shock of great violence, I may say
that in the first shock the rocking
and rising and falling were so sharp
and so sudden that they instinctively
produced a shivering feeling. Even
at its loudest, the roar of the earth,
however sharp or thunderous it might
be, never ceased to be at the same
time strangely tremulous. Of all the
images that have occurred to me to
illustrate the movement, I should
select the sensation of instability that
might be felt on an island rock
broken off, lifted up, and being
rapidly split into fragments by a
tumultuous Atlantic wave. That
night there were eight shocks, more
or less cataclysmic in their violence
and all of them highly destructive,
but the first was by much the worst.
The roar which heralded it by a

second and continued that distance of
time ahead of each succeeding tremor
might be likened, simply enough, to
an express train approaching you in
a cutting or to the violent escape of
steam from a boiler, the throbbing of
which is certainly similar ; but I can
think of nothing which describes it
more fairly than to say that it came
with an ever-increasing tremulous
roar, apparently produced by the
beating and pounding and explosion
of rocks by a force travelling at such
an excessive rate of speed that no
separation of the blows or beginning
or ending of the sound was percep-
tible. From the first tremors I
noticed to what seemed the last I
do not think the shock lasted more
than seventy seconds — quite long
enough, by the way, for those who
experienced it. The vertical displace-
ment came first, the horizontal rocking
followed, and combined with it, and
between the twentieth and fortieth
seconds of the total period of seventy,
I should say the maximum of violence
was attained. All this, however, I
only arrived at by thinking the
matter over during the ensuing night,
and comparing my experiences with
those of others.

The daylight showed how great was
the damage and almost irreparable
the loss ; how even those houses which
were built on solid principles and had
their walls composed of good hand-
made bricks and honestly cemented
with shell-lime (not the abominable
article of commerce which now does
duty for it in the United States) had
collapsed as houses built of cards, or,
where the walls were yet standing,
were rent from top to bottom with
fissures which gaped the wider as they
neared the foundations and therefore
their contact with the earthquake-
wave. The wooden houses suffered
even more, and frequently had been
moved several feet along the piles on

134

Weathering an Earthquake.

which they were built. I even saw a
large warehouse which had slid some
two feet along the wharf on which it
stood ; and there was one huge ware-
house, about four hundred feet long,
and built on piles, which was not only
of great weight in itself but had some
thousands of tons of phosphate in it,
which had been moved ten feet in
a southerly direction ! That is an
example of the horizontal force of the
wave. The fellow of this warehouse,
in all respects similar in size and con-
tents, had been bodily lifted up
several inches.

After such a proof of the great
force of the shock, it will seem no-
thing to speak of the damage done to
domestic and smaller buildings. Yet
they presented some curious examples
of the movement of the earth, — in no
way, perhaps, more strikingly than in
the way one was taken and another
left. A large store almost opposite
my hotel had the whole of one side
(some two hundred feet of brick wall)
dashed to fragments in the street.
With it went roof and floors and
every partition and piece of furniture
and part of the interior structure.
Yet curiously enough, the front of
this great building stood on the
main street apparently compact and
entire, with the tin sign hanging from
the slender iron rod, notifying that
business was still to be done. On the
other hand, in the next street (Broad
Street) I saw a domestic dwelling of
substantial style, the whole of the
front of which had fallen into the
street, but left the interior absolutely
intact and every room in perfect
order, so that one looked successively
into drawing-room, dining-room, and
bed-rooms and saw them each suitably
furnished, fitted and complete just as
one does when looking into the dolls'
house of the nursery. But there was
this quaint phenomenon, — nearly
every picture had been swung out

from the wall into the air and was
now hanging back outwards. In
another street everything had gone
ker-smash, as the Americans say, with
the exception of the roof which lay
over a wide waste of bricks and
mortar like a tarpaulin and apparently
as intact as ever. Here, the whole of
the upper part had fallen, and there
much of the lower. In one place the
high garden walls were flat but the
house almost untouched ; in another,
the house would be riddled with holes ;
in a third it would be riven with
fissures. Of the wooden houses many
were mere heaps of timber ; others
were completely turned over on their
sides so that you would have to climb
up the foundations, walk along the
level of the wall of the house, and
drop down into your front door with
a complete sense of an abysmal descent
wjo-stairs. Eccentric the movements
must have been, for here heavy pic-
tures would be thrown to the ground
and their frames smashed to match-
wood, while near by a delicate Parian
vase stood unmoved and unhurt. The
whole wall of plaster was ripped from
the lathing along the side of a room ;
a few feet away, on a light table, still
stood some framed photographs. In
another, a sofa was thrown twelve
feet across the room and smashed ; in
the opposite corner a spider-legged
Chippendale chair had not moved an
inch. Charleston, a city of fifty thou-
sand people, had in a moment become
homeless, and all the world and his
wife began to live in the open air.

Of tents, at first, we had none ;
and the shifts to which we were put
were sometimes absurd and always
inadequate. Every sort of canopy
served as a tent — rugs, carpets, quilts,
curtains, sheets, and blankets. For
props we used curtain-poles, ladders,
balustrading and anything indeed to
serve the purpose ; and as one walked
about it was strange to see protrud-

Weathering an Earthquake.

135

ing from these rude shelters the end of
a richly brocaded sofa or a handsome
chair upholstered in silk, and odds
and ends of good furniture which had
been carried hastily from the houses.
Never was there such a jumble of
the incongruous. Ladies in beautiful
peignoirs peeped out of the gaps
in tents contrived of curtains, and
exchanged greetings with neighbours
similarly situated in a wigwam of red
blankets. Sometimes personal cloth-
ing and umbrellas helped to eke out
the shelter ; tin cooking- vessels and
gilded chairs jostled one another with
an equality bred of equal utility.
Omnibuses, carriages, and carts all
served for temporary homes; and
when other expedients were appar-
ently wanting, there were scores of
huge barrels in which people were
sleeping. These strange encampments
overflowed the squares and open
spaces, and might be found on any
vacant lot, in many gardens attached
to ruined houses, and even along the
wider streets. I saw a ship's main-
sail ingeniously spread over a wooden
frame, and under it at night I
reckoned there were three hundred
people ! Charleston, in short, be-
came a city in camp. Everything
went on under canvas, or what did
duty for canvas. The course of
justice was not stayed, but the
judges held their court in a tent
which rapidly became suffocating ;
for churches were substituted small
canvas chapels, open in front towards
their open-air congregations ; the
steamers and vessels in the harbour
were occupied by thousands ; the
goods-trucks and carriages which stood
in the sidings of the railway-station
were crowded with refugees nightly
sleeping in them, and no one, not
even the boldest, ventured at first to
pass the night in a house. On Sun-
day the services were all held out
of doors, and the clergy and people

were so emotional that both fre-
quently burst into tears. The scene
outside the Roman Catholic church
was very striking. It was unsafe
for people to enter, so the priest
locked the entrance-gate but opened
wide the west door. A great con-
course of people gathered at this
gate and on their knees sought con-
solation by gazing through the doors
at the altar, in front of which the
red lamp was seen burning steadily
in the gloom.

For thirty days following this
terrible Tuesday the earthquake may
be said to have continued. On the
night of August 31st there were eight
shocks in all ; on Wednesday, three ;
on Thursday, three; on Friday, two
— all severe and dangerous. On
Saturday there were two more, and
from that time the shocks decreased
in violence though they occurred
almost every day. In fact, they
went on intermittently to the end
of March in the next year. But
their force was abated, and Charles-
ton was busy rebuilding and looking
forward to the future too hopefully
to be downcast by them. But all
the time I remained in the city and,
as I heard from others, for weeks
afterwards, there always seemed to
be in the quiet hours of the night, —
perhaps there really was — a most
curious tremulous feeling as if the
earth thereabouts were cushioned on
a bed of jelly in perpetual tremor.

It was perfectly natural, of course,
that for some people the real horrors
were not enough to satiate their
imagination. We were surfeited in
fact with many wonders. Balls of
fire were said to be bursting in mid-
air, wherever there was no one to see
them. It was not enough that streams
of water, mud, and sand were thrown
up through the fissures which had
opened in countless places and given
cause for fresh outbursts of terror ;

136

Weathering an Earthquake.

some historians of the time laboured
to make us believe that flames were
pouring through the cracks and seams
and threatening to consume the
whole country. On a few occa-
sions there was an upthrow of peb-
bles (probably from the wells) but
these became in the course of an
hour or two, or of a street or so,
heavy showers of red-hot stones, com-
pleting the destruction of such houses
as had been only partially demolished.
Quicksands there are, both under and
about Charleston ; but I know of no
single house which disappeared in
them. Hours and days of great emo-
tion there undoubtedly were, hair-
breadth escapes without number, and
strange meetings and partings in
plenty ; but I am sure that the promi-
nent citizen who was seized by his
burning hair as he was disappearing
down a flaming fissure and pulled up
out of the very jaws of hell by the
keeper of the dry-goods store (to whom
he owed much) was not at Charleston
on this occasion. History is notori-
ously difficult to write, but according
to some of my American friends it is
fairly easy to make.

It was only after a week and when
I was leaving Charleston for Savannah
and the South, that we realised how
really extensive the earthquake had
been. Tor more or less severe shocks
had been felt as far north as Canada,
as far west as the Rocky Mountains,
and as far south as Cuba ; but Charles-
ton was within fifteen miles of the
centre and radiating force, and all its
great devastating power was devoted
to that unfortunate city. But the
elasticity of the American tempera-
ment is great. Within a week, amidst
all the ruin and confusion, trade
began again. With a characteristic

grasp of the sweet uses of advertise-
ment, large posters appeared outside
the stores with legends such as these
writ large upon them : Same as last
week — Building down, Business up —
See our new Fall Stock — Owing to the
Removal of our Walls, our facilities
for handling our Business are In-
creased. To meet the very real dis-
tress, money began to pour in from
all parts of America and beyond it —
even from our London Mansion-
House ; and I think that one of the
quaintest endorsements ever made
was that written by the Mayor on the
back of a cheque for five thousand
dollars sent by the city of Baltimore :
The momentous question that came
down to us through the centuries —
Who is my neighbour ? — has been
answered. (Signed) Wm. A. Courte-
nay, Mayor.

But when I left Charleston I had
not done with the earthquake.
Wherever I travelled in Georgia or
Florida I came across vestiges of it
and constantly experienced renewed
though milder shocks. And more
than two months later, when I was
sitting in the hall of the chief hotel
in the quaint city of Savannah, with
its wonderful live-oaks and intolerable
streets of sand, a violent shock turned
the hotel practically inside out and
sent two hundred people flying,
dressed or half dressed, into the open
square in front. On the next day
after I set sail in a coasting-vessel for
New York, which port we safely made
after having spent three dismal nights
and days lost in one of those impene-
trable fogs that make the reef-bound
coast of Cape Hatteras unenviable
indeed. Still, I had weathered the
earthquake.

ARTHUR MOSTTEFIORE BRICE.

137

THE HOUSE BY THE SEA.

MY friend and I were walking along
the sea-shore in front of a northern
town at which we had spent the
summer together. He, who was a
painter and rather a moody fellow,
had been for a long time silent, and
I, in silence also, was observing the
unusual and sinister appearance of the
landscape. It was a strange evening.
The sun, not yet set, was a dull
orange colour, and with one single,
vertical, upward ray disappearing into
a cloud above, seemed to hang sus-
pended in the mist like a huge pen-
dulum swinging over the edge of the
world. The sea beneath it had that
curious unliquid appearance which
sometimes falls upon it with night,
while across it and the sand a mist
was slowly dragging itself, and with
us, as we walked, there sped the long,
melancholy, complaining sound of a
wind that carries rain.

" What a strange night," I said
aloud.

" Yes," answered my companion,
raising his head and coming to a
halt. " It is on such a night, in such
a scene, that I find the answer to
those well-meaning people who would
convince me that a landscape is in-
complete without a human figure.
Confess now, you who maintain that
there is no great art which has not
its birth in great emotion, what is
there wanting in this solitary shore,
under this darkening sky, to which a
human figure could add anything of
passion? Even the sinister touch
which your modern artist demands
is here."

"I agree with you," I returned,
" that there is in this desolate land-

scape a deep and lasting emotion, but
it seems to me as though one should
go a step further. Suppose this wide
sea-shore as waiting for some pas-
sionate human moment. Suppose
that, even as we are walking here,
some tragedy should detach itself
from those dunes and come to meet
us."

" I see what you mean," he replied
after a pause ; " but in that case I
should give up painting. Such emo-
tion is not paintable, or at any rate
it has no place in landscape-painting.
Your human climax would unnerve
me absolutely."

" For instance 1 " I asked.

" Ah, that is difficult," he an-
swered; "but I will try, if only to
convince you. Shall we walk on ? "

We resumed our walk, and after a
moment's thought he began.

" Well, explain it as you will, but
your suggestion, and perhaps also
something in this place under its
unusual aspect, has recalled to my
thoughts an incident which I wit-
nessed years ago on just such a shore
as this, an incident which I had
almost forgotten, but which recurs
to me now with great vividness, till
I seem to remember every word and
gesture of the unhappy woman whom
I then discovered. It happened, as
I said, some years ago, so that I was
younger than I am now. I had gone
to a small sea-side town to paint.
The town itself was a fair-weather
place full of invalids and fine ladies,
but several miles along the shore there
was a hamlet, or rather a jumble of
huts built under the sand-hills on a
part of the shore from which the

138

The House by the Sea.

water had receded, and which, covered
by a green moss, became even then at
high tide little more than a morass,
quaking and difficult to cross. This
colony was inhabited by the shrimp-
fishers who abound on those sandy
levels and had a bad name for squalor
and rioting.

" One day I set out to walk to this
place along a raised high-road built
out on the sand between the sea and
the town. It was a fine day; the
sun had blazed down from earliest
morning and by mid-day there was
not a cloud in the sky. Miles of
bleached sand, which the tide had
not covered for weeks, were around
me, and the road, raised above it,
upon which I was the solitary travel-
ler, with its end disappearing, as it
seemed, into that wilderness, appeared
to me like a great visible parable or
irony of life. There was no wind,
and the sea had ebbed far away out
of hearing, and, except for one long
flickering line on the horizon, out
of sight. Looking back at the point
where the road makes an abrupt turn
to the left towards the land again,
I saw the promontory upon which
the town was built, rising, or so it
appeared at that distance and place,
straight from the sea, a white curved
arm encircling the shore. Leaving
the road now empty behind me, I
was at once at the entrance to the
uninhabited country of sand, such
a place as the one through which we
are now walking, on one side rough
hills bound together by grey wisps
of deep-rooted grass and untrodden
mosses, and on the other a low sloping
plain, with its gulls and sea-fowl, its
passing sounds, its vague unlocated
mourning and lament, — a silent waste
where few people go and where strange
things might very well happen even in
daylight.

" For an hour I walked through this
desert without seeing any living being,

and hearing only my footsteps in the
sand. Then on looking back I could
no longer see the town, and in front of
me the sand-hills changed in shape, be-
coming lower and lower, until at last
they had the appearance of one large
field lapsed without purpose into sand.
From this point I could see the long
green spit which the land had thrust
out towards the sea, and above it the
houses of the fisher-folk, tumbling
hovels jostled together without any
attempt at a street among them, the
whole settlement haphazard and deso-
late and now almost empty.

" As I wandered among these huts,
from which came the sharp, pungent
scent of tar, of tackle and salt-fish, all
at once I came upon a ragged house of
the kind to be met with in a moor-
land country, long and low and
roofed with slabs of stone which had
gathered a greenish tinge from mould
and exposure. Beside it, and joined
to one end, was the black unroofed
skeleton of an old windmill. How
far inland had this mill once stood
before the sea, sucking away the land
had advanced to its edge, then re-
treating, left it useless to sea or land ?
It stood quite solitary, holding aloof
from the crowded impudent huts be-
low, like a baited creature sullenly
giving no sign to its tormentors.

" It seemed a ruin so desolate that
the thought of any person living there
did not occur to me. But following
the track which led to the landward
side of the mill I came upon a woman
standing with a child in her arms.
Stunted and bent with work rather
than with age, for her shoulders were
bowed, her hands seamed, and her
arms long and powerful, with one
hand she stroked the head of the
child who lay on her neck without
stirring, uttering a faint whining
sound like a sick animal. And, indeed,
on coming nearer I saw that it was
very ill of some wasting disease, 1

The House by the Sea.

139

saw also that the woman's face was
sunken, her mouth drawn in, her eyes
dull in the midst of two dark hollows.
To explain my appearance I asked
some question about the mill which
she answered briefly ; and then look-
ing at the child I said : ' The baby
is very ill.'

" ' Yes, Sir,' she said.
" ' Is she your only child ? ' I asked.
" ' No, Sir,' she answered ; ' I'm the
mother of eleven. You wouldn't think
it to look at me, but I am. They are
all buried but this one. I had four
little boys among them ; they seemed
strong, but they died.'

'"Eleven is a great number,' I said,
something at a loss for words. ' Did
you lose them young 1 '

" ' Before they was of an age to take
notice. Yes ; I've had eleven little
childern. It seems a good many, but
the Lord was very good to me, as He
is to poor people : He took them all
from me. Yes, Sir,' she continued,
seizing desperately at the sympathy
of a stranger as a lonely person will,
' I grieved at the time very hard,
especially when I lost all the little
boys ; I couldn't part with them easy.
But the Lord knowed best. I dare
say He thought of the struggle I
should have to keep them all. I
should have had to work harder than
what I have done to keep eleven chil-
dern. And then the thought comes
to my mind that they're all there
waiting for me.'

'"That is a comfort to you,' I
said.

" ' Oh yes, Sir, a comfort. But it
grieves me most that I can't read. I
can't fly to God's Word in trouble.
The Lord knows it and no doubt
He'll forgive me. There was a lady
tried to learn me, — in her own home
she did ; she took me into her own
home, but what with having had to
work and being of a good age I
couldn't take it. She gave me the

Book too ; but there, — I can't read
it nor never shall.'

" Perplexed and embarrassed I did
not know what to say, but the woman,
pushing open a door behind her, con-
tinued : ' My father's in the house.
Will you come in and see him 1 '
She went through the door-way and
I followed her into a kitchen which
was dim and close and dry as an
oven, in the darkest corner of which
a very old and very decrepit man
was sitting, his head fallen on
his breast and his hands clasped in
front of him. The woman went up
to him and grasping his shoulder
shouted : ' Father, Father, here's a
gentleman come to see you.'

" The old man raised his head and,
sighing at every movement, peered
round the room in search of me. As
I stepped forward that he might see
me, he said shaking his head, ' I'm
an ould man, Sir.'

" ' I'm afraid you're not very well,'
I replied taking his hand.

" ' I'm an ould man,' he repeated ;
' that's what it is ; I'm an ould
man.'

" ' He's eighty-nine is Father,' said
the woman ; ' aren't you, Father ? ' she
asked bending down.

" ' Eh1?' said the old man looking up
sideways.

" ' You're eighty-nine — eighty-nine
years of age.'

" ' Yes,' he said, c eighty-nine ; the
age of my father before me.'

" ' That's a long life,' said I ; ' you
remember strange things I dare
say.'

" ' Yes, Sir,' he said, stirring a little,
and gasping at the same time. ' Do
you know a place called Home's
Wood?'

" ' No,' said I.

" ' Home's Wood,' he repeated look-
ing at me doubtfully. ' No 1 It was
theer I come from, — from Home's
Wood. There was a journey-man

140

The House by the Sea.

tailor lived theer in them days, very
like you to look at. You don't know
it?'

" ' No, I never heard of it,' I said
again, upon which he seemed to con-
sider. ' I had two donkeys in them
days,' he said after a pause, raising
his head and chuckling ; ' that was
before I come here.'

" ' Tell us their names, Father,' said
the woman.

" ' Names ? There was one of 'em
Lady and the other was Lion.'

" ' He were a pedlar once wur
Father,' explained the woman, ' be-
fore he wur laid aside. It's rheu-
matic gout as ails him. I laughed at
the doctor when he told me. " Oh
yes," he says, "it's all right; poor
people can have gout as well as the
quality." "It seems then," I says,
" that there's complaints can be had
free by poor people if there's nothing
else ; " and he laughed and says " Yes,
it does seem so." '

"Here the old man stirred again
and looked at his daughter. ' She's
seen sorrow,' he said. I nodded.
' Yes ' he said ' she's seen sorrow.'

"After this he became silent and
with his head bowed seemed to have
withdrawn from us into himself, into
his memory perhaps, or that empty
echoing place which his memory had
become.

" The woman, talking still, went to
the window-sill and took from it one
of those cheap Bibles which are used
to distribute among the poor.

" ' This is what the lady give me/
she said holding it out to me. But
as I took it, a movement from the
child in her arms made her look at
its face. I could see that it was
already dying. The woman held it
for a moment, and then, laying it on
a wide chair covered with a cushion,
she went and seated herself on the
floor several paces away and covered
her face with both hands. ' I cannot
abide it ! ' she cried. ' Oh, I cannot
abide it ! '

" The old man remained motionless,
and though I saw that there was
nothing to be done, I could not go
away. Then I thought of going to
summon some help and moved towards
the window to lay down the Bible
which I was still holding upon the
sill ; but suddenly the woman spring-
ing up snatched the Book from my
hands. She opened it once and held
it as though trying to read it ; then,
with a gesture which I have never
forgotten, she raised the child's head
and laid the Bible underneath it.
At the same moment the child
trembled and lay still, its head rest-
ing on God's Word. I could do
nothing. I went out and found a
woman to whom I gave some money
and sent her into the house; and
then I set out over the sands, which
were nearly dark, towards home.

" You see," said my friend in con-
clusion, " I know the kind of emotion
you mean. But don't ask me to
paint it— that's all."

141

A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel I
To-night strange news we have to tell.
Three wandering merchantmen we be,
Come to you from a far countree.

The world is wide from sea to sea,
Many as sands its wonders be ;
But never sailor's tongue can tell
Of stranger goods than these we sell.

With scented woods in far Cathay
The merchants traffic day by day,
With carven ivory, ball in ball,
Tables of teak and jade-beads small.

The hunters from the chase come back,
Where their own blood has made the track,
With tiger-claws and tiger-hide, —
The world is rich, the world is wide.

But we three merchants have to sell
A thing more warm than wild beast's fell,
A thing more rich than teak or jade,
Fairer than toys for princes made.

Here in a carven box lies hid

A secret Egypt's pyramid

Were all too poor to buy, a thing

By beggars sought, scorned by a king.

Who to this casket puts his ear
The singing of the stars shall hear ;
And under those strong melodies
He shall hear, too, a Baby's cries.

Who to this casket kneels to see
What secret in its clasp may be,
Shall see the shining of a star
Brighter than those which flame afar.

142 A Christmas Carol

The bounds of time shall break, and he
A night in Nazareth shall be,
And seek the manger manifest,
To see God on His mother's breast.

Ages ago such sight we sought,
And beyond space and time were brought
To roam the world as merchants three,
Bearing for sale this mystery.

The world is fair, the world is wide,
The strong men perish in their pride :
The world spins on, and all is well —
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel !

U3

IMPRESSIONS OF KLONDIKE.
V

A GREAT deal that is misleading has
been written about the climate of the
Klondike. The country is an Arctic
one, and certainly not a place for
delicate persons ; but with reasonable
care, proper food and clothing, and
attention to the elementary rules of
health, there is no reason why the
Yukon Territory should prove fatal to
anyone. It was not the climate that
killed many and ruined the physique
of more ; if the victims had led any-
where else the life they led in the
Klondike the results would have been
the same. Nearly every case of collapse
was due to want of proper nourish-
ment, over-exertion, dissipation, or
uncleanliness, — often to a combination
of all four causes. Scarcity of fresh
food predisposed many to disease. In
their haste to grow rich men were led
to work an unreasonable number of
hours, to ignore the necessity of cook-
ing their food thoroughly, and of
taking time over their meals. Fat
bacon, greasy beans, bread made with
baking-powder, tea and coffee, often
without milk and sugar, were the
typical articles of food, varied occa-
sionally with oatmeal and dried fruits
stewed. Even the fresh exhilarating
atmosphere of the Klondike could not
enable men, who were leading particu-
larly laborious lives every day of the
week, to maintain health and strength
on such a diet. A man requires good
food under ordinary conditions of life ;
and in an Arctic country, where the
j cold saps the vitality, not a worse but
I a more generous supply of nourish-
ment is essential. But, owing to the
mistaken advice given them, the

majority of those who went to the
Klondike only took with them what
were deemed the necessaries of life, a
supply of food upon which no white
man would think of living at home for
a month, much less for a year. The
high prices that ruled in Dawson
prevented many men from purchas-
ing luxuries, even if they were wise
enough to appreciate how miserably
inadequate was their outfit.

Dirt was another fruitful cause
of disease and ill-health. Personal
cleanliness is not the strong point of
the miner in any part of the world,
but in Klondike the neglect of this
cardinal virtue amounted almost to a
crime. To a limited extent it was
excusable, for a bath is no easy
thing to come by in those parts. In
winter snow or ice has to be melted,
and in summer the water in nearly
all the streams is very muddy ; but
upon those who persistently ignored
her laws, Nature took a terrible
vengeance.

All these evils, however, arose out
of the circumstances under which men
were living in a wild, isolated, un-
settled country, and cannot be put
down to the climate, which, though
severe during many months of the
year, is certainly not unhealthy.
Except for the absence of sunshine
from November to the end of January,
the winter is not depressing. The
sharp, dry cold, without a breath of
wind, is particularly invigorating, and
enables one to accomplish without
excessive fatigue what would be im-
possible in a more genial climate. Even
when the sun does not rise above the

H4

Impressions of Klondike.

horizon there are never less than six
hours of daylight, and eight hours of
sufficient light by which to work out
of doors.

During the winter of 1898-9 the
lowest temperature recorded was fifty-
five degrees below zero, or eighty-
seven degrees of frost; this occurred
at the end of November, and only
lasted for a few days. The next
coldest spell, when the thermometer
remained almost persistently at from
forty to fifty degrees below zero, was
in February, and lasted for nearly a
fortnight. But these low tempera-
tures are not so terrible as they sound.
There was not a day during this ex-
tremely cold weather on which I was
not out for many hours, often travelling-
long distances. I have walked as
much as forty-five miles a day, and
after a good sleep felt none the worse
for it. In England, even if I were in
good condition, such a journey would
be a physical impossibility for me.

Two things I learned by experience
carefully to observe. The first was to
make adequate provision for shedding
the wind. Even the slight stir caused
by walking through the still atmo-
sphere must be guarded against. The
keen air cuts like a knife, and pierces
all ordinary clothing ; and I shall not
readily forget what I endured from
neuralgic rheumatism in my knees the
first time I was exposed for hours to
the cold without proper protection.
A parka, — which is practically a long
sack with arms, and a hood that can
be drawn over the head or thrown
back — made of some light fur, soft
leather, or cotton twill, is the best
thing for shedding the wind under
all circumstances. - My own parka
weighed less than four pounds, and
proved invaluable. The only other
differences I made in my winter-
clothing between London and the
Klondike, were a flannel instead of
a linen shirt, felt instead of leather

boots, lined buckskin mits instead of
gloves, and for head-gear a woollen
toque that could be pulled well down
over the face and ears. The second
thing to be observed when working
or walking is not to be too warmly
clothed. Nothing is more dangerous
than to get over-heated, and wet with
perspiration. A violent chill is almost
certain to be felt as soon as one stops,
and if dry underclothing cannot be
obtained the result may be serious.

There are traditions that at times
the temperature in the Klondike falls
to seventy and seventy-five degrees
below zero, but I am not inclined to
give any credit to these stories. Ex-
cept during the cold spells the
thermometer during the winter of
1898-9 ranged from fifteen to forty
degrees below zero, the average being
approximately from twenty-five to
thirty. This was not in Dawson, but
up in the mining district. But the
more moderate temperatures often
prove the more trying, owing to the
prevalence of wind. Ten degrees
below zero with a strong wind is
far harder to bear than eighty-seven
degrees of frost with not a breath of
air stirring. In exposed places like
Dawson, where the wind sweeps down
the Klondike and up the Yukon
River, as through a vast funnel,
there is always more or less wind ;
but in the valleys a breeze in winter
is rare, and I never knew it to blow
during the extremely cold weather.

The autumn and spring are de-
lightful, with plenty of warm sun-
shine during the day, and sharp,
bracing frosts at night. These bright
days, when it is rarely cloudy or
stormy, compensate for the short d
days. I thought the weather duri
September, March, and April, perha
the most beautiful I had ever ex
enced. In May the days begin
grow unpleasantly long, and the s
too hot. The sunshine is white

Impressions of Klondike.

145

glaring, and though the heat of the
sun is not remarkable, it is peculiarly
scorching. During the summer from
eighty to ninety degrees in the shade
are not uncommon in the middle of
the day, but the heat is nearly always
tempered by a refreshing breeze. The
mornings and evenings are cool, the
nights damp and chilling, and the
constant variations of temperature
are trying to everyone. Storms of
rain and hail are frequent, and
though the summer generally speak-
ing is a dry season compared with
England, the weather is often cloudy
for days together and depressing.
During nearly three months it is suffi-
ciently light to work the whole of the
twenty-four hours, but even on the
longest day of the year the sun dips
below the horizon, and except from
the tops of the hills is invisible for a
considerable time.

Winter in the Arctic regions makes
different impressions upon different
minds. To me the dominant cha-
racteristic of the Klondike was its
silence, a silence that was always
oppressive and at times appalling.
There are few things that weigh
heavier on the spirit, or are harder
to sustain unshaken. Away from the
beaten lines of travel there was not
a sound to be heard, except the noise
of one's own movements, which, in
that dry still atmosphere, thrust itself
upon the ear and alarmed by its un-
accustomed importunity. For many
weeks it was almost a pain to move
about my solitary cabin ; the creak
of the boards under my feet, the harsh
noise made by the moving of any
article, jarred upon the ear and
startled the attention. I seemed
haunted by strange sounds, which
preyed on the mind and terrorised
I the nerves. Outside, the solemn
silence was only broken by the hoarse
cry of black, ominous ravens. For
weeks at a time not a breath of air
No. 494. — VOL. LXXXIII.

stirred, and even when the wind blew
there was not a tree, not a bush, near
my cabin, in which it could awake
mournful music. It was a silence as
of the grave ; a frozen world wrapped
in death-like stillness, that over-
awed the mind and stifled human
aspiration.

The solitude of Nature is only one
degree less oppressive than the lone-
liness of a great city. There can be
nothing so depressing, so hopeless, as
the feeling that comes to the weary
and the unfortunate in the midst of
thousands of fellow-beings with whom
no ties of friendship exist. But next
to the despair born of this loneliness,
comes the despondency that fills " the
wilderness and the solitary place."
Brought face to face with Nature in
this way we recognise that the bond
we would fain believe to exist be-
tween her and humanity ia a thing
of the imagination, and that it is only
our craving for sympathy which leads
us to endow with our own emotions
the passionless, unheeding world
about us. The sea moans, but it is
not with those who mourn ; the sun
shines, but it is not for those who
rejoice. In face of the insensibility
and unconcern of Nature man feels a
pigmy ; his aspirations are dwarfed,
the limitations of immortality hem
him in on every side. Few who have
spent a winter in the frozen North
can escape feeling the oppression of
its silence, the dread of its solitude.

I have been in many parts of the
world but have never seen anything
to equal the glory of sunset and sun-
rise in the Klondike. Night and
morning the sky is aflame with colour,
to which the long cool shadows, the
dark green masses of fir and spruce
tree, the sombre rolling hills, are a
vivid contrast. It is an apocalypse
of the immortal and the earthly. The
skies glow, the ethereal blue is barred
with fire, far away the Rocky Moun-

146

Impressions of Klondike.

tains clad in eternal snow grow rosy
at their peaks, and hide their seamed
and rugged sides in deep purple
shadow ; but at our feet the earth
wears no radiant garment, for neither
the glory of the sun nor the splendour
of the moon can transform the dreary
monotonous hills, or brighten the
dense colour of the Arctic verdure.

VI.

Of the wealth of the existing gold-
fields it is difficult to give trustworthy
information. From the first the
total output of gold has been grossly
exaggerated. The wealth of the
Klondike has been judged, not upon
the basis of what all the claims worth
working will yield, but upon the basis
of what has been obtained from a few
exceptionally rich ones. At the same
time there can be no doubt that the
district is a very rich one. The total
output for the year 1897-8 may safely
be estimated at nearly three million
sterling. During 1898-9 the value
of the gold obtained must have been
close upon five million, and it is be-
lieved the returns for the past year
will be nearly six. Altogether fully,
if not more than, thirteen million
pounds worth of gold have been taken
out of the placer claims, and it may
confidently be asserted that not a
tithe of the wealth of the existing
gold-fields has been touched. But
whether the very large deposits of
gold that exist outside exceptionally
rich areas can be worked at a suffi-
cient profit to justify the employment
of capital, is a question which only
mining experts can answer satis-
factorily. The shortness of the
summer, the scarcity of water, the
absence of lakes which could be
utilised as reservoirs, the uncertainty
whether hydraulic methods can be
applied successfully under the peculiar
conditions of the Klondike, render it

difficult even for mining-engineers to-
speak with certainty. On the whole
I am inclined to think that the ob-
stacles can be overcome, and that
many years must elapse before the
Klondike as a gold yielding district
is exhausted, even if no new dis-
coveries are made.

Whether new placer gold-fields, and
quartz sufficiently rich to pay for
working, will be found, is a matter
of conjecture. The districts of the
Stewart, Felly, and Salmon Rivers,
of which so much was expected, have
so far proved grievously disappointing.
So far as we know not a single dis-
covery has been made outside the
Klondike mining district, and its im-
mediate vicinity, which promises to
prove of value. The considerable
amount of intelligent prospecting done
has conclusively shown that gold does
not exist in paying quantities in many
places where there were believed to
be rich deposits. But it would be
rash to assert that good placer claims
will not be found in other parts of
these large areas. The conditions
which governed the distribution of
gold in the Yukon Territory are only
now being examined, and those en-
titled to speak with authority are
confident that in time new and
valuable gold-bearing areas will be
located and developed.

The Klondike is essentially a coun-
try for the employment of capital.
In the development and working of
claims the poor owner is forced to
adopt slow, costly, and wasteful
methods, and only works the richest
part of his claim. The remainder of
the ground is left untouched because
it would not pay to handle. But in
many of the creeks there is gold in
every foot of the waste ground, and
gold in ample quantities to warrant
working by improved and economical
methods, which are only within the
reach of capitalists. Up to the

Impressions of Klondike.

147

present, except in a few instances,
nearly as much gold has been left
behind in the ground worked as has
been taken out ; while, even of the
gold brought to the surface, a con-
siderable percentage is lost owing to
the careless and defective methods
employed.

Nothing more primitive can be
imagined than the system of mining
that prevailed up to 1899. Upon
the majority of claims not more than
three or four men were at work ; and
beyond picks, shovels, and a few car-
penter's tools, they had no appliances.
Two or more shafts were sunk, about
twenty feet apart ; the alluvial de-
posit was cut through with a pick
and an old axe ; so soon as sand and
gravel were reached, the ground had
to be thawed by means of wood fires.
Each fire only penetrated to a depth
of eight or ten inches, and consumed
a large amount of fuel, which not
only had to be cut and split, but
often hauled by hand from a distance
sometimes of a mile. Sinking was
therefore painfully slow work. When
a depth of six feet was reached, a
windlass had to be erected over the
mouth of the shaft, and the thawed
ground brought to the surface in
square wooden boxes, or buckets as
they are called, attached to the end
of the windlass-rope. In some dis-
tricts gold is found at the very be-
ginning of the gravel, the deposit
increasing in richness until the broken
bed-rock is reached. The bed-rock
varies greatly in character. It con-
sists chiefly of mica-schist, quartzite-
schist, quartz, slatey-shale, and in a
few places of ground-up quartz and
other sediment. Where the broken
stone stands on edge across the valley,
or across the course the gold was
driven, it acted as a riffle, and the
deposit is generally very rich. By
means of his gold-pan the miner tests
the value of the auriferous ground

every few inches. The pan, which is
made of sheet steel, is circular, with
sloping sides, and holds rather more
than a large shovel full of gravel. In
washing out a sample of auriferous
dirt the pan is held in a tub of
water, and skilfully swayed from side
to side. This motion gradually sends
the heavy gold to the bottom, and
the sediment and gravel are washed
away over the edge, the larger stones
being taken out with the hand.
There is much more skill in panning
than might be imagined. An old
hand will separate every particle of
dirt and gravel from the gold in a
surprisingly short time, without losing
any of the precious metal.

After all sand and gravel have
been got rid of, the gold is found at
the bottom of the pan, together with
a quantity of black sand, which is
really nothing but pulverised magnetic
iron ore. Where the particles of gold
are not light and flakey most of this
heavy sand can be panned out in the
same way that the gravel and sedi-
ment have been got rid of. But
where the bits of gold are light and
fine a little mercury is placed in the
pan, and run backwards and forwards
over the sand. Wherever it touches
the particles of gold they combine
with it, forming an amalgam, which
is placed in a piece of buckskin, and
the surplus mercury squeezed out and
put back into a flask for further use.
The lump of gold and mercury that
remains is placed in a steel pan or
shovel, and heated over a fire until all
the mercury is vaporised, and nothing
remains but the gold. Mercury is
seldom used in the Klondike District
as the gold is fairly heavy ; but the
product of each pan generally has to
be freed of black sand with a magnet,
to which the particles of iron ore
adhere. These rough and ready
methods are excellent for the pro-
spector, but lead to considerable loss

L2

148

Impressions of Klondike.

when applied to the working of a
mine. It is surprising how little gold
it takes to make up the value of six-
pence or a shilling ; and the wasteful,
happy go-lucky miner throws back
upon the ground the value of a great
many more shillings in the course of
a week than he imagines.

Panning-out is the sole guide of
the alluvial miner. Without it, par-
ticularly in a frozen country, he is
working in the dark. Its results tell
him how much of the gravel is worth
winding up to the surface, and how
far down in the difficult bed-rock,
which first has to be thawed by fires,
and then loosened with the pick, it is
worth while to go. This taking up of
the bed-rock, to the depth of from one
to three feet, is very slow, laborious
work, but the miner is often rewarded
by seeing the gold lying thick in the
crevices, and adhering to the sticky
sediment on the face of each piece of
stone. I have taken as much as ten
shillings' worth of gold off one small
piece of bed-rock.

When the shafts have been sunk
to the desired depth, the miner con-
nects them by a tunnel. Every inch
of the frozen ground must be thawed,
and until a considerable working-space
has been cleared, all the ground, rich
or worthless, has to be wound up by
hand to the surface, the pay-dirt, or
auriferous soil being thrown on one
heap, and the waste on another.

As the face of the drift under-
ground is extended, fires are laid.
These are lighted the last thing at
night, and are burnt out by the
morning, when the drift is ready for
the miner with his pick and shovel.
Three industrious and intelligent
men will work a surprisingly large
piece of ground in this primitive
manner between the beginning of
October and the end of April, the
ordinary months for working in win-
ter. Much depends, of course, upon

whether an ample supply of fuel has
been laid in beforehand. For mining-
purposes, and for heating their cabin,
three men require fully thirty cords
of wood ; and on some of the rich
claims, where a large number of men
are employed, as much as four hun-
dred cords are used in a winter. In
a district where the trees are not
large, the timber, at this rate of con-
sumption, may truly be said to vanish
like smoke.

As the warm weather approaches
drifting underground has to be given
up. The milder atmosphere causes
the fires to thaw out to a greater
height than required, the roof scales
off, and there is a danger of the
undermined ground caving in. An-
other and more serious obstacle is the
carbonic-acid gas generated under-
ground by the wood- fires ; this is
deadly, and has caused the loss of
many lives in the Klondike. While
the cold lasts, and the atmosphere is
light and dry, the gas, even with
little or no ventilation, readily
ascends ; but so soon as the weather
gets warmer, the gas hangs about in
the pit, clinging to the ground and the
sides, and tilling the crevices. Being
scentless, its presence is first detected
by a slight smarting of the eyes ; and
the miner who, through ignorance or
foolhardiness, neglects that ominous
warning has few minutes to live.
As he moves about he creates a cur-
rent of air ; the poisonous gas rises,
and the unfortunate man suddenly
falls insensible. Unless help is at
hand, and he is at once taken to the
surface, and means of restoration
applied, death ensues within a few
minutes.

I had an unpleasant experience
soon after arriving in Klondike with
this deadly enemy. K. and I had
gone to examine a claim on Hunker
Creek, where was the owner M. with
two other men, A. and J., to help us.

Impressions of Klondike.

149

We were fully warned of the danger
of carbonic acid gas, and were all
made more careful by a shocking
tragedy which had jusb occurred on
Dominion Creek. There three men
had been at work, two on the surface
and one below. Suddenly the man
at the mouth of the shaft saw his
comrade underground fall as though
dead. There was no ladder. Calling
his other mate, he made a loop in
the end of the rope, put one foot in
it, grasped the line in his hands, was
rapidly lowered to the bottom, and,
being a powerful man, picked up his
insensible companion, planted both
feet in the loop of the rope, and
shouted to the third fellow on top to
hoist. The man at the windlass
wound his two companions up. With-
out being aware of it the man who
was carrying his insensible partner
had inhaled a good deal of gas and
the moment he got into the fresh air
near the top of the shaft he lost
consciousness. His hands relaxed
their grasp and both men fell back
into the mine. Helpless to render
assistance alone, the man at the
windlass frantically sought help ; but
aid came too late, and when taken
out, both the unfortunate men were
dead.

This made us very cautious. Fires
were lighted in two shafts, connected
by a tunnel, for ventilation, and
ample time was allowed for all gas
to escape before we attempted to
descend the next day. Then we
lowered a lighted candle into the
mine, and as it burned brightly we
concluded there was no danger.
Owing to an injury to my foot it
was arranged that I should stay on
the surface with J. My friend K.,
the owner, and one of the miners
were let down by the windlass-rope.
They declared there was not a particle
of gas, and we sent down the buckets
to be filled with samples of the auri-

ferous deposit. The man J. who was
working the windlass had been drink-
ing, and was in a nervous excitable
state. The first bucket came up, and
taking it off J. sent down the rope
again. As he was winding up the
second, I saw A. who had been using
the pick and shovel, suddenly stagger.
He would have fallen if K. had not
caught him. " Hurry up," I shouted
to J., and as the bucket came to the
mouth of the shaft I swung it out,
unhooked the rope, and sent it back
as fast as possible, at the same time
shouting down, " Make the rope fast
round his body under both arms."
This was done and we wound up A.
quickly ; he was a large heavy man
who weighed at least fifteen stone.
When he came to the mouth of the
shaft J. held the windlass, and with
much difficulty I dragged A., who
was insensible, over the edge and laid
him on his back on the ground. J.
seized the rope to undo it, but between
his excitement and the condition he
was in, his efforts were useless ; nor
would he give way till I resorted to
force, and finally got the rope loose
and sent it down again, calling out
to M. and K. to put the rope round
their bodies. M. came up next, K.
refusing to leave till the last. When
the rope had been again returned, K.
was evidently dazed. At first he
refused to slip his arms through the
loop, and insisted we should wind him
up with his foot in the lower loop and
holding on by his hands. How
thankful I was afterwards that I
sternly insisted on his doing as he
was told. After what seemed a
terrible suspense, he at last adjusted
the rope, and we brought him rapidly
to the top. Before he reached the
mouth of the shaft he was insensible,
and was in the first stage of a con-
vulsion. Wo had much difficulty in
restoring both men. Strangely enough,
M. felt no ill effects, but K. and A.

150

Impressions of Klondike.

were exceedingly ill ; their teeth and
hands were clenched, their limbs
rigid and icy cold. We carried them
into the shade, induced artificial
respiration, rubbed them vigorously
to promote the circulation, and, as
we had no alcohol, gave them strong
coffee. But it was five hours before
they were able to walk about, and K.
suffered from indisposition for ten
days afterwards.

When the warm weather comes and
there is plenty of water, the aurifer-
ous deposit, or pay-dirt, brought to
the surface during the winter, and
heaped up by itself, is washed out
by means of sluice-boxes. A line of
these are placed by the side of the
heap. The boxes are usually twelve
feet long, ten inches wide at one end
and twelve at the other, the two sides
being about eight or ten inches high.
They are fitted into each other, the
small end of one being dropped into
the large end of another. In the
bottom of the boxes, into which the
pay-dirt is to be shovelled, and for
several boxes further on, riffles are
placed. In the Klondike the riffle in
general use consists of four or five
round pieces of wood, flattened on
the part that is to lie against the
bottom of the sluice-box, and fastened
together by a four-sided block at each
end ; these are wedged down firmly
to keep them in place. The fall given
to the sluice-boxes varies from eight
to twelve inches per box, according
to the amount of water obtainable.
When all is ready the water is turned
through the boxes, and the pay-dirt
is shovelled in, care being taken that
the boxes do not choke, and that the
water is allowed sufficient time to
keep the top of the riffles clear of
debris. The gold falls to the bottom
between the poles of the riffles, and
only travels a few feet ; while the
sand, gravel, and smaller stones are
swept away by the rushing water. In

one of the boxes, which is made very
much wider than the others, stands a
man with a fork, who throws out the
heavy stones, and turns over and over
the pieces of bed-rock until the gold
adhering to their face has been washed
off. Every day or two the riffles are
loosened, only a gentle stream of
water is allowed to flow through, and
by a skilful use of a bit of flat board
and a whisk, most of the sand and
gravel is separated from the gold,
which is then scooped up, put in a
pan, and thoroughly cleaned in the
way already described. Where there
is an adequate supply of water, the
flow of which can be properly regu-
lated, an experienced man will clean
up the sluice-boxes in a short time,
and take out the bulk of the gold
freed from all other matter.

The clean-up is a time of excite-
ment and anxiety for the owner, for
upon it depends the success or failure
of his many months of patient toil.
In nine cases out of ten the result
is disappointing, often disastrous.
Even old miners find it very difficult
to form an accurate estimate of the
value of the pay-dirt they bring to
the surface during the long winter
months. On the very few rich claims
the clean-up is sometimes a sensa-
tional sight ; two I can remember
which made me wish I was the
fortunate owner. In one case, where
six men had been shovelling into the
sluice- boxes for eighteen hours, the
gold taken out amounted in value
to £2,200 ; in another, at which I
assisted as a spectator, the gold was
valued at over £6,000, and included
one nugget worth nearly £60. A
few sights of this kind are apt to
make one enthusiastic for the time
about gold-mining in the Klondike,
and to promote a belief that you have
only to go and dig, to be equally
fortunate ; but experience is a great
disenchanter. Next to witnessing a

Impressions of Klondike.

151

large clean-up the greatest sensation
is a rich pan-out. In panning I ac-
quired no small skill, and could pass
for a cunning old hand at the opera-
tion. But my best pan was only a
little over £5 ; though I have seen
many finer results, one on Dominion
Creek which yielded nearly £50, and
one on Eldorado where the shovel-full
of dirt produced fully £100. These
picked pans, however, give no real
idea of the value of a claim. Too
often the miner in Klondike finds
that he has absurdly over-estimated
the value of his pay-dirt from the
results of his pannings, and that
though he may obtain a large amount
of gold, it has cost him nearly a
sovereign, if not more, for every
twenty shillings he has taken out
of the ground.

It is only reasonable to assume
that, even if no new discoveries of
gold are made, the rich deposits of
coal, copper, and other minerals,
which are known to exist in the
Yukon Territory, will be worked.
There are also considerable tracts of
land that could be brought under
cultivation for crops requiring only
a short season. The country is very
far from being the land of desolation
it has often been described. The soil
is rich, and when stripped of the
thick moss with which the surface is
covered, quickly thaws out in spring
to a sufficient depth to render it pro-
ductive. Many successful experiments
in market -gardening have already

been made near Dawson. During
the summer of 1899 there was a
large supply of locally-grown lettuce,
radishes, French beans, and other
vegetables, which were of excellent
quality. Some districts are a verit-
able flower-garden in summer ; and
many plants and flowers not indi-
genous can be cultivated in the open.
There is no reason why any resident
of the country should suffer from
scurvy owing to want of fresh food.
On the hills and in the gulches tons
of delicious wild cranberries, bil-
berries, red and black currants, and
raspberries may be gathered. The
cranberries, which do not ripen till
late in the season, can easily be frozen
and stored in that way for use during
the winter and spring ; but up to
the time I left the Klondike these
abundant local supplies of fresh fruit
had been almost entirely allowed to
go to waste.

Though the timber in the vicinity
of Dawson is small, and the supply
rapidly becoming exhausted, there is
plenty of fine timber up the Klondike
and Stewart Rivers, and in many
other parts. Pine, spruce, poplar, and
birch abound, many of the trees being
of good height, and of sufficient
diameter to yield excellent logs. In
short the country, in spite of its long
winter and extreme cold during some
months of the year, is a very good
one, and in time can be made to
support a large population.

CHARLES C. OSBORNB.

152

THE RESERVIST IN WAR.

BY A REGIMENTAL OFFICER.

ONE of the most important and
most difficult tasks before the new
Parliament is the decision as to the
future organisation of our Army ; and
as the existing (Short Service and
Reserve) system has for the first time
been thoroughly tested during the
war in South Africa, some details as
to the conduct and physical charac-
teristics of the Reserve-soldier may
be both valuable and interesting.

It is true that portions of the
Reserve have been re-called to the
Colours on two previous occasions,
but their embodiment then was but
brief and partial, and they were not
required to face a formidable foe.
The test, therefore, was not a thorough
one, and the value of the Reserve
was, a year ago, still uncertain.

I will frankly confess that, like the
majority of regimental officers, I was,
before the present war, sceptical as to
the worth of the Reservist. I believed
that he would prove weak in discipline,
a bad shot, and that, being older than
many of the non-commissioned officers
under whose orders he would find
himself, he would frequently get out
of hand and be a source of weakness
rather than of strength to his battalion.
I am glad to admit that, with certain
exceptions to which reference shall be
made, I was wrong in this opinion,
and that the Reservists who have
come under my eyes during a year's
campaign have done excellent service
in action, and have behaved well in
camp and on the march. They have
imparted steadiness to the young
soldiers, and have not fallen behind

them in dash. Their knowledge of
camp-life (acquired for the most part
in India) has enabled them to pick up
the esssential habits of campaigning
with great promptitude ; and during
the real war-stress of the protracted
operations leading to the relief of
Ladysmith, and the hardly less trying
monotony of stationary life under
service-conditions that followed, their
discipline in essentials has been
excellent.

As for their skill in shooting, the
limited practice that we were able
to carry out during the voyage to
Cape Town showed that mastery of
the rifle, once acquired, was easily
regained ; and on the rare occasions
(I can only recall two) when they
fired for a considerable period against
the Boers on fairly equal terms, they
showed a decided superiority, kept
down the enemy's fire with perfect
success, and inflicted more loss than
they sustained. The last statement
is made on the authority of Boer
prisoners of war, with several of
whom I have discussed the course of
the various actions, and who had no
object in deceiving me.

If the shooting of the man in the
ranks was satisfactory it was, how-
ever, difficult in the limited time at
our disposal to instruct the Reservist
non-commissioned officer in the exer-
cise of fire-discipline ; and this state-
ment brings me at once to the
unpleasant task of finding fault, and
to the duty of pointing out what I
hold to be the real weakness of the
Reserve- system, the non-commissioned

The Reservist in War.

153

officer ; for though the Reservist
private has agreeably surprised me
by his good qualities, I am bound
to state that the Reservist non-
commissioned officer has proved dis-
appointing.

There are of course reasons why
one portion of the Reserve has shown
itself inferior to the remainder, and
that portion consisting of men who
must formerly have shown aptitude
at their duties ; and I will give some
of these reasons. In the first place
a considerable proportion of the
sergeants serve on for pensions and
consequently do not enter the Reserve
at all. The sergeants who do enter
it are therefore those who prefer civil
to military life, those who see no
prospect of rising in the service, or
those who join the Reserve because
they find their duties in the Army
beyond their powers. It will be
readily understood that Reserve-
sergeants of these three classes are
not likely to be particularly valuable
when recalled to the Colours. The
same arguments apply to the corporals,
most of whom would have risen to the
rank of sergeant while with the
Colours had they been really good
non-commissioned officers.

The second reason goes to the root
of the Reserve system and exists in
all continental armies. Reservists,
when relegated to civil life, particu-
larly in the case of regiments re-
cruited in and about London and the
other great cities of the kingdom,
are thrown into close contact with
one another. I have frequently been
told by my own men that in the
street in which they live there are
from thirty to forty families con-
nected with the regiment. A large
number of the men are also related to
one another. It is surely evident
that such close association makes it
difficult for men, who have been carry-
ing on their civil trades cheek by

jowl since they joined the Reserve,
to resume the relation of non-
commissioned officer and private on
returning to the Colours. Home-
relations to a certain extent explain
why some young non-commissioned
officers fail to exert authority ; but it
is much more the case on the occasion
of an embodiment of the Reserve, and
a little consideration will show why
this is so.

It will, I think, be readily under-
stood that it is a great source of
weakness for a battalion going on
active service to be flooded with
sergeants and corporals of this de-
scription, worthy men, many of them,
who could not be deprived of their
rank without an appearance of harsh-
ness, and yet worse than useless from
their inability or unwillingness to
exercise their authority.

Before leaving this portion of my
subject I should like to add that I
have seen many brilliant exceptions to
this unsatisfactory condition, and that
in the stress of circumstances the good
qualities that lay dormant even in the
sluggish and inefficient shone forth
most unexpectedly.

Before illustrating the admirable
conduct of the Reservist in war, I
will trouble the reader with a very
few figures which show clearly his
strength and endurance under the
strain of a campaign. The battalion
to which I am proud to belong was
one of the first to embark for South
Africa, leaving England on October
20th, 1899, and landing at Durban
on November 14th. Eight days after
landing it took part in the arduous
and severe nightaction of Willow
Grange, and subsequently was em-
ployed in every operation in Natal
after its arrival there. Its losses in
action were very heavy, and it also
suffered severely in the epidemic of
enteric fever that raged after the
relief of Ladysmith. On leaving

154

The Hesermst in War.

England the composition of the bat-
talion was, in round numbers, six
hundred Reservists and five hundred
Colour-men. During a year of active
service it was replenished from Eng-
land by drafts amounting to four
hundred men, of whom half were
Reservists and half soldiers who had
been left in England as too young for
active service. The latter were sent
out to the battalion in batches, as
they attained the prescribed age of
twenty. Within those twelve months,
then, there have passed through the
ranks of the battalion eight hun-
dred Reservists and seven hundred
Colour-men, and at the end of that
period there remain fit for duty six
hundred and fifty of the former and
four hundred of the latter. The
waste, therefore (to use the technical
term), has been one hundred and fifty
Reservists out of eight hundred, and
three hundred Colour-men out of
seven hundred. The casualties in
action have been rather more heavy
among the Reservists than among the
Colour-men, and it is therefore easy
to see that the superior stamina of
the former has triumphantly asserted
itself. Their marching-power and
dogged courage has also had an in-
valuable effect on the young soldier,
to whom a good example means every-
thing. In these figures I have not
taken into account the Volunteer
company, but it is instructive to note
that, although the latter did not join
the battalion until after the relief of
Ladysmith, and appeared on arrival to
be composed of men of good physique,
its rate of sickness has been more than
double that of the Line companies.

The pluck and steadiness of the
Reservist impressed me particularly
in the early part of the campaign,
partly because I had been depressed
by hearing and reading many hard
sayings concerning the conduct of the
British soldier in the Tirah cam-

paign ; and partly because the first
actions of the war took place so soon
after the embodiment of the Reserve
and before the men had recovered
from the confinement on board-ship.
Troops have seldom endured a more
severe initiation into the trials of a
campaign than did the two battalions
which formed the attacking force at
Willow Grange on the night of
November 22nd, 1899. Constant
marching and night outpost-duty in
very wet weather had told on men
who had but eight days before landed
from a long sea- voyage. An arduous
day's work on scanty food, and move-
ments over heavy ground lasting six
hours, had been followed by a night
of incessant and slow movement over
rocky and slippery hill-tracks, all
meanwhile being exposed to a pitiless
storm of hail and rain. So cruel was
the weather that the Boer picquet on
Brynbella Hill (the position assaulted
by Colonel Kitchener's force) had no
conception that any troops would
move in it; some of the Boers who
were on the hill that night have since
mentioned this fact to officers of my
battalion. All who have experienced
night-operations are aware of the
great strain they make on the nerves,
and it is not surprising that on such
a night, so early in a campaign, and
on such difficult ground, some con-
fusion occurred, and that some shots
were fired with unfortunate results.

Now, however, the good quality of
the men and the value of a large
proportion of old soldiers in the ranks
showed itself. In a wonderfully short
time quiet and order were restored in
the disordered companies, so quickly
indeed that those in front did not
even know that anything had gone
wrong ; and after the briefest possible
delay the whole assaulting force
moved on to its task, which was
easily accomplished.

This brief sketch of the assault at

The Reservist in War.

155

Willow Grange may serve to dispel
false impressions left by the imagina-
tive narratives which appeared in the
Press at the time of the action. No
special correspondent was present at
the assault, and one vivid and ex-
tremely inaccurate description of it
was written by an individual from
the secure refuge of a hotel in Pieter-
maritzburg. It need hardly be said
that his comments were severe.

Without attempting to follow the
Reserve-soldier through all the changes
and chances of the Natal campaign
I will content myself with saying
that my battalion, in common with
the other three battalions of the
Second (or English) Brigade, took
part in the disastrous action of
Colenso, losing heavily and showing
perfect steadiness with hardly the
consolation of firing a single shot in
return for the many thousands which
sang through its ranks. In the
second advance, generally known now
as the Spion Kop advance, it was
also warmly engaged. In the third
(or Vaal Krantz) advance it spent
a highly unpleasant thirty hours on
that furnace of a hill, exposed to a
heavy shell-fire from the front and
from both flanks, bearing this fiery
trial with the utmost steadiness and
cheerfulness, and withdrawing at night
in a manner that no troops but
English could have equalled.

It will be understood that what
is here said of my own battalion is
intended to apply equally to the
other three which completed the
Brigade, though they want no praise
from a humble individual like myself.
Their record will appear in the
Despatches — some day !

The history of Sir Redvers Buller's
relief operations were, until the cap-
ture cf Monte Christo on February
18th, 1900, but a record of reverses
and retirements. The retirements, it
is true, had all been carried out in

accordance with orders, and, thanks
to the discipline of our army, had
been attended by no demoralisation
in the ranks ; on the contrary, it
seemed to me that every man set out
on the fourth advance with the same
dogged determination and the same
conviction that, if let go, nothing
would stop the relieving force, that
had appeared all through the cam-
paign.

Monte Christo fell so easily, and
Colenso was so promptly abandoned
by the Boers, that the self-confidence
of the men seems to have been shared
by those in command, and in con-
sequence the force marched down
from its commanding position and,
crossing the Tugela for the third
time, entered the low ground about
Colenso that was to furnish a grave
for so many of their number. The
fiery trial that ensued gave the
Reservist a chance of showing his
quality of which he took full
advantage.

It was a beautiful morning, follow-
ing a rainy and misty night, when on
February 22nd my battalion marched
down from Monte Christo and, cross-
ing the pontoon bridge under a fitful
shell-fire, turned off to the left past
Fort Wylie and settled down for a
rest on the wooded banks of the
Tugela. The companies had been
scattered along the northern ridges
of the hills during the three preceding
days, and the men were in high spirits
at finding the battalion together again
and fairly on the road to Ladysmith.
Warned by painful experience, we
lost no time in cooking our frugal
mid-day meal (our appearance would
have given Pharaoh a night-mare —
we were lean kine indeed !) and there-
fore were not taken by surprise when,
about one o'clock, we were suddenly
ordered to advance. The day now
became unpleasantly hot, and we spent
the remainder of the afternoon lying

156

The Reservist in War.

under shelter of various rocky kopjes
and gradually closing up on the
troops in front. At dusk we were
ordered to take up a position under
cover of a very precipitous hill, almost
a cliff, where the whole Brigade was
crowded together. A heavy shell-
fire was passing over our head, but
did us no harm, and most of us
believed that we were to pass the
night here, safe enough and ready for
work if required. Required we were,
for scarcely had the battalion formed
up when our Colonel was ordered to
advance as rapidly as possible and re-
inforce the Brigade in front, which
was hard pressed and running short
of ammunition.

Knowing that directly we showed
ourselves we should come under a
heavy fire, we were ordered to ad-
vance in a column of half-companies,
each in single rank and with an
interval of six paces between each
man, the half-companies following one
another at a distance of about fifty
paces, — sixteen lines of men widely
scattered. I am particular in describ-
ing our formation in order that the
reader may realise to what an extent
every man in that advance could
behave as seemed best to him. Dark-
ness was coming on rapidly, shells
shrieked incessantly over our heads,
and the air seemed alive with bullets.
The advance was a long one and while
it was taking place I passed quickly
from company to company, hardly
anxious about the conduct of the
men, so plainly admirable was it, and
yet watchful that all kept up with
their companies. From what I saw
at the time, and from enquiries made
subsequently, I do not believe that a
single soldier dropped out unwounded ;
yet shelter abounded and detection
would have been impossible.

In pitch darkness we arrived at the
foot of two low hills connected by
a nek or saddle ; half the companies

ascended the hill to the right, while
it fell to my lot to take charge of
that on the left of the nek with the
remaining companies. To follow the
fortunes of all would be too long a
story, yet one well worth telling ; but
I think an idea of the Reservist, and
of the young soldier too, at their best
will be given by relating what hap-
pened on the right.

It so happened that one of the four
companies on that hill had but one
officer with it; a gallant man who
met a soldier's death in the action
that followed. Its captain was ill in
hospital and its colour sergeant had
been severely wounded at Vaal
Krantz ; so it fell out that the
command of the company soon de-
volved on a Reserve-sergeant, one
of a class of whom I have said hard
things. Let his report written to me
some days later show how true gold
is proved by the fire. After describing
the ascent of the hill and the re-in-
forcement of the troops found there,
the sergeant tells his tale as follows :

Colonel — then gave the order for all
to make cover, fix bayonets, and keep
alert. A heavy firing was then com-
menced by the Boers and kept up during
the night. At daybreak the C. O. [com-
manding officer] gave the order for A.
Company to advance. We advanced about
250 yards when the firing became so
hot we were ordered to drop down and
open fire. We kept up the firing as
hard as possible which enabled the —
to retire out of the position they were
in. After that the Colonel commenced
to double back for re-inforcements but
had only got about thirty yards when
he was wounded. He shouted to me
to tell Mr. H. to take command, which
I did. Then Mr. H. ran towards the
Colonel, but before he reached him he
was wounded and ordered me to take
command. I then passed the order for
all to keep as well under cover as pos-
sible and to await re-inforcements or
darkness to retire. We kept in that
position the whole day, the Boers keep-
ing up a fire whenever they saw a
move. At about 6.30 p.m. I ordered the

The Reservist in War.

157

company to retire. I saw everybody
off the hill and made my way as quickly
as possible for stretcher-bearers.

(Signed) F. C. L., Sergeant.

This quiet narrative omits points
which will elucidate matters to the
reader : first, that the advance de-
scribed brought the company to within
one hundred and fifty yards of a Boer
breast-work ; secondly, that the men
lay there for fourteen hours under a
burning sun without food or water ;
and thirdly, that the nature of the
fire under which they lay, and under
which the two officers moved, may be
estimated by the fact that one officer
was killed, one wounded in nine
places, and half the company were
killed or wounded. Four days later,
having spent the intervening period
mostly under fire by night and day,
this same company showed perfect
steadiness at the battle of Pieters and
volunteered to find eight orderlies for
the commanding officer, that being
considered the most dangerous work
that fell to a soldier. Is not the
regimental officer justified in his
belief in the English soldier's fighting
qualities 1

All that has been said may, how-
ever, perhaps, be looked upon by the
ungenerous as evidence from a pre-
judiced source. If such there be
among the readers of this narrative
let him consider the following extract
from an officer of the gallant regi-
ment which on this occasion received
assistance from mine. The extract
refers to another of the four compa-
nies on the right hill. The officer
who wrote the letter is a stranger to
me and to my regiment.

The company on the right of your
regiment lay down in extended order
across the plateau. I went on and we
commenced to send our men back.1 But

1 These men had charged to within a few
yards of a Boer ttvnch and were unable to
retire from the shelter they had found until
covered by the lire of other troops.

hardly had one man risen from his place
when the Boers opened fire from their
trench at short range. Some returned it,
while others kept running back, but
what commanded my admiration was the
splendid behaviour of the company of
your regiment under Major S. They lay
still under this fire until our last man
had passed through, and then I heard
them firing volley after volley to cover
our retreat. It was fast getting broad
daylight, and I am convinced that few of
us would have run that gauntlet safely
without this assistance.

The writer goes on to say that he
formed a line with some of his men
to cover the retirement of Major S.'s
company in turn, and an idea of the
very close range at which these opera-
tions took place may be formed from
the fact that this officer subsequently
examined the ground and found that
this, the last position taken up during
the retirement, was only four hundred
yards from the Boer trench.

Wounds received at such close
quarters were necessarily serious, and
it is not surprising that Major S.'s
company lost eight killed and sixteen
wounded in their retirement. Many
of the men were struck by more than
one bullet.

It is pleasant to add that neither
the officers nor men of the company
considered that they had done any-
thing out of the way The subaltern
of the company, when the battalion
was withdrawn from the two hills
later in the day, told me that they
had had a warm time, that the major
was wounded, and that the company
had behaved well. I talked to a
number of the non-commissioned
officers and men without realising in
the least from their remarks that
they had advanced in the open, and
without firing a shot, right up to a
Boer trench ; and it was therefore a
complete surprise, as well as a great
pleasure, when I heard what had
actually happened, in consequence of
a generously appreciative report

158

The Reservist in War.

made by the commanding officer of
the men to whose aid our companies
advanced. Modesty is not always a
characteristic of the soldier, but the
man who does something really good
is usually silent about it.

Whether my time for thinking over
past scenes is to be long or short, I
shall always carry with me a picture
of that advance on the evening of
February 22nd, 1900. When I wish
to think of the British soldier, stal-
wart Reservist and well-trained
Colourman, at his best, I shall recall
those long lines moving rapidly
through the dusk towards danger,
wounds, and death, with the steady un-
concerned air which is so peculiar to
our troops and so singularly unlike the
demeanour of men in battle as depicted
by writers who have never seen one.

So much for the Reservist in
general, and for his effect on the
battalions into which he is drafted for
war. Let us now complete our mental
picture of him by a study of one or
two individuals.

If the reader is good enough to
remember that, on the night of Feb-
ruary 22nd, I found myself in charge
of the left of the two hills to which
my battalion had been sent, he will
readily imagine that when, after a
cold and rainy night, dawn began to
break, one of the first duties under-
taken was that of communicating with
the Colonel and his four companies
on the other hill.

With this object I sent two or
three messengers down the steep hill
I was on, saw them run across the
exposed ground in rear of the nek,
and disappear on the other side ; but
after an absence of some duration the
messengers returned and said that
they could not find, or could not reach,
the Colonel. By this time I had
heard rumours from the men in my
firing-line that troops had advanced
on the right hill and suffered heavily.

Being anxious to hear how things
were going with our companies, and
also finding myself in a position to
offer reinforcements, should they be
urgently needed, as seemed possible,
I asked the officer commanding the
nearest company to select for me a
messenger who would not be turned
back by trifles. He immediately
called up a lance-corporal, a compara-
tively young Reservist, with nothing
about him that particularly attracted
my attention. His captain (then in
hospital, having been wounded at
Vaal Krantz,) subsequently told me
that throughout the campaign he had
selected this man for any duty that
required nerve and steadiness.

I am happily able to relate my
messenger's adventures from his own
modest and quiet narrative, contained
in a letter written from hospital to
his father and mother, as follows :

March 9th, 1900.

MY DEAK PARENTS, — I am glad to say
that my condition is more favourable
than when I last wrote; in fact I am
getting on splendidly, the outside wounds
are practically healed, but it will be some
time before I am right again, the move-
ment of my heart and lungs preventing
the wound from healing inside. I pro-
mised when I last wrote to give you
details as to how I got wounded, so here
goes. [The writer then describes the
night-march.] .... On Friday morn-
ing about 8.30 we commenced throwing
up earthworks to protect us from a heavy
fire expected from the left. We had
finished that, and I had got nicely down
under cover, when I was detailed as a
messenger from the Major to the
Colonel, who had command of the force
on the right hill, we being on the left.
The Major told me he had sent four men
and they had been unable to find the
Colonel, and I had been specially recom-
mended to him by my company officer
for the task, and I tell you I felt highly
honoured, and vowed inwardly to find
him or die in the attempt ; but little did
I think then what it was going to cost
me. However I got down to the bottom
of the hill and crossed the space of about
fifty yards between the two hills success-

The Reservist in War.

159

fully and advanced up the other one,
where I found the — 's entrenched on
the ridge. Here I asked a captain if he
could direct me to my colonel, and he
said " Yes." Pointing across about eighty
yards of flat ground to the firing line, he
said : " He is there ; but what do you
want to know for?" I told him I was
conveying a message from the other hill,
and he said : " My dear man, if you value
your life, don't go there have been
dozens of men knocked over trying to
reinforce them," and to give me a better
heart he told me I should have three
cross-fires to contend with. However
I was determined to go, and pointed out
to him that it was my duty to do so.
So making myself as small as I could
I darted across about thirty yards, and,
finding the rifle-fire rather hot, I lay
down on the ground. After I had got
my wind, and they had ceased firing a
bit, I got up and covered another thirty
yards with success, the fire being hotter
than ever; again I laid myself out flat
and got my wind, I then being about
twenty yards from the firing-line where
there was plenty of cover and I should
have been safe, but they had me spotted,
for when I got up to make the final dash
I had not gone more than five yards
when I got it straight throught the chest,
this being about 5.30 a.m., and there I
laid until 7 o'clock in the evening, the
sun fetching the skin off my chest. I
must close this long letter with my
fondest love to you all from your loving
son,

B.

P.S.— I hope you will not think I have
written this for the sake of bravado, but
it is simply the true facts of the case. '

No bravado indeed ; loving son,
true Englishman, brave soldier !

Lance-corporal R. P. was, however,
but one of many good men on that
fatal hill, and he was not long per-
mitted to lie in the open uncared for.
Another company of the battalion lay
hard by, and though to venture into
the open was a task of the greatest
danger, as appears from the above
letter and from the testimony of all
who were present, Private W. B.,

1 This letter was printed in an English
journal of April 14th, 1900, having been sent
to that paper by the employer of the lance-
corporal'B father.

another Reservist, went out no less
than four times from safe cover to
dress the lance-corporal's wounds and
to do what he could to assuage his
sufferings. These brave actions were
witnessed by a young officer of the
regiment who reported Private B.'s
conduct to me in writing on the same
day. Both incidents, as it happened,
also occurred under the observant eye
of the officer whose letter to me
concerning Major S.'s company has
already been quoted. Save for a very
natural mistake in believing that
Lance-corporal P. was killed, his letter
closely confirms that of the latter.
After describing the conduct of Major
S.'s company he continues :

[I also saw] one or two individual in-
stances of splendid behaviour on the part
of your men. The space between the
rear line taken up before the retirement
and the rear edge of the hill was difficult
to cross, and some of the — (my regi-
ment) made gallant attempts to come up
to us. One corporal succeeded in reach-
ing our line and was full of jokes when
he had done so. Another man ran up
and was shot before going many yards.
With great bravery another man, also in
your regiment, ran back to him and com-
menced to bandage him up. He died
almost immediately but his last words
were, " I've a letter for the Colonel."
His comrades found the letter and
brought it back to the line, when it was
passed up to the left.

This description of the brave con-
duct of Lance-corporal P. and Private
B. is a little hard to understand with-
out knowledge of the ground, but it
must be remembered that the Boer
trenches were not continuous, nor did
our companies advance simultaneously,
in consequence of having had to start
in the dark and in perfect silence.
Thus it came about that though he
had rushed to within twenty yards of
the front position of the left company,
Lance-corporal P. was still in the
rear of the line to which the right
company had fallen back.

160

The Eeservist in War.

To complete the story I have in my
possession a note written by a young
officer, who was present, to a brother
subaltern. It runs thus : " Lance-
Corporal P., H. Company, messenger,
just arrived. He is wounded and
cannot say who sent his message."

Perhaps the reader is weary of
these reminiscences. "Superfluous lags
the veteran on the stage ; " but very
dear to the regimental officer is the
story of brave deeds done by his own
men, and this fact must be my excuse
for my prolixity.

There is, however, one more point
concerning the Reservist, and the
British soldier generally, on which I
think a few words may well be said.
What, does the reader suppose, is the
motive which impels him, whom he
is pleased to speak of in his kindest
mood as " an absent minded beggar,"
to lay down his life in his quiet,
matter-of-fact way, for the country
and Queen about whom he seldom
speaks in enthusiastic terms ? Is it

simply from blind discipline, as some
are found to say ?

No, a thousand times no ! I who
write have lived among soldiers since
my boyhood, and I tell those who do
not know it that the English soldier,
like nine tenths of the class from
which he springs, is at heart as truly
a patriot as Horatius or Sir Richard
Grenville. He does not howl out his
devotion to his country with the noisy
fervour whose life is short as the
"light fire in the veins of a boy."
Happily the national shyness, or pride,
keeps him very silent on the subject of
his feelings ; and long may it be so.
Yet in the intimacy for which war
sometimes gives opportunity, I have
sounded the thoughts of many men,
and never have I failed to find a clear
comprehension of the issues at stake,
and a quiet but very resolute con-
viction that, cost what it might, the
struggle in South Africa must be
persisted in until England has her
own again.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1901.

THE SINNER AND THE PROBLEM.
BY ERIC PARKER.

CHAPTER VIII.

IT came about in this way. I had
settled with them for an expedition
to a certain spinney, distant perhaps
a mile or so ; they were to attempt
the capture of a hawk's nest believed
to exist in a hollow elm, and I was
to sketch the central glade of the
place, — a delightful opening of young
bracken with grey rock right and left,
and a tiny streamlet bubbling from
pool to pool between. We were to
start at half -past two; but when I
had waited half-an-hour at the top
of the chestnut-avenue and there was
no sign of either of them, I began to
wonder if we had understood each
other, and the thought crossed my
mind that possibly they were waiting
for me elsewhere. Wherefore, de-
ciding this to be the only explanation
of their absence, I returned to the
house and made enquiries ; as a result,
I learned that they had set out for the
spinney near an hour ago.

I was a little annoyed at this, for
it was one of the hottest days of the
year, and dusty roads have but few
attractions for me. I had found, too,
no better recipe for the beguilement
of such a tramp as this than the pre-
sence of my pair of tireless, irrespon-
sible youngsters, and therefore I com-
passed my two miles in no easy humour.
I abused my calling, and vowed never
No. 495. — VOL. LXXIIII.

to stir out of a studio for the rest
of my life. Walking for walking's
sake I have always detested ; not per-
haps to the extent of a certain friend
of mine, whose sole ambition in life
was a bungalow, basing a cynical view
of existence on the ever-present neces-
sity of stairs. Poor fellow ! for when
his wish was realised, he found that
his spirit would take no rest unless
nearer by fifteen feet to heaven at
night; he could not sleep on the
ground-floor.

And when I came to the spinney,
and, setting my easel and all against
a rock, stood and shouted, they were
not there. A magpie clattered out
of a thorn-bush, — one for sorrow,
thought I — and then another, to
make light of the proverb : a jay
barked at me angrily and glinted,
blue and pink, to the covert ; and a
pair of crows sailed in higher circles
in the hot ring of sky. Beyond the
wood I could see a gipsy-encampment,
van and horses, laid lazily in the
shade of a clump of elms ; three bare-
footed children shaded their eyes and
gazed suspiciously in my direction —
a keeper, thought they, and would
warn their men-folk. But of my pair
of graceless nobodies there was not a
sign.

Still the air blew about me clean
and flower-scented, and the sun shone
so gladly on the green branches, and

162

The Sinner and the Problem.

the water raced so merrily over the
mosses and pebbles, that I soon had
my picture chosen and began washing
in my ground-tints. And by seven
o'clock I had made so fair a start
that I tossed up a prayer for fine
weather and was off homewards, com-
posing the while a flawless lecture
on the merit of punctuality, — I who
have kept more men waiting than
would fill a Blue-book.

But at the gate I was met by mine
host, and when he saw that I was
alone, and heard that the two chil-
dren had played me false, he was
perplexed not a little. For it seemed
that they (I had forgotten it) should
have returned an hour back, for
evening preparation or some such
necessary discipline. At first he had
laid the blame freely on myself, but
now he was puzzled where to lay it,
for the Sinner and Problem, many
and varied as their escapades had
been, never had gone so far before
as to disregard conventionalities to
the extent of more than a few
minutes' quarrel with the school-clock
in the momentous matter of prepara-
tion-time.

A thought struck me (not unwel-
come in one sense, owing to the
possibilities involved), that they might
have come to some accident (a wetting
perhaps) in company with the Lady
of the Lake. And mine host thanked
me from his heart (ignorant man !)
when I offered to see if it were so.
Off, then, I set to the lake, and found
my Lady in the garden.

But she had neither heard nor seen
anything of them, and I could find
but little excuse for prolonging the
interview. And to tell the truth,
this was the only occasion when I
made my talk with her shorter than
I need have, for I was anxious to be
away on a new quest ; I had remem-
bered the gipsies by the spinney.
She made light of my anxiety, and

repeated that there was no need to
expect anything but that they would
return before nightfall with the laugh
against us. I was not so certain of
it ; mine host had sterner notions of
school-boy proprieties. She changed
the subject to my paint-box, and I
confessed to some hard work since
last I saw her, part of the work
being to decide what not to sketch.

"You can come to that decision
easily at times," said she.

"I do not always paint a gloomy
picture," I answered.

" Did you finish that one 1 " she
asked.

" But I often paint my mood into
a bright one," I continued.

" I see." Her eyes danced under
the lashes, and the corners of her
mouth began to twitch.

" That might have been a bright
picture, too," I observed ; but she
was already ten yards off towards the
house. " Good-bye," she said. " And
don't add to your sorrows by puzzling
over those two small friends of yours.
Bo-peep and the sheep, — and they'll
bring their tales with them, you may
be sure." But she again stopped
before she had gone very far. I
halved the distance between us. " Do
you care for interiors?" she asked
with an air of seriousness.

" That depends upon the furniture,"
replied I.

She appeared to consider matters.
" There's a tea-table," she said. "Sup-
pose you brought the boys for me to
scold, — let me see — on Sunday ? "

" If I can find them for you," said
I, adding the last two words to please
myself. Verily, I believe if I had
not had my object in coming to think
over I should have thrown my hat in
the air, when once round the corner.
And yet the gods willed it that I
never took advantage of that invita-
tion ; at least not the advantage I
foresaw then.

The Sinner and the Problem.

163

There was no news of them waiting
for me at the school ; and I earned
more gratitude from mine host (who
was beginning to be seriously alarmed)
by an offer to search the gipsy-en-
campment. To aid me he offered a
gig and one of the fat roans (a most
unwilling conscript) and a stalwart
gardener in addition to our driver.
Under these conditions the two miles
were covered again quicker than they
had been six hours before in the after-
noon.

But here was another disappoint-
ment. From the cunning-faced women
and bronzed hard-visaged men that
hemmed in the kettle and tripod we
could learn nothing. Only the bare-
footed children told a strange tale of
voices that filled the spinney when
the sun was high ; outlandish oaths
and echoes of oaths they reported.
At any other time I should have
caught at the chance of such models,
for the fire of the wood-embers on one
side and the glow of the western sky
on the other threw quaint shadows
and lights on their clear-cut bronze
limbs and weather-tanned faces ; and
there were old women in the back
part of the group whose eyes were
riddles and histories for any who
could read them. But I was in no
mood to pick a model then ; and sup-
posing it possible that these sunburned
thieves were concealing their know-
ledge in the hope of a reward, I
believe I valued the Sinner and the
Problem at five pounds apiece, to the
.astonishment of my comrade the gar-
dener, who was for turning the van
inside out there and then. But all
I read on their faces when I made
the offer was genuine regret that they
were unable to deserve it.

Back, therefore, we went to the
school, and saddened mine host with
the tale of our ill-success. He, good
man, had already made communica-
tion with the local constable, yet in

small hope of obtaining much from
that worthy, whose office for ten years
past had meant little more to him
than the peaceful occupancy of a
cottage and apple orchard. Nothing
to be done, said he, but to wait for
the daylight. There were lanterns,
— but where to look 1 For the strange
part of it all was that no one had set
eyes on either of the boys, except
to watch them out of the gate, since
luncheon.

To bed and sleep, then, they went,
but I sat waiting with my pipe in
the heavy-curtained little smoking-
room, and the cuckoo-clock in the hall
clucked out the hours with springs and
whirrings and the slap of a shut door,
till a blackbird woke in the laurels
and whistled that morning had come,
and I threw open the windows.

Out in the garden the dew lay
heavy and grey on the lawn, but my
blackbird roused his companions, and
soon a merry chorus thrilled from
every bush and tree. With a towel
under my arm I strode out to the
garden-pump ; and the sluicing of
that bright cold water left me clear
and strong for a long day's work if
need be. I had it in my mind to pull
the fat roan out of his stall and drive
him into the town ; but that, I con-
sidered after, could help me very
little till the townsfolk were out of
bed. And finally I made up my
mind to walk there, which I did, but
without much hope of better luck
with the town-constables. Nor were
my expectations groundless, for the
bluff, good-natured fellows had no
news for me. At the inns I fared no
better, and finally made haste to the
junction, to catch the train back to
the signal-box and wood-planking
which served us in these parts for
a station. And whom there should
I see but the Chief Butler, grave,
black-hatted, and important in bear-
ing ? " What news ? " I asked.
M 2

164

The Sinner and the Problem.

" Well," said he, "I'm off to
Axham. The police have telegraphed
news of two boys there, Avho answer
very fairly to ours, looking for a ship."
" Is that so ? But then, — they
could only have got there by rail :
the place is thirty miles away; and
no boys have asked for tickets."

" 7 don't know," said the Chief
Butler, who was visibly annoyed at
having the journey to take. " All /
know is that if I find them — " It
was a dire aposiopesis. " However,
I'm paid for a first return," he soli-
loquised, stepped into a third-class
smoking-carriage, and was twenty
yards away from me before I had
time to ask more of the telegram.

It was past eleven before I found
myself at the school-gates, and visions
of cream and coffee, rich red hams
and new-laid eggs began to take the
place of a certain picture I had been
troubled with ; a picture of two
weary little forms trudging along a
dusty road, heaven knows with what
object or whither, — trust the Sinner
for some mad project ! But if I had
known twelve hours before what I
was to learn before the morning was
out, — certes, but I should never have
heard that blackbird wake in the
laurels !

There were more thanks from
mine host, and regrets at my use-
less journey. He relied strongly on
the Axham telegram. "Of course,"
said he, " of course ; some crazy sea-
going notion, — silly boys, silly boys !
But I'd wish them here, I'd wish
them here," he repeated. " It never
happened before, never before. I'd
sooner have lost any boys than those
two," he added. I knew he would
have said this of any of the boys, but
I liked him for it nevertheless. He
then went into the schoolrooms, and
I heard afterwards that many a lazy
youngster blessed his stars that his
dominie's mind was occupied with

other matters, and took small note of
false concords and impossible caesuras.
Marks ran high for the dullards that
morning.

As for me, I wandered into my
own room, and (I cannot tell with
what prescience) idly took up a book
I had been reading yesterday. Out
tumbled a piece of paper I had never
put there, a message, a letter from
the Sinner, and folded three-corner-
wise as I had taught him. " We are
going to make an encampment on the
river. Will you come and help us ?
From your affectionate Sinner."

Now when I have news of that sort
I have no inclination to hurry and
scramble. My thoughts come to me
quickly, but they do not tumble
helter-skelter, and they ran somewhat
in this order.

The matron had reported the
absence of the Sinner's and the Pro-
blem's travelling-rugs ; therefore they
meant to sleep at their encampment.
They had no money ; therefore they
must be short of provisions, for they
had not let the Lady of the Lake
into the secret, and could only have
abstracted a few crumbs of bread and
a biscuit or so. If they had come to
any accident, I must be quick, but
must take some necessaries with me.
If they were drowned, I reflected,
there was no hurry ; but I knew they
were not. Their encampment must
lie up-stream, — the same stream that
fed the lake, for it alone was known
as the river; down-stream the water
ran between open banks and the
town.

And at last, — perhaps five minutes
after I had the letter — I had sent a
note to mine host that I was off on
another expedition, with what hopes
I did not say. I had stuffed my
pockets with some hastily-cut sand-
wiches, a flask of brandy (I laughed
over this at the time) and a roll of
lint, which never was meant for the

The Sinner and the Problem.

165

use to which I put it, and was off
down the fields to the head of the
lake ; nor as I went could I help
laughing, despite my own uncer-
tainties, at the certainty of the Chief
Butler's failure. However, he was
to make some pence over his journey ;
an entry for the black leather book.

It was a blazing hot day. Up
above in the cloudless blue a brazen
sun glared and burned, and not a
breath stirred the full foliage of the
oaks and ashes, not a whisper of air
moved in the undergrowth. Once I
came to a bush of sweetbriar, and
the dew-begotten scent steamed round
me as I passed it. A pair of rabbits
bobbed off into the covert, and the
white scutt of one of them paused
over the scratched earth. I clapped
my hands, and the burrow was brown
and empty.

Soon I was at the head of the lake,
crossed the little wooden bridge, and
took my course up-stream. I chose
the left bank, for the other was im-
passable in places ; they could not
have gone that way. The May-flies,
that happy, light-winged crowd of
ephemerals, were dead and done with
by now : just here, earlier in the year,
gray drake and green drake were
balancing five on a flower, and the fat
spotted trout were filling their bellies
with quiet, sucking gulps at them as
they caught in the water-way ; but
now the meadow-sweet and willow-
herb sparkled with tiny restless
dragon-flies, needles of sapphire and
emerald, poised and counterpoised to
each other in a gay cotillon of court-
ship. Here and there a water-rat fell
plump in the dark water, — a diamond
bubble to mark his track — rose softly,
brushed silver water from his back
against silver reeds, and plumped in
the pool again, — you could see the
dints of his little feet in the mud.
Water-hens paddled nervously in and
out of the rushes, and a pair of dab-

chicks played hide and-seek in the
weeds, — plenty of havoc they had
made with the trout-spawn, I knew.
Once a kingfisher darted up stream,
just a flash of shot turquoise. And
over all the sun shone, brazen, parch-
ing, resistless.

I dare say I had walked close on
a mile, when something white on the
bank caught my eye; it was a litter
of shavings, — some one had cut a
withy. A little further were more
shavings, and the willows had been
partly pollarded. And then I turned
a corner and coming on a strange
picture, leaned behind a tree-stem to
take it in.

A small clearing in the under-
growth left a green patch of grass
running down to the sedge of the
stream's bank. At the back of this
three hazel-clumps, their upper
branches arched over and tied to
make a roof, were fenced round with
intertwined withies and bracken,
hardly leaving an air-hole. In the
recess of this arbour were two neatly
folded rugs, and two bows, trimly
pared, also of bent hazel, stood with
a bundle of black-feathered arrows
against the side. These arrows were
tipped with twisted strips of lead, and
the hackles were fastened with thin
string. A very small dead rabbit,
pierced through and through with one
of the arrows, hung over a cross-
branch, legs together, the feathers on
the notched end of the wood draggled
and disarranged. The remnants of a
wood -fire spread in a little grey pile
on the edge of the water, the herbage
having been cut short for a yard on
either side. The skin of another very
small rabbit was stretched on the
bark of a large oak in the background.
At the entrance of the arbour were
strewn two heaps of clothes.

In the centre of a flattened circle of
grass lay the Problem, his head on his
elbows, staring lazily at the water. A

166

The Sinner and the Problem.

few yards up stream a huge willow bent
over the pool, and on the horizontal
stem of it stood the Sinner, balancing
himself by a branch, the sun on him
full and warm and the water below
dark and cool. The moss of the bank
had deadened my footsteps, and neither
of them had seen me.

Presently the Sinner let go his
branch, poised himself, took the
prettiest header into the pool, swam
slowly to the bank and clambered out
gleaming. He stood for a minute on
the edge, glanced round, and caught
sight of me. " Oh, have you really
come ? Are you going to stay with
us?"

I stepped into the clearing and the
Problem sat up and regarded me. The
grass-bents marked him in a quaint
criss-cross pattern. " Where are your
towels ? " I asked.

The Sinner looked round with a
meditative air. " I believe, — we've
only got a handkerchief," he said.

The Problem also considered matters.
" You didn't bring yours, you know,"
said he ; "so there's only one, in my
pocket."

" Get it," said I. It was extracted,
and proved to be of minute dimensions
with a spotted border. The pair of
them stood watching me.

" I'm very nearly dry," began the
Problem apologetically.

I surveyed him. "You may put on
your clothes."

The Sinner looked rather taken
aback. "Shall I dress too?" he
asked. I gave him the handkerchief
and — to what strange uses ! — the roll
of lint from my pocket.

He looked at me uncertainly.
" Are you angry with us 1 " he asked
in a subdued voice.

" I shall not speak to either of you
until you are dressed; then I shall
have something to say to you." I
spoke very severely, and the Sinner,
retreating in the direction of his

clothes, began smoothing and rolling
up the soaked lint.

" Put that down," I said, " and
dress." He dropped it with a start,
and began to dress hurriedly, getting
into his garments the wrong way
round, and out again with an appre-
hensive look at me. The Problem
clothed himself methodically and
silently with an air of abstraction.
I sat down with my back against a
pollard.

Presently the Sinner, halfway
through his task, paused, hesitated a
moment, and came quickly across to
me. " Oh, don't be angry, please
don't. We didn't think — "

" Be quiet," I said sternly, and he
returned to the difficulties of his
collar. I bethought me of my pipe,
and lit it ; feeling that I wanted
something to occupy me, much as your
actor has to learn what to do with his
hands. When the blue smoke was
lifting kindly, I looked up. The
Problem had finished dressing and
was picking burrs off the Sinner's
coat ; except that his face had a little
more colour he seemed much as usual.
The Sinner, — well, the Sinner was
very quietly but very unmistakeably
weeping. I fell to examining a dead
leaf with interest. A stifled sob made
me glance at the boys again, and I
saw that the spotted handkerchief
(dripping) was being used for normal
purposes. Matters became too much
for me. " Come here, both of you," I
said, and blew smoke into the sun
slowly and judicially. The Sinner
choked manfully and dropped the
handkerchief. They stood before me,
and I surveyed them with calmness, I
hope. " Now, what have you to say
for yourselves 1 "

There was silence. The Problem
shifted uneasily from one leg to the
other. Then the Sinner said, with
odd little jerks between the words :
" We did not think you would be

The Sinner and the Problem.

167

angry. We thought you would un-
derstand. We meant — meant — "
But what he meant became more than
he could manage to tell me just then,
and I had recourse to my pipe again.

When he was quiet I spoke. I
found that it was best, while speak-
ing, to gaze steadfastly at a fixed
point in the landscape. A rook on
a far elm suited me admirably.
" Before I speak to you of the anxiety
your absence has caused," — (the rook
flapped and was off — I rose) — " I
should like to ask you a few ques-
tions." This method of procedure
appeared to me desirable in two re-
spects ; it mystified the Sinner and
the Problem, and allowed me to walk
about while making inquiries. I
could not have kept my countenance
long with those two wide-eyed, sorrow-
ful ragamuffins standing dumb before
me. I went to the arbour. " How
did you make this ? " I asked.

" We cut some willow-branches — "

" Exactly ; you cut some willow-
branches. Now, to whom do those
willow-branches belong 1 " There was
no answer. " You see what I mean ?
It is other people's property."

" They're very little ones," sug-
gested the Sinner. " She said — "

"Do not tell me what she said.
Did you obtain permission ? " Again
there was no answer. " This is a
very little one, too," I said, indicating
the suspended rabbit. " Which of
you killed it ? "

The Sinner brightened visibly. " I
got them both," he began quickly.
" They—"

I was examining the arrow. "You
have poked this through further than
it went at first, have you not 1 "

The Sinner nodded. " He thought
it looked better," explained the
Problem. " Besides, it wasn't, — it
wouldn't die, you see."

"It came hopping out," went on
the Sinner ; " it and the other."

" Was it far off? "

" No, not very far ; at least, about
two yards. I was afraid it would
run away, and it didn't seem to be
looking, you see, so I shot it."

" And the other ? "

The Sinner regarded me doubtfully ;
I was speaking with great sternness.
" Well, the other, you see, was wash-
ing its face. It licked its paws and
then rubbed them on its nose ; and
I had one shot at it, but it missed,
and so it stopped, and then it sat up
again and went on washing itself. So
I hit it in the chest."

" Was this one far off? "

"It, — it was about three yards
off, farther than the other. The
Problem said I ought to have taken
it unawares, but I should think I did,
because it didn't seem to know I was
going to shoot it."

"Where is it now1? I mean, this
is the skin ; where is the rest ? "

The Sinner looked rapidly about
him. Then he darted to a big dock-
plant, and took something from be-
hind it. " Here's its head," he said ;
"we cut it off. You don't, — do you
want to see the inside ? " he asked re-
spectfully, glancing at the dock-plant.

"The legs," said I hastily, "the
legs, where are they 1 "

" Well, we, — we ate some, you see
for supper. We roasted it by the fire ;
it wasn't very nice, "he added thought-
fully. " The cook at my Aunt's — :

" I do not wish to hear about the
cook at your Aunt's. What else did
you have 1 "

" Bread," said the Sinner promptly ;
" we got a loaf from the baker when
he came yesterday."

"Did you pay for it?"

" No ; we just asked him for it
and he gave it us."

" Sinner," said I, " you are wonder-
ful. That is to say, your conduct — "
But I had made a slip, and he saw
that in a twinkling.

168

The Sinner and the Problem.

" Oh, don't be angry any more,"
he said appealingly. " We didn't
mean — "

" Look here," I said. " Here are
you two boys ; you ask to come with
me for a walk to find a hawk's nest,
and then after keeping me waiting
half-an-hour you don't come; you
have gone off somewhere else. You
frighten everybody at the school till
they are at their wits' end ; you keep
me sitting up for you all night, and
looking for you from three o'clock in
the morning. I haven't been to bed,
and I don't suppose that any of your
masters have slept a wink all night.
One of them went off early this
morning to Axham to look for you.
I walked myself to Overdon to ask
about you : I drove six miles yester-
day night to a gipsy-camp to see if
you were there; and the police have
been searching for you since seven
o'clock last evening. The police," I
repeated with emphasis.

The Sinner grew pale as I spoke.
The Problem (I knew it even then)
saw through me; still, he listened
with attention.

"But I wrote you a letter," began
the Sinner.

" Why did you not tell me straight
out 1 "

There was no answer. " He only
thought of it before dinner," put 'in
the Problem ; " and after dinner you
weren't in your room, so we left a
note in the book."

" H'm ; but — I don't know, it
seems to me incomprehensible. How
long did you mean to stay here ?
What did you think would be the
end of it all? What were you to
eat ? " The Sinner glanced at the
rabbits. " And what if it rained ?
And — by the way, do you know what
the time is ? " They shook their
heads. " Past one o'clock. Well,"
said I cheerfully, " I suppose you will
be having lunch soon ; so will I."

I retired to a mossy stump in the
background, took out my sandwiches
and spread them invitingly; then I
pulled out my flask, measured a small
portion of spirit, filled that up at the
pool and returned to my stump. The
two boys watched me in silence. I
began on a sandwich, taking no notice
of them. They watched me for a
little while, and then the Sinner
nudged the Problem and turned to
the stream. He stood with his back
to me and looked hard at the dis-
tance. " Come," said I, and he faced
me very quickly. " I've brought my
lunch, you see. I thought it would
save you trouble. Don't mind about
me, go on with yours ; but perhaps
you've had it already ? " The Sinner
shook his head. "Well, there's that
rabbit, you know ; you had better
make a fire and cook it."

The Sinner glanced at the tiny
heap of ashes, and then at me, and
then at the rabbit.

" There's plenty of wood," said I ;
" or do you want a match ? Ask
me for anything you want."

The Sinner touched the Problem's
arm, and set off manfully to gather
wood. He brought a bundle of
bracken, which the Problem arranged,
and then some sticks. Then came
a pause, and I wondered how long
I should hold out. " By the way,
you two," I suggested, as if the idea
had just occurred to me ; " had you
thought what a fine whacking you'll
get, when you get back 1 "

The Sinner looked at me again, but
only sadly. Then followed a search
for a match ; but there was only
one, and it went out. I made no
further pretence about matters.

" Confound it ! " I shouted, and
remembered to whom I was speak-
ing. " Here, bother it all, you poor
little nobodies, come and eat this, —
all of it, and hurry ! "

I expected a joyful surprise, and

The Sinner and the Problem.

169

the instant disappearance of my
sandwiches, but I was mistaken.
The Problem looked round eagerly,
it is true, but the Sinner did not
move. The Problem gazed at him
with anxiety. Then he stepped for-
ward quickly, — I believe the Sinner
would have fallen ; he was very
white. Good heavens ! thought I,
and remembered the brandy. It
was very lucky, — but just then the
Sinner collapsed altogether, and for
the next few minutes I was busy.
When I look back on the fifteen
seconds or so while the Sinner lay
small and white on the grass before
me, I believe they were the most
miserable of my life. I did not
know, — how could I have known ? —
how little bread had been left for
breakfast ; how early the boys had
turned out of their arbour; how
they had been in and out of the
water nearly all the morning. But
it was only fifteen seconds or so
before the Sinner looked up at me,
choking a little over the brandy;
then his colour came back, and he
regarded with interest a sandwich
offered by the Problem, whose face
was aglow with the liveliest affection
and happiness. Indeed, he told me
afterwards that he had never seen
anyone faint before ; he thought the
Sinner had died very suddenly.

My proposal that we should return
to the school was accepted in silence
as inevitable. And in silence we
returned, except that the Sinner re-
marked once that it was a cold
wind. And mine host being occu-
pied with the oratio obliqua and a
blackboard, I took the pair of them
to the matron, a raw-boned Scots-
woman for whom I entertained the
most respectful regard, and who, I
learnt afterwards, had spied on me
through the keyhole as I cut the
sand wiches.

"It will be before sundown that

they will be back," she had remarked
to the odd man of the place, who
groaned under a basket of boots ;
and she watched my direction from
the window as he went up-stairs
creaking. When she did set eyes
on us she had made up her mind,
over I don't know how many pairs
of stockings. " Do not talk to me
about it," she said ; " yell straight
to bed, the pair of ye." And with
an indignant glance at me she
marched them up the passage ; but
it was she who sent me my luncheon
by the boot-boy for all that.

CHAPTER IX.

THE next morning there came news
that had sent a messenger post-haste
to Overdon. I had been awakened
more than once during the night by
mysterious sounds of comings and
goings in the passages outside my
room, muttered orders, indistinct
questions, scuttering feet ; and twice
I thought I heard the voice of mine
host's good lady, urgent and agitated.
But my tired brain took little heed
of it all ; indeed, I doubt if I made
more out of it than to recognise a
break in the sleep that lay heavy on
me after that last night's vigil, — a
pleasant invitation to lengthened
slumbers ; and I awoke finally from
a dream in which I had taken refuge
in the cellar from the Publican, who
was battering at the door of it with
a mahl-stick.

Some one was tapping at the door ;
and it was not long before I under-
stood, from the biting Scots of my
friend the matron, that the Sinner
was ill, — in a raging fever — and
latterly had been asking for me
(though it seemed he knew no one)
with such miserable persistency that
the doctor had given orders I should
be summoned. It was a short toilet

170

The Sinner and the Problem.

I made, and I learned later that mine
hostess supposed I had been dressed
already when the message reached
me. I was taken by my guide down
a passage to a small room discon-
nected from the boys' dormitories;
the sick-room was the name given to
it, as I was told on the way.

The door was ajar. Mine hostess
stood by it, her face betraying a
motherly concern. She pointed to
the smallest of beds in the corner of
the room beneath a bay-window; it
seemed they had moved the Sinner to
this on his showing signs of feverish-
ness late in the afternoon. The
doctor stood in the window, a ther-
mometer or some such instrument
poised in his fingers. I went to the
side of the bed. The Sinner lay
there, his face flushed and his eyes
closed, the abandoned attitude of a
child's suffering. He was not asleep,
as I could tell by his breathing.

" Sinner," said I.

But the Sinner took no notice.
He stirred uneasily, and in doing so
his hand touched mine for a moment.
I know nothing of fevers, nor much
of any illness beyond my own of
three months back, and I had made
neither head nor tail of that ; but the
burning heat of the child's hand
astonished me, and I looked question-
ingly at the doctor. He nodded, and
tapped his thermometer. From his
low-voiced conversation with mine
hostess it appeared that he thought
a crisis of some kind likely in the
course of the next twenty-four hours ;
what might happen he could scarcely
tell ; the fever might leave him, but
in these cases, as a rule, — prolonged
exposure, — heavy dews, — develop-
ments, complications, — impossible to
say — hoped for the best — good consti-
tution— bah ! I declare I had heard
the identical words, a dozen times, all
of them.

" We have sent for his aunt,"

explained mine hostess. " He is an
orphan, as I dare say you know. She
is a strong-minded, unsympathetic
woman, but perhaps really fond of
the child. She will be here, if she
comes (which is doubtful) by twelve
o'clock."

" I shall look in later," put in the
doctor. " Meanwhile, — nothing much
to be done, — cooling drinks, — some
one he knows to sit with him."
Mine hostess glanced at me. I knew
how busy her mornings must be, and
nodded ; though I needed no con-
sideration of that kind to induce me
to stay. Perhaps it was an accident
of my lonely, selfish existence, but in
some way the fact that the child had
all along sought my company unasked,
— nay, had come to look upon the
companionship as a kind of right —
had wrought a curious change in my
attitude to the world in general ; and
between the Sinner and the Problem
and myself particularly there existed
that unreasoning bond of sympathy
which has its basis not in common
pursuits and interests, but is born of
a confidence impossible of analysis :
the trust, the faith — no, but it
is the creed of dumb animals and
children.

From mine hostess came a grate-
ful look and murmured thanks. She
drew me a chair to the bed-head and
the doctor followed her to the door.
I was left with the matron, whose
face wore a forbidding look of dis-
favour— indeed, I was in doubt how
to deal with her. She looked me up
and down, and I bore the scrutiny
with what grace I might.

" Ye'll not have had much experi-
ence with the sick, I'm thinking,"
said she with a preliminary sniff.

I answered that I had been under
doctors' care myself.

"That I do not doubt," she ob-
served. " With your fondness for
sitting in the damp places and like,

The Sinner and the Problem.

171

ye will have caught your colds before
now."

She eased the pillow at the Sinner's
head and lifted his arm for a moment.
In her big bony hand the Sinner's
sunburned wrist looked absurdly
small and weak. " Ye'll be knowing
nothing of the nursing of a child,
of course," she said. " Aweel, there's
nothing much here. The doctor — eh,
but doctors are fules."

I asked her opinion of the case with
the deference she evidently expected ;
but she was not explicit. " Ye will
set at the bedside and ye will give
him his drink ; and ye will see that
he does not throw the clothes from
him ; and if he speaks to ye, ye will
know that it is deleerious and as
nature means him. There will be
nothing in that."

I inquired if the bell communicated
with her room.

" I am no more than across the
passage," she said. " Ye will ring
if ye choose, but it will be no great
trouble to ye to step to my room.
No but what I should hear ye move."
She busied herself with smoothing
the sheets on the bed as she spoke.
The Sinner seemed quite unconscious
of her presence, and though he opened
his eyes now and then, only closed
them without apparent recognition
of anything that was passing. She
smoothed the hair gently from his
forehead. " Eh, but 'tis hot," she
said to herself. I caught sight of the
wedding-ring on her finger. " Puir
wee soul," she whispered. Her mas-
terful and comprehensive gaze went
round the room, and she shifted the
barley-water a little nearer to me.
" Ye will mind that it is a preevi-
lege," she remarked abruptly.

I assured her that I was grateful
to be allowed to do so much.

" Aweel, the child has been speirin'
for ye," she said ; and just then the
Sinner started up with my name on

his lips. I spoke to him, and he
looked at me vacantly and lay down
again. I settled the clothes about
him, the matron regarding me sternly
as I did so.

" Have ye had breakfast 1 " she
asked with some fierceness. Truth
to tell I had forgotten it. She sur-
veyed the bed critically, tucked in
the blankets at the sides, and re-
arranged the barley-water. " Ye will
sit in the chair," she said ; and she
turned with her hand on the door to
take a final and jealous scrutiny of
the room. She gave some kind of
a snort, — of pleasure or toleration I
could not tell — and disappeared. It
was not five minutes gone before she
returned with a tray containing the
breakfast of a giant. She set it on
a table in the window and I thanked
her ; but she opened the door again,
shut it behind her without a word,
stepped across to her own room, and
returned within the minute to con-
template me with the utmost severity.
" And if I did not know ye would
be guid to the child I would have
seen ye to that London of yours
before I would have let ye look at
the keyhole of the door of this room,"
she said, and was gone so silently that
I never heard the catch of the lock.

Thus it was that I gained my first
experience of a sick-room without a
doctor's bill to follow. And after
all it was no great matter, though I
made sure of the use of my bell
before I was in any sense at ease ;
that is speaking comparatively, for I
cannot say I was ever at ease during
the three hours I spent there. I
think I had never before seen a child
suffer ; and the only associations I
connected with the Sinner were those
of skies and flowers and outdoor
growth and activity ; an innocent
faun in my new-found Arcadia ; the
apotheosis of mischief in a garden of
primroses.

172

The Sinner and the Problem.

For quite an hour the Sinner lay
there tossing uneasily. Now and
then he started, stared wildly round
the room, and fell back again always
without any kind of recognition of
my presence. I had some trouble to
keep the clothes on him, and that I
knew I must do after the caution
given me by the Scotswoman, or I
think I should have left him as he
seemed to wish, and you could see
the whole of him longed for the cool-
ness of the air. Yet there was no
resistance to any measures I took to
obey the Scotswoman's injunctions ;
you would not realise, until you sat
as I did by the bedside, how small a
thing a child is.

And then he began to chatter.
One cannot suppose anything more
startling to a man untrained as my-
self than these sudden breakages of
silence, — the causeless inception of
speaking after unnatural stillnesses —
and above all, the mechanism of it ;
there was a machine, and twice in a
minute the piston thrust and the
wheels ran and there was speech. It
was not the Sinner, though he spoke
of nothing but the trivialities of the
small life he lived ; arithmetic and
school-bells and cricket-balls, from one
to the other and over again ; and
sometimes of my pictures and me, but
that was the saddest of all, for each
time I was hoping the words had
their meaning, and each time he
reverted to something quite outside
my relations with him, — Latin sen-
tences, always Latin sentences, sub-
ject and object and predicate and all
the unmannerly jargon of schoolbook
grammar. And twice at least there
were words indicative of the more
serious interviews with mine host, —
a sort of comment unspoken till now
— and yet 1 knew the Sinner thought
lightly of such matters ; but they
were part of his daily life, and so I
think found their utterance then. I

am sure I should have laughed at the
word Don't at any other time; just
then, in that connection, I wondered
what it had cost him before to sup-
press it ; not much I dare say, but in
that little bed he did not look worth
whipping.

Perhaps it was more than could be
expected of any man in my position
that I should take all this as a matter
of course ; "as nature means him,"
that was the matron's expression of
it. Indeed, I doubt if it was pro-
posed I should. There was the
removal of my breakfast, which broke
the spell for a minute or more ; and
twice or three times I thought I
heard a rustle and the fall of a foot
and guessed the Scots mother at the
keyhole. However that may be, the
Sinner was on the point of revealing
some mystery connected with one of
mine host's last interviews with him
(and I was on the tip-toe of expecta-
tion, a glass of barley-water in my
hand, and I do not know with what
other intentions of making matters
easy) when there came to me the
distant sound of voices, nearer and
nearer, up the stair and along the
passage, till they ceased at the door
of the room.

" You see, sir — " said the Sinner,
and his voice was hopeless of reprieve.
Then the door opened softly.
If the Problem had set himself of
designed purpose, that first afternoon
when I met the Lady of the Lake, to
draw me a picture of the Sinner's
Aunt as I was to meet her then, he
could not have outlined her with an
exacter touch. There were the
goloshes, the umbrella, the cotton
gloves, the spectacles like carriage-
lamps on each side of a red-tipped
pole of a nose, the wisp of hair under
a black bonnet, the thin figure, and
the rasping voice. I declare I had
known her for years.

She was accompanied by mine

The Sinner and the Problem.

173

hostess, a grave and matronly person.
I rose from my seat at the bedside as
she entered, and found my right hand
encumbered with a glass of barley-
water, which I was not far off
spilling. I was conscious of a pro-
longed glare from the black-rimmed
spectacles. I remember speculating
on the possibility of black kid being
bound so neatly on the nose-rest, — if
that be a correct term, and I am
ignorant if it is. Mine hostess intro-
duced me, and the Sinner's Aunt
bowed, a sort of snap out of the
perpendicular and back again.

"Let me see the child," she said.
I made way for her to the bedside,
and as I did so, I caught sight of the
matron's face behind her ; the mouth
was thin and forbidding.

The Sinner's Aunt surveyed the
fevered little face with severity. She
handed me her goloshes and umbrella
and bent over the bed. " What did
you tell me that doctor said ? " she
asked abruptly. Mine hostess in her
reply happened to mention the word
crisis.

" Crisis 1 " she rapped out in a
strident undertone, and sniffed.
" Crisis ? A cold, nothing more nor
less. From the telegram I received
this morning I thought the boy

" And ye will be so kind as to
remember that this is a sick-room,"
quoth the matron.

The Aunt turned upon her, looked
her up and down, and snorted. The
Sinner tossed fretfully and thrust a
hot little foot from under the
blankets. The Aunt replaced the
clothes somewhat more gently than
I expected. Then he chattered out
something about buttercups and the
river, and whatever answer the
matron would have been given for
her interruption was forgotten.

" H'm," said the Sinner's Aunt.

" Ye will see that it is more than a

cold," said the matron ; " and perhaps
it would be better that not so many
should stand round the child's bed,"
she added to mine hostess. " There
will be the room yonder, and it is no
more than to step the passage."

I suggested this to the Sinner's
Aunt. Contrary to my expectation
she at once took her goloshes and
umbrella, and with a parting glare at
the matron made for the door with
such speed that my intentions of
opening it for her were belated by
half the length of the room; before
I could do so much as make my way
past the little table containing the
barley-water she had turned the
handle, opened the door, and to my
bewildered vision appeared to fall
headlong into the passage. There
was a resounding thump and a
muffled cry, and leaving the matron
in a state of speechless rage and
indignation I darted to the door
followed by mine hostess, the latter
almost tearful in her perplexity. It
was a strange sight that met our eyes.

The Problem was sitting on the
floor rubbing his head dismally. Be-
yond him a confused heap, — I am
unable to describe it with particulars
— which, as the key turned behind
us in the sick-room door, shook itself
convulsively, came to a kneeling
posture and at last rose with frantic
sweeps at dress and hair and bonnet,
— the Sinner's Aunt, voiceless, pant-
ing.

She waved me aside and leaned
against the wall. Mine hostess
opened the door of the matron's room,
and she allowed herself to be assisted
in. I picked up the Problem and
followed them.

" Take him away ! " gasped the
Aunt. " Take that boy away ! Do
you hear me ? Take him away ! "

" He is hurt, I think," I said ; and
indeed the Problem gazed most mourn-
fully at me.

174

The Sinner and the Problem.

"What, could have happened?"
asked mine hostess, busy with a
smelling-bottle and a fan.

" Happened ? The boy deliberately
thrust his body before me as I was
leaving the room, deliberately threw
me to the ground. Take him away !"

" I didn't," murmured the Problem.

" Deliberately threw me to the
ground. Take him away ! " She
was recovering her breath a little.
" What were you doing at the door ? "
she asked severely.

" I was listening, listening at the
keyhole."

" Listening at the keyhole ! I tell
you, take him away ! "

" Yes," said the Problem, " I
wanted to know how he was."

" A likely story," she sniffed.

" The boys were great friends," I
interposed. " This is the one who
was so foolish as to run away with
your nephew, and he is naturally
anxious — "

" Anxious, indeed, he anxious !
And is no one else to be anxious, I
should like to know ? For a great
boy like that to be lumbering round
a keyhole — "

" At least," I suggested, " he has
not benefited greatly by doing so."
There was a sorry lump on the boy's
forehead, as I turned his head for her
inspection.

"H'm," said the Sinner's Aunt,
"butter. Take him away."

I beckoned to him to follow me.
In truth I thought I saw an oppor-
tunity of doing something which had
been in my mind all the morning,
and that was to send a note to the
Lady of the Lake acquainting her of
the way in which matters had fallen
out. She would come, I knew, and
the thought of it made me for a
moment forgetful of the reason. The
Problem assented with alacrity; he
was just out of school, and could be
back before dinner. So I set him off

to the lake and returned to mine
hostess in the matron's room. I
found the Sinner's Aunt in a some-
what more composed frame of mind.
She enquired when the doctor would
be returning. In about a couple of
hours, thought mine hostess, and
went on to explain that lunch had
been prepared and was waiting. I
was invited to accompany them, and
on the way managed to slip behind
and knock at the bedroom door.

" Is yon body wi' ye ? " asked the
matron with caution through the
crack. " Weel then, ye will tell the
mistress there is no deeference in the
child's condeetion. No that to any
who has had expeerience it would be
expectit. Ye can judge for yersel',"
she added, opening the door a thought
wider, and I peered in. The Sinner's
eyes were not shut, but I do not
know what he was seeing. And still
he chattered of rabbits and algebra
and bows and arrows, and I left him,
asking permission (it was politic) to
return later.

I have little remembrance of what
passed at luncheon. The Sinner's
Aunt I recollect contemplating the
rice-pudding with acrimony and even-
tually being helped twice to it; but
beyond that, and noticing that she
guarded her goloshes under her chair,
I think I might have eaten that meal
alone. The windows were wide open,
and in the sunshine outside a pair of
peacocks strutted proud in shot bronze
and blue ; clusters of wistaria swayed
in the breeze, and there was a merry
chase of sparrows after a white butter-
fly— a flash of forked wings and a
swallow had it; you could hear the
snap as he shut his beak. And then
the gate swung and a gracious figure
came into the framed square of garden.
And the Lady of the Lake, my note
in her hand, and her eyes grave and
kind, crossed the lawn with the pea-
cocks stepping daintily after her.

The Sinner and the Problem.

175

I think the Sinner's Aunt was glad
to see her. But her first action was
to gather her umbrella and goloshes,
and she stood to shake hands with
a yoke of flabby blackness on her left
wrist. They were but the merest
commonplaces my Lady exchanged
with myself ; she thanked me for the
note I sent her, and perhaps not five
minutes were passed before she was
away with mine hostess and the Aunt
to the sick-room. I followed.

At the door we found the doctor.

"Difficult to know what to make
of it," quoth he. I know the matron
behind him sniffed. Mine hostess
engaged him in a muttered conver-
sation, of which the result was this ;
that the Sinner's Aunt accompanied
her to the drawing-room, the doctor
nodded to the matron and was off,
and the Lady of the Lake turned to
me — not a thought of laughter in lips
or eyes. " I am going to sit with
him," she said. " If anything should
happen, — you understand — I will send
for you at once."

I may have replied as I ought, but
it was a different ending to my note
from that I had pictured. You see
I had hoped for so much; and I
changed my views about it all before
I was down-stairs, and found that I
was saying too much over and over.
My pipe, thought I, and work, — which
led only to my pipe.

It was a cloudy day, and no need
for the peacocks to foretell rain. Rain
was in the air, a lull of singing birds,
and a darkening of green on the trees.
And there was silence in the garden ;
hardly a sound but of bumble-bees at
the mignonette and roses, and those
nodding in a fluctuant warm wind
against a sky of grey and purple.

A verandah ran outside mine host's
smoking-room. Further along the
house-wall I could hear the drone of
his class humming through the open
windows. I sat in the verandah in

a painted garden-chair, possibly for
an hour, while the smoke from my
pipe curled among the wistaria stems,
lifted to the roofing, nestled to the
twisted iron, lapped under the eaves
and away. There was not a puff of
wind ; the stupor of that still garden
overtook me, and I sat watching the
shifting smoke-wreaths, whitened from
grey because of the drab clouds that
writhed and grew beyond the hill,
sharp edges and reeling globes of
vapour. It was hypnotism of a kind,
for the live faculties in me were
bruised and deadened ; the crash must
come, you felt that, and till then there
was nothing to do but to wait. But it
fitted the time ; sunshine and flowers
and birds and bees, six weeks of them,
and leading up to this; cloud and
silence, the tension of my string of
adventures tightened to breaking
point, the storm to come, — and after
that?

The dull air split with light; a
knife of light that probed once, twice,
and then an oppression of dark-
ness on pained eyeballs. There was
a scared cheeping in the ivy, and
again silence. Then a crackle, miles
beyond the hill, that grew to a roar,
rolled and crashed overhead and
mumbled sulkily, loth to leave its
hold on our hearing. That suited my
mood. I longed for the snap of the
string, the relief of the strained fibres ;
I welcomed each stroke of the knife,
keen, white, resistless. There were
shock and crash that followed, but
sound after silence was the event we
were moving to : another flash, and
another ; a circular sweep of the
blade, nearer volleys, artillery gallop-
ing into line, a stifling atmosphere
that bound brain and sight and
thought.

Some one touched me on the
shoulder. It may be I guessed more
than the Scotswoman meant to tell
me, but as I followed her I knew there

176

The Sinner and the Problem,

was not long to wait. The doctor 1
If he were not here by now, no need
of him.

The room was altered. In the
morning there had been light, air,
a patch of blue beyond white-sashed
windows, the happy chirping of
restless sparrows, and the Sinner
talking only as he might talk in his
sleep. But now I saw a lurid square
of sky, a darkened room, my Lady of
the Lake at the Sinner's bedside, and
mine hostess and the Sinner's Aunt
in the corner behind her. And there
was the Sinner bolt upright and
staring straight before him : chatter,
chatter, a gesture of the hand, a shake
of the head ; the lightning playing
round and round him, cutting queer
shadows on the wall ; a question and
a strained pause for the answer he
never heeded, the voice of my Lady
of the Lake, soothing and caressing;
the furious blows of thunder that
drowned speech and mocked the in-
tense longing to hear that possessed me.

The blind, thought I, the blind,
and shut it out. It was a red one,
and half way down before the Scots-
woman could stop me. " tip wi' it,"
she gestured more than spoke in the
din. " We drew it before, and it sent
him daft." Lightning through a red
blind !

I have never seen a picture such as
that. There was a flash that whipped
the darkness, flicking a white thong
into every corner ; a simultaneous
rending above us, — it was a yell, a
scream, a shout ; the lightning licked
at the Sinner's mouth and eyes like
the tongue of a snake. His lips were
moving, but there came no sound from
them. He pointed straight beyond
us all, and the black shadow leaped
up on the wall, a hand denunciatory,
threatening, the hand of a prophet
cursing a city. The strangest thoughts
ran riot in me ; I could formulate no
idea but built its theme on the

shadow ; Jonah and Nineveh, Elijah
and Baal — and then a repetition of
words, the same again and again.

" Elias was a man subject to like
passions as we are, and he prayed
earnestly that it might not rain —
prayed earnestly that it might not rain

The Lady of the Lake was kneeling
at the bed-side. There was a lull in
the storm and the room grew darker.

" And he prayed again, and the
heavens sent rain — he prayed again — "

The Sinner had stopped chattering
and was lying back on the pillows.
There was a moment of intensest
silence. The room was so dark that
it was only by leaning forward I could
see that his eyes were open. His
breathing was faint and short.

A splash on the window-pane, —
another and another, — half-a-dozen.
And then came the rain : sheets and
sheets of rain ; rain that hissed and
raced over the tiles, choked the
gutters, danced away down to the
gravel path to make a little sea there,
slashed and tore at the sea till it was
the colour of tan, scattered the rose-
leaves, spilled the mould of the beds
a yard away, and poured in a yellow
waterfall down the stone steps to the
lawn beyond.

The Lady of the Lake rose and bent
over the Sinner. One of his hands
lay palm-upward on the counterpane ;
it was wet and glistening. The Scots-
woman took the wrist, held it a
moment, and nodded. I think we
were all watching her. " Ye may
leave him now," she said to the
Sinner's Aunt. The tension had
broken with that heavy splash of
rain upon the window. The Sinner
was fast asleep.

CHAPTEE X.

I WAS told the next morning that
the Sinner slept through the night as

The Sinner and the Problem.

177

we left him. He was not awake at
eight, so much I learned from the
Problem, an early riser ; but later in
the day I made inquiries at the
matron's door and the big Scotswoman
eyed me kindly.

" Aweel, ye will not do more than
look in at the door," she said. " No
that the child is in his fever now,"
she added, " but [with a prodigious
sniff] 'tis doctor's orders."

I opened the door softly. My
sakes, but here was matter for
thought ! The Sinner's Aunt at the
bedside, and she was reading, — I
guessed Bunyan— it was THE FAIR-
CHILD FAMILY.

The Sinner turned quickly, and the
Aunt's book closed with a snap.

" Oh," said the Sinner, " why ever
didn't you come before 1 "

" One can't be running everywhere
after, — good-morning," said I paren-
thetically to the Gorgon — " after a
small boy who* — "

" Oh, but we didn't mean — I didn't
mean — "

" Who does all sorts of extra-
ordinary things, and then expects —
have you been here long?" I asked.
The Gorgon had risen and was facing
me with a severity impossible to dis-
regard. "Long enough for my liking,"
was the answer, "and I understood
that the doctor had given orders — "

" You see I've had a cold," said the
Sinner. " I mayn't read. "Will you
come and read to me ? " THE FAIR-
CHILD FAMILY was placed on the
table with a subdued bang.

"I've only come for a minute,
Sinner. I think I mustn't stop to
read. And besides, your Aunt — you

" Yes," said the Sinner.

" Perhaps I shall see you later," I
remarked to the Sinner's Aunt. She
took not the smallest notice.

I closed the door, and, a sudden
idea striking me, made my way to the
No. 495. — VOL. LXXXIII.

school-library, a sunny panelled room
on the ground-floor. I took up the
catalogue, and searched under F ;
THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was not there,
which set me thinking.

But I had a further object in leav-
ing the Sinner abruptly. I knew
that the Lady of the Lake had left
on the evening before with the inten-
tion of coming up from the house in
the valley early the next day, and I
thought I knew the way she would
come. So I betook myself to the
verandah and my pipe, and that was
pleasing me mightily. My pipe has
ever been my truest friend, though
you may lose sight of your truest
friend for a day or two ; but there
are times when through the soft grey
smoke-wreaths the world takes colour
like a flower in the sun, crimson and
purple for duns and drabs ; and here
was a time when the storm of yester-
day was over and you looked straight
ahead into clean skies and clear
weather. I suppose I lost myself in
the contemplation of it ; for yesterday,
as we were leaving the Sinner asleep
in that quaint little room, with the
lightning dying in the west and the
rain helter-skelter at the window, I
caught a glance from the Lady of
the Lake, and if she read a twentieth
part of what I was thinking she must
either have been angry or not. At
any rate she was to return this morn-
ing, and through my pipe-clouds the
world went alive and rosy. Under-
stand, I was sitting with my
back to an open French window.
There was a tap on my shoulder. I
must have turned with more than
mere politeness.

"No, I know you didn't expect
me," remarked the Sinner's Aunt.

" I beg your pardon," said I, and
immediately saw there was no reason
why I should have done so, "I
thought you were with the — with
your nephew."

178

The Sinner and the Problem.

" I have been with him since three
o'clock," said the Aunt.

" You must be tired," I ventured.

" I am not," replied the Aunt.

"Won't you sit down?" I asked,
hoping she would not.

" No," said the Aunt with emphasis.
Her voice rose. " No. Why should
I sit down ? Can you tell me that ? "

" I am sure I cannot," I replied.

" Then why did you ask me 1 " she
snapped. " But there, you're like the
rest of them. They're all alike. When
I came here yesterday, what did I do ?
Sat in a train for three hours, except
when I walked up and down the
carriage. I get out of the train and
sit in a brougham for half-an-hour. I
am met at the door of the house and
asked to sit down. I sit in that room
at the child's bedside for six hours,
come down-stairs and am asked — to
sit down. Well, it's about all some
people are fit for, to sit down them-
selves or to ask some one else to do
it." She regarded my deck-chair with
meaning.

" I am very sorry," I observed.

" You are not," she rapped out.

" Well then, to tell the truth, I am
not," I answered, "not in the least."
I was half-angry, half-laughing. Per-
haps she was unused to be met
with her own weapons ; at any rate
a grim smile deepened the lines about
her mouth.

" If every man and woman told the
truth under all circumstances," said
she, " the world would be a very
different place."

"It would be very dull," I
suggested.

"Dull? It would be about as
lively a place as I wish to see. Dull,
indeed ! "

" Of course. You would never be
able to wonder whether your neigh-
bour was saying more than she meant ;
or whether she would think you meant
more than you said."

" H'm," said the Sinner's Aunt.
"Well, it's not likely to be tried, that's
one thing."

" It might be tried, for five minutes
at a time ; a sort of game, you know."

" H'm. Why are you sitting here?"

"To smoke, and to think, and to
look at the view."

" Bah ! " said the Aunt.

" Does that mean the experiment is
to be regarded as a failure ? "

" Not at all. It would have been
a failure, young man, if you had told
the truth. As it is, I'll trouble you
to accompany me round the garden."
There followed business with the

" I shall be delighted," said I.

" That is not true either," said the
Sinner's Aunt.

It occurred to me to relight my
pipe. " You don't object to smoking ? "
I asked, and was certain I could not
have said that ten minutes ago.

"I shall be delighted," said the
Sinner's Aunt. There was a con-
vincing snap of elastic bands.

"I believe that is true," said I. But
I believe too that my own profession
of pleasure in the Gorgon's company
was not conventional, for I was
beginning to be more than interested
in the owner of this rasping tongue
and these goloshes. I doubt if I was
not a little flattered that she had
insisted on my being rude to her.

We set off up the path in silence,
the Sinner's Aunt leading the way.
At intervals she stopped and prodded
a rose-leaf, or tapped at the stem of a
clematis, or whisked aside straggling
sweet-peas. The storm had left havoc
behind it, and though the red gravel
of the paths was swept clean and un-
even, and the mould of the garden-
beds, parched to cracks last week, was
dinted and kneaded into a rich level
of blackish brown, and though the
grass steamed in the meadow beyond,
arid on all sides was that intoxicating

The Sinner and the Problem.

179

smell of earth after rain, still there
•was a sigh here and there for battered
roses, snapped poppy-heads, draggled
jessamine ; or you stooped for a pansy,
and found it splashed and spattered,
and your geraniums sodden. But my
sighs ? Well I had hoped to have
spent part of that morning with the
Lady of the Lake, and matters were
not setting fair in that direction, I
had been thinking.

"Why does that child like you?"
she asked.

I suppose I had expected, if I was
thinking about the Sinner's Aunt at
all, some commonplace in regard to
battered geraniums. ' ' Your nephew 1 "
I asked back.

" Of course. Why is it ? "

" But children like anybody."

" They do not," quoth the Sinner's
Aunt, and there was nothing more to
be said,

We had reached the end of the
path, where it led away to the cricket-
field and the laurel-walk. Thither
went the Aunt, and I at her side, my
dreams for the morning fled back to
the ivory gate, for the laurel-walk
was hidden, and invisible from that
side of the house by which the Lady
of the Lake must reach it.

" When that boy's mother was
dying," said the Sinner's Aunt, " she
asked me to take care of him."

" She was your sister 1 " I asked,
for there was silence.

" Of course she was," she snapped.
" Who else should she have been ? "

" She might have married your
brother — "

" She didn't," said the Aunt. " I
never had a brother."

" Oh," said I.

" She asked me to educate him,"
continued the Aunt. " Humph."

" And you said you would ? "

" I did riot," said the Aunt. " I
said I would not." I could think of
no answer to that. " And then I

did," said the Aunt, and banged a
wet laurel-leaf with her umbrella, so
that the heavy drops fell with a
rattle.

We walked on rather faster, till
she stopped abruptly. "That child
is the image of his father," she said,
and went on still faster.

"You knew his father well1?" I
questioned after a little, for want of
something better worth asking.

The Sinner's Aunt made no answer
to this. " I told his mother I should
never do it," she said.

" But you would have."

"I tell you I should not," she
cried fiercely, and cut at the laurels
again.

" Did his father die before he was
born?"

"Of course he did." The Sinner's
Aunt turned and glared at me.
" Why am I telling you all this ? " she
asked.

•' I don't know. Please don't tell
me anything you would — "

"I shall," said the Aunt. "I told
you just now that the child was the
image of his father."

" Yes," said I.

" That's the reason." We had
arrived at a place where there were
no laurels, and the umbrella drilled
little round holes in the moss. "You
can understand that, I suppose ? "

" I can," said I. And by a com-
mon impulse we turned back down
the walk.

" I'm a fool of an old woman, I
dare say. I dare say I've got my own
notions about bringing children up as
they ought to be. I dare say I've
a good many ideas in common with
Solomon."

" And I also," I interpolated.

She looked sharply at me. "I've
done my best to bring that boy up as
I thought he ought to be. I'm not
talking of expense, I've got nothing
to spend my money on ; I'm not one
N 2

180

The Sinner and the Problem.

of those idiots who found homes for
dogs, and cemeteries for cats, and
that sort of nonsense. But I've done
what I thought best." I said I had
no doubt of it. "I taught him to
read and write and cipher, read the
Bible to him, taught him his prayers."
The umbrella stirred gently in some
ribbon-grass. " I taught him every-
thing, trained him up, beat him."
Here came a cut at an oak-twig.
"And the end of it all is that the
boy hates me, — hates me ! "

" No, no," said I.

" I tell you he does. Do you
think I can't tell1? When a man is
delirious, what does he talk about 1
People he thinks about, people he
knows. Isn't that true 1 "

" It may be true sometimes."

" And it's the same with children,
What did that boy talk about 1
Rabbits, and knives, and watches, and
his cousin, and his schoolfellows, and
you."

" But then, how about algebra and
Euclid and Latin, and things he
hated 1 "

" Yes, and never about me, never
a word about me, not a single word.
I didn't ask them, but do you think I
didn't know ? "

" Perhaps when you were out of
the room — "

"Nonsense. Here, — you were in
the room three hours with him, they
tell me. Did he talk about me once ? "

"I was only there three hours.
Perhaps the matron — 1 "

" Bah ! " said the Aunt.

" Of course, it's the middle of
his school-time. He would naturally
think about his everyday life, the
things and people he had seen lately."

" Not in the least. When his
father was delirious — bah ! the boy
never said a word about me, because
he never thought about me."

A puff of wind shivered in the
leaves above us, and a little shower

of water rained down. The Aunt
took no notice. " I brought a book
with me to read to him. Of course
he thanked me — had to. Do you
suppose he liked it 1 "

I said I had not a doubt about it.

" Not a doubt about it 1 No.
There was none — that was why.
What was the first thing he asked
you when you came into the room
this morning 1 "

" I don't remember."

" You do. You would not say you
didn't if you did not. You know as
well as I do that he asked you to
read to him. Didn't he ? "

" I believe he did."

" And how long do you suppose I
had been reading to him ? Two hours,
off and on. I began as soon as he
woke up —

" Perhaps the book —

" It was a most interesting book ;
it was the only book I ever had to
read as a child. No," said the
Sinner's Aunt, "he didn't like the
book, because he didn't like me. He
dislikes me, is afraid of me, hates
me, thinks me a monster."

Through the trees I caught a
glimpse of a white frock and a blue
sash.

" Attend to me, if you please," said
the Aunt. " That boy doesn't like
me, but he likes other people ; and
they like him, don't they 1 "

I said that the Sinner was an object
of affection to all he met.

"H'm. You think the boy is
worth educating 1 "

" If my judgment is of any value — "

" It's not," said the Sinner's Aunt ;
" not when you are looking through
the trees every minute — do you think
I can't see ? Just attend to me, if
you please."

" I am all attention," said I.

" Listen to me. I've something to
say to you, not about the boy. I've
something else to say to you — about

The Sinner and the Problem.

181

the answer you gave me when I asked
you why you were sitting in the veran-
dah. Do you remember, young man ? "

I acknowledged the fact.

" Well then, I'm going away this
morning, and I've seen as much as it
is necessary for me to see."

" And that is 1 "

" I have two cautions to give you,
young man. One is, — that's a dan-
gerous young woman."

" I beg your pardon 1 "

" And the other is, — you're not the
first she's made a fool of."

I bowed, I think. We were stand-
ing at the end of the walk, in full
view of the house.

" I'll not trouble you to accompany
me any further," said the Aunt. " I
am returning to the house." She held
out her hand stiffly. I bent over it,
feeling sorry that I had looked away
at the white frock. " Bah ! " said the
Sinner's Aunt, and stepped majestic-

ally towards the house, her skirts
held high and her white stockings
showing quaintly. But she stopped
after may be a dozen yards. " Come
here," she said, turning.

I obeyed her.

" How many pictures do you sell
in a year ? "

I said that it depended upon the
gullibility of the British Public.

"H'm," said the Aunt. "Paint
me two, four, half-a-dozen."

" It would give me great pleasure
if you — "

" Bosh ! " said the Aunt. " Half-
a-dozen, large ones."

I murmured something about the
probable cost.

" Don't bother me with the cost.
Send the bill into my lawyer. Don't
send it to me ; if you do I won't pay
it."

I attempted to express my thanks.

" Bah ! " said the Sinner's Aunt.

{(To be continued.)

182

MY ART.

I HAVE been asked to give some
opinion on various subjects relating
to my art and more particularly on
the question as to whether I should
advise a young woman to dedicate
herself to it. I will not believe that
such a question is put to me with any
doubt as to the dramatic art being
most noble, and I should be sorry for
any one so wanting in intelligence
and culture as to entertain such a
doubt. The philosophy of Descartes
did indeed in its time renew the
charge of Plato that among the arts,
which were all wicked, save only
music, the dramatic was essentially
the most wicked. Louis the Four-
teenth, troubled by those doctrines
which appeared new among the dis-
ciples of Descartes and were worn
out among Platonists, asked Bossuet
whether a true Catholic could fre-
quent the theatres with a quiet con-
science. " There are grave doubts to
the contrary, and many examples in
favour of the theory," replied the
great prelate. To the more recent
accusation that it is an art of an
inferior order, I should not even
think of answering. Hence, with no
further notice of this very unim-
portant criticism, I pass on to a
thing which, though so well known,
it is in these days essential to re-
peat : " For the production of art,
before all else, the artist is needed."
No art is more beneficent, more
honourable than the dramatic if a
young woman take to it for pure
love of it and for no other reason.
Next to the pulpit nothing is more
productive of good than the stage,
if it be understood as the Talmas, the

Modenas, the Siddonses, and other
great actors have understood it.
Other, quite other are the reasons
for regret with regard to this art.
Teachers are wanting, and, what is
even worse, good sense.

Why should the vocation of a
young woman be called in question
if she possess the requisites for suc-
ceeding in this art 1 Ah, if the
world would only see the foundations
that Nature lays ! But the founda-
tions are not enough, — the young
must also entrust themselves to a
guide ; good seed is not sufficient, —
a good tiller is also needed. Cer-
tainly genius is a school in itself, but
geniuses are not born every day, and
fine intelligence may easily go astray
if not properly directed. The best
disposition may be spoiled by bad
training. How many could I name
who have been ruined by false teach-
ing ! It is no question of founding
academies or schools of acting in
which most part of the time the true
teacher or, to say better, the teacher
of the true is the very thing lacking ;
it is a question of not entrusting one-
self to a false school. At one time
there was so much declaiming on the
stage ; now there is an exaggeration
in the opposite direction, and a colour-
less way of acting and of manifesting
the feelings is held to be true.

I cannot say that I am an advocate
for academies so far as dramatic art
goes. How many examples have we
not of the small need of these insti-
tutions for one who has an inborn
vocation for the stage, and contains
within himself the germs of dramatic
art ! If he is without these, no teach-

My Art.

183

ing could instil them into him. Per-
haps the little interest I have always
felt in academies arises from my
having seen many great actors become
such without the least need of aca-
demic rules. I cite England as a first
example of what I say. From the
sixteenth century downwards have
academies, or schools of declamation,
ever existed in that country? And
yet what a group of dramatic celebri-
ties has she produced, exciting the
emulation of other nations ? The
first great actors were inspired solely
by the impressions they received from
the genius of Shakespeare, and from
his creations they drew their stage-
models. By this school many cele-
brated artists, such as Garrick, Kean,
and Mrs. Siddons were greatly in-
spired, and they have left not only
true models but also rules for studying
the interpretation of the characters
they had in mind to embody.

Neither in Austria nor in Germany
exists an academy on the artistic basis
of the one in Paris ; the only object
of the German academies is to teach
music in all its expressions. In Italy
there have never been academies or
schools of acting ; nevertheless how
many great actors have made my
beautiful country famous even in
remote times. Where there is real
dramatic talent great actors are not
the product of academies. Do not
let it be supposed that I deny the
benefit of a good training in elocution,
and in the physical graces of deport-
ment, movement, gesture (in expres-
sion and in reticence) which the stage
demands. These are of great import-
ance for they are the grammar of our
dramatic utterances ; and for lack of
them many a young actor (may I say
more especially among English and
American ones ?) are launched upon
the stage but half equipped to meet
the difficulties they have to encounter.
In some cases, even a really fine actor

never rids himself of bad habits and
tricks thus unconsciously acquired.
In any case some of the precious
years of youth on the stage must be
lost for want of a directing hand in
the preparatory period.

Whosoever resolves to devote him-
self to the dramatic art must set
about it by studying characters of
action rather than those purely of
declamation. This should be the first
aim of an actor who desires to raise
himself to eminence. He must give
the precedence to action rather than
to oratory because the former requires
greater talent than the latter. When
the words expressed are in contrast
with the condition of the mind he
must make this understood to the
public by the workings of his face and
by the accent of his voice, until the
discordance between the word and the
truth becomes evident to the spectator.
Diction is the actor's brush ; without
it he can give no colour to his acting.

Nature is varied ; the physiognomy
of every country differs from that of
another as do its expressions, its
manners, its institutions; or, allowing
that all have feelings more or less
uniform, this conformity varies ex-
ceedingly in its manifestations.

Dramatic teachings may be of
general application as to {esthetics,
but not as to dispositions and mani-
festations. Every nature has its own
special character in expression, in
intonation, and in movements ; there-
fore it is impossible for one nation to
serve as a basis for another in educa-
tion for the stage. For instance, the
character of the Latin race manifests
itself by a vivacity remarkable in
movement and expression, while in
the Northern races, notable for their
reserve of manner, the expression of
feeling is entirely different.

Other fundamental rules are, the
teaching of good carriage and atti-
tudes, of correct diction, and of

184

My Art.

gesticulation ; the pupil must be
taught to study the beautiful in
his gestures, and to avoid the ex-
aggeration and affectation which are
often put on to excite the applause
of the public. Among these rudi-
mental teachings, let the master never
forget to instil into his pupil the
necessity for a conscientious study of
the human heart. Let him also never
tire of repeating that the aforesaid
rules cannot be general since all are
not gifted with the same physical and
intellectual qualities as their pre-
decessors, and cannot consequently
obtain the same results by the same
means. By the inter-mixture of art
with nature and of nature with art a
perfect actor will be found.

Another important precept to be
instilled into the pupil is, that the
actor must not only occupy himself
with a physiological study of his
character, but must also make a
special study of the epoch in which
the action unfolds itself. This last
study, together with that of exactness
in the costumes of the parts I played,
was always one of my great aims.

Verse may be excellently recited
.without monotony in the inflexions
or unnecessary breaks of the voice. I
allow that tragic personages should
have a special dignity of recitation, but
this dignity must always be kept within
the limits of naturalness. Modena,
the reformer of our dramatic art, thus
understood the recitation of tragedy,
as did Marchionni and Pellandi in
Italy, Talma and Rachel in France.

But, while advocating careful in-
struction, my objection to academies
is founded on the autocratic conven-
tionality which rules with an iron
sceptre in such establishments. On
the French stage you will see, as a
rule, every young actor make love with
uniform gestures and identically the
same trembling of the voice and of
the hands, regardless of what his

individual temperament would impel
him to do ; while one ingenue cannot
be differentiated from another, so
identical are their modesty, their
sportiveness, their lamb-like ways.
Against this monotony, I confess, my
spirit rebels.

My practical experience is that,
when by fortune a good guide is met
with in the person of a tried director,
his first task will be to make his pupil
recite some passage of poetry or prose
in order to enable the teacher to
judge of the manner in which he
expresses his sentiments, what qualities
he possesses and wherein he must
correct himself ; for not every one
expresses grief, joy, and indifference
in the same way.

The true teacher should before all
be able to discern how much there is
of personality in the pupil, and this
personality must not be fettered and
subjected to servile imitations. Rivers
run to the sea even without the help
of engineers ; but young actors, with-
out the help of a teacher such as
I mean, make no step in advance.
Even with exceptional talent I doubt
they can find their way alone. The
teacher must only guide the pupil's
inclination, not substitute his own ;
he must, in fact, help the pupil to
develope the gifts he has in embryo,
leaving intact his originality.

The true actor says with Schiller's
Marquis de Posa, " I will not become
the chisel since it is given me to be
the workman." He who will, I do not
say excel in, but at least not mar the
dramatic art, requires, besides apti-
tude, both figure and voice. To be
sure, by indefatigable study, one, with
even a poor voice or of insignificant
build, may succeed in becoming dis-
tinguished. Even on the stage will
is power, and I have known actors
who, wanting in fibre, or voice, or
figure, have yet succeeded in rising
out of the crowd ; but one flower

My Art.

185

alone does not make a spring, and
if it does blossom, in spite of its sweet
fragrance, the weakness of its stalk
will still be apparent.

A Giacomo Leopardi may perhaps
succeed in writing a HAMLET ; but in
performing it on the stage — never !
Let me narrate a case which, among
many others, recurs to my memory,
and which came under my notice here
in Rome, during the Jubilee of Leo
the Thirteenth.

One day my servant came to tell
me that a young girl, a pilgrim come
to Rome on this occasion, begged the
favour of an audience with me. I
complied with her request and she
was admitted. Trembling, hesitating,
her emotion nearly choking her, the
young girl came forward, curtsying
low and stammering out excuses for
having had the boldness to present
herself before me without an intro-
duction. " Come," said I, touched
by the sight of so much gentleness
and humility, " sit down and tell me
why you have come to see me." And
she, in still greater trepidation than
she had yet shown, but overcoming
herself, told me, that from her child-
hood she had had an invincible long-
ing to go on the stage.

I set myself to regard attentively
this pilgrim come to Rome to do
honour to the Holy Father, and re-
vealing herself to me as an enthusiast
for my art. She said that her rela-
tions looked upon her vocation with
no favour, nay, that they resolutely
opposed it and tried by every means
to get the idea out of her head, but
that she was as resolutely determined
to become an actress ; and she'added
that, at any rate, she intended as soon
as possible to join a dramatic com-
pany ; she should never give herself
any peace till she had realised her
golden dream. Having heard of me
and of my living in Rome, she had
put in execution her plan of coming

here as a pilgrim with the idea of
seeing me ; she would have come even
barefoot to ask for advice and patron-
age from me. The poor thing seemed
to be quite mad on the subject of
dramatic art.

I sat looking at her in silence for
some time, I do not know whether
with a smile of pity, or with a sense
of amazement. She was diminutive
of stature, stout, and not pretty ;
but let the features pass : one may
be even plain of feature and yet
be most attractive on the stage,
if the face be illuminated with the
beauty of talent. Fine eyes and a
pleasant smile are the first requisites
for the face on the stage. The young
woman's voice was disagreeable too ;
but notwithstanding this, had she
been cast to play the part of an
enthusiast for art, and rendered it
as she rendered it to me, she would
have been applauded. Very different,
however, is the feeling for the truth
and its expression on the stage of life
from the reproduction of that truth
on the boards of the theatre.

"Now, my dear," said I at last,
" let me hear what you can do." The
poor girl trembled like an aspen-leaf,
and I could almost hear the beatings
of her heart. However, plucking up
her courage at last, she recited a
patriotic poem of her own composi-
tion. I listened to her attentively.
Her gestures were nothing wonderful,
her voice not particularly pleasing,
and though ske rendered the idea of
the composition fairly well, she was
far from showing sufficient talent to
explain her passion for art.

"When she had finished, she stood
with her eyes fixed on me, as if await-
ing the answer of an oracle, and I sat
thinking how best to tell her my
opinion. Finally I decided that it
was best to give her some pain now
and spare her much in the future.
"My dear," I said, "you do not

186

My Art.

lack feeling, and I see that you are
intelligent enough to allow of my
telling you the plain truth. You do
not always give the proper colouring
to the phrases : you are too often
declamatory; but this and other
defects would not be incorrigible. I
must, however, tell you that your
person is little fitted for the stage,
and your provincial accent is so
marked that it would never be tole-
rated by the public. Then what
parts should you wish to play, — title-
rdles 1 "

" Yes," she replied. Truly there is
no temerity like that of an amateur ;
no drawing back for them in face
of any difficulty whatever. Smiling,
I said : " And so, you feel yourself
equal to sustaining the part of Mary
Stuart or of La Dame des Camelias 1 "

" I think so," she answered with
complacency.

" And I am not quite of your
opinion," I said. "I should not
advise your attempting anything be-
yond the part of soubrette, or at most
of ingenue. Before all, you are mis-
taken if you think that the manager
of any but an inferior company will
engage you off hand only because you
show an enthusiasm for art. If you
have an aptitude for acting, which I
shall see presently, and cannot obtain
advice from a good teacher, try at
least to exercise your skill in some
philo-dramatic company, or enter, if
you can, some modest company, to
accustom your eyes, so to speak, to
the footlights. Art requires practice ;
before learning to run one must know
how to walk. The criticism of the
paying public is quite another thing
from the criticism of such as kindly
listen gratuitously to the performance
of amateurs. Begin with small parts.
" Prendete il monte a piu lieve salita
(Begin to climb the mountain at the
easiest part of the ascent) " as I was
reading in LA DIVINA COMMEDIA at

the moment you came in. Many of
our best actors have done no other-
wise with regard to the first steps in
their art, to practise it later in a
worthy manner. They were private
soldiers before they became leaders ;
I myself began thus, guided (as, thank
God, I was !) by the good sense of my
father, who would constantly repeat
to me that most elementary theatrical
maxim ; Before appearing on the stage,
one needs to accustom one's self to the
stage.

" Difficulties are overcome, one at
a time, in the solitude of the artist's
study. I, for my part, began the
ascent of the mountain at the easiest.
The attempt to soar, at once, to the
summit of art does not seem to me a
good experiment. ' Daring is a fine
thing, but an excess of it is presump-
tion,' was said in my time ; and this
wish to become everything, all at
once, seems to be one of the evils of
our day.

" It is true that Schiller says :
' Here below, there is no throne so
steep and high but the strong man
may spring on it at one bound.' But
of the strong in the dramatic art,
who, at one bound, have sprung upon
the throne of Gustavus Modena,
Talma, Kean, Rachel, Siddons,
Salvini, Rossi1? I know of none. In
addition to the gifts with which one
may be endowed, one needs measure,
and measure can be acquired only by
experience.

"All these rules you will learn
more quickly if you have the good
fortune to meet with a good guide,
a good director. But when I have
given you these few hints and this
good advice, I shall but have opened
your eyes to the road that lies paved
before you. Not that I would have
anyone be dismayed at its difficulties.
The struggle has always intoxicated
me ; yet I have known young people
like you, who have fallen in the

My Art.

187

struggle, and have paid dearly for
their love of art."

I gilded the pill as thickly as I
could, putting all the feeling possible
into the effort I was making to accom-
plish my end. Seeing her almost
ready to faint at this sentence and yet
resolute, I was touched, and hastened
to recommend her to a teacher of an
amateur dramatic company ; but I was
convinced that I was not mistaken,
and that my prognostications would
be verified. In fact, poor thing, she
set to work, to study with all alacrity,
but, alas, not with corresponding
results. She resigned herself to
entering a second-rate company,
hoping that by constant practice she
might get herself accepted more easily
by the public ; but all was in vain !
I pitied, but could not help her
further. Poor girl, I dare say the
indulgent friends of whom she spoke
were partly to blame for her dis-
appointment as regards her vocation.

For young beginners great harm
may arise from their not discerning
the difference between the applause
bestowed on merit and that given for
encouragement, and even more that
which is granted not so much to the
skill of the actor as to the attractive-
ness of the person and the pleasantness
of the voice. How often do the public,
caught by the taking appearance of
a young beginner, mar her future by
excessive praise of the few qualities
she may chance to possess ! Such
inconsiderate praise cannot give young
actors a just measure of their worth,
and they consequently believe them-
selves on the further shore when they
have barely unfurled their sails.
Hence, they no longer think it neces-
sary to devote themselves to that
persevering study in which the actors
of all nations who have given the
greatest lustre to the dramatic art
passed their lives. Alfieri, my own
Alfieri, said: "But why do I speak

of Greek to those who are in swaddling
clothes in Latin ? " And why do I speak
of the goal of art to those who, hardly
entered on the road, believe themselves
to have already travelled over the
whole of it? In all good faith they
accept the most forcible epithets,
which should be applied only to the
truly great when they have left behind
them their thorn-strewn path and
arrived at the apogee of art.

Thorny is this road no less than
that of all studies made in every art
which is to be exercised worthily later
on. Sometimes, it seems as if the
forces cannot stand the trial, even in
one who may have all the advantages
of nature to enable him to reach the
goal. I remembered how I redoubled
my own efforts, and that to my trepi-
dation I never failed to respond : " Do
not fear, you will come off victorious."
Without this trepidation on one side,
and this persistence on the other, one
can never become an actor ; the
material and intellectual forces are
not exercised. It is always the same
thing. How could you play Othello
or Mary Stuart if, even having the
intellectual forces, you are wanting in
the physical? And more than all,
how can you be led on to approach
perfection, if you believe yourself
already perfect ?

My father, an actor from his child-
hood, son of a mother full of intelli-
gence and practical good sense, who
had herself been an actress of no
ordinary renown, never ceased to warn
me, wounding even my self-love, by tell-
ing me that the enthusiasm I excited
in the public was to be attributed to
my youth and attractiveness, and that
I was not to think myself safe in port.
Certainly, if an opportunity had pre-
sented itself of getting me into a first-
rate company among celebrated actors
conducted by a model manager, he,
my father, would not have hesitated
one moment in making me enter that

188

My Art.

company, even to perform inferior
parts to those which I played in the
company in which I stood pre-eminent.
" Better be the head of a lamb than
the tail of a lion," says our proverb ;
but in a dramatic company it is better
to be the last in an array of great
actors, than the first among inferior
ones.

One must be educated to the art of
true actors even at the cost of coming
on the stage as the bearer of a letter.
Hence my father resolved to refuse
even the most advantageous offers
which would have obliged me to
sustain parts beyond my physical and
intellectual forces, and the playing of
which, by injuring my health, would
have ruined my future. Pardon me
if I affirm that few actresses can boast
of having been more cordially received
by the public, more its spoiled child
than I was from the first days of my
appearance on the stage. In those
days lengthened applause and clamor-
ous ovations were seldom lavished on
a young girl as they are now ; so that
my self-love, excited by my youthful
fancy, might have carried me away
even to fatal intoxication, had I not
always had, as a guardian angel, a
feeling of modesty in my heart.

How often have I not seen the
theatre dressed up with flowers tied
with sky-blue and white ribbons,
because these were my favourite
colours ! How many showers of poetry
and flowers did there not fall on me !
Never was there more eager rivalry
than among ladies wishing to show
me their sympathy. And all these
things might have been fatal to a
young girl as I was, and indeed did
almost set me against the wise counsels
of my father ; but he was pitiless. I
cannot say how often I afterwards
blessed his memory for having put
into my heart the doubt whether all
these ovations were not a tribute to
my youth and beauty rather than to

my worth. I was almost wrathful,
and my wrath turning into a rage
for study, I set to work with all my
might and main.

One evening, raising my eyes from
the volume over which I was poring,
they fell on Hesper shining more
brightly than ever through my window-
panes, and a voice seemed to whisper :
" Go, study. Without serious training
for the stage, beginning at the very
beginning of things, the ignes fatui of
these ovations will soon fade away.
See, little by little, the age of maturity
is coming on ; and without that
training, you will end by quenching
the springs which nature has set
flowing."

I resolved more than ever to give
heed to my father, and I still bless his
memory. Beauty, voice, good carriage
have but an ephemeral worth if an
actor be wanting in the true founda-
tion, that is, in the intellect of his
art. And not even intellect suffices ;
one must needs dig deep down for the
foundation, to lay stone upon stone
and to erect the building one's self.
He who does not do all this attains
nothing. He must, before all, study,
and not superficially, what I call the
materialism of the part ; in other
words, the physical force needed for
rendering it ; and then he must
go on to the study of its idealism,
getting at the bottom of the character,
giving it its colouring with the colours
one has on one's palette, and especially
(here lies the difficulty), harmonising,
so to say, the colours he possesses
with those proper to the type to be
rendered.

I had all the colours on my palette,
and had also strength of fibre ; but I
should have spoiled both but for my
determined will to come out of my
own nature and enter that of the type
I wished to represent ; whereas it
seems to me that certain actresses do
nothing else than reduce all types to

My Art.

189

their own nature. I dare say this is
the most convenient method, but
observe ; the young man or young
woman of fine promise remains a
mediocrity, a poor creature, even if
successful, who leaves no "foot-prints
on the sands of Time."

Let this prompting of mine be,
instead, a stimulus to constant study,
seeking how to reproduce the varying
types of humanity. To seek the true
and the beautiful is worth nothing
if one cannot overcome the great
difficulty of reconciling the true which
the actor has in himself with the true
in the type to be rendered. By this
path only does the actor reap the
reward of his labours. I conclude by
saying that it is not even enough to
seek the objective truth and make it
harmonise with the subjective; one
must do more, much more. It is not
permissible to faithfully reproduce the
true as in nature, because the true in
nature is scarcely the root of the
artistic true and beautiful ; the latter
is the flower of the former, and one
must not, so to say, pluck up the
whole plant ; one must only gather
the flowers.

The realism which in these days

finds only too many partisans is, in
my opinion, as defective as conven-
tionalism and mannerism j and in a
way the cleverest of actors is every-
where a loser by it. We have lately
had a proof of this. When all Paris
was talking about the forthcoming
performance of Sardou's CLEOPATRA,
much was said of the asp which was
to sting the Egyptian's bosom, and of
Sarah Bernhardt's training a small
snake to go into a little bag which
she ingeniously concealed in the folds
of her costume. What happened?
Sarah Bernhardt could not draw the
attention of the public to her tragic
death-scene ; they were all too intent
on watching the unwinding of the
creature's tail, as it glided out of the
bag, to pay any heed to her beautiful
acting.

Here I bring to an end my thoughts
on the dramatic art as it has been
practised by those who have been its
glory and honour, trusting that, if the
importance of the subject has made
me dwell too long on it, the reader
will pardon me — there is still so much
more to say.

ADELAIDE RISTORI,
(Marchesa Del Grillo).

190

TWO GREAT PICTURES.

IT is not always the strait gate
and narrow way which lead to salva-
tion, in spite of all the preachers may
insist. In Italy, indeed, it is nothing
for nothing, but everything for a
farthing in matters both temporal
and spiritual. From the closely
packed little town of Vicenza, nestled
amid its sunny vineyards at the very
foot of the blue mountains, to the
church of the Madonna which crowns
the Monte Berico, any but an Italian
could saunter in less than half an
hour. All that art and modern con-
trivance can do to lighten the ascent
has been abundantly done. Were
difficulty or physical fatigue a neces-
sary condition of ecclesiastical absolu-
tion or plenary indulgence, surely
none but the halt and lame among
the faithful, with here and there a
curious traveller, eager for no reward
other than the prospect of a fine view
and the sight of a couple of rare
pictures, would tread the seven hun-
dred yards or so of dusty road leading
to the sacred spot. But the Italian
loves to earn both his livelihood and
his exemption from purgatory on the
easiest possible terms, and an indul-
gent Providence holds out an ex-
cellent bargain in the shape of a
delightful afternoon's excursion as
against many years in that dubious
antechamber of Paradise. Hence the
pleasant way is seldom deserted, the
quiet church rarely empty ; and who
can say how many pence find their
way into the modern Peter's pocket 1

But even to the mere pleasure-
seeker who hopes for no spiritual
benefit, the ascent of Monte Berico
is far from the least delightful episode

in the course of his wanderings in
North Italy. Vicenza, though indeed
it lies on the main line between Milan
and Venice, the very high road of
tourists, scarcely offers enough of
popular interest to tempt the ordinary
sight-seer to alight from his express
train and risk his night in unre-
nowned and possibly unclean inns.
Hence the occasional visitor may
wander at his will, unmolested by the
barefooted, tattered urchins, who in
Verona or Venice make his path a
burden with their never wearying
wail of soldini, soldini. Here too the
greedy sacristan is less on the alert
to pounce upon the unwary devotee
who, guide-book in hand, endeavours
to pierce the dusty darkness which
shrouds some golden altar-piece by
Bellini or Pal ma. The Vicentine
native has not learned to distinguish
between the English milord, with his
full pocket and free hand, and the
portly German whose pompous tread
is commensurate with his sense of his
own importance ; or between the
thrifty Frenchman, from whom less
may be expected, and the rich
American whose inability to utter a
word of any but his own lingo
makes him an easy prey : forestieri
covers all alike. As you wander
through the quaint Piazza dei Signori,
under Palladio's noble arcades,
bargaining for ripe purple figs or
sweet-scented peaches, you muse on
the old proverb which stigmatises the
Vicentines as magnagattl, or as we
should say, stuck-up but greedy.
There is but little scope for such a
feeling in these days, unless it be in
the relics of an ancient long departed

Two Great Pictures.

191

splendour, of which only the tradition
lingers on in the stately though
neglected palaces which border the
cobble-paved streets, within whose
wrought - iron gates green vistas of
garden and vinery suggest rather
peaceful domesticity than proud pre-
tentiousness. Every one of the small
towns over which the Venetian Re-
public exercised her sway maintained
an individuality of its own. Thus
the citizens of Verona were distin-
guished for their light-heartedness,
Veronesi, mezzo matti, a quality amply
reflected in the paintings of their
school, with its love of gay colour, of
birds and animals, fruits and flowers,
and debonnair angels tuning their
lutes and mandolins. On the learned
Paduans, the epithet Gran dottori
was bestowed, while the Venetians
themselves, the proud rulers of this
rich domain, received the stately and
well-merited designation of Gran
signori.

Strolling through the streets and
piazzas of Vicenza it is impossible to
forget the part Palladio played in
the beautifying of his native town.
After having surfeited your eyes with
the elaborate Renaissance palaces and
churches with which Venice is thickly
sown, this simple, rhythmical style,
guiltless of all fuss or flourish, pos-
sesses a quiet, harmonious dignity
that can hardly fail to charm.

But it is October, the month of
vintage, and in a quiet street close
beside the duomo a merry scene is
enacting. Five vast vats, mounted
on carts, are piled almost to the brim
with black and white grapes, while
purple-legged youths in tattered
garments and splashed faces stamp
out the precious juice, which froths
through short pipes inserted near the
bottom of the vats into wooden tubs
placed below to receive it. Every
now and then the grapes are turned
over with a pitchfork while men with

large shining copper vessels relieve
the tubs when they threaten to over-
flow, and convey the cloudy crimson
liquid to larger receptacles. Bumpers
of the yet harmless fluid are freely
quaffed and many pleasantries inter-
changed. Under the blue Italian
sky and genial sun work is carried on
but leisurely. It is impossible to
believe that this is other than a game
enacted for your amusement, parti-
cularly when, having mounted on the
rickety shaft of one of the carts to
peep into the winepress, a malicious
though scarcely perceptible flick of a
foot among the grapes sends you back
spattered with purple to the accom-
paniment of broad grins and un-
feigned chuckles of delight. Surely
the Italians young and old are but
children ! Their very attempts to
cheat you are childish, and a small
joke, be it never so feeble, goes
further than torrents of abuse.

Sauntering across the peaceful
green Campo Marzio, you enter a
broad ascending avenue, flanked on
one side by thickly planted chestnut
trees, on the other by a handsome
arcade, by which you may climb in
shady comfort to the church of the
Madonna of the Monte, your goal, un-
less indeed you prefer to ride up on
one of the donkeys standing for hire
at the foot of the ascent. Nothing is
neglected that may sweeten your path,
short though it be. Through occa-
sional openings in the wall of the
arcade charming little pictures of
mountain and fertile plain, or glimpses
of distant campanili relieve the
monotony of white plaster and dazzle
you by the radiance of their colour.
The green is as fresh as English grass
in April, the sky more blue than
forget-me-nots ; an occasional red roof
of villa or church adds a sting of
warm colour, and all swims in the
golden air.

At the bend in the road you

192

Two Great Pictures.

pause, not for breath, for the ascent
is easy enough, but to turn and
feast your eyes on the landscape
stretched below. Hanging over the
low red wall of a vineyard, it is a
goodly sight that meets the eye. Just
beneath lies Vicenza, blushing pink
in the soft afternoon light, Palladio's
tower rising like a straight stem above
the other belfries and towers. And
away beyond the town rise the moun-
tains, their summits veiled in billowing
clouds, which foretell the storm that
before night will sweep across the
plain, filling the trenches in the fields
and converting the lazy streamlets
into foaming brown torrents. As yet,
however, all is still and tranquil as a
summer day. The little towns spotted
about the hillsides twinkle in the
brilliant sunshine. What images their
very names conjure up ! There to
your left lies Asolo, a white cloud on
the mountain side. Hither Caterina
Cornaro, the widowed Queen of
Cyprus, retired to spend her days in
graceful dalliance, when ousted from
her throne by Venetian intrigue.
Here too the courtly Bembo, that
chief of the Apes of Cicero, as
Erasmus scornfully dubbed them,
often repaired from his Paduan villa,
to which he had betaken himself
worn out with a life of graceful indo-
lence, Bembo, the friend of Lucrezia
Borgia, after that much maligned
lady, having espoused Alfonso of
Este, settled down into a life of com-
paratively uneventful respectability at
the Court of Ferrara. To her indeed
he dedicated GLI ASOLANI, his treatise
on Platonic love, and to this day the
curious in such matters may see a
bundle of her letters and a lock of
her yellow hair preserved in the
Ambrosiana at Milan. We catch a
glimpse of this same Bembo in the
pages of the CORTIGIANO, that mirror
of fine manners and good breeding
emanating from the most polished

centre of Italian life, the Court of
Urbino. Lower down on the plain you
may descry Castelfranco, the birthplace
of the romantic Giorgione, whose
wonderful altar-piece is still enshrined
in the great, bare duomo of the quiet
little town. Feltre, Bassano, Citta-
della, and a host of names soft to the
tongue, rush to the mind as the eye
travels along the blue ridge, and where
the eyesight fails, the imagination may
still supply the gap.

But time will not stand still, even
in Italy, and as you turn to continue
the ascent, the goal of your wander-
ings rises suddenly before you. The
straight avenue leads direct to the
domed church of the Madonna of the
Monte, whose tall red campanile, with
its blue-faced clock, dominates the
approach. Five minutes' easy walk,
and you stand on the flight of steps
leading to the church-door. You enter,
and when your eyes have become
accustomed to the change of light,
you perceive that the glitter within
is scarcely less than the glare outside.
It is indeed a temple of tinsel, this
holy shrine. Wherever the eye roves
it encounters gilding. The altar is
encrusted with votive offerings, the
walls hung with tawdry pictures.
From a side chapel the monotonous
droning of some sacred office seems
to lull the heavy, incense-laden air,
and little wonder is it that two of the
kneeling pilgrims who have perspired
up the easy slope, have pillowed their
heavy heads on their brown arms and
fallen into an uneasy slumber. A
glance suffices to sweep in these
impressions, and you pass on to the
secluded chapel or sanctuary to the
right of the high altar.

Here indeed is reward for your
labour, if labour it were. Behind the
altar, half concealed by the tall
candles and tawdry paper flowers,
glows the wonderful Pieta, painted, as
its inscription tells, by the Vicentine

Two Gh'eat Pictures.

193

artist, Montagna, in the year 1500
As you gaze, a sense of the solemnity of
the scene creeps over your soul. The
gilt and tinsel vanish, the droning is
heard no longer. You stand alone in
the presence of a great grief, a porten-
tous event, pregnant with mystery and
awe. On a kind of rocky platform in
the centre, sits the Madonna holding
on her lap the dead Christ, whose head
she lovingly supports in one hand,
while with sorrowful eyes she gazes
on the beloved features, now so calm
and passive in death. On the right,
St. John, with clasped hands, bends
as though in reverent worship, and in
front the kneeling Magdalen bewails
the cruel wounds in her Master's feet.
On the other side St. Peter looks out
from the canvas as though appealing
for your sympathy and participation
in the mournful scene. Seldom has
this well-worn subject been treated
with greater understanding and depth
of feeling. Nothing could exceed the
intensity of expression in the faces of
the Madonna and St. John, yet there
is no touch of exaggeration or carica-
ture, no affectation or hysteria. In
the background a peaceful landscape
relieves the tension of the scene ; the
grey sky is swept with light, windy
clouds ; the hill-side is dotted with
trees and red brick buildings to which
a winding road ascends. Indeed the
landscape suggests the neighbourhood
of the hill itself, whose green slopes
the artist had doubtless often climbed
while painting this altar-piece for the
church of the Madonna. The poetry
of the spot seems to have held him in
its spell as he painted this delightful
distance, so full of atmosphere and feel-
ing of breezy space. For Montagna was
a citizen of Vicenza, its one painter of
great note and originality, and it is in
the churches and picture-gallery of his
native place that he may still be seen
to best advantage in fresco and altar-
piece. He seems to have been a pupil
No. 495. — VOL. LXXXIII.

of Alvise Vivarini, and to have come
under the influence of Gentile Bellini,
and perhaps also of Carpaccio ; but he
kept a strong individuality both in
drawing and in his feeling for deep,
glowing colour. He, like Mantegna,
who by the way was born in Vicenza
though he subsequently settled in
Padua, inclines to the sterner aspects
of nature and humanity. His pictures
impress by their force and vigour of
conception, but seldom delight or
charm by those softer qualities which
we love in Giovanni Bellini or that
playful genre by which Carpaccio
captivates. Yet sometimes in his
landscapes, as here, Montagna shows
himself a true poet. Indeed in this
picture he almost touches the sublime.
From the church you are led by a
sober black-robed brother down a short
flight of steps to the former refectory
of the monastery in which a few
monks still linger on, doubtless in
daily expectation of corporate as well
as individual dissolution. At the end
of the long, bare apartment, now so
deserted and desolate, one of Paolo
Veronese's great supper-pieces still
hangs on the wall for which the
painter designed it. It represents
the Feast of Gregory, in illustration
of the old legend that Pope Gregory,
unaware of the honour done him,
once entertained Christ Himself in
the guise of a pilgrim. Doubtless
the subject formed an excellent topic
for the reflection of the monks, as
they sat over their frugal meals amid
the silence which was always strictly
enforced ; but the spiritual element
of the story is the last theme on
which the painter chose to insist.
Brilliant pageantry, Palladian archi-
tecture, massive robust men and
women in gorgeous garments, sunshine
and light, life and colour, all the
elements in fact which constituted
the brilliant life of Venice in the
sixteenth century, these are the im-
o

194

Two Great Pictures.

pressions he conveys to the gazer.
Into the very centre of the rigid
monastic life, which has renounced
the world, the flesh, and the devil,
Veronese daringly introduces all three,
clothing them with a splendour and a
fascination that might well strike dis-
content into the mind of some half-
hearted brother whose thoughts have
not yet set wholly heavenwards.
Perhaps, and fortunately in this case,
the danger was more apparent than
real. It is not often that we look
at the pictures in whose company we
live, and possibly many a monk who
had dined daily during a score of
years beneath the Feast of Gregory
had scarce ever raised his eyes above
his plate and cup to the glowing
canvas at the end of the room, and
could barely recall an incident of the
scene.

As the eye wanders over the
multitudinous detail of this wealthy
canvas, revelling in its colour, stimu-
lated in every nerve by its exuberant
vitality, you realise to the full that
here as in the other great supper-
pictures by Veronese, — the sumptuous
Marriage of Cana in the Louvre,
perhaps his masterpiece, the Feast
in the House of Levi at Venice —
the subject has been merely the
most transparent pretext for all this
magnificence.

This feast is actually a banquet of
modern date, the guests Venetian
nobles and grandees of the painter's
day, the scene a gallery in a Venetian
palace. All Veronese's usual para-
phernalia are here, pages in gold
brocade carrying in the meats, spec-
tators on a balcony behind, the
monkey, the dog, the small spaniel
held by a boy in striped tunic and
trunk-hose, even to the cat whose
green eyes gleam out from under the
table. It was for such frivolities that
Paolo fell under the suspicion of the
dreaded Inquisition, and was called

before it to answer to certain charges
brought against his orthodoxy. Had
he not introduced into a picture in
which Christ and many holy per-
sonages were present a number of
German mercenaries, hated Lutherans,
dogs of heretics, together with such
unworthy objects as buffoons, dwarfs,
and other fooleries ? Was not one of
the holy apostles represented in the
act of picking his sacred teeth with a
common fork1? The poor painter,
puzzled at these grave charges, and
hopelessly out of touch with his
inquisitors' point of view, tried vainly
to explain that his motives were
aesthetic and not religious, either in
the way of orthodoxy or heterodoxy.
A blank space in the composition
must be filled, and what more decora-
tive than the inventions he had chosen
for the purpose. It was fortunate
for him that he escaped with a
reprimand and an order to remove
the obnoxious figures at his own
expense. To a painter whose whole
preoccupation was with colour, sun-
light, and joyous life, such hair-
splitting must have appeared little
less than idiotcy.

In spite of all the vicissitudes it
has undergone, for in 1848 it was
torn to pieces by unappreciative
Austrian soldiers, the picture is in
good condition, though some of its
splendour of colour has vanished
for ever. The feast is held at a
long table spread under a loggia.
The Pope is sitting in the centre, the
stranger pilgrim on his right lifts the
cover of a dish which he holds. One
of the cardinals, seated on the nearer
side of the table, seems to suspect
something unusual in the guest, for
he gazes intently through his heavy
rimmed spectacles across the table at
Christ. In one corner of the picture
a delightful incident occurs. A crowd
of sturdy beggars, old men and women
with babies in their arms, have assem-

Two Great Pictures.

195

bled to witness the repast. One of
the guests, a young man, filled with
compassion surreptitiously passes a
loaf of bread behind the pillar to the
nearest suppliant. For the rest, the
scene is one of movement, bustle, and
unsurpassed magnificence. As you
turn from it to leave the dreary
refectory, you feel an inevitable pang
of regret that all this splendour should
be enacted day by day to bare walls
and hollow-sounding floor. Yet there
is unending pleasure to the wanderer
in the finding of such a jewel off the
beaten track, and the great Paolo can
well afford that one of his treasures
should be hidden under a bushel since
he has strewn his gems so lavishly
over the walls and ceilings of Venice.
So in great contentment you retrace
your steps through the gaudy church,
where the droning still persists, and
emerge again into the brilliant sun
shine of the Italian afternoon. As
you swing down the avenue, your
curiosity satisfied, your expectations

fulfilled, you note the beggar-boys lying
about the arcade in fantastic coils of
brown legs and arms ; the old women
and girls bending to pick up the
chestnuts which, smooth and glossy
brown, strew the ground, the stalls
with their motley assortment of trum-
pery, the lemonade-sellers crouched
beside their burnished copper bowls.
Stalwart pilgrims mounted on little
donkeys descend the hill at a smart
jog-trot ; their piety satisfied, they
forget the story of Baalam and his
works. Indeed the whole pilgrimage
is little more than a pleasant summer
fairing, with the additional spice of
some substantial but not too definite
advantage in the hereafter. And
standing on the green sward at the
foot of the hill, you take a last glance
at the gay group of buildings clus-
tered on its summit, with feelings of
gratitude for a system which calls its
votaries to sacrifice in such pleasant
places.

M. H. WITT.

196

AT MERLINCOURT.

AH, the benison of dawn

Waking on a night of weeping !
All night long to hear, unsleeping,
Plashing pathway, sodden lawn,
Echoing the dull insistent
Diapason of the storm-tost

South wind through the forest sweeping,
Like the sobbing of the lost,
Like the moans of anguish drawn
From the lips of unresistant

Harassed souls in torment keeping !

Now, with flush of orient fires,
Flame the solemn poplar spires ;
Now the lawns, still wet with rain,
Lie with shadows overlain ;

And the blackbird, golden-throated,
High in his embowered resort,
Chants the matin-note of day
Where the drowsy branches sway
Over old-world, tower'd, and moated,
Triple-tower'd and mirror-moated,
Many-memoried Merlincourt.

Merlincourt, that once you loved,

Home of antique northern graces,
Wakes, in beauties you approved,

Fragrant copses, moss-grown spaces,
Scent and shadow, birds and trees.

Musing does a rare thought come
Winged with light regret to these

From your far-off island home ?

Nay, I trow not ! Sleep affrighted,

In night-trances I have guess'd
Gloomed with purples, amber-lighted

Splendours of the tropic West.
Lands more fair, that call you queen,
In sad visions I have seen,

Where day's bright effulgencies,

At Merlincourt. 197

Led through pomps processional, glow
Into starry, hyaline,

Amaranth deeps and mysteries.
Beauty's fountain-heads are these,

Murmurous surfs, and isles that owe
Inviolate bonds to sapphire seas.

Yet, methinks, this immemorial

Day, new-born from night's despairing,
Some faint, phantom'd, half corporeal

Thought of mine is faring, faring
Through the fire-flies, through the musk,
Through the star-enamelled dusk,
To your dreaming, and you know
How I loved you long ago.

A. K

198

THE FAUST OF THE MARIONETTES.

THE marionette theatre, although
once extremely popular both in France
and England, never attained in those
countries to the position which it long
occupied in Germany. French and
English actors of the seventeenth
century both found reason to be
jealous of their insidious little com-
petitors ; but during the long agony
of the Thirty Years' War and the
period of depression which followed
it, the mimic actors of the German
puppet-show had few rivals, and the
German dramatic instinct seemed to
find full satisfaction in the marionette
stage. The epochs which produced
Shakespeare and Jonson, Corneille
and Moliere, would have been blank
pages in the history of German litera-
ture had it not been for the hymns
into which the poetic genius of the
age breathed a wistful beauty which
gives them a place of their own among
the spiritual songs of the world.

The art which ended in the wander-
ing showman's booth at a country-fair
began life as the handmaid of religion ;
the marionette principle was first
utilised (in Europe) to animate the
sacred images which were adored at
the altars of the Church. In remem-
brance of its high descent, the mario-
nette plays were for a long time
mainly of Biblical origin. " I know
this man well," says Autolycus in THE
WINTER'S TALE. "He hath been a
process-server, a bailiff; then he com-
passed a motion [a puppet-show] of
the Prodigal Son." " When God gave
Adam reason," says Milton in the
AREOPAGITICA, "He gave him freedom
to choose ; he had else been a mere
artificial Adam, such an Adam as he

is in the motions." The marionette-
manager became by degrees very large-
minded and fairly ambitious in his
choice of plays. Classical or romantic,
antique or modern, Medea, Alcestis,
Mariana or the Female Brigand,
Judith and Holofernes, Don Juan, Le
Malade Imaginaire, — anything was
acceptable provided that it permitted
the introduction of a good moral and
a laughable clown. The Life and
Death of St. Dorothea was a special
favourite on account of the ingenious
mechanism which permitted the
martyr to be neatly decapitated in
full view of the audience, in happy
contrast to the shifts to which the
regular drama is reduced at such a
crisis. But of all the plays on this
mimic stage THE TRAGEDY OP DOCTOR
FAUST held the place of honour.

The date of the marionette FAUST
is unknown ; it is perhaps not much
younger than Marlowe's FAUST which
was played at Dresden in 1626 by the
English comedians, and may have
inspired the German dramatist. Nor
do we know for certain whether the
play was originally written for the
miniature stage or whether the writer
aimed higher and missed his mark.
The traditional text made its first
appearance in print not much more
than fifty years ago, and it must have
been considerably modified since it
left the hands of its unknown author
not later probably than the middle of
the seventeenth century. A special
interest attaches to this old German
drama of which there are several
versions ; it was not played at Strass-
burg exactly as it was played at
Augsburg, at Ulm, or at Cologne, but

The Faust of the Marionettes.

199

in essentials it is the same. It is one
of the only three modern renderings
of the Faust-legend which have in
them any spark of vitality, its author
handling his theme with a finer
dramatic perception than Marlowe;
and it was this work which suggested
to Goethe the idea of his masterpiece.
In this small pool he saw reflected the
vain desire and the vain regret which
made up so much of the sum of his
own life ; and from the significant
puppet-show fable, as he calls it, he
gained a vision of the soul of man
which haunted him all his days.

Both Marlowe's FAUST and the
FAUST of the marionettes were based
on the volume published by the
Frankfort bookseller, Johann Spies,
and sold for the first time at the
autumn fair of 1587. The Doctor
John Faust whose scandalous career
forms the basis of the Frankfort book-
seller's compilation, was a disreput-
able charlatan who wandered through
Germany in the early part of the
sixteenth century. He was known to
Melancthon (near whose home he was
born) and to other writers of the time,
one of whom describes him as being
famous " not only for his skill in
medicine but in necromancy and other
similar arts." Probably he was iden-
tical with the notorious impostor
Georgius Sabellicus, — -fons necroman-
ticorum, magus secundus, chiromanti-
cus, aeromanticus, pyromanticus — who
styled himself, in addition to all these
titles, Faustus Junior, pointing thus
backward to an earlier Faust whose
traces have disappeared. It has been
supposed that this earlier Faust may
have been the Bishop Faustinus of Riez
in Provence who was seduced from
the right way by Simon Magus ; or
else that he was Johann Fust, the
printer of Mainz, who was tradition-
ally declared to have been in danger
of being burned as a sorcerer ; but
upon these points no certainty seems

possible. We know very little about
the clever conjuror who contrived
somehow to trick destiny into grant-
ing him a seat among the Immortals.
John Faust flourished, as the old
chronologies say, in the sixteenth
century, but the Faust-legend is as
old as Christendom. Its black fan-
tastic shadow haunted every medieval
hearth ; it lurked in the crowded street
and in the quiet woodland ; the holiest
places could not shut it out. The grim-
mest version is that which tells how
Pope Sylvester the Second, before he
became the Vicar of Christ, pledged
himself to the Evil One in order to be-
come wiser than is permitted to mortal
man ; he was saying mass one morn-
ing when the Devil crept behind
him as he stood at the high altar
and whispering in his ear that his
hour was come, carried him down
to hell from the very threshold of
heaven. The Reformation, which
broke with so many traditions, held
this one sacred ; and the HISTORY
OF DOCTOR FAUST was evidently
compiled by a Protestant theologian.
But in the handling of it there
is, as Kuno Fischer points out in
his study of Goethe's FAUST, a not-
able difference. In the medieval
story there is always at the last
moment a hope of intervention ;
the Church has power to defend
her children from the great adver-
sary of souls. Trickery may be
met by trickery (for who would feel
bound to keep faith with the Father
of Lies ?), and sometimes the Devil is
cheated out of his prey by a cunning
ruse, sometimes, as in the case of the
clerk Theophilis, he is defeated by
the direct and irresistible interposi-
tion of Our Lady. The point con-
stantly insisted upon is that there are
more ways than one of getting out of
a bad bargain, and that the Church has
a very long arm. In the teaching of
the Reformation we miss this consol-

200

The Faust of the Marionettes.

ing reflection. Here the man must
abide by his compact, or at least must
look for no external ally to rescue him
from the consequences of it. There is
always hope for the penitent soul on
this side of the grave, and he is not
finally lost when he signs the dire
agreement ; but he must fight out his
own quarrel. No saint will stoop
from Paradise to take his part in the
conflict; no counter magic of sacred
rite and relic can avail him anything ;
the tempter and the tempted stand
face to face, and Heaven looks on in
silence. It is this austere and very
tragic circumstance which distin-
guishes the Faust of the sixteenth
century from his spiritual ancestors.

The author of the marionette-play
opens, as Marlowe and Goethe do,
with Faust alone in his study,
meditating upon his wasted years of
solitary research. The days and nights
devoted to the pursuit of learning
have profited him nothing ; poor,
friendless, and burdened by debt, in
despair he turns to the Black Arts to
help him to the success which is other-
wise unattainable. His monologue is
disturbed by two voices which float
faintly into the room ; he recognises
the one as that of his guardian angel
warning him to go no further, but
he listens instead to the other, that
of an evil spirit who urges him to pro-
ceed. His servant Wagner interrupts
his reflections by informing him that
he has met at the inn two students
who have a book which they wish to
present to him ; the title of it is THE
KEY OP MAGIC. Faust, much agitated
by this coincidence, bids Wagner bring
the strangers to him when they have
been suitably entertained ; but Wagner
returns with the news that the students
have unaccountably disappeared leav-
ing their book behind them. There is
no comparison between the artistic
effect of this unaccountable visit, and
that of the substantial Valdes and

Cornelius who make Marlowe's hero
" blest with their sage conference."
Repairing at midnight to a solitary
place where four roads meet, Faust
draws the magic circle and with the
aid of THE KEY OP MAGIC calls up
demons. Of the six spirits who appear
he will have the swiftest to serve him,
and questions each in turn. The first
is swift as the shaft of the pestilence,
the second as the wings of the wind,
the third as a ray of light, the fourth
as the thought of man, the fifth as
the vengeance of the Avenger. " His
vengeance is swift?" says Faust; "and
yet I live, and yet I sin ! And thou,
Mephistopheles "? "

" As swift," says Mephistopheles,
" as the passage from the first sin to
the second."

" That is swift indeed," says Faust.
" Thou art the devil for me."1

This dramatic incident has no
counterpart in Marlowe, and this is
the more surprising because it is based
on a chapter in the Frankfort book,
which Marlowe followed in the main
much more closely than his German

The next scene introduces Kasperle,
the clownish peasant who brings the
necessary element of buffoonery into
the play, and is engaged by Wagner
as his assistant. The signing of the
compact follows, and Mephistopheles
engages to serve Faust for four and
twenty years, receiving his soul for a
wage. Faust makes only two condi-
tions ; he is to enjoy all the delights
of the world, and to receive a true
answer to every question. Then he
sends for an inkbottle, but the devil
laughs at his inexperience and explains
that he must sign the agreement in

1 There are several readings of this scene.
Another, probably an older version, has
only three spirits, as swift as a snail in
the sand, an arrow from the bow, and the
thought of man. In another Mephistopheles
claims to be as swift as the passage from good
to evil, — a very unsatisfactory comparison.

The Faust of the Marionettes.

201

his own blood, and, this being done,
a raven flits into the room and flies
away with the parchments in his
beak. Faust, who has confronted the
demons fearlessly on his lonely heath
at midnight, is naively alarmed by the
appearance of the black messenger.
" What was that ? " he cries. " Woe
is me ! " " Courage, Faust ! " answers
Mephistopheles. " It was only a bird
of hell sent by my prince Pluto to
carry him your writing." But Faust
cannot be reassured. "Oh Mephis-
topheles," he says reproachfully, " was
there no other way of sending him
the paper except by that bird of hell ?
See how I quake with terror ! "
Mephistopheles carries him then to
the court of Parma where he enter-
tains the Duke and Duchess by
magical shows, calling up for their
gratification Samson and Delilah,
David and Goliath, Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba. We are told that
from Parma they travelled to Con-
stantinople, but of this voyage we
hear nothing. With remarkable self-
restraint the marionette-play omits the
burlesque scenes with the Pope and
the friars, with the Emperor's knight,
and with the horse courser, which
Marlowe transferred from the history
direct into his drama. Faust is here
always taken seriously, the farcical
scenes being provided by Kasperle.
Kasperle is a ludicrous parody of his
master. He too has dealings with the
Evil One, having meddled with Faust's
magic circle and picked up the words
of incantation ; but unlike the un-
happy scholar he finds necromancy a
very harmless diversion. He stoutly
refuses to sign away his soul on the
plea that he cannot write his name;
but having discovered that at the
word Perlippe the demons appear
and at Perlappe they vanish again,
he pronounces the potent syllables so
often that the spirits get out of breath
and very irritable.

In the last act we find Faust again
in Wittenberg where Kasperle, who
had scruples of conscience about
remaining in the sorcerer's service,
has now the post of night-watchman.
During the twelve years that have
passed since the signing of his com-
pact, Faust has had his fill of pleasure
and found it vanity, and has at last
turned homeward, sick at heart and
bent on finding if possible some place
of repentance. In his dreadful ex-
tremity he puts the question to his
only companion, and enquires of
Mephistopheles whether it is possible
for such a sinner as he is to come even
now to God. The devil curtly refuses
to answer ; Faust presses for a reply,
and he maintains a sullen silence ;
then Faust reminds him of his pledge,
— the strangest surely ever exacted
from the deceiver of souls — and
Mephistopheles vanishes trembling
with a terrible cry. Full of new hope
Faust throws himself before a statue
of the Virgin, weeping and praying;
but Mephistopheles, seeing his prey
about to escape him, returns and bids
Faust rise and look upon the bride he
has brought him, — Helen of Greece.
Faust tells him to be gone and leave
him to his prayers, — he did not think,
alas, of saying Perlappe — but Mephis-
topheles insists upon his taking at least
one look. Faust still refuses. " Lying
spirit," he says, " you bring me but a
wreath of mist that will vanish at a
touch." "Not so," says Mephistopheles ;
"stand up and judge for yourself."
The tempter has his way. Faust rises,
lifts Helen's veil, and straightway
forgetting his penitential resolves,
carries her off in a rapture of wonder
and delight, but only to rush back in a
moment to overwhelm Mephistopheles
with furious reproaches. The lovely
vision has turned to a serpent in his
embrace ; the devil has deceived him.
"What else," says Mephistopheles
drily, "did you expect from the devil?"

The Faust of the Marionettes.

In the next scene Faust is startled
by the appearance of Mephistopheles
in the hideous form in which he had
first seen him ; and the evil spirit
explains that he has come in his own
shape because Faust's hour is at hand.
He had engaged to serve him for
twenty-four years, but since Faust has
employed him by night as well as by
day, the allotted period will be at an
end that night on the stroke of twelve.
Left once more alone, Faust throws
himself again on his knees before the
Virgin's image, but as he gazes, a
change passes over the sculptured
marble, and Helen rises before him
where Our Lady should have stood.
Now he knows himself lost indeed,
and he wanders forlorn and desperate
through the empty streets until he
encounters Kasperle going his rounds
as night-watchman. " Ah, it is you,
Kasperle," he says, recognising his old
servant and catching at any human
fellowship in his misery. " You have
come to light me home 1 "

" Not I," says Kasperle ; " I light
no man home now-a-day. I am a
night-watchman of this town and my
own master and my own Lord
Chamberlain ; and if I find any one
abroad in the streets after ten I have
orders to march him straight to the
lock-up. You'd best not let me find
you here when I come back." Faust
still entreats his company. If Kasperle
will light him home, he shall be re-
warded by a good suit of clothes ; but
Kasperle repels this offer in which he
perceives a snare. " No, no," he says,
" I wear no clothes of yours. Who
knows if down yonder they might not
take me for you ? "

Some such hope as this seems to
have flickered in Faust's breast; for
all his intimacy with Mephistopheles,
he still credits the devil with a
remarkable degree of simplicity. The
notion that he might escape his awful
penalty by changing his coat is one of

those childish touches which are in
curious contrast to the general treat-
ment of the plot ; it recalls the student
in Marlowe's play who suggests that
the master's anguish of mind at his
approaching doom may be perhaps
the result of his having over-eaten
himself on the previous day. Ten
o'clock strikes and then eleven, and as
Kasperle hoarsely chants the rhyme
of the hour Faust hears a solemn
whisper pronouncing sentence upon
him. "Go," he says to Kasperle as
midnight draws near, "and stay not
to see the dreadful end to which I
hasten." "So it is true then," says
Kasperle, "and the devil is really
coming to fetch you as people said he
would 1 Well, good night, and a
pleasant journey to you ! " He goes
out; the fiends carry Faust off, and
Kasperle returns presently to find him
gone. " Poof, " says he, " what a
smell of brimstone ! "

Both Marlowe's play and the
marionette FAUST are based as has
been said upon the adventures of
Doctor Faust as recorded in the
Frankfort volume ; and the German
writer has handled his material much
more freely than Marlowe did. But
the main difference between them
does not consist merely of selections
or omissions ; there is a characteristic
divergence in the conception of the
plot. In Marlowe's play, as in
Goethe's, the issue is never doubtful.
Goethe's Faust is certain from the
beginning of ultimate salvation ; he
does not make a compact, he only lays
a wager with the Devil, a wager,
which we know from the prologue,
Mephistopheles has no chance of
winning. There was not a trace of
the medieval spirit in Goethe's im-
perial intellect ; not renunciation but
development was for him the keynote
of life ; and in all the universe he
could discover no place where man
could turn his back upon God. He did

The Faust of the Marionettes.

203

not venture, — no modern writer could
venture — to set before us the great
legend in the naked simplicity of its
original conception ; in the older Faust-
stories there is no secondary motive,
no love, no jealousy, no revenge. They
dealt with a question so absorbing, so
supreme, that it compelled the atten-
tion and was independent of other
aid. But for Goethe, and for Goethe's
world, the question had lost its point ;
and in the light of Goethe's sanguine
view of the future, the tragic element
of the drama disappeared. It was
necessary to replace it, and we find it
accordingly in a love-story so tender
and passionate that for many readers
Faust is before all a love-story. Mar-
lowe, on the other hand, did not
shrink from presenting the tragedy
to us in its primitive form. In his
play there are virtually only two
actors, the man and his enemy ; the
other characters, princes, clowns, and
students, pass and repass like shadows.
Here, too, the issue is certain ; this
Faust is damned from the beginning
of the play. Wealthy, successful,
famous, he is driven to his fall by the
pride of life, by the lust of limitless
possession. He has so much that he
must have more.

All things that move between the quiet

poles
Shall be at my command.

In the Frankfort book, the reprobate
" took to himself eagles' wings and
was fain to sound the abysses of
heaven and earth " ; here he does not
believe in any unsounded abysses.
He gibes at the Devil's vain longing
for the heaven he has lost :

What, is great Mephistopheles so
passionate

For being deprived of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus inanly fortitude.

He meets Mephistopheles's foreboding
of a time when

All places shall be hell that are not
heaven,

with the cheerful retort,

I think hell is a fable.

He rejects the miraculous " staying of
the blood " in which he was signing
his compact with careless defiance.

Faustus gives to thee his soul : ah,

there it stay'd 1
Why should'st thou not ? Is not thy

soul thine own ?

It is plain that this cynical, confident
sinner had travelled far on the road
to perdition before the Devil appeared
to show him the shortest way.

The fate of the marionette Faust,
on the contrary, is no foregone conclu-
sion. He is no famous and successful
teacher, but a hungry, anxious, dis-
appointed man with whom the world
has dealt very hardly. Yet while
Goethe's Faust desires to live, and
Marlowe's to possess, this poor scholar,
the child of the Renascence, is
devoured by the craving to know.
He is lost, but he might have been
saved : by Mephistopheles's own ad-
mission, his fate was not sealed till
the last act; and we might indeed
imagine that the author had strug-
gled hard with himself before con-
demning this tired seeker after
truth to eternal torment. This lends
a human interest to the marionette
drama which is missing in Marlowe's
mighty lines.

H. C. MACDOWALL.

204

A NAVAL CHAPTER IN INDIAN HISTORY.

WE are generally accustomed to
take it for granted that, in the very
nature of things and by right divine,
Britannia rules the waves. Unfor-
tunately it is not so. For some
centuries she has claimed the do-
minion of the sea as her prerogative ;
but there have been times, and not
a few of them, when her sovereignty
has dwindled down almost to the
point of extinction. It is admitted,
by those who are best qualified to
judge, that at one time within the
last thirty years our naval forces
were so weakened that we should
have been hard put to it to maintain
our supremacy if it had been seriously
challenged. The maintenance of our
naval and military strength has
ceased to be a question for the
decision of governments alone. In all
times of peace the country is liable
to be seized by a penurious fit. It
grudges the heavy premium which it
has to pay for imperial and com-
mercial insurance : the army and
navy are denounced as " bloated
armaments " and suffered to fall into
a decline ; and for a season the rich
and helpless British Empire is left
naked to its enemies, while the few
political personages who dare to de-
nounce the national folly are out of
office. Then come a sudden panic
and a rumour of war; the imperial
temperature rises to fever-heat, and
millions are lavished in order to do,
hurriedly and imperfectly, what ought
to have been thoroughly done for half
the money. That is our modern and
democratic fashion of playing ducks
and drakes with our patrimony. In
earlier times the same thing was done
in a different way.

Why was it that our naval power,
which had been supreme at the end
of the seventeenth century, fell so low
before the middle of the eighteenth ?
In 1692 Russell crushed one French
fleet at La Hogue : in 1744 Matthews
was left by his captains to fight
another almost alone; and in 1756
Byng failed to make any impression
upon a third, and after a council of
war decided to abandon even the
attempt. No doubt there were many
reasons, but our failure was princi-
pally owing to our clumsy fleet-tactics
and the incapacity of our flag-officers.

The line of battle, which is said to
have been first formed by Penn in
1653, the line ahead, was the for-
mation which best developed the gun-
power of broadside-battery ships ; but
later admirals with less fighting ex-
perience elevated it into a fetish, and
regarded the maintenance of its per-
fection as the end rather than the
means of battle. It was not the
first time that the value of a special
fighting formation had been exag-
gerated. The Italian school of naval
tactics, which won the battle of
Lepanto, was admirably suited to a
fleet of galleys, propelled by oars and
able to move in any direction as
freely as the tertias of Spanish
infantry whose parade-movements it
imitated; but when it was proposed
to apply its principles to a fleet of
sailing-ships, Sir William Monson
extinguished the idea. " The weather
at sea," he wrote, " is never certain ;
the winds variable ; ships unequal in
sailing ; and when they strictly seek
to keep their order, commonly they
fall foul of one another, and in such
cases they are more careful to observe

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

205

their directions than to offend the
enemy." But there was no Monson
to revise the fighting-orders of the
navy which proclaimed the sanctity
of the line of battle, and denounced
the officer who dared to break it or
allow it to be broken. In 1744
Admiral Matthews bore down out of
the line, because while he remained in
it he could not get within range of
his enemy. Lestock, his second in
command, refused to follow him, and
remained orthodox but ineffective.
Matthews, for fighting in an unpro-
fessional manner, was sentenced to be
cashiered ; Lestock, who did not fight
at all, was acquitted. He pleaded in
his defence that he could not have
engaged without breaking the line,
which he dared not do, because the
signal to form line was not hauled
down when the subsequent signal to
engage was thrown out. Most pro-
bably he had other reasons which he
did not mention. Campbell denounced
him as "an artful, vindictive disci-
plinarian " whose principal object was
to ruin Matthews ;* which is probable
enough, for at that time personal
quarrels and political prejudices were
frequently gratified at the expense of
the vital interests of the country ; a
form of treason which seems to have
been banished from the navy, al-
though it may still be seen in action
at Westminster.

All offensive tactics, in order to
be effective, either afloat or ashore,
must be directed to the attainment
of one object. That object may
be briefly described as a concentra-
tion of the attack upon the weakest
portion of the defence ; but the naval
authorities of that day had a different
conception of the ideal sea-fight, and
its perfection could be attained in
two ways. In the one, two lines of
ships filed past -one another in stately

1 LIVES OF THE ADMIRALS, iv. 60.

procession on opposite tacks, and ex-
changed their broadsides in passing,
like medieval knights who jousted in
a tournament ; in the other, two lines
of ships moving in the same direction
were accurately pitted against each
other, each ship engaging her proper
opposite in the enemy's line, to • fight
it out, " shot for shot, and damn all
favours." There was a fascinating
flavour of chivalry about the business,
but it was unpractical, and rarely, if
ever, decisive.

The nation was utterly disgusted
with the ill success of its fleets : even
the naval authorities seem to have had
misgivings ; but one of the first to
diagnose the disease and suggest the
remedy was a landsman. John Clerk
of Eldin, that wonderful theorist who
never went to sea and yet formulated
a system of naval tactics which gained
the commendation of such men as
Rodney, Jervis, and Duncan, wrote his
book before 1782, though it was not
published till some years later ; in it he
declared that in the late sea-engage-
ments the British had never once
been able to close with, follow up, or
detain for a moment, a single ship of
the enemy. The French had never
risked an attack, and had invariably
chosen the leeward position ; while
the British attack had always been
made in a long extended line, generally
from the windward, by directing each
individual ship upon her opposite in
the enemy's line. The French had
always disabled the British fleets as
they came down to the attack ; and
having done so, either withdrew their
ships to form a new line to leeward,
or made sail ahead, demolishing our
van ships in passing. From this he
argued that they possessed a system
of tactics of which our officers were
ignorant, and that it was superior to
ours.

While our fleets had been so feebly
handled and so unsuccessful, we had

206

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

been generally victorious in single-
ship actions. Our officers could
handle ships and small squadrons as
well as ever ; but when they found
themselves in command of large fleets
they seemed to be paralysed by a
sense of responsibility, and a super-
stitious reverence for the fighting-
orders. But better men were coming
to the front ; the flags of Hawke and
Boscawen were already flying, Rodney,
Keppel, Howe and Hood were post-
captains, and whatever may have been
the merits of the French school of
fleet-tactics, the day of its success was
nearly over.

The evil days were at their darkest
in 1758. Our national memory for
troubles is so short that most of us
have forgotten how heavily the clouds
then lowered over England. Brad-
dock's defeat in 1755 had been
followed by Byng's, and the loss of
Minorca only preceded by three weeks
the loss of Calcutta and the horrors
of the Black Hole. The Great Com-
moner's first experience as a war-
minister was of almost unbroken
failure. The Duke of Cumberland's
defeat at Hastenbeck, the first and
unsuccessful attack on Ticonderoga,
the fruitless attempts on Rochefort
and St. Malo, — so the panorama of
misfortune continued to unroll itself.
The captures of Louisbourg and
Ticonderoga could not balance the
account. Ruin seemed imminent,
and the country's distress was such
that it wrung even from polished,
cynical Chesterfield that cry of des-
pair, " We are no longer a nation ! "

But the dawn was already breaking
in the East. Clive, the civilian, with
Admirals Watson and Pocock, re-
covered Calcutta in January, 1757,
and very nearly came to blows after-
wards. When Clive entered the fort
at the head of the Company's troops,
Captain (afterwards Sir Eyre) Coote
presented a commission signed by

Admiral Watson, appointing him
governor of the fort. Clive denied
the Admiral's right to appoint a
junior officer in the King's service
as governor of the Honourable Com-
pany's fort, and threatened Coote
with arrest. Watson sent to ask by
what authority Clive assumed com-
mand ; and Clive answered, by his
commission as lieutenant-colonel com-
manding the land-forces. Thereupon
Watson sent him a veritable ulti-
matum, informing him that " if he
did not abandon the fort he would
be fired out by the ships."1 Clive
declined to give up command, and
refused to be answerable for the con-
sequences. Matters were compromised
by the Admiral coming ashore in
person to assume command, whereupon
Clive handed him the keys of the
fort to be delivered to the former
governor, Drake; the very man who
had run away from it seven months
before.

The breach between Clive and
Watson was soon healed. On March
18th they captured the French settle-
ment of Chandernagore; and on June
22nd Admiral Watson and a naval
brigade of fifty seamen took part in the
victory of Plassey. On August 16th
Admiral Watson died of fever ; and
Pocock, now Yice-admiral of the Red,
succeeded to the naval command.

George Pocock was then in his
fifty-second year. Nephew of Sir
George Byng, created Viscount Tor-
rington for his victory over Castaneta's
fleet at Cape Passaro, and cousin of
Admiral John Byng, shot on board
the MONARCH at Portsmouth for the
loss of Minorca, he was related to the
most successful and the most unfor-
tunate admirals of his time. John
Byng was executed on March 14th,
1757: it may even be that the news
had not been received in India when

1 ECHOES FEOM OLD CALCUTTA, by H. E.
Busteed ; p. 31.

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

207

Pocock succeeded to the command ;
but if he did not know it then, the
ill news could not have been long
delayed, and it was scarcely of a
character to induce him to run any
risks in order to defeat the French.
When an admiral was liable to be
shot for a blunder on the one hand,
beside being hampered by the fight-
ing-orders on the other, the safe
game was the only game to play ; yet
in war there can be no great suc-
cesses without great risks, and there-
fore Pocock, unwilling to run the
risks, never gained the successes.

The French were keenly conscious
of the importance of the great struggle
for supremacy in India. General
Lally, Baron and Count de Tollendal,
the Irish adventurer who was now
sent out to take the chief command,
was an officer of higher rank and
greater reputation than any who
preceded him on that service. His
policy was simple ; it was, he said,
comprised in five decisive words, Plus
d? Anglais dans la Peninsule. Had
D'Ache been more enterprising, or
George Pocock less dogged, he might
have carried out his simple programme ;
but when he landed at Pondicherry
in 1758 he found Chandernagore
already lost and everything in con-
fusion. With two battalions of his
own regiment, two of the regiment
of Lorraine under Count d'Estaing,
and a swarm of native auxiliaries, he
invested Fort St. David, (then the
most important station held by the
British) and sent orders to D'Ache
to meet him there. On April 28th
D'Ache* sailed into the roads of Fort
St. David and found there two small
English ships, the TRITON and BRIDGE-
WATER, each of twenty guns. Taken
by surprise by eight French line-of-
battle-ships, they were run ashore
and burned to avoid capture.

Pocock, lying in Madras Roads
with three line-of-battle-ships, was

joined on March 24th by Commodore
Stevens and four more, and the little
fleet sailed at once in search of
D'Ache. After running as far south
as Negapatam without finding any
signs of them, he stood back to
St. David's Roads, and on the morn-
ing of the 29th the French look-out
frigate SYLPHIDE signalled the British
fleet in sight. D'Ache at once weighed
and stood to the northward, followed
by Pocock. Presently D'Ache formed
his ships in line of battle, accepting
the leeward position according to the
usual French practice. Neither of
the adversaries had any previous ex-
perience in handling fleets in action,
though each had served with distinc-
tion ; but D'Ache was trained in the
better school and commanded the
stronger force. The two fleets were
as follows.

French Line.

ZODIAQUE, 74 (flag).
BIEN AIME, 74.
VENGEANCE, 64.
ST. Louis, 64.
Due D'OELEANS, 60.

DUG DE BOURGOGNE,

60.

COND£, 50.
MORAS, 50.

British Line.

YARMOUTH, 64 (flag).
CUMBERLAND, 66.
ELIZABETH, 64.
WEYMOUTH, 60.
TIGER, 60.
NEWCASTLE, 60.
SALISBURY, 50.

Pocock formed his line to wind-
ward, and bore down to attack after
the manner prescribed in the English
fighting-instructions. Theoretically,
all his ships should have come into
action together, each against her
opposite in the French line ; but as
the French continued to move straight
ahead, while the British ships steered
diagonally to close them, the natural
result ensued. The French ships,
sailing the shorter and direct line,
drew ahead. Pocock's leading ships
got into action first, and remained
for a considerable time unsupported.
Three of his captains, Legge of the
NEWCASTLE, Vincent of the WEY-

208

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

MOUTH, and Brereton of the CUMBER-
LAND, either mistook his signals, or
were unable, from their position in the
line, to get into action. The CUMBER-
LAND got up too late to be of service ;
the other two never got up at all.

In spite of the heavy odds against
them, Pocock and his four ships stood
to it well. The engagement followed
the usual course. For two hours the
French gunners worked havoc in the
English spars and rigging, while the
English shot smashed into the French
gun-tiers ; and when D'Ache was tired
of it, he sheered off, but being pre-
sently reinforced by the COMTE DE
PROVENCE (74) and a frigate from
Pondicherry, he formed line again to
leeward. Pocock tried to follow him
up and recommence the action, but
four of his ships were badly damaged
and almost unmanageable ; so D'Ache
hauled to the wind and sailed north
to anchor off Alamparva, and there
the BIEN AIME drove ashore and was
lost.

The British are said to have lost
twenty-nine killed and eighty-nine
wounded ; the reports of the French
loss vary from five to nine hundred.
As the British fired at the gun-tiers,
while the French devoted their atten-
tion principally to the rigging (each
following their national custom) the
French loss would necessarily be
heavier than ours ; and the dispro-
portion would be increased by the
numerical superiority of the French
crews which were much stronger than
the British.

Pocock in the YARMOUTH had
beaten off the ZODIAQUE and BIEN
AIME, but had been much damaged.
According to one account his fleet,
encountering bad weather, was twice
driven as far south as Ceylon, but at
length he reached Madras, where he
refitted his damaged ships. The CUM-
BERLAND is said to have been so
shaken that it was found necessary to

send ten of her guns ashore, because
she was no longer strong enough to
carry them ; as she could not have
suffered in the action, she had pro-
bably been strained in the gale.
Another unpleasant duty had to be
performed ; the courts-martial, which
seem to have been the usual sequel to
naval actions of that time, were duly
held. Legge was cashiered, Vincent
and Brereton dismissed their ships ;
but Brereton was immediately ap-
pointed to the SALISBURY. It is at
least possible that their failure to get
into action was due as much to in-
ability as to any misconduct on their
part ; for the faulty English tactics
made it extremely difficult for the
rearmost ships in the line to get into
their station.

Once more ready for sea, Pocock
went out to look for D'Ache', and on
May 30th discovered him in Pondi-
cherry. So soon as he appeared in
sight, Lally ordered D'Ache to put to
sea and engage him. The French
admiral came out, but instead of
attacking Pocock, he proceeded to
manoeuvre in the direction of Fort
St. David, and after a decent interval
returned to Pondicherry without
having done anything, reporting that
he had offered battle, and the British
had declined to accept. Probably
both admirals failed to obtain the
position they wanted, and were un-
willing to attack until they got it.
Two days later Fort St. David, the
strongest fortress of the English East
India Company, capitulated.

The two fleets did not meet again
till July 26th. Again Pocock found
D'Ache at Pondicherry, and from
July 27th till August 3rd he
manoeuvred patiently, as he had been
taught, trying to get to windward of
the elusive D'Ache. It is not stated
whether he ultimately attained his
object by skill and sailing, or if it
was given to him by a shift of the

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

209

wind. However that may have been,
he got it, and proceeded to make
excellent use of it. His line was
formed with scrupulous precision, even
to the extent of making the ELIZA-
BETH and TIGER change places, so
that they might find themselves
matched equally with their opposites
in the French line. When once the
preliminaries were arranged to Po-
cock's academical satisfaction the real
fighting power of the man had a
chance. The action commenced about
one in the afternoon. At the end of
fifteen minutes, the ZODIAQUE and
COMTE DE PROVENCE were both on
fire and fell out of the line. The
French complained that combustibles
had been thrown on board their ships,
and it was not fair fighting. It is
difficult for us in these days to appre-
ciate such nice ethical distinctions ;
but a similar accusation was brought
against us after the battle of the Nile.
In that case it was proved that the
immoral missiles had come from the
magazine of the French SPARTIATE,
and that they were usually supplied
to all French ships.

Seeing the flag-ship leave the line
of battle, the rest of the French fleet
made the best of their way out of
action, and a running fight ensued.
The French ships cut away their
boats and crowding all sail escaped to
Pondicherry, Pocock all the time in
hot chase of them. D' Ache's ships
had been so roughly handled that he
sailed early in September for the Isle
of Bourbon (Reunion), to refit, leav-
ing Pocock, whose fleet had always
been inferior to the French in num-
ber of ships and men, as well as in
weight of metal, supreme in East
Indian waters.

At the end of the year the British
fleet was despatched to Bombay to
bring reinforcements to Madras,
which Lally was besieging with every
man and every gun he could collect.
No. 495. — VOL. LXXXIII.

Had D' Ache's fleet been at sea,
Pocock's task might easily have been
made impossible, Madras might have
fallen, and with it our Indian empire;
but D'Ache was refitting his ships
two thousand miles away. When
Pocock arrived with reinforcements
on February 16th, 1759, Lally hastily
raised the siege and made the best of
his way to Arcot, leaving fifty- two
guns and most of his ammunition
behind him.

The French strained every nerve to
enable D'Ache to bring an over-
whelming force against his hard-
hitting enemy. With eleven sail of
the line (the strongest fleet that had
ever sailed the Indian seas) he ap-
peared on September 2nd off Nega-
patam, where Pocock, reinforced by
the GRAFTON (70) and the SUNDER-
LAND (60), was lying at anchor.
Pocock immediately weighed with his
nine ships, and signalled for a general
chase, but the wind fell and he could
not get within range. Next morning
the French fleet was seen in line on
the starboard tack, four leagues away
to leeward, eleven sail of the line
beside frigates and store-ships, carry-
ing beside their own crews a number
of troops for Pondicherry. According
to the statement in Campbell's LIVES
OF THE ADMIRALS, they had a supe-
riority of one hundred and ninety-
two guns and twenty- three hundred
men.

Pocock, as usual, bore down to
engage, but the enemy kept away till
nightfall, when they wore ship and
formed line on the opposite tack.
Fearing to lose sight of them in the
night, he steered to cut them off from
Pondicherry, their port. It was not
till a week later that he got in touch
with them, in line on the starboard
tack, eight miles to leeward. At ten
o'clock they wore on to the larboard
tack and steered a lasking course,
that is to say, they kept the wind on

210

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

the larboard quarter. Then Pocock
ran down into action. Had he held
right on, broken through their line,
and engaged to leeward, he might
have gained a great victory ; but,
true to the vicious system in which
he had been trained, he hauled to the
wind so soon as he got within point-
blank range, and matched his nine
ships against D' Ache's eleven, broad-
side to broadside. D'Ache was a
better tactician. When he saw the
English line extended to cover the
longer line of the French, he concen-
trated his fire on the seven leading
ships, cutting off the SUNDERLAND and
WEYMOUTH which were last in the
line. It is difficult to follow the very
vague descriptions of the naval his-
torians, but according to a contem-
porary account in THE GENTLEMAN'S
MAGAZINE, he appears to have actually
cut the British line in two. All
accounts agree that the two rear-ships
were shut out of the action for a con-
siderable time ; but though he could
and did out-manoeuvre Pocock, he
could not out-fight him. The English
were better gunners than the French,
and whatever their fleet-tactics may
have been, the individual ships were
certainly fought well. In compliance
with the code of naval etiquette,
Pocock in the YARMOUTH engaged
D'Ache in the ZODIAQUE, flag-ship to
flag-ship, while Rear- Admiral Stevens
in the GRAFTON, assisted by the TIGER
and NEWCASTLE, hammered the ST.
Louis, Due D'ORLEANS, and MINOTAUR.
The little fifty-gun ship, SALISBURY,
had the ILLUSTRE of sixty-four guns,
all to herself, and kept her busy till
the two rear-ships, the SUNDERLAND
and WEYMOUTH, broke into the melee,
and drove the ILLUSTRE out of action.
The burden which had lain so heavily
on Pocock's spirit was lifted when his
cherished line of battle was shivered
in the first shock of the engagement.
Free to fight as he would, he showed

himself for what he was, a hard hitter
of the old fashion, and this, his last
action with D'Ache', was by far the
best of the three. For nearly six
hours the hard pounding went on, till
D'Ache bore up and ran down to lee-
ward with more than a thousand dead
or wounded men on board his battered
ships, leaving Pocock's ships half un-
rigged, and unable to follow up their
advantage. The British loss amounted
to one hundred and eighty-four killed
and three hundred and eighty-five
wounded ; the TIGER, commanded by
Captain Brereton (who had been dis-
missed the CUMBERLAND after the
action of April 29th), greatly dis-
tinguished herself, losing more men
than any other British ship. Both
admirals claimed a victory ; but on
October 3rd, so soon as he had re-
fitted his damaged ships, Pocock led
them into the roadstead of Pondi-
cherry, where the French fleet was
lying under the guns of the fort,
formed his line in front of them, and
offered battle. D'Ache weighed and
stood out as if to engage, but without
firing a shot he slipped away south,
and, outsailing Pocock, disappeared in
the night and made his way back to
Reunion. The monsoon was coming
on, and there were heavy repairs
needed in Pocock's fleet; he sailed,
therefore, for Bombay, and on October
19th he fell in with Admiral Cornish
and four sail of the line. Thus re-
inforced, he held absolute command
of the sea, and Lally shut himself up
in Pondicherry. It was well for him,
as it is for all men, that he had no
foreknowledge of the few and bitter
years that lay before him ; but his
evil destiny marched apace. Three
months later he was utterly defeated
by Eyre Coote at Wandewash ; an-
other year, and he had surrendered
Pondicherry. Five years after that,
he learned that the Bastille and the
scaffold were all the reward that

A Naval Chapter in Indian History.

211

France had to bestow upon a brave
man who had failed.

Throughout the whole of these
operations Pocock never once gained
a decisive success. Tactically D'Ache
always secured an advantage, though
he never availed himself of it. The
French historians admit that nearly all
the actions in which he commanded
had an unfortunate termination ; and
though he was never actually de-
feated, though he never lost a ship in
action, yet in a few months he lost
every station that France possessed on
the Malabar and Coromandel coasts,
and allowed the trade of the Com-
pagnie des Indes, which rivalled that
of our own East India Company, to
be almost destroyed. George Pocock
had little skill in naval tactics, but
he could fight, and his gunners were
well-trained ; it was his steady deter-
mination, and the straight shooting
of his crews that made the conquest
of India possible.

There is a passage in Campbell's
LIVES OF THE ADMIRALS which is
curiously indicative of the utter mis-
conception of the principles of naval
warfare which prevailed before 1782.
He sums up his account of Pocock's
operations in the East Indies thus :

Admiral Pocock more than once com-
pelled Mr. D'Ache, the greatest admiral
that France could boast of, who alone
supported the declining reputation of her
marine, to take shelter tinder the walls
of Pondicherry. Pocock had reduced the
French ships to a very shattered condition,
and killed a great many of their men ;
but, what shews the singular talents of
both admirals, they had fought three
pitched battles in eighteen months with-
out the loss of a ship on either side.

Compare this with the picture of
Blake in Clarendon's HISTORY OF THE
REBELLION :

He was the first man that declined the
old tract .... and despised those

rules which had been long in practice, to
keep his ship and men out of danger,
which had been held in former times a
proof of great ability and circumspection,
as if the principal art requisite in the
captain of a ship had been to be sure to
come home safe again.

Nelson declared that he was always
ready to lose half his own fleet to
ensure the destruction of the French ;
but Blake and Nelson were giants who
made the times in which they lived
heroic. Pocock, born in a meaner
age, was but a pigmy beside them;
yet he played no small or unworthy
part in the great drama of Indian
conquest.

There have been many periods in
the history of the navy which are
pleasanter to remember, and more
grateful to write of, than this ; but
it has one deep and abiding interest.
Feeble and indecisive as these actions
of Pocock's were, they made the work
of Clive possible. Though he never
won a battle, yet he retained sufficient
command of the sea, against a superior
force, to hamper Lally's operations by
cutting off his supplies and bringing
up our reinforcements. Had Pocock
been defeated, Madras must have
fallen, and it is unlikely that the East
India Company would have recovered
from the blow. And one thing more,
— though Pocock was invariably out-
manoeuvred and over-matched, yet his
indomitable fighting spirit pulled him
through. Though governments were
spiritless and admirals ill -taught,
officers and men alike seem to have
done their duty throughout these, the
last days of our ill-success, as faith-
fully and cheerfully as they have ever
done it when they had learned to look
on victory as a foregone conclusion.
These are the reasons which make the
three battles of Pocock and D'Ache
worth remembering.

W. J. FLETCHER.

P 2

212

EDWARD FITZGERALD AND T. E. BROWN.

IN reading the letters of Thomas
Edward Brown, — differing from all
others as the man was different
from all other men — one is curiously
reminded, as much by contrast
as by resemblance, of Edward Fitz-
Gerald.

The one was a Celt, feeling in-
tensely, passionate in his love of
beauty, and brimming over with
delicate fancy ; the other was a
Saxon, equable, reticent, and almost
phlegmatic. The one was optimistic
and buoyant with large hope; he
had found " the key to all the
mysteries." The other moved in the
twilight of doubt, groping around the
door to which he found no key.
One laughed his mirthful laughter ;
the other smiled serenely, tenderly.
Brown loved mankind with a love
that came near to genius ; he poured
sunshine upon his friends, making
one apprehend sadly what the silence
must now mean to them. FitzGerald
too loved his friends ; but it was as
impossible for him to live with them,
as it was for Brown to live without
them, and many a time did he
return from town without having
mustered up courage enough to knock
at their doors. Brown might be
likened to a St. Francis of the nine-
teenth century, loving with joyful-
ness the beauty around him, and
seeing God in it all, while FitzGerald
seemed to be always wrapped round
in an Omarian mantle of gentle
fatalism.

And yet, in spite of fundamentally
different temperaments and with an
entirely individual way of approach-
ing things, these two men had a

strange similarity of tastes and pur-
suits. One is tempted to feel that
beneath the superficial differences one
golden thread linked them. What
was it ?

Both were endowed with a far-
reaching sympathy, which made them,
each in his own way, the centre of a
group of adoring friends. Both had
the power of retaining life-long friend-
ships, and both were loved by their
friends with a love " passing the love
of women." Thackeray was once
asked which of his friends he loved
best; "Why old Fitz, of course,"
was the re,ady answer ; and who has
not been touched and thrilled by the
tributes of love and gratitude paid
to the large-hearted Manxman 1 In
both men there was a vein of deli-
cate whimsical humour, — the humour
which has been so happily described
as wit hand in hand with love, and
which leaves behind it a fragrant
essence of a man's personality.

Brown felt all the charm of Fitz-
Gerald's letters. "There is an rjdos
in FitzGerald's letters," he wrote,
" which is so exquisitely idyllic as to
be almost heavenly. He takes you
with him, exactly accommodating his
pace to yours, walks through meadows
so tranquil and yet abounding in the
most delicate surprises, and these sur-
prises seem so familiar, just as if they
had originated with yourself. What
delicious blending ! What a perfect
interweft of thought and diction !
What a sweet companion ! " And
again : " Blessings on FitzGerald !
How delightful he was ! How he
comforted me ! I have now finished
him. That is the worst of it." Is

Edward Fitzgerald and T. E. Brown.

213

not that what we all echo about his
own charming letters, which we have
laid down so regretfully 1 The well-
loved voice is silent ; that is the worst
of it.

It is not, however, a resemblance
in the style of their letters that
strikes one. In his introduction Mr.
Irwin rightly points out that the
letters of Brown cannot be compared
to those of FitzGerald, that each has
his own qualities, and that the former
has nothing of the carelessness which
so charms us in the latter. But let
us look into the intellectual pleasures
and affirmations of these two differ-
ently tuned natures. Both were
scholars in the widest sense, and
both scorned scholarship for its
own sake. "By becoming scholars
(Heaven save the mark !) " says
Brown, " we have gained some-
thing ; but we have lost, I had almost
said, everything." The other sighs :
"I find the disadvantage of being so
ill-grounded and so bad a scholar.
But what does all this signify ? Time
goes on and we get older, and
whether my idleness comprehends the
distinction of the first and second
aorist will not be noted much in the
Book of Life, either on this or on the
other side of the leaf." Yet both
had that large assimilative passion
for the Classics, "the old men who
are full-orbed, serene, fixed in their
everlasting seats." Both steeped
themselves in the rich-sounding Greek
language, and both, with spontaneous
pleasure and without a touch of
pedantry, often made use of its ex-
pressive words. For both Greek put
forth " a branch-work " extending to
the " vista opening far and wide."
Both absorbed the essence of Greek
thought and life. Speaking on some
point about the teaching of Greek,
Brown says : " To me the learning of
any blessed thing is a matter of little
moment. Greek is not learned by

nineteen-twentieths of our Public
School boys. But it is a baptism
into a cult, a faith, not more irrational
than other faiths or cults; the baptism
of a regeneration which releases us
from I know not what original sin.
And if a man does not see that, he is
a fool, such a fool that I shouldn't
wonder if he gravely asked me to
explain what I mean by original sin
in such a connexion." Here again, is
a characteristic sentence from Fitz-
Gerald. " It is wonderful how the
sea brought up this appetite for Greek.
It likes to be called 6d\acrcra and
TTOI>TO<? better than that wretched
word ' sea ' I am sure, and the Greeks
(especially ^Eschylus, after Homer,)
are full of sea-faring sounds and allu-
sions. I think the murmurs of the
^Egean (if that is their sea) wrought
itself into their language. How is it
that the Islandic (which I read is our
mother tongue) was not more Polu-
phloisboi-ic \ "

Both returned over and over again
to the ancient authors. FitzGerald
sobbed over Sophocles. Brown de-
clared that the tremendous parabasis,
"Aye 8r) (f)v(riv avSpes a/j,avp6/3toi,
from THE BIRDS of Aristophanes
made him tremble. To both Homer
was a source of delight, " Sophocles
has almost shaken my allegiance to
^schylus," cries FitzGerald. "Oh,
these two CEdipuses ! but then that
Agamemnon ! Well, one shall be
the Handel, t'other the Haydn, one
the Michel Angelo and t'other the
Raffaelle of Tragedy." And again:
"Sophocles is a pure Greek temple;
but ^Eschylus is a rugged mountain,
lashed by seas and riven by thunder-
bolts ; and which is the most wonder-
ful and appalling 1 Or if one will have
^Eschylus too a work of man, I say
he is like a Gothic cathedral, which
the Germans say did arise from the
genius of man aspiring up to the
immeasurable, and reaching after the

214

Edward Fitzgerald and T. E. Brown.

infinite in complexity and gloom, ac-
cording as Christianity elevated and
widened men's minds. A dozen lines
of JEschylus have a more almighty
power on me than all Sophocles's
plays ; though I would perhaps
rather save Sophocles, as the consum-
mation of Greek art, than -^schylus's
twelve lines, if it came to a choice
which must be lost. Besides these
-^schyluses trouble us with their
grandeur and gloom ; but Sophocles
is always soothing, complete, and
satisfactory."

Both felt the power of Dante;
both acknowledged their awe of him
and turned with relief the one to
Ariosto, the other to the "ever-
green " Boccaccio. " Dante is mono-
tonous," says Brown, " but what a
monotone ! He drowns you in a
dream and you never want to wake."
His fine quatrain on Dante and
Ariosto is a perfect criticism in
miniature on the two men.

If Dante breathes on me his awful

breath

I rise and go ; but I am sad as death —
I go — but turning, who is that I see ?
I whisper: — Ariosto, wait for me !

FitzGerald places Dante "apart in
the Empyrean," but for " human de-
light " he demands Boccaccio. He
would have appreciated Brown's son-
net on Boccaccio.

To both Walter Scott was supreme.
" I have been reading Sir Walter's
PIRATE again," says FitzGerald, " and
am very glad to find how much I like
it — that is speaking far below the
mark — I may say how I wonder and
delight in it . . . with all its
faults of detail, often mere careless-
ness, what broad Shakespearian day-
light over it all, and all with no
effort and, — a lot else that one may
be contented to feel without having
to write an essay about." And
again : " They won't beat Sir Walter

in a hurry. He will fly over their
heads come aquila still ! " Brown,
in a characteristic burst, exclaims :
" The great discovery, or rather re-
discovery has been Scott. I have
read WAVEELEY, OLD MORTALITY,
WOODSTOCK, REDGAUNTLET, THE
BRIDE OP LAMMERMOOR, ROB ROY,
and am now reading QUENTIN DUR-
WARD. They quite spring on me,
these old darlings. What a man !
I am full of ' wonder, love, and
praise'; I seem to see all manner
of great and good things ; but the
main thing is, — the joy and glory
of it all is, — what I suppose the
French mean by verve, at any rate,
what I understand by that favourite
term of French criticism." And he
adds humorously, with reference to
an attack on Stevenson : " These
fellows are drawing nigh to the very
sanctities — the cry will soon be,
perhaps already is, 'The ark of
Scott is taken ' ; if so, I shall be a
broken-hearted old Eli."

Both Brown and FitzGerald were
enthusiastic over Burns. " That red,
red Rose has burnt itself into my
silly old • soul," cries FitzGerald.
" Burns is a blackbird and mimics
nothing," says the other. " He is
inevitable." Curiously enough they
both compare the passionate lyrical
outbursts of Burns with more artistic
work, — FitzGerald with Bdranger,
Brown with Tennyson — and both have
to admit that the song of the artist
in its self-consciousness loses some-
thing of pure lyrical passion. With
what relish and keen appreciation
did they both return again and again
to Milton, and to Cowley and Addi-
son (" how delicious he is ! ") and
Sir Thomas Browne, who was some-
times, to his namesake's mind,
Absolute. Every reader of FitzGerald
remembers his love, his old ever-new
love for Crabbe ; Crabbe's son was
his friend. He edits Crabbe's TALES

Edward Fitzgerald and T. E. Brown.

215

FROM THE HALL. Crabbe is his
"great gun," his "eternal Crabbe."
The author of FO'C'S'LE YARNS was
as appreciative of the poet as his
earlier champion could desire, and
FitzGerald would have twinkled
over the exuberant aside with which
the name is heralded : "By the bye,
do you think of him as Crabbe fish
or Crabbe apple?" He advises his
friend to read everything FitzGerald
has said " about his beloved old
crustacean," and calls himself " an
old Crabbian."

It is not in literature only that
their tastes coincided. Both had a
passion for music ; both were com-
pletely happy when they were in
possession of a piano or an organ.
We can fancy Brown bringing music
even out of an " old tub of a piano " ;
and who does not recall FitzGerald
and the parson's son and daughter,
" with not a voice amongst them,"
going through Handel's Coronation
Anthems? The letters of both are
full of allusions to the pleasure of
playing and composing, and both
give interesting criticisms, Brown's
abstract and poetically conceived,
FitzGerald's more concrete and pic-
torial. In music too their affections
were set on the Classics ; on Beet-
hoven and Bach and Mozart and
Handel. "Mozart is the purest
musician" says FitzGerald. " Beet-
hoven would have been poet or
painter as well."

For both men the sea had an
abiding soul-satisfying charm. What
a marvellous description we have of
a storm in Brown's CHRISTMAS ROSE,
and in THE BRISTOL CHANNEL !
Brown is constantly walking by " his
old chum," and bathing in its blue
depth and singing paeons to its ever-
changing beauty. " I have gone
back to singing," he says in one of his
letters, " a vice of my youth. I
always think the sea the great

challenger and promoter of song.
Even the mountain is not the same
thing. There may always be some
d — d fool or another behind a rock.
But the sea is open and you can tell
when you are alone and the dear old
chap is so confidential ; I will trust
him with my secret." There is hardly
a letter of FitzGerald's which does
not make allusion to it ; " That old
sea " was always talking to him,
telling its ancient history. For both
men this love meant enjoyment in
boating and bathing. FitzGerald
was continually on board his little
lugger even when it was drizzling,
or he was " perishing with a N. E.
wind," and was never happier than
when sailing her. Brown revelled in
the crossings and in the excursions
round the coast of his darling Mona.
And then there was for both the
blessed intercourse with the fisher-
folk ; for it is strange that the shy
Suffolk Sage was as much beloved by
them as was the genial Manxman.
Both could enter into the lives of
their humble friends. Mr. Hindes
Groome, in his Memorial of Fitz-
Gerald, gives a charming picture of
him and his friendship for " Posh."
Posh was the skipper of his lugger,
or rather the lugger shared by them
— the Meum and Tuum — usually
called, to FitzGerald's intense delight,
the Mum and Turn. He enjoyed the
companionship of this old salt as
much as Brown enjoyed Tommy the
mate and his friends. The letters
abound in such allusions to him as
these : "I believe I have smoked my
pipe every day but one with Posh at
his house, which his quiet little wife
keeps tidy and pleasant. The Man
is, I do think, of a royal nature."
" I have just left Posh, having
caught him with a pot of white paint
(some of which was on his face) and
having made him dine on cold beef
in the Suffolk Hotel Bowling Green,

216

Edward Fitzgerald and T. E. Brown.

washing all down with two tankards
of Bullard's ale. He was not dis-
pleased to dine abroad, as this is
Saturday, when he says there are apt
to be ' squalls ' at home, because of
washing, etc." On one occasion,
having been obliged to remonstrate
with Posh on his behaviour, he
wrote : " It makes me sad and
ashamed to be setting up for judge
on a much nobler creature than my-
self." In all this the man whom
some have called a misanthrope (as
Cowell says he was only in the
abstract, having the tenderest love
for the human beings near him),
showed as much sympathy for his
humble friends as did Brown for his.

Both men, again, had in a marked
degree that instinct which can only
be described by the Scotch word yird-
hunger, — the longing to go back to
the land of their early days, the land
of sweet associations. Brown always
sighed for the mountains, the beau-
tiful glens, the bog-bean-scented
curraghs of his beloved isle, and Fitz-
Gerald was unhappy away from the
soft verdant landscape of Suffolk.
Both were jealous, in the best sense
of the word, of the dear home-

country; both wished to keep the
ancient simple manners, to gather the
lore and traditions and to preserve
the rapidly disappearing dialect. Fitz-
Gerald wrote several papers on the
Suffolk dialect and sea-phrases for
the EAST ANGLIAN NOTES AND
QUERIES, and Brown has preserved
for us the manners and expressions
of his " darling race, the warm-
hearted, humourous, loving Manx
folk." He was indeed a true son of
his own people.

One more resemblance is to be
noted. The deep love for Nature,
for spring-time, for children, for birds,
for all creatures. The scent of cow-
slips and primroses blows over their
pages. For both the yellow crocuses
" spring like tongues of living fire."
The blackbird,

The lusty bird, whose throat was clear
And strong with elemental cheer,

sings hopefully for the one, the
nightingale pensively for the other.
Both had the poet's eye and ear for
all the fairest sights and sounds of
life, and the tender heart for human
suffering. And therefore both suffered
much themselves.

217

JACK'S MOTHER.

FOE twelve long years Jack Wil-
loughby had sat on the same stool,
in the same office, plodding through
the same uninteresting work, — work
in which lurked absolutely no sugges-
tions, which ran always on the same
level, and led ever into itself again.
The suggestions, thoughts, and fancies
found in, or springing from, work on
a higher intellectual plane, also lead
ever into themselves again ; and the
ground over which they pass may
become as deadly monotonous, to a
man of Jack's temperament, as teach-
ing village children the alphabet, or
preparing the Answers to Correspon-
dents, for AUNT SUSANNA'S SUNDAY
MAGAZINE, would be. Yet, being
assured that the flight of the sea-gull
and the progress of the slug would
eventually prove equally wearisome,
who would not choose the sea-gull's
flight?

By nature Jack was a dreamer, an
artist, a poet. Now there are artists
who mix their colours with their own
heart's blood; and there are poets
who fling their bitterest pangs (and
also the bitterest pangs of their
friends) into verse. But Jack would
never have been one of these ; rather
he would have found his place among
those who touch only the pathos and
the most delicate humour of life, sing-
ing us sweet and tender songs, and
setting forth bright idylls of nature.
For he loved all that was tranquil
and fair ; the golden green of a beech-
wood, beneath the pale blue sky of
an early spring-day, filled his heart
with a deep peace. He was one of
those (not many, in these latter days)
who believe that the deeper and the

finer issues of life can only be reached
through things purely beautiful ; and
at times he well-nigh touched despair,
because he thought he might never
take even the first step towards the
goal where he fain would be. So
might a child, hurrying homewards,
cry bitterly because it had lost its
way.

There was nothing beautiful in his
life, Jack would have said; only a
sordid monotony which crushed all
vitality out of him, and against which
his eager spirit could make no stand ;
with brief and rare intervals of rest,
lovely indeed, but over before he had
fairly got his breath.

Had he been independent of work,
Jack would have loitered through life,
interested, alert, and most intensely
receptive ; and the inevitable reactions
to weariness, due to the strain of
melancholy in his character, would
have been but the necessary shadows
among the bright and delicate colouring
of the whole. He would also, in all
probability, have found himself able to
considerably augment his income from
time to time, with no more than a
wholly pleasurable effort. Whoso
hath, to him shall be given. Had he
stood alone, and taken his own way
in the world, office-walls would never
have held him ; but what would have
become of him is problematic. A man
of intellectual tastes, who yet will
dream away his yearly holiday (of a
fortnight's duration) in one little West
Country village, instead of making
a wild rush on the Continent, crowd-
ing as much as possible into the cruelly
short time, is a man whose capabilities
it would take some insight to gauge.

218

Jack's Mother.

Jack loathed the office. A little
devil dwelt there, flourishing exceed-
ingly (as little devils do in this little
world), who was for ever whispering
in his ear, " Cut it, cut it, cut it, you
fool." That was the text, to be followed
up by plans for the fool's method of
procedure, when he had cut it. These
were varied. There were hopeful
plans, and desperate plans ; plans
heroic, and plans cowardly ; wise
plans, and plans hopelessly foolish ;
plans which opened such a vista of
golden days, when a man should be
his own master, and take his will of
the bounties which God pours for us
into the lap of His handmaid, and
hear his fill of that which he tells us
through His mouthpiece, Nature, that
Jack had to set his teeth, and write,
write, write, while the little devil
capered with glee in a corner.

" While the Mother lives, I run no
risks," Jack would say to himself.
" Thank Heaven, she does not guess
how nearly mad it sends me ! "

Hour after hour, day after day,
week after week, month after month,
year after year, there he sat, and
wrote, wrote, wrote. While spring
was setting her foot-prints on bank
and meadow and moor, passing her
hand over the hedges, and swinging,
singing, in the trees ; while cliff and
headland and hill, and the great sweep
of the great sea lay beautiful and
calm beneath the April sky, and his
soul was sick with longing for the
Mighty Mother; when summer burst
into throbbing life ; when autumn
flung her rich and marvellous mantle
over the wolds ; when winter tan-
talised men with swift change from
dazzling purity to sullen, yet so restful,
grey, — Jack sat ever in the office, and
wrote, wrote, wrote.

At one time he gave up his excur-
sions into the country on Saturday
afternoons ; perhaps on the principle
which will make men give up smoking

altogether, rather than restrict them-
selves to one pipe a day ; or more
likely because, as the years went on,
Saturday afternoons found him so
weary, — fagged out, he called it.
Sundays he had rarely, very rarely,
taken for himself at all. " If you do
make a lay-figure of your life," said he
" you may as well put on its rouge.
So he stayed at home and took his
mother to church, in all her Sunday
glory of silken gown and a wondrous
bonnet, compared to which her week-
day head-gear was as moonlight unto
sunlight ; and he would even, occa-
sionally, set the finishing touch to his
conduct by appearing at her select
little seventh-day tea-party, — a most
orthodox figure, in regulation Sunday
attire, but with a lack of expression
in his brown eyes which called forth
many unfavourable comments. He
was not a favourite with his mother's
friends.

" Jack," said Mrs. Willoughby, with
an obvious effort after pride, "is the
best son in the world. Of course, I
am aware that he does not shine.
Mrs. Taylor's second son has written
a novel which Beatrice Taylor describes
(very improperly) as a shilling shocker.
It has had a great success, and his
family is in-ord-in-ately proud of him."
The little woman always tripped over
a long word with the most dainty
care, even as a dainty maiden trips
over a narrow bridge. "Well, no
doubt it would be gratifying to any
mother ! But 7 am quite content,
with my kind, stay-at-home son."
And, on the rare occasions when Jack
had not made good his escape at the
beginning of this sort of speech, she
would put out a tiny hand, well-kept
in spite of all the work it had done,
and still did, and pat his arm in an
encouraging manner.

She certainly did not consider her-
self dull. Do any of us know, when
we are spiritually hard of hearing?

Jack's Mother.

219

She was a talkative and sociable little
woman, who prided herself on a rare
combination of all the virtues. Was
there a better housekeeper to be
found ? Did any one of Jack's fellow-
clerks ever eat a better dinner at
home than he did every day of his
life ? Yet who was more economical
than she ? And was she not also
well-read, and able to talk on many
subjects 1 On what subject indeed
will a woman of her stamp not talk !
And did she ever trouble Jack with
domestic worries, as Mrs. Smith was
always troubling that poor unfortu-
nate Mr. Smith ? And did she not
properly appreciate, and acknowledge,
Jack's unfailing goodness and courtesy
to herself ? And had he the faintest
idea that she sometimes almost wished
that he had been a more striking
man ?

She thought he had not ; but it
was a subject over which Jack had
many a grim little laugh. " The
Mother would like me to write an
idiotic novel, or to do something else
equally unholy," he would say to him-
self ; " and I, — I only want to think
my own thoughts, and live my own
life, instead of dying a daily death in
that cursed office."

Of the longings, the unquenchable
desire for freedom, the mad impatience
which sometimes seemed as though it
must break all bounds, she knew and
guessed nothing. He went from her
morning after morning, with a bright
good-bye, and re-appeared in the
evening, tired, it is true, but usually
with a good appetite, and always
courteous and ready for conversation.
He told her sometimes that he had a
headache ; but he never told her that
he was seldom without one.

" The best son in the world," she
truly said ; but no one knew less than
she how good. She could not have
grasped, — nay, she could have laid no
hand upon the sense of the deadly

grind, the daily treadmill, which
seemed now to numb, and now to
madden him ; so that the best which
ever happened was that now and then
he lived through one supreme moment
which held the concentrated bitter-
ness of months ; for he refound him-
self, listless and apathetic, and felt
nothing for many a long day after.
You cannot eat your cake and have
it.

" Always the same," Jack's mother
said he was ; and so indeed he was,
to her. " A moody beggar," his
acquaintances called him ; and so
indeed he was, to them. What he
would have been, had he lived with
the Mighty Mother whom he loved
who can say? Her hand was on his
heart-strings, day and night. At
times, a sudden memory of her calm,
of her witchery, of her grandeur, of
her loveliness, of her music, — or even
of her enthralling incomprehensibility,
at moments when she has nothing
but her wonderful loneliness to offer
us, as in the fen -lands of England,
or as (though Jack had never seen it
there) in leagues upon leagues of flat
and barren veldt, — a sudden thought
of these things, I say, would some-
times take him by the throat and
well-nigh choke him. He longed for
her, sea or mountain, fen or moor,
what matter? Does a child, sick for
its mother, care what will be the
fashion of her robes, when she comes,
singing the lullaby it longs for, once
more?

So with ailing brain and longing
soul Jack sat in the office, and wrote,
wrote, wrote, through weary morning
and wearier afternoon, month after
month, year after year.

Once he spoke to his mother of
moving to some little town, if he
could get work in such a one ; some
place set in the real country, he said,
and from which one got fairly away
in three minutes' run. There was no

220

Jack's Mother.

wistfulness in his voice, nor were
there ever any tears in his eyes ; but
the bitterest tears are those that are
never shed.

His little mother was aghast at
this proposition, and talked against
it, with her usual correct volubility,
for some small space of time. What
she said was really eminently sensible,
but not therefore particularly worth
listening to. Then she came to the
point, though she hardly considered it
as such.

"As to getting into the country,
my dearest boy," said she in her little
tinkling voice, " I did not know you
cared much about that. Why, you
absolutely refused to go to the Spencer's
picnic last week ! If it is really such
an object with you, surely, as it is,
you could manage it a little oftener, —
if you only had a little more energy,
my dear ! "

" I have no energy at all, Mother,"
Jack said quietly ; he thought of the
grave, where what little energy he
ever had lay buried.

" Well, it often seems to me that
your work does absorb all your
faculties," returned his mother ; " and
it is, no doubt, a good thing that it
should be so." There was just the
suspicion of a sigh in her thin voice,
and Jack knew that she was thinking
of that book, so improperly designated
a shilling shocker, which somebody
else's son had written. But she was
getting away from his subject, and he
gently brought her back to it. " You
would really dislike such a plan,
then ? " he asked.

" Dislike it ? Well, yes ; but do not
think that that is the question. Have
you ever known me to put forward my
own likes and dislikes ? It is that it
would be so bad for you, Jack. And
pray, how would you be likely to get
anything good enough, leaving the
firm which knows you 1 "

" Oh, of course, I know it all

hangs on an if," said Jack abstractedly;
" still I think that Mr. Powell could
and would help me."

Then did little Mrs. Willoughby
become seriously alarmed. She was a
thorough cockney, with all a cockney's
genuine horror of provincial life ; and
the madness of Jack's idea of leaving
the people for whom he had worked so
many years, and who must surely raise
his salary before long, filled her with

She gathered up all her forces.
"Indeed, Jack," she began, with as
much solemnity as her small per-
sonality could carry, " I know that it
would be a very bad thing to make any
change. Here, we are known : we are
settled ; we have many, many friends
by whom we are respected." A pro-
cession of his mother's friends, with
their endless tittle-tattle, kind or un-
kind, but tittle-tattle always, passed
before Jack's inner eye. " Here at
least, in this centre of civilisation, we
can feel the throbs of the heart of the
world." Mrs. Willoughby paused, as
well she might, and gave a positive
gasp of delight at her achievement of
this sentence, while Jack manfully
repressed a desire to giggle. " And
then, my dear Jack," the little tinkling
voice went on, with maternal playful-
ness, "I really do tremble to think
what you would become in a little dull
country town, with no life stirring,
and nothing to keep you a little rubbed
up ! Even here, with all the quite
superior people we see, your, — your, —
your manners, in short, my dear, are, —
are not — "

Jack's mother stopped, having gone
further than she intended (as ninety-
nine people out of a hundred do when
they have once started), and having
the grace to feel a little embarrassed ;
which feeling, however, was not shared
by Jack. Jack's conscience was quite
easy respecting his manners to his
mother ; it was also quite easy,

Jack's Mother.

221

though from another point of view,
respecting his manners to Miss Effusia
Spencer.

" Yes, I know, Mother," he said
nonchalantly, with his tired brown
eyes, in which the lights and shades
were shifting and changing, fixed
earnestly on nothing at all. " And
if you dislike my idea so much, why
we will say no more about it."

Suddenly Jack's mother had an
actual qualm of conscience, a thing
which had not happened to her since
her husband died. The consciences of
some people are like the boy in
Grimm's Fairy Tales, who did not
know how to shiver, until his wife, the
Princess taught him with a bucketful

of fish in their native element, applied
as he lay warm in bed. " Of course,"
she said, with a sudden softening
of her voice, which came to Jack's
heart as showers to a thirsty land,
" of course, anything you really wish,
I must agree to. You have been a
good son to me, Jack ; and you must
not think that I forget that I am
almost entirely dependent on you — "

"Hush, Mother, hush" said Jack,
reddening. " And as to my plan, it
was just a passing thought, and I
spoke of it ; that was all."

This was not true, but he never
spoke of the matter again. And if
he had flitted, the probabilities are that
the little devil would have flitted too.

222

AN IDEAL REFORM BILL.

MOST of us, I suppose, have been
ambitious to set the world right at
least once or twice in our lives ; and
I frankly confess that on more than
one occasion I have felt confident that,
if the opportunity were only given to
me, I could improve upon the bungling
work of some of our politicians. Re-
vived by all I had been reading and
hearing, in the newspapers and else-
where, about the late General Elec-
tion, some such notion as this had no
doubt been simmering in my mind
the other night when I fell asleep
and dreamed a dream, in which the
idea worked itself out in the follow-
ing fantastic fashion.

Lord Salisbury, having heard from
a friend that I had meditated long
upon problems of government, and
that I had written a considerable
work dealing with property as the
foundation of civilised order, and
having moreover read that work on
the recommendation of the friend
aforesaid, invited me to call upon him.
He received me most cordially, and
declaring himself to have been deeply
impressed by the arguments and facts
set forth in my book, expressed an
anxiety to learn my views as to the
possibility of checkmating our modern
demagogues in their design to use
the political power of the masses to
destroy the foundations of the State,
or, in other words, to stem the tide
of democratic socialism which is now
rising so high and swelling so widely.
He was good enough to say that I
had evidently studied these matters
long and deeply, and that I might
therefore be considered an expert
upon them ; and for his own part he

was not ashamed to say that he had
learned a great deal from me and
might yet learn a great deal more.
Even Ministers of State did not know
everything and could not possess all
the wisdom in the world ; and he
regarded it as his first duty to the
Sovereign and the country to avail
himself of any and every means of
obtaining knowledge on the most diffi-
cult and responsible work of govern-
ing the Kingdom and the Empire,
Her Majesty had been of late, he told
me, much occupied with these matters,
and she had charged him as her Chiei
Minister to look closely and deeply
into them, and to report to her
as to what could and should be done.
He, for his part, could think of no
better expedient than to consult me ;
and finally he requested me to favour
him with my written views on the
nature and effect of the legislation
of the last fifty years, and in what
directions and to what degree it
ought to be, or could be, modified.

There's for you ! Think of a Prime
Minister consulting an author upon
the work of governing the country ?
Is it not deliciously absurd? But
you will remember, of course, that
this is only a dream.

Thus inspired and fortified I set to
work, and in the course of a few days
drew up a brand-new Reform Bill,
which I then submitted to his lord-
ship ; and now submit to you.

Whereas sundry laws have of late
years been passed for extending the
political freedom of the citizens,
placing the institutions of the King-
dom on a broader basis, and pro-

An Ideal Reform Bill.

223

moting the good government of the
country generally :

And whereas divers political agita-
tors and seditious societies have
taken advantage of the said laws
to disaffect the minds of peaceable
citizens, stir up discontent, subvert
lawful authority, and overthrow the
institutions of this Kingdom :

Be it therefore enacted by the
Queen, the Lords Temporal and
Spiritual, and the Commons House
of Parliament, as follows :

First. This Act shall be entitled
an Act for the Better Government
of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland.

Secondly. All previous legislation
relating to the election of members
of the Legislature is hereby repealed,
experience having demonstrated that
our people are not yet sufficiently
intelligent and sober-minded and
patriotic to make a wise use of
the powers conferred upon them
by that legislation ; and the following
laws are hereby ordained to be
substituted :

(a) No citizen shall be permitted
to vote for the election of a member
of the Legislature until he has passed
an examination in the history of
Great Britain and Ireland and also
on current social and political ques-
tions, to the satisfaction of a Board
of Examiners, which shall consist of
six persons, viz., one Graduate of the
Universities of Oxford or Cambridge,
one Judge of the High Court, one
Minister of Religion, one Banker,
one Magistrate, and one Member of
the House of Lords ; and such Board
shall meet in every district for the
examination of those citizens who
claim to be qualified to exercise the
privilege and the responsibility of
the franchise.

(b) Absolute equality shall exist as
between rich and poor with regard
to the franchise, no man being per-

mitted to vote because he is rich,
or being debarred from voting
because he is poor ; the only tests
of fitness being intellectual and
moral. So that the poorest peasant
who has educated his mind and
disciplined his character may attain
to this high privilege ; while the
millionaire who is morally debased
and intellectually uncultivated will
be shut out from it.

(c) A second vote shall be allowed
to every citizen who, being duly
qualified to give a first vote under
sub-section (b), shall possess landed
or other property to the value of
£1,000; a third vote if he possess
property worth £4,000 ; a fourth
vote if he own property worth
£10,000; and a fifth vote if his
possessions be worth £20,000 ;
though no man shall possess more
than five votes, however great his
wealth. " The object of this provision
is to secure adequate representation
of property; and justification for it
exists in the nature of property,
which is vitally bound up with the
liberty of the individual and the
progress of the State. Where there
is no security for property there
can be no freedom, no civilisation,
no morality, no religion. In safe-
guarding property the nation pre-
serves its own life.

(d) A second vote shall be allowed
to every citizen, who, being duly
qualified to vote a first time under
sub-section (6), shall follow the avo-
cation of a Minister of Religion, an
Author, a Doctor of Medicine, an
Architect, an Artist, or a Composer
of Music. In the past the repre-
sentation of the people and the
making of our laws have been too
exclusively in the hands of those
who follow the profession of law,
religion, literature, and the fine arts
being too much ignored. Yet these
latter are at least of equal conse-

224

An Ideal Reform Bill.

quence with law, and it is the pur-
pose of this provision to give them
an efficient voice in the framing of
legislation.

(e) A citizen who is otherwise duly
qualified to vote shall not be dis-
qualified by the fact of his being
unmarried ; but a citizen who has
been married, and a respectable
and reputable householder for twenty
years, shall in virtue of that fact
acquire a second vote. Parents and
heads of households constitute the
backbone of a nation's strength ; they
have heavy and peculiar responsi-
bilities, and it is therefore but just
that they should be able to exert an
effective control over the course of
legislation.

(f) A working man who is duly
qualified to vote a first time under
sub-section (6), shall, if he possess
£100 invested in Government bonds
of any kind, in virtue of that invest-
ment acquire a second vote. The
object of this provision is to secure
adequate representation of property
among the classes who labour for
their daily bread, just as the object
of sub-section (c) is to secure such
representation among the middle and
the upper classes.

(g) At intervals of five years the
register of voters shall be rigorously
revised, and any person who has
in the meantime been convicted of
felony or misdemeanour or other
crime, or who has become notoriously
immoral in character, shall be dis-
qualified from voting and struck off
the list.

(h) No woman shall vote for the
election of any member of Legisla-
ture, or any other official whatever,
in the Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland. Woman's sphere is the
home, where she reigns supreme ; the
home is the corner-stone of the State ;
consequently women, in preserving
the happiness and purity of the

home, are rendering the Kingdom far
higher and nobler service than could
be rendered by the exercise of the
franchise or by political work in
public.

Thirdly. Whereas Labour Com-
binations of an illegitimate and anti-
social character have sprung up of
late years, and have taken advantage
of the Franchise Laws to bind working
men together in Societies, Unions,
and Federations, and to induce them
to use their votes in order to secure
for themselves hours of labour so
short and wages so high as to con-
stitute an intolerable burden upon
our industries, and to make it im-
possible for those industries to be
carried on with profit to the em-
ployers, thus leading to the closing
of mines, ironworks, factories, and
workshops, and to the enforced idle-
ness of multitudes of workmen, all
of which are wrongs and injuries to
the community.

Be it therefore enacted that all
such Societies, Unions, and Federa-
tions shall hereafter be compelled to
register and enrol themselves at the
Board of Trade, and to submit their
rules and laws to the Minister of
that Department for approval ; and
that any such Society, Union, or
Federation which shall neglect so
to register and enrol itself, or the
rules and laws of which shall not
be approved by the Minister, shall,
in default of such registration and
approval, be, in virtue of such default,
and without further trial, declared
illegal, and shall, if necessary, be
forcibly dissolved and suppressed.
Provided always that the refusal of
the Minister of Industry to sanction
the constitution of any such Society,
Union, or Federation, shall be sub-
ject to an appeal to the Legislature.

Be it also further enacted that any
such Society, Union, or Federation,
which, having been duly registered

An Ideal Xefonn Bill.

225

and approved, shall violate its own
constitution to the injury of society
generally, or shall illegally interfere
with an employer's action in the
management of his business and
deprive him of his lawful freedom, or
inflict upon him injury and loss, or
shall intimidate a workman from
following his lawful occupation and
infringe his rights and liberties, shall
in virtue of those misdeeds and
offences be forcibly dissolved and
suppressed as provided in the previous
subsection.

Be it also further enacted that
every such Society, Union, or Federa-
tion shall in law and in fact possess
the status and be liable to the
responsibilities of a corporation, and
shall be subject to be sued as a body
for the acts of any one of its duly
appointed and responsible officials,
and that the whole of the funds
of such corporation may be seques-
trated and forfeited in making good
the damage done by the acts of the
said officials.

Be it also further enacted that in
the rules and laws regulating the
internal constitution and action of
every such Society, Union, or Federa-
tion, the following provisions shall
be incorporated :

Every member of a Trade Society
of ten years' standing or under shall
have one vote in its councils ; every
member of between ten and twenty
years' standing shall have two votes ;
every member of twenty-five years'
standing shall have three votes, of
thirty years' standing four votes, of
thirty-five years' standing five votes,
and of forty years' standing six
votes.

The object of these provisions is to
ensure that the older workmen, who
are wiser and less liable to be carried
away by impulse or caprice than the
younger men, and who moreover have
heavier responsibilities as heads of
No. 495. — VOL. LXXXIII.

households, shall have the preponder-
ating power in deciding matters
which may lead to the loss of their
employment and the ruin of their
industry.

Fourthly. Any combination of
capital shall be lawful which is made
for defensive purposes purely. An
employer is indubitably entitled to
manage his business in his own way
so long as he infringes not the
liberties or the rights of the workman,
nor acts contrary to the interests of
the community, and any combination
of employers which is necessary in
order to enable each individual em-
ployer to so manage his business shall
be protected and upheld by law and
by the forces of the realm.

No combination of capitalists shall
be legal unless it is registered and
enrolled at the Board of Trade, and
its rules and laws have been approved
by the Minister of that Department,
in the same manner as provided in
relation to Workmen's Societies ; and
any such Capitalists' Combination
which shall neglect so to register
itself, or the rules and laws of which
shall not be approved by the Minister,
shall in default of such registration and
approval be in virtue of such default,
without further trial, declared illegal,
and shall, if necessary, be forcibly
dissolved and suppressed. Provided
always that the refusal of the Minister
of Industry to sanction the Constitu-
tion of any such Union or Federation
of Capitalists shall be subject to an
appeal to the Legislature.

It is hereby enacted that any such
Union or Federation of Employers
or Capitalists, which, being duly
registered and approved, shall violate
its own constitution to the injury of
the community, or shall illegally in-
terfere with a workman's action in
the use or disposal of his labour, or
deprive a workman of his lawful
freedom or inflict upon him injury

226

An Ideal Reform Bill.

and loss, or shall intimidate a work-
man from following his lawful occupa-
tion and infringe his rights and
liberties, shall in virtue of those
misdeeds and offences be forcibly
dissolved and suppressed, as pro-
vided in the case of Workmen's
Societies in the like event.

It is further enacted that every
Union or Federation of Employers
shall in law and in fact possess the
status and be liable to the responsi-
bilities of a corporation, and shall be
subject to be sued as a body for
the acts of any one of its duly
appointed and responsible officials,
and that the whole of the funds
of such corporation may be seques-
trated and forfeited in making good
the damage done by the acts of the
said officials.

Be it also further enacted that in
the rules and laws regulating the
internal condition and action of every
such society of Capitalists and Em-
ployers the following provisions shall
be incorporated :

Every member of an Employers'
Union or Federation whose business
and plant shall be worth £1,000 shall
have one vote in its councils ; every
member whose business and plant
are worth between £1,000 and
£5,000 shall have three votes; and
every member whose business and
plant are worth £5,000 and upwards
shall have six votes.

The object of these provisions is to
ensure that the larger employers, who
employ many thousands of people
and whose industries are of national
importance, and who moreover have
heavier responsibilities to bear and
have larger interests at stake than
the smaller employers, and conse-
quently are more likely to take com-
prehensive and statesmanlike views,
shall have the preponderating in-
fluence in deciding matters which
may lead not only to the wreck of

their own business but to the ruin of
a national industry.

It is also hereby enacted that any
monopoly for the manufacture or
sale of any manufactured article or
any natural commodity, except such
monopolies as are in themselves
natural and unavoidable, shall be
illegal. That is to say that any
Trust, Syndicate, or other Combina-
tion which shall artificially force up
the prices of corn, flour, agricultural
produce, tea, sugar, coffee, cocoa, iron,
wood, copper, coal, cotton, wool, or
any other commodity which is essen-
tial to the life and happiness of the
people generally, or which shall in
any way restrain the natural freedom
of any trader or merchant to buy
or sell such commodities, shall be
regarded and treated as ipso facto
illegitimate and illegal ; and the funds
and property of such monopoly shall
be forfeited to the State without
other inquiry or trial than is neces-
sary to establish the fact that such
monopoly is artificial and not natural.
The general aim of these enact-
ments with regard to Capital, Labour,
and Trade is to secure to every work-
man and employer, to every merchant
and trader, in this Kingdom, the full
enjoyment of the amount of liberty
to which he is legitimately entitled
according to the ancient laws and
traditions of the realm, viz., nothing
less than the freedom which may be
exercised without infringing upon the
freedom of others, or injuring the
welfare of the community. Until
recently it has been the glory of this
Kingdom that every one of its
citizens, rich or poor, could exercise
and enjoy such liberty ; but recent
legislation, and still more the un-
worthy abuse of it, have seriously
tarnished the national honour in this
respect. It is hoped that these
enactments, which are believed to be
grounded in justice and wisdom, will

An Ideal Reform Bill.

227

more than revive the ancient glories
of England as the Mother of Freedom.

Fifthly. Whereas a section of the
people of this Kingdom, especially in
Ireland, have taken advantage of
recent Franchise Laws to bind to-
gether peasant and other farmers in
Agrarian Leagues, with the object
of securing to such farmers reductions
in or the total abolition of rent,
which are inequitable and oppressive
to landowners, and inimical to the
true interests of the nation :

And whereas such Agrarian Leagues,
by instigating plunder and outrage
and murder, have intimidated and
terrorised the peaceful and law-abid-
ing sections of the community, in
order the more readily to attain their
dishonest ends :

And whereas, notwithstanding the
criminal character and proceedings of
these Agrarian Leagues, certain poli-
ticians and parties have joined hands
with them and have thus secured a
majority in the House of Commons,
and such majority has then used its
power illegitimately to force through
legislation on the land-question of an
intolerably unjust nature, which has
proved a bane to both landlords and
tenants, as well as to the Kingdom
generally :

Be it therefore enacted that all
the land-laws passed in reference to
Ireland during the last twenty-five
years are hereby repealed, and the old
laws for which they were substituted
are hereby restored in all their former
force and authority ; and all Land
Courts and other institutions which
have grown up out of these recent
laws are hereby disestablished and
dissolved, the judges and officials of
such Courts and Institutions receiv-
ing as compensation for the loss of
their offices their full present salaries
for five years from the date of the
passing of this Act.

Experience has abundantly proved

that agriculture, like trade, can only
flourish where freedom of contract
prevails, in other words, where land-
lord and tenant are absolutely free
to make whatever arrangements they
may agree upon for their mutual in-
terests, unfettered by any legal enact-
ments or any Courts or officials, and
where the only province of the law
is to see that each party fulfils his
part of the contract according to the
agreement which he voluntarily made
and entered into. The object of this
Act is to re-establish that state of
things, twenty-five years of bitter and
disastrous experience having proved
that it never ought to have been
departed from.

Sixthly. Whereas recent Fran-
chise Laws have also been perverted
by political partisans in order to pro-
cure the passing of legislation im-
posing heavy and onerous duties upon
estates when they pass from one
owner to another by reason of death,
which legislation has fallen with ex-
treme severity upon landowners :

Be it therefore enacted that the
whole of such Finance Acts dealing
with Death-Duties, Succession-Duties,
Probate-Duties, &c., which have been
passed since the said Franchise Acts
came into force and are based upon
them, are hereby abrogated, together
with the said Franchise Acts ; and
further that the Acts which regulated
these matters of finance until they
were superseded by these new Acts
are hereby revived in all their former
authority, and shall remain in force
until the whole of these vital and
complicated questions can be con-
sidered by the Legislature de novo.

God save the Queen. God save the
Nation.

Having neatly copied out this new

Reform Bill, I at once submitted it

to the judgment of the friend who

had commended me to Lord Salis-

Q 2

228

An Ideal Reform Bill.

bury. He expressed both admiration
and approval of it so far as his
own personal views were concerned,
though he was exceedingly sceptical
as to any responsible politician being
willing to identify himself with a
measure which, however equitable,
would undoubtedly be denounced by
the whole of the Radicals as re-
actionary, and perhaps even by many
who approved of it in theory as
Quixotic. Nevertheless he would
not suggest any modification of
the measure, deeming it the better
plan that I should place the manu-
script in the hands of Lord Salisbury
just as it was.

This I did. Lord Salisbury took
precisely the same view as our friend ;
the measure, he said, expressed his
own views exactly, but he felt certain
that it would never be accepted by
the Legislature, and that it would
even be dangerous to propose it.
He was honestly convinced that a
majority of the people throughout the
country were in favour of the views
expressed in my Reform Bill, and
that they would hail its passage into
law with delight. But there was no
means of ascertaining the real opinion
of the people, as they had no effec-
tive method of expressing it. One
half of them were so disgusted with
politicians that they would not take
the trouble to vote, and the other
half were the tools or dupes of wire-
pullers. However, he stated that he
intended to take the opinions of Mr.
Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain upon
the matter, and also to submit the
measure to the Queen, after which he
would write to me at length.

In the course of a fortnight I
received from the Marquis a long
Memorandum, which I here transcribe.

"SiR, — After giving much further
consideration to the proposals for a
new measure of Reform which you

were good enough to submit to me,
I beg to renew on my own behalf
the assurance which I gave to you
verbally on first seeing your manu-
script, that I attach to your work
the highest possible value, and to add
the opinion that if the propositions
you have formulated could be carried
into law a new and brighter day
would dawn for our country.

"But I have grave doubts as to
whether they can be carried into
law. A Democracy is very difficult
to deal with, and it is specially diffi-
cult to undo anything that has once
been done, however foolish or unjust
it may be. The obstacles do not
arise so much from the people them-
selves as from their so-called leaders
and guides. In a country like this,
where we have two great parties,
one will always oppose legislation
which is brought forward by the
other. Only a crisis which threatened
the very existence of the nation in
some sudden and dangerous form,
and which appealed to the national
imagination and patriotism, would
unite these parties. No doubt the
evils arising from recent legislation
do threaten the nation's life, but
they do so in a manner which cannot
be perceived or felt by the people at
large, and which therefore makes no
impression upon the mind of the
nation as a whole. Nevertheless if
the leaders of both parties could
be brought to realise the peril, and
to agree upon a policy for coping
with it, no formidable difficulties
would arise from the people them-
selves. The mere fact that the
people are apathetic on these
matters is sufficient guarantee as
to this.

"But in the present case the laws
which we seek to modify or to abro-
gate are the work of one of the two
parties, and that party would of
course stultify itself were it to

An Ideal Reform Sill.

229

sanction such a policy ; consequently
it will work with all its might and
main against it. Political parties
never admit that they make mistakes.
We could only succeed, then, after
a series of pitched battles between
the two parties, ending in a hand-to-
hand fight. Such fighting as that
implies earnestness, and politicians
are never in earnest, — except in
regard to office and its emoluments.
I confess frankly that I could not
confidently rely upon three of my
own colleagues in such a conflict as
I foreshadow.

" Balfour, who leads the Lower
House, and would therefore have
to bear the brunt of the fighting
on such a measure as you have
sketched, absolutely declines to even
consider the matter. He thinks it
a hare-brained scheme. The utmost
he will concede is that the proposals
on Capital and Labour might with
advantage be embodied in a separate
Act. But he is aghast at the bare
idea of seriously proposing to repeal
the Franchise Laws and the Land
Laws, though he dislikes them as
much as you and I do. It is curious
that a man should be willing to
perpetuate that which he dislikes,
and which he knows is ruining the
country; but that is politics. In
this country we are great wor-
shippers of Precedent. If a thing
is unprecedented, that fact is quite
enough to damn it irrevocably.
How, then, you will ask, were the
first precedents made ? The question
is a fair one, and honestly compels
me to answer it by saying that an
original precedent could only be
made by people who were in
solemn earnest, and were willing
to brave the opposition which an
unprecedented course always evokes.
You will retort that this is precisely
our position to-day, and I admit it.
But what if we have not the leaders

who are in solemn earnest? Certainly
Balfour is not earnest, except in
urging that we should leave matters
alone, and drift on to our predestined
doom.

" Chamberlain is even worse, for he
affects to regard the legislation which
we seek to repeal as beneficent, and he
threatens to leave the Government if
any such measure as you have sketched
is even suggested. Yet he calls him-
self a Conserver ! This is politics
again. The fact is that Chamberlain,
though with us, is not of us, and has
never been of us. We accepted him
as a colleague through one of those
compromises which are the bane of
our politics, and which throttle every-
thing that is earnest and thorough :
there has always been friction be-
tween us ; and between ourselves I
should be thankful if some cause of
difference were to arise which would
separate us once more. For Cham-
berlain is aggressive and ambitious,
overbearing and headstrong, and alto-
gether a most difficult fellow to work
with. Still, he has a following both
in the Legislature and in the country,
and the question is whether that
following is strong enough to place us
in a minority, or whether by a bold
policy we should not attract enough
support from the more moderate
section of the Radicals to more
than counterbalance the defection of
Chamberlain and his so-called Pro-
gressives. Personally, I believe we
should, and that if we appealed to the
country on the basis which you have
laid down we should come back to
power the strongest Government that
this country has ever seen. But I
cannot get Balfour to share this view.
He fears Chamberlain is more for-
midable than I imagine him to be.

" I had written thus far when I was
summoned by the Queen to a special
audience. When I waited upon Her
Majesty I found her to be greatly

230

An Ideal Reform Bill.

interested and excited with regard to
your proposed measure, a copy of
which I had sent her. ' The author
of that measure is a wise man,' said
the Queen. 'I hope you will see
that he is rewarded, and well provided
for.' She is most enthusiastic over
your proposals, and declares that this
is the only common-sense measure she
has ever seen. When I ventured to
intimate that it would be difficult,
if not impossible, to carry such a
measure, and that even if carried
it would entail considerable unpopu-
larity, Her Majesty only asked, ' Is
it right?' I was bound to admit
that I believed it to be right.
' Then,' said the Queen, ' do what
is right, and never mind the conse-
quences.' To that I could answer
nothing, except to say that I would
use my best endeavours to carry out
what I believed to be right, and also
to please my Sovereign. Her Majesty
thanked me and informed me that she
would now — "

It is the wont of dreams, whether
they come through the gate of ivory
or the gate of horn, to break off

abruptly at the most critical moment,
and mine was no exception to the
rule. My servant entered with hot
water — superfluous surely, my Radical
friends will say, for a man who even
in a dream could frame such mon-
strous propositions — and I woke to
realise that the third day of December
had come and the new Parliament
would meet ere it had gone. What
Her Majesty confided to Lord Salis-
bury I never learned, but that it was
something wholly wise and good I am
sure. Nor, strive as I would, have
I ever succeeded in recapturing that
dream.

With what dull pain

Compass'd how eagerly I sought to

strike
Into that wondrous track of dreams

again !
But no two dreams are like.

And thus mine ended, cut off pre-
maturely at the moment of promise,
like the famous speech of Civilis on
the broken bridge, for each who reads
it to complete as he will.

JOHN BULL, Junior.

231

CHRONICLES OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY.1

FOR very many people, and in
particular for those who have come
at all under the spell of these great
northern solitudes, if only in their
outskirts, the Hudson's Bay Company
is a name full of attractive and
mysterious significance. Hitherto,
so far as I am aware, there has been
little opportunity of gratifying one's
curiosity as to the life led by the men
in the service of the great company.
I remember on one occasion, nearly
thirty years ago, being camped upon
a lake in the back country of Ontario,
perhaps a hundred miles north of the
nearest town, and my imagination
was pleasingly stimulated by that
fact and by the impressive loneliness
of forest, lake, and rapid. One night,
however, there stole out of the gloom
a birch-bark canoe and a sinewy,
swarthy individual, almost as dark as
an Indian, stepped into the flare of
the camp-fire and made himself, as
in the circumstances was perfectly
legitimate, very much at home for a
week. The young man was a gentle-
man and bore a Highland name ; but
the point of the incident is that he
was in the service of the Hudson's
Bay Company, and had but a few
days previously arrived from some
point verging on the Polar regions
where he had not seen a white man
for five years ; a life-time as it seemed
to us youngsters, and we looked at him
and listened to him with awe. Our

1 1. THE GREAT COMPANY (1667-1871) ;
by Beckles Wilson. In two volumes.
London, 1900.

2. THE REMARKABLE HISTORY OP THE
HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY ; by George Bryce,
M.A., LL.D. London, 1900.

pretensions to adventure in the wilder-
ness, but three days of paddle and
portage from a town where you might
need your dress-clothes four evenings
in the week, sank into insignificance
as we realised by degrees the kind of
life our still somewhat tongue-tied
visitor had led. The latter indeed
well repaid the primitive entertain-
ment afforded him, though it took
him some little time to get back the
power of ready speech. The wild and
lonely surroundings amid which he
told his story helped materially to
impress it upon the mind and to
create a permanent disposition to
hear and know something more of
the great corporation that held sway
for so many generations over so vast
and shadowy a region. In short, the
Hudson's Bay Company has long been
in sore need of a chronicler ; and now
two have come forward almost simul-
taneously, and each has done his
work in so complete a fashion that
it would be invidious, and indeed un-
necessary for our purpose here to
draw comparisons between them.

In spite of his biographers many
of us perhaps still think of Prince
Rupert only as a dashing and reckless
leader of cavalry. The fact of his
name being written in big letters
over most of unsettled Canada in
belated atlases did little probably to
enlarge our notions of him. What-
ever may be our shortcomings in this
respect Messrs. Bryce and Wilson
have now given us the opportunity at
any rate of making up for them and
understanding what a very real part
the Prince played in the inauguration
of the British fur-trade. England,

232

Chronicles of tlie Hudson's Bay Company.

in the days of the last two Stuarts,
cut, as everybody knows, a very un-
dignified figure in European polity ;
but in things which we know now
to be of more consequence she was
extremely busy. Among the crowds
of claimants to the gratitude of
Charles after the Restoration, came
many of adventurous tendencies ask-
ing for trading-privileges on far-off
shores. These concessions cost no-
thing ; indeed they were sometimes
to his Majesty's profit ; accordingly,
when Prince Rupert, whose moral
claim upon his cousin was immense,
asked for nothing more than the
monopoly of trade in a vague un-
trodden territory between the French
settlements in America and the
North Pole, Charles, as Mr. Wilson
remarks, was no doubt greatly re-
lieved. The Prince, when his cavalry-
days were over, had turned sailor,
commanded the royal fleet till there
was little left of it, and with the
remnant had for some years prosecuted
a lively and profitable business on the
Spanish Main, without too nice a
distinction of nationality in his cap-
tures. He had returned to England
with a varied and useful knowledge
of the outer world, and a keen in-
terest in exploration and scientific
pursuits. He was, in short, the very
man to become patron of a great
over-sea enterprise.

The French fur-trade in Canada
was then no secret in England, and
the Jesuits' narratives gave terrible
notions of the country in which it
was pursued. This, however, had not
been extended to Hudson's Bay, a
region then only known to the boldest
seamen. Of all this great district to
the north the French as yet knew
little ; of rivalry there they did not
dream. It remained for two French-
men, renegades in a sense, to disturb
this serenity and show to Englishmen
what a chance was theirs.

Chouart des Groseilliers was a dar-
ing French trapper, and had married,
it may be noted, a daughter of the
Quebec pilot, Abraham Martin, who
gave his first name to the plain where
a century later Wolfe and Montcalm
fell. He had found a staunch com-
rade in a Huguenot gentleman (one of
the very few Protestants in Canada)
named Radisson, whose sister he sub-
sequently married. Able, fearless,
and energetic the two friends accom-
plished great things in the perilous
path they trod. For a whole season
they traded and explored to the north-
west of Lake Superior, and in addi-
tion to acquiring large stocks of furs
they convinced themselves of the
value of a great untapped fur-bearing
region to the north. On returning to
Quebec they urged the authorities to
give them means to explore this un-
known land in French interests. The
Canadian government, however, were
sceptical, laughed at the idea of
rivals, and moreover, mistrusted their
suitors, partly, perhaps, because they
were boastful-seeming reckless men,
and partly, no doubt, because they
were Protestants.

With prescient eyes and unabated
faith, but disgusted with their own
people, the pair then sought New
England, where their story was be-
lieved and their scheme approved.
Money, however, was scarce in Bos-
ton and badly needed for home con-
sumption ; and though urged by an
English official, one Colonel Carr, to
take their scheme to London, the
brothers-in-law, wishing to give their
own countrymen another chance, went
to Paris instead. There they met
only with rebuffs till their New
England acquaintance, Colonel Carr,
opportunely came on the scene again.
He had faith in the two Frenchmen
as well as influence at Court, and
found means to despatch them to
England, remarking that he thought

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

233

they were the most valuable present
he could make to King Charles.
They took letters also to Prince
Rupert, and this proved to be the
best thing they could have done. A
group of gentlemen, headed by the
Prince, took up their cause, intro-
duced them to the King, and in due
course provided them with a well-
found ship, commanded by a New
England captain of their own se-
lection.

June 3rd, 1668, is a memorable
date in the annals of the Hudson's
Bay Company, for on that day the
NONSUCH, of fifty tons, sailed from the
Thames to commence its first chapter,
after Prince Rupert and a goodly
company had gathered in the cabin
to drink success to the voyage in
bumpers of Madeira. Radisson re-
mained in England to await events or
for business reasons, and in the mean-
time married the daughter of Sir
John Kirke, a famous navigator and
member of the new Company. When
the NONSUCH landed Groseilliers with
that first instalment of men and goods
upon the desolate shores of the Bay,
no sail had appeared there for a
quarter of a century, and the Indians
were astonished to see these white
men, who commenced operations with
the inevitable fort. The result of
this initial venture was a rich cargo
of peltries which reached London the
next season to gladden the eyes of the
Gentlemen Adventurers and confirm
them in their resolutions to form a
company and apply for a charter.

Groseilliers, in the meantime, had
stayed on the Bay where there was
much to be done. The tribes who
knew nothing of trading had to be
persuaded into the business, others,
who had already dealt with the French,
to be diverted to the new fort.
"Tell all your friends," said the
Frenchmen, "to come hither; King
Charles will give you double what

King Lewis gives ; " and indeed he
could afford to be liberal, for a glance
at the map will show what water-
carriage to Hudson's Bay meant. In
the next July to Groseilliers's delight
his brother-in-law sailed up to the
lonely fort in a fresh ship, with
another cargo from London, and with
the good news of the arrival of the
NONSUCH and the preparations that
were making for further efforts. The
new Company consisted of seventeen
noblemen and gentlemen headed by
Prince Rupert, who in due course
received from the King's own hand
"one of the most celebrated instru-
ments," says Mr. Wilson, " which ever
passed from monarch to subject, and
which, though almost incessantly in
dispute was perpetuated in full force
through two centuries." The recipients
of the Charter were " The Governor
and Company of Merchant Adven-
turers trading into Hudson Bay."
Their territory, described as Rupert's
Land, comprised the immense region
whose waters flowed into the Bay.
It was indeed a vast tract ; how vast
its grantees knew not, for even the
formation of that part of the continent
was as yet imperfectly understood.
For all the Adventurers knew the
Pacific was not more than two hun-
dred miles west of the Bay. Yet it
was in the stirring days of La Salle's
and St. Lusson's explorations and of
Colbert's Ministry, and in the north-
west French traders had pushed as
far as the great rapids of the Sault
St. Marie by which the waters of
Superior rush down into those of
Huron. News now filtered through
the wilderness to the French out-posts
that strange ships had been seen in
Hudson's Bay, and they did not like
it. For the French, by title of very
dubious land-exploration, claimed the
whole basin of the Bay, while the
English claimed it by virtue of the
undoubted fact of prior navigation.

234

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

These shadowy claims were argued
for a century and must not detain us
here. Both our authors, however,
examine them at some length.

The Company's offices were in Broad
Street, which sounds very modern and
commonplace. Their first official sale
of furs, held at Garraway's coffee-house,
created considerable excitement and
was quite a fashionable event, the
Duke of York and John Dryden,
among other celebrities, being present.
Hitherto English-cured furs had been
of poor account, people of wealth and
quality resorting to the Continental
markets. But the nearer the Pole
the better the fur, and England had
now got in next to the Pole. The
Company's weekly board-meetings, at
first held in Prince Rupert's house
in Spring Gardens and afterwards in
Broad Street, were very serious func-
tions to those concerned, and for those
outside possessed a mysterious air of
romance. Originally the conventional
bead formed the chief article of com-
merce, but by advice of the shrewd
Radisson, guns, axes, kettles, ammu-
nition, knives, and so forth were given
the chief place. Both the Company's
ships and their officers were constantly
beset by throngs of would-be private
adventurers anxious to share in the
lucrative traffic ; but, one need hardly
say, no encouragement was given to
the clamorous public by these exclu-
sive and aristocratic traders.

To Groseilliers and Radisson the
Company were under priceless obliga-
tions. But they were born intriguers,
restless, intrepid, and contemptuous
of plodding ways and plodding people
— and perhaps rightly, the Great
Company throughout the first period
of its existence went slowly. Be-
ginning with Fort Charles at the
bottom of the Bay they had crept on
to the establishment of Fort Nelson,
seven hundred miles away on the
western shore, before the end of the

first decade, while the French, labour-
ing over-land from Canada, had
established a post or two between
the British forts. Each claimed the
country, and though the English with
ocean-carriage and cheap goods easily
out-did their rivals in trade, they
met with infinite annoyance from the
efforts of the French to poison the
minds of the interior tribes against
them, while continuous bad blood
often generated quarrels involving
destruction both of property and life.
The Company's method of procedure
was a passive one, namely, to keep
strictly to their forts and await the
trade that came to them. Radisson
and Groseilliers had by their enter-
prise and influence secured so good a
connection, further increased by the
Company's fair and liberal dealing,
that the latter, when it had achieved
four forts and four ships and was
paying a dividend of two hundred
per cent., thought the limit of success
was reached, an attitude which greatly
irritated the two enterprising French-
men and in part caused their defec-
tion. The rank and file of its
servants were made of poor stuff,
young fellows who had failed at home,
in London or Bristol, many of them
without either physique or courage.
The discipline of a fort, says Mr.
Wilson, was that of a man-of-war.
The Governor was an autocrat, and
had the little company at his mercy ;
he was often, too, a choleric, hard-
swearing person, and very liberal
with the lash, which was within his
privilege. The clerks and servants
were not allowed even to speak to
a native, or indeed to walk outside
the stockade without leave ; their
spare time, which was considerable,
hung with unwholesome heaviness on
their hands, as may be well imagined,
and was chiefly spent in eating, drink-
ing and sleeping. At the trading -
seasons the natives with their furs,

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

235

of which beaver was the principal
item, were admitted by .twos and
threes within the stockade and did
their dealing with the chief trader
through a window. It is not sur-
prising therefore that the first half-
century of the Company's rule in
Rupert's Land produced but a scanty
crop of those hardy hunters and
explorers which so distinguished
French Canada ; nor yet that the
Company's forts thus manned were
frequently captured by the French
under conditions which make dis-
agreeable reading to an Englishman.
Of the two Frenchmen who were the
practical founders of the Company,
the Huguenot Radisson was the most
permanently conspicuous. These slug-
gish doings, however prosperous, were
not at all to his taste, and still less
so were the governors of the forts, to
one of whom he found it necessary
to administer a severe thrashing.
Radisson's career from 1670 to 1685
is a marvellous story of valour,
duplicity, prescience, and hardihood.
Disgusted with the Company he, with
Groseilliers, returned to his native
allegiance, and did much damage to
his former employers ; but mistrusted
by the French authorities, partly on
account of his English wife who
obstinately refused to leave her coun-
try, he returned again to the service
of the Company, at their own solicita-
tion, and was equally vigorous against
his countrymen. French or English
was probably the same to Radisson ;
he did great things and made fortunes
for other people, but was himself
always poor and does not seem to
have greatly cared for money. Our
space does not admit of even a lucid
picture of this "Prince of bushrangers,
traitors, and liars," as Mr. Wilson
calls him, though Mr. Bryce is much
less harsh in his verdict. No ships
were so crazy, no crews so timid but
Radisson could compel them to carry

him through the stormiest seas. The
awful wilderness that stretches from
Lake Superior to Hudson's Bay
had no terrors even in winter for
him. Indians, who cared for no one,
trembled before Radisson and did his
bidding without question. Equally
at home in London, Paris, and
Quebec, he affected always the exag-
gerated costume of the backwoods, —
a fur cap, tangled beard and hair,
bare neck, leather leggings and mocas-
sins, with a long knife stuck in his
girdle. Thus he appeared at Court,
on the Mall, or at the play, and was
for a time a familiar figure in fashion-
able society. He cracked jokes with
the King, talked business with the
Duke of York, Prince Rupert, and
Captain Churchill (to be better known
as the Duke of Marlborough), was
often closeted with Colbert at Paris,
and was both dreaded and mistrusted
in Canada, where he and Groseilliers
were burned in effigy, and a price
ultimately set upon his head ; indeed
a whole chapter would not suffice to
do justice to this strange man's
adventurous life. It only remains
to say here that he spent an obscure
old age in England in receipt of a
small pension, and died prosaically in
his bed, in prosaic Islington, at the
age of seventy-four. Groseilliers, who
made his peace with the Canadians,
died earlier after some years of quiet
life on the St. Lawrence.

Big dividends, in the meantime,
kept rolling in from the Bay into the
pockets of " the smug ancient gentle-
men " as some envious wit called the
proprietors of the Charter. But a
terrible catastrophe was now brood-
ing. In the throes of the Revolution
of 1688 a romantic old French Cana-
dian noble named De Troyes conceived
a notion that he had been chosen by
Heaven to drive the heretic English
from the Bay. He asked leave of his
government to make the attempt and

236

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

it was granted, the trifling obstacle
of the peace existing between the two
nations being generously overlooked.
De Troyes was fortunate in securing,
as his lieutenants, the three brothers
Le Moine, the most warlike family
in Canada. Eighty Canadians and
thirty regular soldiers completed his
following ; and the perilous over-land
route was the one chosen. It was
nearly six hundred miles from Mon-
treal to the foot of Hudson's Bay as
the crow flies, and a country over
which, to borrow a familiar metaphor,
even a crow would have to carry his
rations. Never surely in the seven-
teenth century did another purely
military expedition of white men
attempt a similar enterprise ! It was
just three months from the time of
starting when this little band of
intrepid men broke out of the forests
and found themselves on the shores
of the northern sea where at the
mouth of Moose River stood the
nearest British fort carrying fourteen
guns. Upon this they fell forthwith,
capturing the score or so of dismayed
and unprepared apprentices who occu-
pied it. Fort Charles on Rupert
River, the oldest post of all, was
much stronger, but this also was
captured and the fortifications de-
stroyed. The elder of the Le Moines,
better known as D'Iberville, though
only twenty-four, was the virtual
leader of the French. He was already
conspicuous as the scourge of the New
England frontier and was yet to win
a much wider fame. While Fort
Charles was being attacked on shore
D'Iberville himself put out in two
canoes with a small party and cap-
tured one of the Company's vessels
that was lying in the Bay. The
French now hurried on to Fort Al-
bany, the strongest of all the British
forts, and mounted with forty-three
guns. So paralysed were the English
by the celerity of their hardy foe that

the Governor, after a brief resistance,
surrendered without even the honours
of war, a fortress which besides the
usual supplies contained fifty thou-
sand francs' worth of furs. Fort
Nelson, seven hundred miles up the
Bay and too remote for De Troyes's
immediate consideration, was now the
only post of any importance left to
the Company. The French leaders
proceeded to collect their prisoners
in one of the captured forts. Some
of them returned to Canada with De
Troyes in the capacity of pack-bearers ;
many were killed by the Indians ;
the remainder were in due course
carried to France by D'Iberville in
the ship he had captured.

The wrath and excitement at the
Company's headquarters in Broad
Street may well be imagined, and
none the less perhaps as it had some
cause to blush for the poltroonery
of its servants. There is some irony
too in the situation from the fact that
the great John Churchill was at this
humiliating moment at the head of
the Company's affairs. The noble-
men and gentlemen who still held
most of the stock made a tremendous
outcry, placarded London and filled
specially published newsletters with
their undeniable wrongs. Their out-
cry was so effectual, and perhaps so
justifiable, that when King William
declared war he quoted the Company's
treatment by the French as one of
his grievances. The two hundred
per cent, which, by good management
as it must be confessed, had steadily
flowed into the pockets of the smug
ancient gentlemen, now vanished en-
tirely for a long term of years. That
these gentlemen, however, sat tamely
down under the staggering blow the
Canadians had dealt them must not
be supposed for a moment. On the
contrary, Hudson's Bay became for
the next decade or so such a scene
of conflict, of sea-fights and land-fights,

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

237

of taking and re-taking of forts,
that it renders lucidity almost
impossible in any narrative that
must be brief. Indeed, when the
treaty of Ryswick in 1697 de-
creed that affairs in these regions
should be restored to their con-
dition before the war, it merely
raised a fresh ferment; for Euro-
peans in North America rarely waited
for such formalities between their
home-governments, and small wars
were frequently raging in America,
while monarchs were embracing each
other in Europe. The Company pre-
sented a bill for damages amounting
to nearly a quarter of a million sterling
which Louis the Fourteenth agreed to
pay — but never paid !

In 1696, however, D'Iberville per-
formed a memorable exploit in the
Bay, which was characteristic of the
daring genius that has kept his
memory so green. Starting from
Newfoundland with four ships-of-war
granted him by the French King, he
entered the Bay with the object of
attacking Fort Nelson. Three English
ships, unknown to him but expected
by the garrison, had passed through
the Straits just before him. In the
meantime D'Iberville in his ship, the
PELICAN, had outsailed his three con-
sorts who were delayed by ice, and
slipping by the English ships, unseen
and unseeing, appeared alone off Fort
Nelson. The governor was greatly
surprised and disturbed, having calcu-
lated on the protection of the British
squadron ; D'Iberville was also per-
plexed by the non-arrival of his con-
sorts. After two days of suspense
three sail appeared on the horizon,
the precise number expected by either
combatant. The French leader, how-
ever, confident that they were his
friends, weighed anchor and stood out
towards them. He soon discovered
his mistake, but seems to have been
in no way dismayed by it ; the British

ships, it is true, were each con-
siderably smaller than the PELICAN
which carried two hundred and fifty
men and forty-three guns. Mr.
Wilson gives a thrilling account of
the desperate struggle which ensued.
The HAMPSHIRE, after four hours of
constant hammering, went down with
sails set and all onboard; the DERING,
though in a terrible plight, managed
to get to shore, while the flag-ship, the
HUDSON'S BAY, ultimately surrendered
to the PELICAN, who herself had
nearly half her men killed and
wounded. In the meantime a storm
arose and night fell upon the scene.
The two ships, the victor and the
vanquished, rudderless and crippled,
lay tossing side by side in a terrific
tempest, their straining cables alone
offering them a doubtful safeguard
from destruction upon an iron coast.
On the British ship, says a survivor,
"the wounded and dead lay heaped
up, with so little separation one from
the other that silence and moans alone
distinguished them ; all were icy cold
and covered with blood." In course
of time the cable broke with a shock,
and a piercing cry went up from the
shambles on the forecastle ; Providence
befriended them, however, and the
shattered hull drifted on to some
level marsh-land. The PELICAN'S cable
held, but the crew had ultimately
to wade ashore up to their necks in
water, and when there, unlike the
English to whom the fort was open,
had neither food nor drink nor
shelter. D'Iberville's three other
vessels arrived in the nick of time,
and after a creditable defence Fort
Nelson was captured. The governor
and garrison, with the survivors of
the wrecked ships, marched out of
the fort with drums beating, colours
flying, and all the honours of war.
" But whither ? " says Mr. Wilson ;
for hundreds of miles of sterile wilder-
ness lay around them and the

238

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

dreadful winter of the North was
already in the air. The conquerors,
if not with pity, looked on with some-
thing of admiration at the undaunted
front with which the Englishmen
marched out to so dire a prospect.
How they fared we are not told.

The French, in spite of their military
success, failed signally as traders in
the Bay. Their Company had no ships,
and land-carriage was desperately
laborious. They were constantly short
of necessaries themselves, while the
Indians, who depended on them, died
by the score from hunger. One
ghastly story is told of an Indian
who having eaten his wife and
five of his children, was seized with
remorse before he had finished the
sixth and the favourite one, whose
remains he tenderly buried and
departed weeping bitterly.

By the treaty of Utrecht the
whole of the Bay was definitely ceded
to Great Britain, though, as usual in
such cases, some time passed before
the French posts were finally evacuated.
When thirty years later the long war
broke out which resulted in the con-
quest of Canada, the Company, whose
prosperity and dividends had returned,
feared a repetition of the old troubles ;
but the capture of Louisburg by the
New Englanders saved the situation.
Their forts and their servants multi-
plied apace, the quality and enterprise
of the latter showing a vast improve-
ment. Their operations were ex-
tended into remoter wilds, and several
attempts were made under their
auspices to discover the North-west
Passage. Dividends in the meantime
averaged about forty per cent, and
raised up enemies everywhere who
cried aloud at the monopoly of
the smug ancient gentlemen, and
made strenuous efforts to upset their
Charter. Nor was it only with envious
traders and capitalists that the Com-
pany had to reckon, but often with

its own ships' crews who, stimulated
by their employers' large profits,
struck more than once for higher
wages. The riverside- folk too were
unfriendly, eagerly believing the tales
to the Company's discredit concocted
by its enemies, and often hooted the
outgoing ships as they dropped down
the Thames.

For this first epoch of the great
Company's existence closing with the
conquest of Canada, Mr. Beckles
Wilson is the fullest and most inter-
esting chronicler. Mr. Bryce rather
reserves his space and his information
for the last century and a half when
the Company's struggles were not
with foreign foes but with rivals
owning allegiance to the British flag.
The conquest of Canada let loose
upon the country a horde of inde-
pendent traders, disbanded soldiers
and others, Scotsmen and particularly
Highlanders predominating. The
numerous and far-reaching trading-
posts of the French still dotted the
western wilderness as far as the Red
River prairies. Their officers and
capitalists had in great part vanished
with the change of flag ; but the rank
and file were there to initiate the
enterprising Scotsmen who now flocked
to Canada with fresh capital and
fresh energies. Till the close of the
Revolutionary war the Canadian fur-
merchants worked as independent
traders. In 1783, however, they
banded themselves together and
founded the North- West Company,
which for so many years waged a
deadly rivalry with the older corpora-
tion to the north of it. Long indeed
before the end of the century their
outermost stations, like those of
Hudson's Bay, were dotted over the
region now known as Manitoba.
There was a wealth of romance about
the fur-trade to which the presence
of the French-Canadian with his folk-
lore, his light heart, his love of song

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

239

and laughter, added colour. It was
the romance of a northern land, clean
and pure and wholesome, of bright
waters, now fretting in rocky
channels, now rolling before pine-
scented breezes in forest-locked lakes,
now quiet and gleaming with the
gorgeous shadows of autumnal woods.
To feel the noiseless leap of the canoe
beneath the paddle's quiet and stren-
ous stroke among such scenes is a
memory that few people who possess
would readily part with. It makes
it easy to picture the long birch-bark
canoes of olden days with their load
of furs and ten or a dozen stalwart
paddlers swinging down with the rapid
currents of the Ottawa or St. Law-
rence, and singing to the measure of
their well-timed strokes the familar
songs of the Canadian woods. Mr.
Bryce treats all these features of the
old fur-trading life with tender and
well qualified hand. The Company's
stations on Hudson's Bay had their
evil moments, to be sure, in the
Napoleonic wars ; but their most
formidable danger was the North-
West Company of Montreal. By the
close of the last century both Com-
panies were operating on the Pacific
coast, and the founder of the Astor
family was competing with them.

The visitor to the North- West now
rarely sails up Lake Superior as he
did in days gone by, and he misses
much, for the grandeur and solitude
of Thunder Bay as you enter it, parti-
cularly in gloomy weather, over dark
tumbling waters, is unforgettable.
Here stood, and still stands with a
station on the Canadian-Pacific Rail-
way, the old central trading-post
of the North-West Company,' Fort
William. Then, as now, it marked
the head of the great lake-navigation
and tapped the arteries of the West.
Here, at the mouth of the Kaminis-
tiquia, exactly a hundred years ago,
arose a small town surrounded by a

high and strong palisade. It soon
became the centre where hundreds
of rugged mortals, Scots, English, and
Canadians, French and Scotch half-
breeds, and native Indians fore-
gathered for both business and
pleasure. Here was a large hall,
hung with portraits, a board-room, and
comfortable quarters for the great
men of the Company during their
annual visitations, besides barracks
for the clerks and traders, ruder
shelter for the throngs of trappers,
and numerous warehouses, stores, and
shops for the upkeep of an industry
that reached from Montreal to the
Pacific.

One hardly needs to be told of the
days and weeks of orgie that were
inevitable in such a place as this.
The North-West Company, with their
Scottish colonial stock-holders and
immense following of French and
half-breeds, were much more hilarious
than their soberer rivals of Hudson's
Bay. Christmas at Fort William
Mr. Bryce describes as being the
season of wildest hilarity : " The
luxuries of Fjast and West were
gathered together and offerings to
Bacchus were neither of poor quality
nor limited in extent. With Scotch
story and Jacobite song, intermingled
with La Claire Fontaine or Malbrouck
s'en va, days and nights passed merrily
away." It was not only among the
wild half-breeds and hunters camped
in and around the station that revelry
was rife ; we are given glimpses of
partners and factors themselves seated
on the floor of their dining-hall and
with poker, tongs, and shovel padd-
ling imaginary canoes over imaginary
rapids with Bacchanalian shout and
song.

The most notable incident that
marked the beginning of the century
for the Hudson's Bay Company was
the advent of Lord Selkirk with his
colony of Highlanders. This philan-

240

Chronicles of the Hudson's Bay Company.

thropic young nobleman felt much
compassion for the Highland crofters
who were rapidly disappearing from
out the north of Scotland. He had
already planted a successful colony of
them in the fertile province of Prince
Edward Island, and he had much
better have kept to it ; but he was
bitten with accounts of the fertility of
the Red River while at the same time
failing to grasp its social drawbacks.
The agricultural settler, one need
hardly remark, was the fur-trader's
natural foe ; but for special reasons a
certain number of the Hudson's Bay
Company's Board were not averse to
his Lordship's settlement, while the
latter, to make matters secure, bought
enough stock to secure a majority for
his scheme. He was granted a ter-
ritory about the size of Great Britain,
and for four years in succession a ship-
load of emigrants was sent to a
settlement on the Red River near
Fort Garry, the modern Winnipeg.
It is a long and melancholy story.
The crops were all that had been
represented, though the grasshoppers
were a lively and unpleasant surprise;
but the wild half-breed population,
backed up by the North-West Com-
pany, had sworn expulsion or exter-
mination to the intruders. A United
Empire Loyalist, Macdonnell, had
been made governor of the settle-
ment; but it was of no avail, and a
series of outrages culminated in 1816
with a regular attack, in which a new
Governor, Semple, with twenty of his
people fell. Lord Selkirk spared no
efforts to put matters right. Having

tried to get justice in Montreal and
failed, owing to the strength of the
fur-trading interest, he adopted
another plan. The two Swiss regi-
ments of Watteville and de Meuron.
who had served in the pay of Great
Britain during the last war, were now
being disbanded in Canada. Lord
Selkirk took a hundred of the soldiers
into his employment with a promise
of land in his colony, and with this
force behind him, and his own
authority as a magistrate, he made
his way to Fort William, and prac-
tically taking possession of the station,
arrested in deserved but somewhat
high-handed fashion those North-
Western officials who had been con-
cerned in the slaughter of his
colonists.

But colonising was not to prosper
in the North- West for many a long
year to come. The two rival Com-
panies made up their quarrels and
united in discouraging the hoe and
plough. Lord Wolseley's expedition
to the Red River, sixty years later,
was directed against the lawless spirits
who represented the old dislike to
civilisation. I myself have good reason
to remember the sort of talk that some
thirty years or so ago used to be rife
in Canada about the prospects of the
newly opened and little known North-
West. Even then the dislike of
the fur-trading population to new
settlers was one among many draw-
backs that deferred till ten years later
the real opening of the country.

A. G. BRADLEY.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

FEBRUARY, 1901.

THE SINNER AND THE PROBLEM.
BY ERIC PARKER.

CHAPTER XI.

So it was that Arcadia was re-
peopled; for the Sinner recovered
in an extraordinarily short space of
time ; much too fast, said the Scots-
woman, but that was because she was
old-fashioned, and expected, or made
believe to expect, a long convales-
cence, doubting the unlikelihood of a
relapse. My own notion of the affair
was that she had had no inmate of
her sick-room for so long (had not
mine hostess boasted of I forget how
many weeks clear from so much as
a surfeit T) that it was a genuine
pleasure to her to fill it, and a sorrow
to find it empty again. However
that may be, there were not many
days past before the Sinner was about
and alive in the sun ; there were
certain reductions of his work to be
made, which left him free at times,
when the others were poring over
Csesar and equations, so that I saw
more of him alone than before.

" They're doing Latin prose now,"
he said to me one morning, with
pensive glee.

" Are they, Sinner ? Is that a
great occasion for joy 1 "

" Oh well, you see, I hate Latin
prose; at least, I don't hate it so
much as some things, — Latin sen-
tences, you know."

" But what is the difference between
No. 496. — VOL. LXXXIII.

those, if a person with a paint-brush
may ask, oh Sinner 1 "

" Oh, they're quite different. You
have different marks ; and then you
have to make a fair copy of sentences,
and prose you just take down what
the master says."

"I see. But — I mean, what do you
have to do yourself that's different"?
It's putting English into Latin, I

"Yes. But you see sentences —
well, they're little things, and you
have to get them right. And prose,
— it's a sort of long thing, and then
if you get it wrong you can say you
tried, — at least, if you copy it out
in good writing."

" You can't copy out sentences in
good writing ? "

" No. You do them in a book,
you see, so you have to go on to the
end of the time. And prose you
write down on one sheet of paper,
and then copy it out on another as
well as you can. And if you write
it well, you know, it doesn't look so
bad when you get it back, — unless
the master uses one of those red
pencils."

"But then, prose is only a lot of
sentences joined together, isn't it ? "

"Well, I suppose it is. But you

see, sentences are all the same length,

and prose, sometimes there's a little

sentence, and then one about twelve

R

242

The Sinner and the Problem.

lines long, and then you put in
ablative absolutes."

" Won't ablative absolutes go" into
sentences ? "

" Yes, but you can't put them into
every sentence. Sometimes it ought
to be in the nominative. I always
get those ones wrong. Having given
the signal, you know, or Having
promised gifts. If you put Gifts
having been promised, you have to do
it again."

" Why, Sinner ? It sounds all
right."

" Well, it may be the other way.
And then Complements."

" What are Complements 1 "

" Oh, they're things — well, there
are Subjective Complements and
Objective Complements."

" Good gracious ! Do those come
in sentences 1 "

" Yes. Ccesar has been informed of
the conspiracy : you have to say
Ccesar has been made more certain
about the conspiracy."

" Is that a difficulty 1 "

" Yes. You see, — has been made —
verb. Who has been made ? Csesar ;
therefore Ccesar is the subject. Has
been made what 1 More certain ;
therefore more certain is the object.
You do it like that."

"It sounds very complicated. Do
these things happen every day ? "

" Yes. Then, There tvas a man,
you know, or There is a city. I never
can make that out. There is what ?
A man ; therefore man is, — well, you
see you can't tell always."

" No, Sinner. And then you have
to make a fair copy, I suppose 1 "

"I do ; sentences and verses, at
least, not always verses. I don't
mind them so much, you know ;
sometimes verses are rather decent."

" When are they rather decent ? "

"Oh well, when they fit in, and
when there isn't an elision, and when
you get the Latin right, and you just

see how it goes. It's a sort of puzzle.
And then there are rhymes."

"Are rhymes different from verses?"

" Oh yes. Verses are Latin ; rhymes
are English. Besides, you make up
rhymes. The Problem has made ever
so many."

" Has he, Sinner 1 What sort of
rhymes 1 "

" Rhymes about what you do when
you find words. Like when you want
a word for an end of a hexameter, you
see if there's one which is short, long,
long."

" Good heavens ! Why?"

" That's the rhyme. A word which
is short, long, long, is a potty peculiar
patent. And though you bust, it must
come at the end of the verse."

"Why must it?"

" Well, it says so in the rhyme. I
think it's short, long, long, but I can't
always remember; it may be short,
short, long. I know there are two
shorts or two longs. Then there's a
pentameter one."

" What is that ? "

" It's about the last word. It's, —
well, I don't remember that one.
When you were a boy, did you do
verses ? "

" I think so, Sinner ; but it was a
long time ago. I think I used to do
lyrics. Do you ever do lyrics ? "

" No," said the Sinner ; " we only
do verses at this school. Were you
at a school like this when you were a
boy ? "

" I'm not sure, Sinner ; it seems
different now. When I was a boy,
you know — "

" Oh, do tell me what you did.
Were you, — I mean, did you get into
rows 1 "

" I think I did ; I'm not sure. In
fact, you see, Sinner, I'm not sure if I
ever was a boy."

" Oh," said the Sinner.
But one morning the picture I was
painting was interrupted in another

The Sinner and the Problem.

243

way, so that I found myself no longer
able to attend to so much as the
mechanical work of it, much less any
hint of colour ; for the Lady of the
Lake came into it. And if when the
Sinner chattered to me of his childish
joys and sorrows, his rabbits and
his verses and Latin sentences, I
was able to work on undisturbed, and
knew that silence in answer to his
questions would be understood, yet
when my Lady of the Lake had once
nodded to me from under that broad-
brimmed hat of hers, and there seemed
the fiftieth of a chance she might do
more, I knew my brushes would be
idle and my paper empty for that
morning. A nod meant that fiftieth
of a chance, and I know I wasted (did
I waste ?) more than one morning
when I had seen her pass up to the
school, and wondered should I see
her again as she went back.

I was busy with a glimpse of the
big school-gate through the beeches.
It was a fine breezy day, a clear sky
and an east wind, and I meant my
picture to show it. The wind was
tossing the rooks overhead like corks
in a shaken pool, up and back and
aslide on the edge of the current ;
now and then a wood-pigeon sailed
down to the firs beyond in the valley
— what a motion that was ! a tremor
of outspread pinions, quills flat to the
blowing air, and fanned home with
a flap and a clatter to the tree-tops.
Or it was a starling making for his
nest, sideways and steered with a
flick of the tail, march and counter-
march, a most military display ; as if
there were an order, — halt ! and at
once the command to double : an out-
line, wing-feathers grey-brown and
transparent ; then the plump body as
the muscles closed for the stroke, a
flash of the sun on blue and gold
hackle-tips, and he was gone swinging
away on the left by the chestnuts.
"Wood-peckers there were too, arrows

of green from stem to stem, whistling
and laughing at the rain that waited .
and nuthatches, a pair of them, round
orange belly and slate-blue above,
alert on branches that swayed and
struck at a neighbour's leaves, the
mightiest of tiny hammer-strokes, and
a cheery note that jumped with the
rush of wind and hiss of trembling
twigs. And above it all the patterned
foliage of the beeches, green and dark
and chequered in the sun, tracing
shadows on the moss below that
danced gaily to the lilt of hum-
ming greenery, — a very morning of
mornings !

And the Lady of the Lake came up
the drive to the school with the spirit
of the morning in her, — you could see
that as she opened the gate. I am
sure I counted every yard of that
brown gravel before I laid my paint-
brush down, and the wind caught
it and rolled it headlong into the
daisies.

She stood looking at my picture,
with her head on one side and her
hair blown across her face. " An east
wind ? " said she, and nodded at the

" If you will name it that," said I,
watching her.

" Oh, you must not name a picture
Name it, and no need to look at it."

"No name, and you ensure a
spectator ? "

"As you see. But I guessed the
meaning ? "

"Whatever you guessed must be
the meaning."

"That is very nicely expressed,"
said she, and came for a nearer
inspection.

Now I cannot tell what god of
mischief twisted the wind awry for
me that morning, but certain it is
that so soon as the Lady of the Lake
was in the grip of that yard of paper,
there was a puff of breeze that sent it,
easel and all, — I had thought it fairly
R 2

244

The Sinner and the Problem.

planted and my picture secured to the
wood — on to her white flannel skirt,
my greens a-smudge, and her skirt
streaked and blotched sadly. No use
to stare at mishap like that; your
business was done, and the best to
make of it.

" Oh, I am sorry," she cried, with
the lightest emphasis in the world.
She picked up my painting and gazed
at it ruefully, and I at her skirt.

" The mischief is done," said I.

" Sponging would spoil it, I
suppose ? "

" I'm afraid so. I'm afraid the
damage is irretrievable."

"It is a great pity ; those greens
were so strong."

" And wet."

" Of course ; otherwise it would
have made no difference."

" Flannel is so difficult to deal with."

"Flannel?" She broke into a
merry laugh. Then she caught the
direction of my glance. " That 1
Why, I was thinking of your picture."

" The picture is not worth a
thought." It was not, in the con-
dition it left the grass; but little I
cared for the picture just then. " If
you were into the house quickly — "

"Are you so anxious for that?"
nodded she. The wind quickened to
a roar in the bending trees above us,
and what she made of my answer
I could not see, for she turned away
to face the blowing, and I stood
hesitant.

" Good-bye," — she was facing me
again — " good-bye." She took a dozen
steps, with the wind a wild anthem
in the beech-leaves, so that my word
passed as if never spoken, and then
she stopped. A gust caught her hat,
and the lithest motion of her hand
replaced it. "I came to see that
small cousin of mine," she said. " It
occurs to me he is probably doing
sums, as he's not with you. Is that
so?"

"I believe it is. He will be out
in a quarter of an hour, or less."

" A quarter of an hour ! Dear me,
what a long time ! What shall I do
for a quarter of an hour ? "

"It is not so very many minutes."
I thought she took a half-step towards
me. " Minutes go quickly," said I,
handling my picture with uncertainty.

"A quarter of an hour," said she
pensively.

" If you were to wait here — "

" Oh if I were to wait here — but
my dress," she interrupted. " I was
to be into the house quickly — "

" I thought—"

"And you were right; flannel is
so difficult to deal with." At that
she set off again, the breeze puckering
the folds she touched. " There's
something I want to tell you," she
called, twenty yards away.

I set down my easel, and took
perhaps five steps towards her, when
she turned away again.

" It's not flannel," she said over her
shoulder, and was into the house.

But she was to return that way,
thought I ; and I set to work to see
if there was anything would set to
rights my blur of greens and browns,
— though I believe that just then I
liked the blur better than what I had
meant to make of it.

And when she did return ! My
eyes had been on the paper and off
again to the doorway twice a minute,
and then, — the door opened and she
came out, followed by the Other Man
and (of all people in the world) the
Chief Butler. They set out in my
direction, one on each side of her.
Now it is a queer business, but I had
never, for some reason or other, asso-
ciated the Lady of the Lake even
distantly with either of these men,
and yet, had I chosen to think about
it, they had had as many opportunities
at least as I of meeting her ; indeed
know her they must, since mine host

The Sinner and the Problem.

245

was known to everybody, and it was
unlikely that they were kept in the
background. Why, and the Chief
Butler, — I declare, he was talking
to her as he might to one of his
schoolboys.

" You two seem to have been
making a pretty mess of things be-
tween you," he rapped out confidently
enough. " I shouldn't have thought
painting was much of a game this
weather. Wind blow the cobwebs
away, eh 1 Inspiration in the
breeze ? "

The Lady of the Lake glanced at
him, and laughed. I could not see
the Other Man's face, but I knew he
was not pleased. And I was in a
dumb rage. You two, indeed !

" It's an ill wind that blows no-
body any good," said the Lady of the
Lake mischievously, regarding her
skirts. " Here I come on a message
of mercy to a small ragamuffin, and
I'm escorted back by three real
grown-up — by the way, which of
you is escorting me 1 " she asked sud-
denly.

The Other Man looked up quickly.
I had started to my feet, but the
Chief Butler anticipated us both.
" Allow me," he said, with a hideous
scrape.

The Lady of the Lake held out her
hand to the Other Man, and then to
me. She may have seen what I was
thinking, for her eyes were dancing.
"Does the wind often upset you?"
she asked. And she turned to join
the Chief Butler, who was standing
expectant.

I must have stood watching them
for longer than I meant, for I was
suddenly recalled to the fact of the
Other Man's presence. "Isn't he
delightful 1 " he remarked. But he
also was watching them ; and after
a minute he laughed shortly, and,
lighting a pipe, strolled away to the
house.

CHAPTER XII.

FROM a certain position on a side
of the broad drive that led to the
school I was wont to amuse myself,
as one who finds diversion easily in
small matters, by watching those who
came and went to the house, calling
on mine host and his lady. He was
a man given to hospitality, and his
lady dearly loved the clatter of her
tea-cups, so that not many an after-
noon passed but one heard the click
of horse-hoofs and the fluent roll of
carriage- wheels on gravel. And then
behind my clump of lilacs (I was
faithful to that long after the big
clusters browned and fell) I would
watch and wonder over the portly
dames among their cushions, and find
myself figuring out history and in-
comes, and much that was their affair
and none of mine. I never met
them ; for if there is a single task
that comes difficult to me, it is to sit
with a tiny brew of scalding tea, and
listen to small-talk about the neigh-
bours of other people.

Now these were the inhabitants of
the larger country-houses round about.
But one day, when the term was
nearing its end, there came a visitor
who did not belong to this category ;
that you could see at a distance even.
She walked differently, for one thing ;
and there was I do not know what in
her dress and the trimming of her hat
and a spotted veil she wore that made
me wonder what might be her busi-
ness. There was nothing of the
parent about her, nor much to show
that she was at ease with her sur-
roundings, and she kicked her skirts
in a way, as I have hinted.

However, all this was nothing to
do with me after all, when suddenly
she caught sight of us ; she had been
glancing doubtfully about her before
that. "You have made a mistake,
my friend," I was thinking. " This

246

The Sinner and the Problem.

is a tyouse for ladies of a certain, —
how shall I put it not to offend you ?
And you are more at home in a push-
ing thoroughfare or a crowded supper-
room, than among these poppies and
with that old house staring at you
and your feathers." That was my
thought ; but she came forward then
over the wet grass (it had been
raining) picking her way on high
heels, with a fine eye for the drier
spots, for all the world as if she were
crossing a London street in December.
1 noticed her instinctive glance to
right and left as she touched the
grass, as if there were omnibuses in
these parts.

She stopped opposite us and spun
her parasol behind her hat, so that
the shot silk changed and glowed
from bright to dark. Altogether the
picture is crude colouring, thought I ;
but the Problem and the Sinner
stared at her in a kind of fascina-
tion, watching the twirl of the red
parasol.

" Is this the school ? " she asked.
Now mine host and his lady, and
the two masters with them, were
away this afternoon to a neighbouring
garden-party, and the boys were left
to play what games they chose alone ;
a plan at times purposely adopted by
their dominie, who would boast that
they behaved as orderly in his absence
as not, and thanked Heaven he was
turning no milksops out into the
world, but rather those who had
learned the meaning of independence.
Thus to welcome this city-cat, as I
guessed her, there was nobody half so
old as she but I, and I was wondering
what she wanted.

" Yes," said the two boys together,
and I saw the Sinner take a half-step
forward, his eyes still on the moving
silk. I explained mine host's ab-
sence, and inquired if she wished to
see him. To which she replied by
asking when would he be back. That

much I did not know, but not for
two hours or more, I thought.
" You're the drawing-master, per-
haps ? " she went on.

Now may I never earn a twopenny-
bit, but it was hard to answer that
politely. However, I did reply as
quickly as might be that I was not,
and that both the masters were with
mine host at the party, if she wished
to see them. I saw by her eyes that
she only just prevented herself from
smiling, because I had asked her
twice what she wanted, and she had
only given me questions back again.
" And you're two of the boys 1 "
" Yes," said the Sinner promptly.
The Problem looked doubtfully at me,
but I was busy with my palette, and
perhaps she saw my meaning. For
she threw me another glance and
addressed herself to the Sinner. It
was a kind of challenge, and I began
to hum an opera-air, and checked
myself as if I suddenly remembered
her presence. She gave a quick little
laugh, and tilted the Sinner's straw
hat a wee bit backwards, looking at
him.

" I suppose I shall have to wait ? "
she said. "Would one of you boys
like to show me somewhere to sit
down 1 "

There was a garden seat not twenty
yards distant. The Sinner half-
turned, and she followed his eyes.
" Thanks," she said,' and picked her
way to it admirably. When she
came there, she turned, sat down,
leaned back, and regarded us Avith
half-shut eyes and twitching lips.
She knew that she had come into my
picture.

The two boys stood by my side.
I fancy that the Problem guessed a
little of what I was thinking, for I
took out my watch and glanced at
the sun, and he looked at her and
then at my picture. But the Sinner
seemed unable to take his eyes off

The Sinner and the Problem.

247

the indolent, figure on the garden-seat,
and stood awhile thinking.

"I know," he said, and walked
rapidly towards her.

"Ah, I thought you would come,"
she said, and he flushed with pleasure.

" Would you like us to show you
over the school 1 " he asked. " It
might pass the time while you are
waiting."

She looked at him attentively for
a minute or two. Then something in
the idea seemed to please her vastly,
for she began laughing. " Capital ! "
she said. " Capital ! "

The Problem stood hesitant. " Does
he mean me to go ? " he asked. But
I was annoyed with the Sinner, for I
meant this patch-of-paint to find her
place again, or tell me her business,
and I did not answer him. I was
still angry, too, at her guessing me
for a drawing-master, though why I
could scarcely tell, for once I might
have been one, after all. Perhaps
she had run a thread of pity into her
tone, as who should say, poor countri-
fied struggler ! Though a painter
may see more of her likes than most
men, for that matter ; and I fancy
she knew that when I gave her my
answer to the question. We under-
stood each other then, and that was
why I was vexed with the Sinner.
The Problem gazed with a puzzled
expression at them ; but seeing that
they were moving off, he spoke again.
" I wonder why he likes her so," he
said. " She looks like a great parrot,
in all that red and green."

Still I did not answer him, and he
followed them slowly. However, it
was not only that I was vexed with
the Sinner at losing my battle for me,
which kept me silent. A thought
had come which hit me and hit again,
as you may say. This bat of the
streets had not hired herself a cab
out here and dismissed it at the
lodge to call on mine host for business

connected with the school ; she would
have driven that to the door. For
whom then, had she come ? For some
one at the school, that I felt certain,
and belonging to the menfolk, too ;
such as she did not dress for women.
There were but two men then, beside
mine host, and he, good soul, — well,
his face was in my memory. The
Chief Butler 1 But I thought of his
black leather book ; he was out of
the question. And then my mind
was made up. Through the trees I
could see the Sinner walking slowly,
and a red parasol that caught the
falling sunlight, and tossed it hither
and thither ; and I made no doubt
that what mine host had to show in
his chapel and dining-hall and gym-
nasium and dormitories would be
exhibited with all the pride a school-
boy possesses for the gods of the
household. I saw them pause at the
old ivied arch that stood over the big
iron gates, and the Sinner waving a
small arm to the yellow lichened
escutcheon on the keystone. Much
she would make of that !

It would take a full hour's walking
to the party. The time was too long,
and I determined to see what could
be done for a conveyance. The two
fat roans of mine host's stables I well
knew to have been set in the phaeton-
shafts three hours ago. True, there
was a ragged pony wild in the
meadow, and a cart it once fitted in
the coach-house ; yet, even had I
possessed the knowledge to catch and
harness the animal, I could not have
carried off anything belonging to the
establishment ; for I needed to be
secret about this business, and could
not afford that even the stable-men
should know I was abroad, or likely
to be anywhere but in the neighbour-
hood laying brush to paper. I hit
eventually upon the notion of apply
ing to a butcher-friend of mine in the
village, a man in a pretty way of

248

The Sinner and the Problem.

business, so far as butchering went,
and also the proprietor of a tiny
house licensed for beer and spirits,
much of which, I made no doubt,
took its way down his own big throat,
for he was a full-blooded old fellow,
sixty years or thereabouts, and a man
of stature more than filling his easy
seat in the bar-parlour. His sister
kept house for him, and though she
poured out his glasses at a word,
would do so with a queer twitch of
contempt on her lips, and set all on
his table without a glance at his face,
which, had she seen it, was a curious
mixture of amusement and depreca-
tion. But he was a rare money-
getter, as she told me, and after all
had sixty years behind him, and the
following of half the village, who
dearly loved a big man and, in their
hearts, a big drinker, though that
much they would not have admitted
to their wives, I suspect. He drove
a weedy ewe-necked mare in a rough
market-cart, and I meant him to take
me near enough to the house I wanted
for me to walk the rest of the way,
and then I was to plead a change of
mind, or a fit of laziness, or any like
reason for my presence ; for I had
excused myself to mine host on the
score of work, and laziness was an
easy explanation. So I left my easel
standing and sought out my friend,
and asked if he were driving the way
I wished ; he knew that this meant
talking, which of all things he loved,
and thrust out his under lip to answer
me.

" Well," said he, with a rare long
sniff, as if considering the matter,
"that might be my direction, so to
speak." He made his rounds for
orders and market-business, as I knew,
about four in the afternoon. "I'll
not say it wouldn't be out of my way,
if it was to-morrow," he added. And
he rapped on the bar-partition with a
wink at me.

His sister entered. She was a
strapping dame of fifty, there or
abouts, with white hair and a cook's
cheeks. She had no weakness for me,
as I well knew, for within a fortnight
of meeting her brother I had drawn
his picture, not a portrait, but more
of a caricature it was, and he had
held it out to her with a dubious
chuckle, and turned his back to show
it was none of his doing. And she
glanced at it, flounced from the room,
and was back again, her voice trem-
bling as she spoke to me.

" I've put it behind the fire, ' cried
she. " I wouldn't have believed it —
no. And you an artist, calling your-
self indeed ! " By this she had worked
herself into tears. " Why, one of our
schoolboys could have done it better
nor that. Behind the fire I put it,
and I'll thank you — " an apron
choked what more was coming. Now
all that was a very unhappy pre-
dicament for me to have been in.

To-day, as whenever she clapped
eyes on me, her greeting was tem-
pered by the coldest politeness.
" Good-afternoon," said I, and " Good-
afternoon," she gave me back again,
with a whisk of her cloth round a
shining pewter, and a clatter of that
on the shelf. She was not best
pleased with her brother, that I was
clinking glasses with him : but there,
it was but by way of business, and
she should have recognised his oceanic
capabilities more openly. Yet even
this amused me ; for though she would
have died sooner than confess so much
as to tolerance of his behaviour, I
believe that she would have staked
her year's saving on her brother to
drink any other pair of men under
the table.

She placed a paper before him, a
list of houses for him to visit. " Be
sure you make certain of that," she
said marking with her nail a particular
address. "So stupid as they are

The Sinner and the Problem.

249

there, I've two minds to go with you
myself."

" As you please, my dear, as you
please," he answered ; and I half-rose,
thinking I must walk after all.

" And who would look to the bar ?"
she asked scornfully. ' ' No, I'm needed
here, at any rate. Would the gentle-
man be going with you, perhaps ? "
Truly, these were hints of a fair
quality.

"'Tis no grand temptation to him,
I'd say," he answered ; and she
stepped forward to a customer for
porter.

He winked at me again, and nodded
to the door. I heard the tramp of a
pair of heavy-booted village-loons and
the hiss of beer in the jug as I escaped.
In a minute he had followed me to
the stable.

" I thought I should have to walk
it," I said.

" Ah ! " said he contemplatively.
" And perhaps you would have, if
she'd thought you meant coming.
She's a good woman, my sister, a good
woman," he added. " I've seen many
women in my day, many women." This
much I had gathered from previous
conversations. " But she's a good
woman," he said again, meditating on
her.

"At least," I said, "she has not
much opinion of me ; " but he fell to
fastening the traces with a chuckle.

It was a cart with a kind of a
plank fastened across the middle as
a seat, that had no back to it ; so that
there was not much comfort to be had
out of a four-mile drive, although the
lanky rat-tailed mare put her best leg
foremost, and jolted us up and down
the hills pricking her ears forward
and back again as her master called
to her. He, to6, was lavish in recol-
lections of younger days, when he
kept a pair of greyhounds which were
the envy of half the countryside ; for
he loved to talk about this, as I knew,

and though I am little versed in such
matters, and could no more tell the
points of a whippet than I could class
a pigeon, still I let him ramble on,
being pleased enough to listen and to
strike in as suited me.

"There was news brought me," so
his reminiscences ran, " that a hare
was in the cabbages at the Grange.
Now that was in a walled kitchen-
garden with a wooden gate, and the
Squire's gardener, he sent to me to
know would I like a bit of sport with
my pair o' dogs. And them I held
in leash trying to make out where
she squatted, but I could not, and
after a bit I sent them ahead to look
for themselves. Sure enough in about
a couple of minutes up she got, doubled
in some raspberry-canes, and came
down the path to me as straight as
she could nose, but looking this way
an' that as a hare will, for the door
was shut and what was she to do ?
And behind her by thirty yards, I'd
say, for 'twas a big garden, was Pre-
tender moving like an arrow and a
snake — and if you've seen a good dog
move you'll know what I mean, ay,
and he was a mover. What did I
do ? Lord keep us, but I couldn't
help myself ! For I was standing by
the gate, and as she come, thinks I
to myself, ' Puss'll be saying 'tis not
fair, and her in a walled garden, and
me not knowing it unless may be told
about her.' So I just steps to the
gate where I was standing, and open
it to her as polite as to my lady, and
I takes off my hat and bows (and
there the gardener stood staring) and
' Good luck to ye,' says I, ' Mistress
Puss, and keep out o' the cabbages
in future,' and I shuts the door quick
in 'Tender's face ; not but what he
nearly had his nose through, and
could hardly pull up in time to save
himself, and as it was, he sputtered
gravel all over me with the way on
him. There, and he twisted round

250

The Sinner and the Problem.

beautiful, same as if she had doubled,
throwing himself along the side wall
to get the pace off. If he had not
known me ! But he whined, an' I
never heard him whine so but once
before, an' that was when Fallowfield
broke his leg, he having hunted with
him since they were puppies."

That was the last story he told
me, for at the end of it we pulled up
fifty yards short of the big gate, and
I got down, thanking the old fellow
for a pleasant drive and pleasant com-
pany. But his story had set me
thinking too, and do what I would,
I could not help fitting the hunted
hare into the shoes of the man I was
coming to look for, and as for the
hound, — well, I misdoubted much if
there would be any to shut the gate
in her face. And I wondered how
the Sinner's acquaintance with that
lady had prospered.

CHAPTER XIII.

I WALKED up the lime-avenue that
led to the house with some misgivings.
Not, in a way, that I doubted my
reasons for coming ; for I cannot tell
how it was, but the thought that the
Other Man would be harmed by this
sudden descent from a gas-lit city sat
heavy and cold on me. I began to
reason out the oddness of the man ;
his indifference to his surroundings ;
the half-conscientious, half -perfunctory
manner in which he carried out his
duties ; the natural brilliance of him,
dulled and buried in this country-side
of cream and beef and apples, a notice-
able distinction in his dress and bear-
ing ; the strange answer he made
me when I asked him, after a parti-
cular occasion when he openly defeated
the Chief Butler in a duel of words,
why he did not turn his talents to
better account. Indeed, I began to
see, or rather guess at, a reason for all
this. There was something in his

past life (of which, be it said, with
the exception of certain dealings with
his tutors, he never uttered a syllable,)
that we did not know, something to
pass over in silence, to forget, to laugh
at ; for do not we that are wise laugh
at most melancholy things ? The man
was hiding.

That was a delightful garden. In
front of the house stretched a large
lawn, smooth as a floor and just
mown, of the shortest finest grass,
and never a plantain to be seen. All
round it went a broad path of orange-
coloured gravel, and on three sides
a wild border backed by a wall. I
know nothing more beautiful than
masses of roses on a wall, and there
they grew as they grow in the Beast's
garden in the old fairy-tale : Marechal
Niel roses of the softest tints of yellow,
Gloire de Dijons, and a profusion of
small white and red Ramblers ; and
beneath them irises and peonies of
a certain Dorian majesty, little
plaster roses, and love-in-a-maze and
arbutus, monkshood and nasturtium
and sweet peas, than which no flower
calls summer to me more quickly, —
unless maybe it is the dog-rose, but
I love them both for that reason.
And behind towered chestnut and elm
and sycamore, dark green against an
amethystine sky. The man who
planted that border knew his busi-
ness. In Nature we are led to expect
dull harmonies and minor thirds of
colour, hues and shades of browns
and greys and greens ; if here and
there a carpet of blue-bells or daffodils,
yet these are but spring-dresses of
light stuffs, and we search in vain for
heavier glories. But a garden must
be trim, mown, cultivated, and if
cultivated, then artificial ; and if that,
why then, mass your colours, yellow
and red and purple, the strength of
jewels and the lees of wine, pour them
in profusion over the walls, heap them
high in the borders ; the brighter

The Sinner and the Problem.

251

your picture, the truer garden for
you. Such at least is my notion ; if
duller effects please you, what need
to call it a garden ?

A lawn sloped up behind the house,
and in this was cut a space for a pair
of tennis-courts. There I set eyes on
mine host and threaded my way to
him to explain my presence as best
I might. He was talking to the
Bishop's wife, an imposing lady in
black silk, the sister of a Cabinet
Minister from whom she borrowed
some of her features.

I should have spoken to him then,
had it not been for this person, for
his broad back was turned to me, and
she was facing me ; and as she looked
at me she raised a double eye-glass
and surveyed me coolly and critically.
And the surprise on her face became
so marked that instinctively I glanced
at myself, in a mental looking-glass
as it were. Heavens, I was in my
work-day painter's clothes ! I had
entirely forgotten the requirements
of a country garden-party. My silk
hat was in London, and my frock-coat
and other appurtenances of society
with it ! This, then, explained the
odd half-looks and glances I had
encountered on my way across the
lawn. However, thought I, if such
be the reception I am likely to meet
with because of the lack of a black
coat and a silk hat, then I was done
with the necessity of an introduc-
tion to the lady of the house. For
which be thankful, I reflected, your
mission is easier ; and I slipped away
to a seat I noticed, which commanded
a view of the situation without assert-
ing an undue prominence for the
onlooker.

The Other Man was nowhere to be
seen as I sat down, but I saw instead
the pleasantest picture of an old
hunting- squire that I am likely ever
to set eyes on. He wore a black
frock-coat, a high white waistcoat,

surmounted by a white choker, the
quaintest long black boots that shone
again, and trousers of a mighty black
and white chessboard pattern, with
spats and a white hat, and under that
the cheeriest, ruddiest face, clean
shaven and wrinkled, that ever smiled
on the work of a pair of pointers. I
could fancy him tall-hatted and be-
gaitered, toppling down his cock-
pheasants with an old muzzle-loader.
He was the apotheosis of a sporting
print.

Suddenly I saw the Other Man
crossing the terrace behind my old
squire ; and I fancy I stood up,
or beckoned in some way, for he
caught sight of me and threaded his
way over. " Why," he cried, " I
thought we were to leave you work-
ing with those two scamps of yours ? "

" I was lazy," I answered ; " and
now, when I do come here, I find I
have forgotten to dress properly."

I suppose he was accustomed to my
work-day appearance, (though he was
an absent-minded man at all times)
for he looked at me, realised me out
of harmony with my surroundings,
and laughed. Then something seemed
to puzzle him. "But you did not
walk over ? "

"Oh yes," said I, — there were
strangers passing.

" Look at your boots," he said ;
" the roads are clay and puddles.
You are like the boy with his little
axe, — you cannot tell a lie."

At which it occurred to me that
I should make but a blundering detec-
tive. Polished boots and these roads !

" But what was the need for —
prevarication ? " he went on.

"The nature of my conveyance,"
I answered ; "a butcher's cart."

" Just a passing fancy ? "

" No, — an object I had."

" She's not here, if you mean that,"
he began. " Did you expect to see
her ? " So he had guessed that much ;

252

The Sinner and the Problem.

yet unless he himself had had some
such idea in coming, would he have
jumped to that conclusion?

" But I wanted to see you," I said.
At first he thought of an accident to
one of the boys, a stray cricket-ball,
a knife, a fall from a tree. " There
was a caller," I continued ; " she
wanted to see one of the masters."

I did not think how else to put it.
The man looked at me quickly ; then
he fell to digging holes in the grass
with his stick.

"Thank God!" he said at last.
" That is to say, garden-parties are
convenient things to happen when it
is unnecessary for everyone to be at
home."

"You see, I fancy she meant to
wait," I went on.

" We will go ; or at least — will you
come 1 You don't care for this kind
of thing ? " He waved his hand
comprehensively.

" If I could help—"

" Ah ! " said he.

We took a back way to the drive.
It would be easy to make excuses
afterwards, a July sun, school-duty.
" That is the pity of it, — it can't be
helped," he added, absently. And
we walked a mile without another
word.

Presently I pulled up to light a
cigarette ; I have noticed that a
stoppage will break the severest
silence. Yet I was not over curious
to know the history of all this, strange
(for me) to say; I thought I could
guess most of it.

" What about the boys 1 " he asked
abruptly.

" Well, two of them were showing
her over the school. One was de-
lighted with — your friend." The word
seemed to touch some spring in him.

" My friend ? " he burst out with ex-
traordinary bitterness. " My friend 1 "
He began to speak rapidly and
unevenly. " Do you know that I am

the most, — do you know what it is
to be as unhappy as I am ? Do you
know what it is to go to bed, — to
make one's self sleepy with whisky —
and try to forget it all, and in the
morning to wake up and find it still
there, the fear and the misery? To
go through every day, hour by hour,
only waiting for the next day, afraid
of, — afraid of something you have no
power to prevent ? To look back on
months that you might have spent
happily, if you didn't know that this
might happen any moment, — that any
moment you might be dragged back, —
away from all that makes life worth
living? Do you know what that
means ? "

"But surely, an ordinary woman — "

" An ordinary woman ! Do you
know who that — is ? "

" A young man's mistake — " I tried
to form the stereotyped sophistry.

"A young man's mistake ? Yes,
— a mistake. She is my wife, — that's
all."

No, I had not guessed that, and
could make no rejoinder.

" Tell me, what did you think it
was ? " he asked, when we had walked
in silence for some minutes.

" I'm sorry," said I.

" Blackmail ? " asked he bitterly.

I could only nod. " I am sorry," I
said.

" There's no need," he answered.
" It was blackmail, — until I married
her. It is blackmail now, — except
that she wants something different.
Before it was only money."

" She was not content with that 1 "

He shook his head. " It's a
curious thing for an assistant-master
to confess to," he said, meditatively.
"You would hardly guess it, what
I'm going to tell you."

"Is that not all?" I asked in
some surprise.

He laughed. "Would you have
guessed I was a rich man ? "

The Sinner and the Problem.

253

So that was the reason. She
wanted position ; and she had found
out his hiding-place, and meant to get
what she wanted. Still I did not
understand —

" You see, it was this way. I
married her when I was poor, com-
paratively speaking. I did that to
save my mother from hearing about
it ; she said she only wanted to be
married. And then my mother died,
and my uncle left me his money, —
that was nearly a year ago. There
was no need for me to keep on
schoolmastering ; but this is an out-of-
the-way place, and I meant to stay
here until I had found out one or two
things. I didn't know where she
was, for one; she had promised to
keep away if I married her. You
see, she could gain nothing by
publicity then ; but she must have
found out about my uncle, and now,
— well it's all over now."

Just then we came in sight of the
valley and the lake. The sun was
gold on the water, and the red-brick
house stood above it like a sentinel.

"Then you stayed here to find out
your position, — was that the reason 1 "
I asked. He was staring out over
the valley, and then he pointed to the
lake. A little punt pushed out from
the greenery, and rippled the gold
water. The Other Man stood looking
at it ; but he said nothing. After
a little while he turned abruptly.
" Come," he said ; "we shall be too
late after all."

We were nearly at the school-gates
when he stopped again. " If only
they need not know yet ! If only I
could have got to the end of this
term ! "

" Would that help you 1 "

" I was going to leave at mid-
summer. Then I could make her an
allowance, and travel, or something."

The man seemed to be gathering
himself together before going in at

the gates. I did not like to hurry
him; but we had not walked fast,
and I knew the time the carriage was
expected back again. " All I want
is for no one to know, — no one to
know — " At that moment two stout
roans drew a phaeton slowly round
the corner of the road, perhaps five
hundred yards away. "That settles
it," he said, and walked up the drive.

But we had not gone as far as the
corner before there was the wave of a
straw hat in the plantation, and the
Sinner and the Problem came on to
the gravel, breathless. They pulled
up on seeing the Other Man.

" Well ? " said I, and turned down
the side-path with them. The Other
Man walked on, looking keenly ahead.

" She's gone," they cried ; and the
Other Man came after us to borrow a
match.

" Who has gone 1 " asked I, pro-
ducing my match-box.

" Why, the lady," — the Other
Man's pipe would not light — " the
lady who asked us to show her over
the school."

"A prospective parent," said I to
the Other Man. He nodded, but
he borrowed another match. " When
did she go, small scoundrel?" This
to the Sinner, who had edged close to
me ; he stood somewhat in awe of my
companion, as I knew.

" Oh, a long time ago. We showed
her over the school, and she asked a
lot of questions, and we answered
them."

" You answered them," corrected
the Problem ; " she only asked me one
question."

" And what was that ? "

"Oh, it was whether you and the
masters were great friends. I said
yes, of course. But she didn't speak
to me much," he added reflectively.
"She liked him, because she said he
was like a boy she used to know."

" Oh yes, and she told me a story,"

254

The Sinner and the Problem.

went on the Sinner, " rather a stupid
one I thought. It was about a girl,
who had a brother she was awfully
fond of, and he was much younger
than she was, and whenever she was
going to do anything she ought not to,
she used to think of him, and then
she didn't do it. Only soon he died,
and then she forgot about him."

He stopped. " Well 1 " said I.

" Well, I asked her if that was the
end, and she said no, it wasn't quite
the end. So I said, 'What is the
end ? ' and she said I had better ask
you. And then she said she thought
she had better go."

" The end seems to have been that
she went away. Did she say whether
she was coming again 1 "

" Oh, I asked her, and she said no,
she didn't think so. She thought the
place was too sunny ; the sun made
her eyes water, I think."

" H'm," said I, and turned to the
Other Man with an eye to the welfare
of my few remaining matches ; but
he had taken from the Sinner's hands
a bat which lacked the string of the
handle, "Like me to re-string this
for you ? " he asked. And the Sinner
thanked him with much joy and a
little astonishment.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE Lady of the Lake was stand-
ing behind me, and I was putting
the finishing touches to a study of
birch-trees.

" A week more to-day," said I.

" And then ? " she asked.

" And then, good-bye to this," I
answered, tapping my easel.

" Only to that 1 "

"And to the Chief Butler, of
course."

" To whom— the Chief Butler ? "

" I forgot," said I. "It is a name
of my own for one of the masters."

She laughed. " I see : mutton-
chop whiskers and the rest of him
pepper-and-salt, and a hint of a
cellar-key seldom used."

" Don't you think it fits him — the
name 1 "

She laughed again — low and
merrily. " He reminds me — I don't
know why — of the Army and Navy
Stores, and the suburbs, Blackheath
and Beckenham and Bickley. Oh,
yes, — and vestry meetings in Ken-
sington— and funerals at Highgate, —
and meat-teas, and dinner at two
on Sundays, and everything that's
respectable."

"I have often wished," said I,
" to be respectable."

" Artists never are, are they ? I
mean, they are unpunctual, and they
have their meals at odd times, and
they wear old coats, and they smoke
the most horrible pipes."

"Now that," I said, "is unfair.
''I admit the unpunctuality, — punctu-
ality is the politeness of people with
appetites — and the old coat, — because
tailors are punctual, and impolite
for that matter. But the pipe, —
when for three hours I haven't — "

" And it isn't respectable to make
hints either."

" You couldn't call that a hint ; it
was a dying request."

" Were you choosing between the
pipe and me ? " she asked innocently.

" And it isn't respectable to make
hints, either," I quoted.

" Quick ! " she said, and stamped
her foot.

"A dying request to the Queen,"
I suggested.

" That is better. Her Majesty
deigns to grant it. It is permitted
to you and your descendants to
smoke in her presence for ever."

"I am your Majesty's most obe-
dient and grateful servant ; " and I
took out my pouch and well-loved
briar- root.

The Sinner and the Problem.

255

" Can anyone fill a pipe 1 " she
asked with humility.

" Probably not, your Majesty. By
the favour of the gods, I myself am
able on occasion to do so."

" Give it to me," she cried im-
periously, and I gave it. She re-
moved my carefully packed tobacco
with some small trinket of a knife
that hung on her chatelaine. " Now
the pouch. Why, it smells of hay."

'* It tastes," I observed, " of
heaven."

"And for that you must have
patience.'' There followed certain
structural proceedings, and then she
handed me a pipe filled to the brim, —
a solid wedge, a kind of masonry of
tobacco.

"Your pardon," said I, and out
with my knife.

*' If you dare to touch it I shall
go away instantly."

" It would seem I have no choice ;"
and I handed it back to her. There
followed a process of dissection, and
it came back to me a wisp of stringy
leaf, a libel on an ill-made cigarette.
I surveyed it with misgiving. " Is
it permitted," I asked, " to make any
alteration in this 1 "

" Certainly not," she replied.

" In that case," I said, and re-
placed it in my pocket.

"Why do you do that?" she asked.

" Should I condemn to be burned
the handiwork of a queen?" I
could not see how she took that.
" Especially of an angry queen," I
ventured.

To this there was no reply. I
glanced round, and saw her biting
her lips ; her eyes were lowered and
she tapped the ground with the point
of her shoe. Then there stole the
lightest hint of a smile into the
corners of her mouth : I turned
quickly, so that she did not know I
had seen ; but I did not expect what
was coming.

"There is a limit to the, —the
things I allow to be said to me ; and
that, I think, a little overstepped it."

At the which I rose. " I am re-
buked," I said, and began slowly to
replace my brushes, with an idea of
returning to the school.

" You need not trouble," she said,
" I am going ; " and she left me with-
out another word.

I watched her white dress and blue
sash till it was hidden among the
trees, and I cursed myself for what
I had said. I had overstepped the
limit, — I had presumed on too near
a footing, — nay, almost on a equality.
An equality ! And yet I had seen
her smile. With that thought I took
up my brush again, and darkened a
shade or so on my birch-trees ; not
much more, but sat biting the end
of the brush and staring out into
the sky beyond the trees, where a
kestrel wheeled and hovered.

" Does the Chief Butler smoke ? "
questioned a voice at my elbow.

I started; the Lady of the Lake
stood behind me, her hand on the
branch of an ash, her mouth all
seriousness and her eyes all smiles. I
believe I rose and murmured some-
thing born of surprise and confusion.
There lay, a yard or so to the right,
the stump of a large beech, dry and
warm in the sun. The Lady of the
Lake seated herself on it demurely,
and looked up at me from under the
broad brim of her hat. " You haven't
answered my question," she said.

" The answer would be easily ascer-
tained—"

" I asked you to give it me," she said.

"By a simple experiment," I con-
tinued.

The Lady of the Lake raised her
eyebrows and turned her head with
an air of petulance. She propped her
chin on her hand and gazed out over
the lake, and the wind touched her
hair gently.

256

The Sinner and the Problem.

" You might fill a pipe for him ;
and if he lighted it, you would know
he was not a smoker."

I think there was the tiniest smile ;
but apparently she had not heard,

" What do you call the other
man 1 "

" The Other Man," said I.

" For want of a better name 1 "

" For want of a worse."

Still she set her eyes on the rim of
hills beyond the lake. " And what
do you call me 1 "

" I do not believe," said I, " that I
ever call you anything."

She seemed lost in thought, and
I busied myself with arranging my
brushes. The sun told me the morn-
ing was over, and I had promised
my presence to mine host at lun-
cheon, his good lady being somewhat
exercised at my abstinence from that
meal these last few days, and regard-
ing it as her personal concern that I
should leave them with no need of
another doctor. For I had spent
three days in the woods, so to say,
with the hope, I know, that I should
meet the owner, and twice I had not
been disappointed, so that time went
for nothing, and the sandwiches which
had been pressed on me early in the
day lay forgotten in my satchel.

The Lady of the Lake eyed my
preparations for departure in silence.
"Of course," I added slowly, "one
does not always call a person by the
name one has given him."

" Him ? " she asked.

" Her," I answered.

She propped her chin on her hands
and looked away again.

" I think of you, for instance, by
a name no one calls you."

" I do not want to hear it," she
said.

" I believe you asked what it was,"
I answered. If she was not angry,

at least the faintest tinge of colour
flushed on her cheek and faded. There
may have been a little toss of the
chin. "I think of you as the Lady
of the Lake." She never moved, nor
betrayed a suspicion of interest in
what I had said, and even then I
marvelled that I had dared to say it.
"And that explains a good deal;"
but I found my voice was no longer
as steady as it ought to have been,
and I rose hurriedly.

" Have you finished your picture 1 "
she asked.

" So far as it is worthy of the name
of a picture, I have finished it."

" And is it your last ? " There was
never a question put in a more con-
ventional form than that.

" With the permission of the Lady
of the Lake, I had intended to begin
my last picture to-morrow."

"And will that be the prettiest of
all?"

"No," said I. For one moment
she looked at me, and I could not be
sure what my eyes were saying.

But her tone was unaltered when
she spoke next. "And at the end of
the week you will be going ? "

"At the end of the week I shall
bid good-bye to the Chief Butler."

" And to the Other Man 1 "

" And to the Other Man."

" Will the picture take you a week
to paint ? " She turned her back to
me and spoke out over the water.

" I hope it will," said I ; and as
she did not move I made to go. I
left her standing there : she never
once looked round nor spoke ; and I,
— who had said more than I had a
right to say, and knew I must say
no more — went up the path cursing
myself that I had said so much, and
— yes ! — counting the hours till I
should have the opportunity of saying
it again.

(To be continued.)

257

FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

WHILE French journalists of the
baser sort are doing their worst to
make mischief between the two
nations, it is pleasant to note how
insistently French men of letters are
directing their countrymen's attention
to English literature. M. Teodor de
Wyzewa in the REVUE DBS DEUX
MONDES, M. Henry Davray in the
MERCUEE DE FRANCE, show friendliness
and accomplishment in their dealing
with English letters : M. Gabriel de
Lautrec, for a member of a witty
nation, treats English humour with
uncommon seriousness and respect ;
and even M. Robert de Souza, while
thanking Heaven that English is
Greek to him, occasionally bestows a
grudging word of praise upon certain
of our writers whose acquaintance he
makes in translations. Never before,
perhaps, was English writing so
generously represented in French
periodicals, reviews, and booksellers'
catalogues as it is to-day. And the
booksellers and editors show a fine
eclecticism : Carlyle and Walter
Pater stand cheek by jowl ; Ruskin
is elbowed by Mr. Kipling, and Mr.
Meredith hypnotised by Mr. H. G.
Wells. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that the only prominent Eng-
lish writer awaiting recognition is
Miss Marie Corelli.

It is natural to enquire how our
compatriots shape in the Gallic mould,
— whether they gain, how much they
lose. There is an initial prejudice to
be overcome. Translation, from any
but the classical languages, holds a
mean place among literary kinds ; a
prevalent belief contemns it as fit
work for broken-down school-masters
No. 496. — VOL. LXXXIII.

and forlorn maiden ladies. Long ago,
even, when to translate Homer or
Virgil was a reputable achievement,
good versions were sadly wanting ;
and for this lack John Dryden gave
as one reason, " That there is so little
praise and so small encouragement for
so considerable a part of learning."
The same reason holds good to-day.
Translation has a bad name ; whether
well or ill done, critics seldom take it
seriously, with the natural consequence
that translators themselves are apt to
esteem their work lightly. Consider,
for instance, the following delightful
apology made by a genial and distin-
guished professor in introducing the
translation of a serious work : " Let
no reader expect that we have turned
a French book into a really English
book. . . . Many readers may not
be displeased at a certain foreign
accent, which in spoken English is so
attractive." The professor (it is almost
needless to say he was an Irishman)
was rash to assume that the reader's
enthusiasm for a palimpsest was equal
to his own. Never was a case so com-
pletely given away at the outset. The
translation so introduced, as one might
expect, is irritating in the extreme to
anyone with the least sense of style ;
just as a London audience would re-
sent a rich Milesian brogue in an actor
impersonating Julius Caesar. Trans-
lation so understood becomes mere
transliteration.

Now, disabusing ourselves as com-
pletely as may be of this inveterate
prejudice, let us look in some detail
at a few recent French translations of
English writers, and see how far they
deserve the praise and encouragement

258

French and English.

so commonly denied ; perhaps our
investigation may provide us with a
little gentle amusement, and even
with a few hints towards a theory.

To begin, then, with a book in
which the readers of this magazine
have a prescriptive interest, Mr.
Pater's IMAGINARY PORTRAITS, his
favourite book, as he said. M.
Georges Khnopff, it must be con-
fessed, is not a very successful trans-
lator. His knowledge of our idiom is
scanty, his style groping and painful.
He seems to have trusted overmuch
to his dictionary, and even to have
used that carelessly. Sebastian von
Storck, Mr. Pater tells us, "made
light of his distress," and M. Khnopff
forthwith writes, " turned his distress
into flame." The somnolent old Duke
of Rosenmold used to " nod early " at
his council-board, and the translator
is himself caught napping when he
renders, " se contentait ' d'un signe de
tete, lien vite," " The very walls " of
the re-decorated salon at Valenciennes,
says the quaint diarist in "A Prince
of Court Painters," " seem to cry out :
— No ! to make delicate insinuation,
for a music, a conversation, nimbler
than any we have known " ; and M.
Khnopff, mistaking altogether the
correction by the way, assures us that
the walls cry out " Non ! " This is
a pardonable slip, perhaps, for which
Mr. Pater must share the blame with
M. Khnopff ; but when the translator
appears to understand by " Dresden
china " a miniature Chinese Empire
set in the heart of Dresden, we are
forced to rub our eyes and ask what
set him upon so tricky a work as
translating English. Such a down-
right misunderstanding seems to imply
a numbness of intelligence, an easy
self-satisfaction which go far to justify
the general contempt in which trans-
lations are held. But, glaring errors
apart, M. Khnopff too often distorts,
slightly in appearance, but vitally in

fact, his author's meaning. " The
great world " is to him le grand
univers, where Mr. Pater clearly
meant le beau monde ; " unsatisfying "
becomes insatisfait, " intently " be-
comes intentionellement ; " headiness "
is completely obscured in candeur.
What is even more unfortunate than
verbal weaknesses such as these, the
whole savour of his style is exotic.
Mr. Arthur Symons had said of Mr.
Pater's prose in this book that it
" smacked of the French soil " ; and a
French critic quickly retorts that the
translator, moulding his work with
scrupulous exactitude to the letter of
his original, has succeeded in destroy-
ing every trace of its Gallic quality.

Can it be that in thus laboriously
following his author word for word
M. Khnopff was paying too much
deference to a dictum of Mr. Pater
himself 1 " Translators," says the
latter in his essay on Style, " have
not invariably seen how all-important
vocabulary is in the work of transla-
tion, driving for the most part at
idiom or construction . . . Plato,
for instance, being often reproducible
by an exact following, with no varia-
tion in structure, of word after word."
A dubious, almost fatal, doctrine this,
surely. It will be better discussed
when we have all our data before us ;
here one is tempted merely to illus-
trate it by a passage from the same
essay : " The artist will show no
favour to short cuts, or hackneyed
illustration, or an affectation of learn-
ing designed for the unlearned ; hence
a contention, a sense of self-restraint
and renunciation, having for the sus-
ceptible reader the effect of a challenge
for minute consideration; the atten-
tion of the writer . . ." Does
not this repetition, this " damnable
iteration" of assonant syllables and
cadences, suggest that the writer was
too greatly preoccupied with single
words to attend to the general con-

French and English.

259

struction and rhythm 1 Again, when
elsewhere Mr. Pater says that Duke
Carl " read with a readiness to be
impressed," the susceptible reader is
conscious of a jingle, undesigned, but
not less vexing.

It is a far cry from the delicate,
sober, architectural prose of Mr. Pater
to the flamboyant, contorted, un-
kempt prose of Thomas Carlyle. Yet,
curiously enough, it seems that M.
Edinond Barthelemy in his translation
of SARTOR RESARTUS, a refractory
subject if ever there was one, has been
much more successful than M. Khnopff.
Such verbal errors as crop up at rather
long intervals are perhaps inevitable
unless the translator has a cyclopaedic
and polyglot friend continually at his
elbow. " The neighing of all Tatter-
sail's," by the simple neglect of the
apostrophe, becomes really opprobrious
in " the neighing of all the Tattersalls " :
might not M. Barthelemy have ven-
tured a discreet enquiry ? " The
Spartans," says Carlyle, " speared and
spitted" their Helots "when they
grew too numerous " ; his translator is
persuaded that Us les rejetaient comme
un vomissement. The Biblical sen-
tence, " Out of the eater cometh forth
meat, out of the strong cometh forth
sweetness," is by some amazing psycho-
logical conjuring transformed into
Sans ce mangeur, nous ne mangerions
pas, nous, aujourd'hui ; sans cette
Brute, nous ne serions pas les delicats
d? a present. French translators never
detect a quotation from Scripture ;
the " many mansions " of St. John
are elsewhere resolved into multiples
Stages, But the English reader of
M. Barthelemy will be most amused
at the unconscious humour of some of
his footnotes. He finds it necessary
sometimes to interpret and label
Carlyle's mordant ironies ; and more
than once he goes astray through
sheer ignorance of British custom and
thought. A casual reference to a

Scottish undergraduate's "milk-scores"
evokes the grave explanation that the
sage was dyspeptic, when nothing
more serious is involved than the
week's bill for the morning dish of
porridge ; and as an example of the
"peasant saint" in whom Carlyle
sees foreshadowed the splendours of
Heaven, the translator prints, in
capital letters, the name of Robert
Burns.

It was only to be expected that
many of Carlyle's picturesque and
forcible phrases should lose lamentably
in transference to the soberer French.
" The sleep of a spinning- top " is
effectually disguised in I'immobiliti
d'une vertigineuse rotation ; " bound
silver snoods about their hair " is
surely vulgarised in ajuste1 a leur chi-
gnon des rubans d'argent ; and " infant
mewling and puking " loses, not vigour
perhaps, but all fitness for a suburban
drawing-room when it becomes poupon
baveux et vomissant. But some of M.
Barthelemy's renderings come as near
to the original as any translator has a
right to hope : " dawdling and dream-
ing and mumbling and maundering "
is as well represented by musant et
revassant et marmottant as many of
Rabelais's alliterations, for instance,
are represented by Urquhart or
Motteux; and "downbent, broken-
hearted, underfoot martyr " is not
wholly unrecognisable as martyr
prostre', pie'tine', au coeur brise". In
some respects, indeed, the translation
may be said to read better than the
original. All Germanic inversions per-
force disappear ; one is not troubled by
the necessity of springing over several
lines of print in order to knot loose
ends of syntax. And yet something
of Carlyle's energy and colour is
preserved, — no mean achievement.

Robert Browning would seem, at

first blush, to be a writer little less

difficult to translate than Carlyle.

But in the choice of PIPPA PASSES for

s 2

260

French and English.

his first essay, M. Jules Guiraud has
been particularly happy and discreet.
PIPPA PASSES is the most lucid of
Browning's early dramatic pieces, and
since a great part of it is in prose, it
makes less exacting demands on the
translator's capacity than almost any
other that might have been selected.
M. Guiraud has been on the whole
uncommonly successful ; his version,
which is in prose throughout, with
line for line renderings of the lyrics,
is fluent and idiomatic, with not a
little of the spirit of the original, —
the passion of the great scene between
Sebald and Ottima, the quiet natural-
ness of the girls' " talk by the way "
as Pippa passes from the turret on
the hill to the Duomo. Once only
does he really trip in his rendering.
The " poor girls sitting on the steps "
start a wishing-game : " You wish
first ! " says one of them, and her
companion's response is " I ? This
sunset to finish," — loving darkness
rather than light, as the naughtiness
of the girl subsequently shows. But
M. Guiraud, forgetting that even
poverty has its alleviations, gives as
her reply : Moi ? Mourir au coucher
du soleil, — the very last thing the
lightfooted young pagan would have
desired.

It is naturally in his treatment of
the verse that M. Guiraud comes
short of his original most manifestly.
French translators rarely attempt to
transmute verse into verse. M. Rene
Doumic has recently declared out-
right that a poem cannot be trans-
lated, but only imitated ; and that
view no doubt accounts for the fact
that the French are traditionally
content with prose versions of lyrics.
Blank verse is represented well
enough by featly modulated prose, —
though Marchant a la tete de son
joyeux cortege a travers ce monde de
verdure is but a poor substitute for
" Leading his revel through this leafy

world." Lyrics, however, in which
form and substance are so intimately
fused, are merely travestied when
an attempt is made to give that
substance formlessly. Few would
recognise Browning's lyric refrain
beginning, "'Hist!' said Kate the
Queen," in the following :

" Ecoute " dit CatJierine la Seine;
Mais "Oh I" s'ecrie la suivante, lui

nouant les cJieveux :
" C'est seulement un page que nom

ne voyons pas et qui chante
En preparant lapatee de vos chiens ! "

Criticism is almost totally disarmed
before such admirable work, each in
its own kind, as M. George Elwall's
translation of Ruskin's CROWN OF
WILD OLIVE and SEVEN LAMPS OF
ARCHITECTURE, and M. Henry
Davray's translation of Mr. H. G.
Wells's WAR OF THE WORLDS.
These titles look a little curious in
juxtaposition, but where both trans-
lators are almost impeccable it would
be invidious to draw distinctions be-
tween them for what is after all only
an accident of temperament, or per-
haps of opportunity. M. Davray is
an experienced translator whose name,
already not unfamiliar on this side
of the Channel, will probably go
down through the ages as that of
the dauntless Gallic champion who
grappled with the prose of Mr.
Meredith ; a translation of THE
EGOIST is said to have been in pre-
paration for several years. Mean-
while M. Davray is content with
the fantastics of Mr. H. G. Wells.
He is clever and alert, deeply versed
in English colloquialisms, by no
means hidebound to the letter of
his text, and master of a fluent
style which makes even scientific
description easy reading. He never,
or hardly ever, mistakes his author's
meaning, and is certainly not open
to the charge of knowing the Eng-

French and English.

261

lish tongue (in the words of a
French critic) "just well enough to
betray it by an equal ignorance of
his own." But do Frenchmen, when
they "clear their throats," degagerr
leur gorge embarrassee, as M. Davray
has it ? " His face was a fair weak-
ness," whatever that may mean in
English, sounds strangely dignified
in Sa figure a lui d&notait une honor-
able simplicity cerebrate ; while, when
this fair-faced curate and his com-
panion look at each other in silence,
" taking stock of one another," we
hardly imagine them procedant Vun et
I'autre a un re'ciproque inventaire de
leurs personnes.

For M. George Elwall's translation
of Ruskin there is unstinted praise.
A Frenchman may read it almost
unwitting that it is not an original
work. Whatever loss the English
suffers it is inevitable ; loss is due not
to any carelessness or incompetence
on the part of the translator, but
to the essential differences between
French and English. Compagnes, for
instance, is but a cold substitute for
"helpmates," and le grand ddchire-
ment et le doute dune perte, good as
it is, is not the same thing as " the
great chasm and pause of loss." But
one is conscious throughout of a real
sympathy between translator and
author, of a real and sincere effort to
give the French reader an impression
of the original, shown by a heedful
following of the sound as well as of
the sense, and a deliberate care to
match idiom with idiom, casting off
the yoke of literalism when it chafes
intolerably. M. Elwall gives us an
opportunity of comparing him with
M. Barthelemy, for he has to translate
the famous passage on war quoted by
Ruskin from SARTOR RESARTUS. A
brilliant French writer tells me that
while the latter has written the more
elegant French, the former has more
faithfully preserved Carlyle's " energy

and brilliant colour " ; an opinion
which is especially interesting because
M. Elwall has departed the more
widely from Carlyle's vocabulary and
structure, has, in short, not translated
him literally.

My space allows me but a few out
of many illustrations of this curious
and, in the main, triumphant activity
of Frenchmen in a form of literature
for which indeed their nation has long
been celebrated, but which it has
hitherto rarely condescended to exer-
cise in our favour. It is now time
to gather up these disjecta membra
into some sort of body or generalisa-
tion. The examples given should
have made it clear that the French
have no common ideal or theory of
translation ; every man is more or
less a law to himself, with the result
that to the French reader Mr. H. G.
Wells, let us say, must appear as fine
a literary artist as Mr. Pater. The
majority of French translators, says
M. de Wyzewa, fail in being too
literal, and he is himself taken to
task for translating Tolstoi too freely.
We are no better off in this country.
One critic sighs for the unchartered
raciness of a L'Estrange ; another
" inclines to the belief that the in-
sidious virtue whose praise is sounded
in such phrases as ' It reads like an
English masterpiece,' and 'It does
not read like a translation,' is culti-
vated far too religiously by many
interpreters." Much could be said
against this belief ; but, in any case,
here we have two respectable critics
in direct opposition. Surely it is
possible to make an attempt to evolve
a semblance of order out of the
present anarchy and confusion. "No
one can expect to enunciate a perfect
theory of translation," as a writer said
recently in THE ACADEMY, but is not
even a glimmer of light better than
limitless fog ?

What light do we get from the

262

French and English.

practice of the translators of long
ago ? Our own Tudor Translations,
for example, lately re-edited and be-
comingly arrayed (in a buckram back
whose colour fades too quickly, and
paper sides all too delicate for con-
tact with this work-day world,) — what
have they to teach us 1 First of all,
that a translator, to be successful,
must be temperamentally allied with
his author. Hoby and Shelton,
Urquhart and Florio, seem to have
been sworn brothers, counterparts, of
Castiglione and Cervantes, Rabelais
and Montaigne, born in due time to
translate great literature imperishably,
writing at an epoch of high emprise,
in the joy of life and the gusto of
achievement, careless of the so-much-
a-line or the so-much-per-cent., before
the world became one vast limited
liability company, — translating at a
white fervour of admiration ; Shelton
(it is barely credible) translated DON
QUIXOTE in the space of forty days.
Not one of them escapes all the pit-
falls that beset the translator's path
so thickly ; but their verbal errors
pass almost unnoticed because they
show us the " form and pressure " of
their authors, because they are filled
with the spirit of them, give us them.
Translation is too much of a trade in
these days, when it is all one to the
mercenary whether his text be philo-
sophy or art-criticism, romance or a
chronique scandaleuse.

Again, the old translators were no
sticklers for literalism. They were
not, of course, insolently free like
that French abbd in the eighteenth
century who declared himself capable
of "supplying defects and repairing
losses " in his original " by the aid of
his imagination." Their ideal was
rather that of Motteux ; to give their
author's " sense in its full extent,
and his style too, if 'tis to be copied."
They would readily have subscribed
Dryden's declaration in regard to his

version of the ^NEID : " I have en-
deavoured to make Virgil speak such
English as he would himself have
spoken, if he had been born in Eng-
land, and in this present age." One
homely instance is typical of many :
" drunk as an Englishman," writes
Rabelais, and Urquhart, with fine
patriotism, alters it to "drunk as a
Switzer."

This question of literal as against
free rendering merits further con-
sideration, for in it lies the gist of
the matter. Let us hear Dryden
again : his Essays, recently edited by
Professor Ker, are a rich mine of
good sense and sound criticism.

A translator is to make his author
appear as charming as possibly he can,
provided he maintains his character, and
makes him not unlike himself. . . .
Too faithfully is, indeed, pedantically ;
'tis a faith like that which proceeds from
superstition, blind and zealous. . . .
"Tis almost impossible to translate ver-
bally, and well, at the same time. . . .
Since every language is so full of its own
proprieties that what is beautiful in one
is often barbarous, nay sometimes non-
sense, in another, it would be unreason-
able to limit a translator to the narrow
compass of his author's words : 'tis
enough if he choose out some expression
which does not vitiate the sense. . . .
By this means the spirit of an author
may be transfused, and yet not lost
. . . for thought, if it be translated
truly, cannot be lost in another language.

That is to say, the translator's first
preoccupation must be his author's
thought ; when he has grasped that,
he is to clothe it in as charming a
vesture as he can, so as to produce
upon his reader's mind the same
intellectual, the same aesthetic effect
as the original would produce on the
mind of a person reading it in his
native tongue. There are thus three
orders of translators : he who preserves
the sense without any regard for style,
for what Dryden calls the "proprieties
of the language," whether his author's

French and English.

263

or his own; he who preserves the
sense, and clothes it in a style, good
in itself perhaps, yet discordant with
the style of his author ; he who pre-
serves the sense fittingly in a style
which, while not that of his author
(style as such is essentially incom-
municable and untranslateable), is in
harmony with it and calculated to
produce, within its own range, a
similar effect. Of the first order
we have an example and a warning
in a recent American translator of
Balzac's LETTRES i L'ETRANGERE :
" Imprint this very succinct explana-
tion in your beautiful and noble, pure,
sublime head " is a literal rendering
in all conscience ; certainly the sense
is clear, but a sentence which strikes
the English reader at once as balder-
dash needs no further condemnation.
Of the second order we have a classic
example in Alexander Pope : "A
pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but not
Homer," said Bentley, characterising
his version of the ILIAD once for all.
Of the third, Urquhart stands out in
uncontested pre-eminence ; to borrow
a sentence from the latest editor of
his translation of Rabelais : " Surely
it is an original that you hold in your
hand, with its perfect sense of narra-
tive, and its accurate echo of a com-
plicated phrase ! "

Granted, then, that a translator's
ideal should be what Urquhart did
and Dry den approved, what method
is the translator to adopt in further-
ance of his end 1 Mr. Pater says that
he must recognise the all importance
of vocabulary, and that he may often
follow his author word after word,
without variation of structure. If
this meant no more than is implied
in the old adage " Delectus verborum
oriffo eloquentice (the right choice of
words is the very mainspring of
eloquence)," no one would object to
it ; but, however it may be with Plato,
or with science generally, it is tolerably

safe to assert that such a principle
applied to modern French literature
would result in a monstrosity. The
complete discussion of this matter
would involve a consideration of the
essential differences between the Latin
and the Anglo-Saxon races, — differ-
ences in blood and genius, in physical
environment and dominant occupa-
tions, in modes of thought and literary
expression ; here I can deal with only
one point, literary expression, and
that briefly. The aesthetic effect of
any piece of writing depends on two
main elements : first, the musical
element, the harmonious succession
of vocables, cadence, alliteration, all
the qualities that express the tem-
perament of the writer and consti-
tute the inexplicable basis of style;
secondly, the suggestive element, the
perfume, as it were, exhaled from
word and phrase, — reminiscences, it
may be vague and unconscious in the
mind of the writer, it may be fully
recognised and designed, of things
read ; so that the man who brings the
best-stored mind to his reading is
bound to derive the greatest pleasure
therefrom. How do these two elements
concern the translator?

First, of the musical element. It
is instantly obvious that translation,
of whatever kind, can rarely hope to
preserve the vocal harmonies of the
original, much less the tricks and
artifices which give to phrases their
particular stamp. When Ruskin, for
instance, contrasts the "bag-baron"
with the " crag- baron," his excellent
translator secures a sufficiently close
approximation in baron du sac and
baron du pic; it happens by the
purest accident that the French
tongue possesses two monosyllables
almost exactly corresponding to the
two in English. But when he talks
of " sanctifying wealth into common-
wealth," the translator has perforce
to resign whatever virtue may lie in

264

French and English.

the phrase, rendering it by sanctiftant
la richesse en en faisant la chose pub-
lique : he would probably have been
more successful if he had been less
literal. So too, when Rabelais, in his
chapter on the Chitterlings, describes
the flying hog as gros, gris, gras, the
cleverest translator in the world would
probably not excel Motteux's "fat,
thick, grizzly," which misses abso-
lutely all effect springing from the
alliteration with the changing vowels
of the original. Or, to take a more
modern instance, when M. de Maulde
tells us that his ancestors were ac-
customed to ;treat les femmes comme
des femelles, a coups de baton, the
translator must e'en put a good face
on it and acknowledge his inability
to reproduce the word-play. Even
Urquhart himself, with all Cotgrave's
assistance, sometimes finds his vocabu-
lary unable to cope with Babelais's
picturesque epithets. "Wide- mouthed,
long-nosed," are words lean and colour-
less beside the French bien fendu de
gueule, bien avantage" en nez.

Secondly, the suggestive element.
Words have a colour, an aroma,
of their own, a content only fully
grasped by a man of infinite reading.
No page of Carlyle or Ruskin, for
example, but is packed with implicit
borrowings from the great storehouses
of English literature, — phrases which
have a reserve of force and a reflex
beauty. French suffers incalculably
in its want of well - springs like
Shakespeare and the Bible, for even
Moliere has not had one tithe of
the influence of our supreme classics.
Now, an ideal translator would be
alive to all the suggestions of the
work he was translating, and com-
petent to reproduce them. To make
a last quotation from Dryden : "A
man should be a nice critic in his
mother-tongue before he attempts to
translate a foreign language . . .
he must perfectly understand his

author's tongue, and absolutely com-
mand his own." But such perfection
is impossible in this world ; no trans-
lator could hope to compass such con-
summate knowledge in a lifetime.
What is he then to do? Is he to
" follow word after word," putting in
the bare equivalents obtainable from
the dictionary, oblivious of suggestion
in his original and barren of it in his
rendering ? That is the sad procedure
of the average translator, and the
result is a thing void of charm,
undeserving of praise or encourage-
ment. Even M. Elwall ignores a
short quotation from Chaucer made
by Ruskin, though Old French would
have given him an almost perfect
equivalent. But why, if the felici-
ties of the original needs must escape
him, should the translator refrain
from acting on a principle of com-
pensation, and supplying felicities from
his own native store, provided they
consort with his author's style and
are equal to his meaning? For in-
stance, when a writer quotes from an
old author the phrase gerbe surbattue,
applied contemptuously to a faded
woman, why not discard the literal
" winnowed sheaf " and, drawing upon
an old author of our own, write
" shelled peascod " ? Again, a writer
tells us that marriage is plain house-
hold bread, not by any means la
creme des entremets ou la bouteille de
champagne : I for one should not
object if the translator, remembering
Malvolio, and the phrase expressive
of the full pagan joy of life in which
no virtuous amorist may share,
should pass the cream - tarts and
champagne for the sake of our " cakes
and ale."

Such instances suggest the general
question of metaphor, which is too
large to be discussed here. It will
be sufficient to say that an English
writer will study to be picturesque
where the Frenchman will strive

French and English.

265

for order and sobriety. A French
writer's metaphors are often mathe-
matical, or drawn from art or science,
whereas an Englishman will be con-
crete if possible, and goes out for
his metaphors into the highways and
hedges. Hence translated French is apt
to read flat and insipid, and translated
English sounds vulgar or extrava-
gant ; to many Frenchman still, as to
Voltaire, Shakespeare is an inspired
savage. An interesting case in point is
provided by a recent number of the
REVUE DBS DEUX MONDES. M. Camille
Bellaigue, reviewing Mr. Shedlock's
HISTORY OF THE PIANOFORTE SONATA,
quotes a sentence in which the English
writer speaks of the sonatas of Philip
Emmanuel Bach as having "paved
the way " for those of Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven. " Paved" says the
critic, " strikes me as too hard a
word. Elles I'ont aplani, tract tres
large, tres droit, et quelquefois meme
elles I'ontfleuri," which is very grace-
ful and very French, but gives to the
little word paved a force that never
entered into Mr. Shedlock's calcula-
tion. He had no vision of paving-
stones ; the phrase " paved the way "
is current coin of the realm, and has
been circulating so long that the
metaphor is worn quite smooth. What
would M. Bellaigue say to the
couplet :

Whose sacred blood, like the young
tears of May,

Paves with eternal flowers that un-
deserving way ?

When a French author remarks, of
commencing Benedicks, that, having
been accustomed in their bachelorhood
a recolter ce qu'ils ont seme", they do
not easily accommodate themselves to

working for a little community, he
uses ail apparently innocent figure
which a translator would be tempted
to render literally. But, in English,
to reap what one has sown connotes a
harvest of pains and penalties, while
the French metaphor implies the
direct opposite, so that one has to cast
about for an idiomatic equivalent. It
is evident, then, that metaphor, like
vocabulary, has to be transmuted in
accordance with the genius of the
language. English vigour must some-
times be toned down, French abstrac-
tions must often be given a body
and raiment, if the translator aims
at equivalence of festhetic effect.

May we not now draw to a conclu-
sion ? Literal translation, as we have
seen from a sufficiency of examples, is
predestined to mishap ; it loses sense,
rhythm, savour ; it fails in possi-
bilities of distinction. So Dryden
said, " Too faithfully is, indeed, pe-
dantically ; " a contemporary French
translator wrote, " Tell me a transla-
tion is literal, and without seeing it I
tell you it is bad." A translator needs
knowledge, of course ; but knowledge
without feeling, sympathy, intuition,
will turn literature into dry-as-dust
and leave the reader cold. Transla-
tion should be living portraiture, not
a death-mask ; an " accurate echo "
through the open air, not the mechani-
cal evacuation of a phonograph. In
short, the translator must be some-
what of an artist. " Not many conde-
scend to translate," says Motteux, "but
such as cannot invent ; though to do
the first well requires often as much
genius as the latter." Genius is not
to be had for the asking ; but a
sympathetic temperament and a clear
ideal will partly serve.

GEORGE H. ELY.

266

WHEN THE BIG FISH FEED.

DARK is the hour before the dawn,
and surely never was dawn preceded
by an hour darker than this. There
is no sound of living thing within the
silent rooms and long lonely passages,
but one may hear the many strange
voices with which an ancient house
complains to itself in the silent hours.
The beams groan and the panels creak,
and ever and anon come the echoes of
forgotten footsteps, that were perhaps
trodden a century ago, and whose
sound has been ever since wandering
up and down the world unheard, until
they have found their way back to
their first home. Of a truth never
has an old house had better reason to
complain. It has known the men of
eight centuries, who have passed their
little hurried lives in it, have uttered
their little hopes and aspirations, have
wept their little tears, for a moment's
space, and then have passed. It has
known the strange cowled race who
in the service of God spent their days
and nights in fast and vigil, and
whose solemn Oremus was the only
sound that broke the stillness of the
old grey walls. Others too it has
known. Plumed and booted and
spurred, the haughty noble has
strutted his brief span through its
courts and passages ; the thrifty
merchant has wakened the silence
of night with the clink of gold, less
perishable than himself in spite of all
the philosophers. These and many
more have added their little para-
graphs to the history of the ancient
house, and it groans anew as it con-
siders the futility of man and his
works. And now there are new
inmates. Little feet that dance and

cause many an ache to its venerable
timbers, little voices that shout and
sing and bid unconscious defiance to
destroying Time. And indeed for
them Time seems to stand still, leaning
on his scythe, as though he knew that
before one thing he was. powerless,
the eternal spirit of youth. But the
old house has no love for youth. It
groans and creaks with renewed
energy, and now and then summons
the north wind to its aid and bangs
its doors in loud discordant protest.
The little feet and merry voices are
still now, for it is the hour before the
dawn. Even the old house, as though
it has protested enough, is sinking
into slumber.

But lo, at the end of the passage
appears a glimmer of light just
sufficient to deepen the gloom. It
approaches, and a dim figure seems to
accompany it. What is it? Is it a
Will o' the Wisp imprisoned for its
evil deeds by the monks of long ago ?
Is it that strange thing, a corpse-
candle, that link with another world,
whose appearance betokens that death
has set his icy grip on one of them
that are in the house ? No, as it comes
nearer it is evidently no more mystic
thing than a bed room- candle, and the
figure that accompanies it is the figure
of a man. A burglar, think you 1 It
may be, for he moves most cautiously.
Slowly and carefully he picks his way
down the broad staircase, crosses the
hall and opens a door under a low
archway. Let us follow him ; if it
be a burglar we must raise an alarm.
Passing in through the doorway, we
seem to be in a large room but
faintly discovered by his little candle;

When the Big Fish feed.

but he has lighted the gas, and now
we may observe him and his sur-
roundings. If he be a burglar he
is most quaintly attired, for as he
stands in his stocking-feet he is evi-
dently clad in shooting-costume ; a
loose Norfolk-jacket, under which we
catch a glimpse of a woollen jersey,
does not look like the raiment of a
burglar. He seems to have been
expected too, for on the table in the
middle of the room is a fair white
cloth and on the cloth are the
materials for a meal. There are the
goodly proportions of an uncut ham,
a loaf of sweet white bread, a butter-
dish, a teapot, cup, and saucer, and
other aids to breakfast. The man
turns towards the fender where stands
a kettle on a small oil-stove. He
lights the stove, and at this moment
the clock on the mantlepiece strikes
three. It still lacks nearly two hours
to sunrise, and by the chinks of the
shutters we can see that it is yet
dark. While the kettle is boiling let
us glance round the room. It is not
so large as we supposed, but it is very
charming. The low ceiling displays
two oak beams and a third which
crosses them. The walls are panelled
with dark oak, and on them hang a
few pictures, mostly of sporting sub-
jects but not all, for over the broad
fireplace hangs the Sistine Madonna,
gazing as if with mild disapproval at
the preparations for breakfast. There
are many bookcases, too, with that
friendly appearance which the soul
loveth, but we may not linger among
them for the kettle has boiled and the
man is already at his meal. Leaning
against the loaf is a book, and he
smiles as he reads, as if he loved it.
Let us glance over his shoulder to see
what it is that charms him ; the
sentence on which his eye is fixed is
this : " And in the morning about
three or four of the clock, visit the
water-side, but not too near, for they

have a cunning watchman, and are
watchful themselves too," — a quaint
old sentence out of a quaint old book,
clad in a quaint old sheepskin jacket.

Now he has finished his breakfast,
shut his book, and is already leaving
the room. In the hall he unfastens
the shutters of the glass door which
opens on to the drive. Through the
frosted panes comes in a faint grey
light more ghostly than the former
darkness ; but it is light, a twilight
which gives promise of day. He sits
him down on a chair, our friend, and
puts on his boots and a stout pair of
leathern gaiters. This done he opens
another door, passes through it and
returns laden with many things. On
his back is a great creel, in one hand
a bundle of fishing-rods, in the other
a camps tool and a basket, and a hat
is on his head. And now, opening
the glass door, he steps out into the
drive, and we his companions step out
with him unseen. For a few moments
he stands drinking in the pure morn-
ing air in deep draughts, for by now
it is morning and we can see the
outline of some of the nearer trees.
Then he turns and walks down the
drive to an ancient gateway, under
which he passes and so out into the
road. Following the road for some
hundred yards, he turns to the right
into a narrow lane which leads
abruptly down hill. Here he has to
pick his way carefully for there are
many loose stones underfoot, and the
morning light is not yet strong enough
to show him the dangers of his path.
After he has gone about a quarter of
a mile along the lane he comes to a
gate on his left over which he climbs
into a field, wherein are some sleepy
bullocks who gaze at him with won-
dering eyes. A few yards further
and he is at the water-side.

A belt of white mist still hangs
over the river which flows between
its level banks noiseless, deep, and

268

When the Big Fish feed.

strong. On this side grow rushes
whose vivid green betokens that their
roots abide in no black fetid mud, but
in clean wholesome gravel. On the
other side grow bullrushes, and where
they are there is mud in plenty, cruel
slimy mud that year by year claims
its hecatomb of victims from the flocks
and herds that pasture among the
river-meads. But our honest angler
has nought to do with mud, and he
knows right well that fishes love it
not, when they may make their feed-
ing-ground on good appetising gravel.
He wastes no time, however, in inward
contemplation, but strides along the
bank until he comes to a little pro-
montory of firm ground that juts out
into the stream. Below this the water
seems to repent of its unreasoning
haste, turning and creeping along the
bank, as though it would retrace its
course. This little bay or eddy is
fringed with rushes, among which lies
a tiny piece of paper, a casual waif
borne hither by the breeze, a man
would say. And yet 'tis not the
work of nature but of art ; for last
night there came one furtively with
a dark lantern, who with unerring
hand cast into the water at this self-
same spot ten large balls compounded
of rich bread, yielding bran, and easy
clay, and finally placed the piece of
paper where it is now plain to see.
And he has come again in this twi-
light of the gods to reap the reward
of his patient toils.

Let us see how he sets about it.
First he places his campstool firmly
some four feet from the water's edge.
Then from the supplementary basket
which he has brought he produces
three balls like to those which he
offered to the fishes on the previous
night, only smaller. These he deftly
drops into the stream, one close to the
bank, the other two about eight feet
out just where the river hesitates in
its course and then divides. Next,

taking his rods and creel, he retires
back into the meadow, to prepare for
the attack. He unties the bundle of
rods and takes out the handle of his
landing-net, to which he fixes the net
which lay in his creel. And this is
wise in him ; we have known anglers
so impatient to begin that they have
forgotten to make ready their net,
and so when that mighty fish came,
whose advent they so eagerly awaited,
they have seen him indeed and
straightway lost him; which is the
more bitter part. Next he takes
from its case a mighty rod whose
joints are six and its length as many
yards ; yet is it light, for it comes
from a land where a generous sun
makes the canes grow tall and straight
and hollow withal. To the butt of
this he affixes a large wooden reel on
which is wound a line of fair white
silk, which he swiftly passes through
the rings ; to this he fastens a bottom-
line of fine gut on which is a large
quill float (once reft from some lament-
ing swan), which he fixes ten feet
from the hook. And now he arranges
his lure. In his creel is a canvas
bag full of rich moss, and in the moss
are worms innumerable both small
and great. One of these he places
on his hook, a large one for it is a
large hook ; and then he takes the
rod down to the water's edge. Very
quietly he drops his line in at the
outer edge of the eddy where just
now he cast in his ground-bait. He
knows that the water there is nine
feet deep, and that the bullet, which
is on his line, will be resting on the
gravel while his bait is borne hither
and thither by the ebb and flow.
Resting this rod on the stalwart
rushes, he takes another from the
bundle and prepares it. Far other
in kind is this, no more than twelve
feet long and so light that a mid-
summer fairy might use it with one
hand, and so frail that it would not

When the Big Fish feed.

269

support the dead weight of even a
little fish, and it has come from far
Japan. To it he fastens no reel, but
a line of single hair on which is a
tiny float and two small shots to
balance it. Then he takes his seat
on his campstool with his landing-net
at his left hand and his creel beside
him. On the hook of his second rod
he moulds a piece of white paste,
with no niggardly hand for he is not
minded to catch little fish, and drops
it in not far from the bank. He
rests this rod too on the rushes, and
then he lights his pipe.

Some men say one thing and some
another, but we will always maintain
that fishes seldom begin their breakfast
before the sun has risen. Our friend
has not yet had a bite ; but just as
the sun's orb appears above the eastern
hills, his nearer float is slightly jerked.
An instant, and it glides slowly
beneath the surface. His hand is on
the rod and a gentle strike meets with
a stubborn resistance. Then there is
a glorious fight, not sudden nor dash-
ing, but a battle of obstinacy and
strength. The fish fights deep down
and circles round and round bending
the little rod almost to the water.
The angler can employ no force, for
a single hair, even though it be the
hair of beauty, can only draw to itself
a resisting power by the subtlest of
strategem. Some two minutes the
battle lasts, and then the circles grow
shorter and shorter, and the fish
gradually comes to the surface, and
we catch a glimpse of a broad copper-
coloured side. At last the fish is
mastered, and the angler, changing
his rod to the left hand, takes his net
in the right. Now he rises and,
stooping down over the rushes, dips
the net under the fish and the battle
is won. His pocket-scales tell us that
the fish weighs two pounds and a half.
Though it is a bream, which is not
a very determined fighter, it is no

small triumph to have landed so heavy
a fish on a single hair. Our friend
appears well pleased ; but we do not
grudge him his pleasure, for we know
that ever in the track of joy follow
sorrow and black care.

Our philosophy is proved, for, scarce
has he baited and reset his line, than
his other float sinks into the depths.
With hasty hand he strikes and
another is hooked ; but no, it is only
a paltry little eel which has absorbed
both worm and hook. Had its pro-
portions been equal to its will, it
would have swallowed line, rod, and
angler too. It is evidently no welcome
guest, and it is ten to one that the
angler will be a hook the poorer.
And so he is ; but the eel's corpse is
flung far away over the river, and
maledicatur resounds on the breeze.
If we may adapt the words of the
poet, " He had not fought him in vain,
but in sorry plight was he " ; for one
eel, be it never so small, can make
itself an intolerable burden to a man
who holds that cleanliness is next to
godliness. But he is not daunted ;
swiftly he repairs his damaged tackle
and rebaits, not again with a worm,
but with a piece of paste so large that
one would think that twelve fish in
these degenerate days could scarcely
swallow it.

It is not long before the little float
again disappears, and the timely strike
induces another battle. This time it
is brisker, and the feeble rod is more
than once in jeopardy. Cunning and
patience however succeed, and the
quarry is safely landed. This is no
bream, but a fish whose ruddy fins,
silver scales, and gold-flecked eyes
bewray the roach. And truly he is
a noble sight ; a pound and a quarter
is his weight, but his fighting-power
exceeds that of his cousin the bream
who sought the death before him.
Again the hook is baited and returned
to the stream; and again, after no

270

When the Big Fish feed.

long interval, it darts under like
lightning. A strike, a rush, and then
— alack, a shotless, hookless line is
fluttering in the air ! It is not every
man, if indeed any, that can capture
logger- headed chub on a single hair,
because his rush is as the rush of a
bull and cannot be checked. This line
must be repaired ; the other still lies
untouched, for the bait is no meat for
little fish, and great fish are slow and
hard to entice. The hair-line is soon
made whole again, but only to meet
with fresh misfortune. The float dis-
appears, and a fish is hooked. It
moves deliberately about, much as
though it were a log of wood suddenly
instilled with life. Long the angler
humours it and fondly hopes to have
obtained the mastery, but presently
the fish makes slowly but irresistibly
for the middle of the river. Its
opponent can only hold on, for he
has no running line, and it avails him
nothing. The line again parts, and
he is desolate ; for such are the ways
of great bream. This is a sad mis-
fortune, for, if we mistake not, he is
now gone with bitter complainings to
his kinsmen, and they will take warn-
ing and refrain from the deceitful feast.
And indeed the angler catches nothing
for more than an hour, except it be one
or two small roach which are returned
to the stream that they may attain
greater weight and wisdom. Never-
theless he fishes on in patience, for
the shoal of bream may come again,
and it were pity to go home with but
two fish to show for all his pains.

In the meantime there has been
plenty to interest us. Far away down
the river we saw a mighty bird that
rose with much flapping of wings, and
sailed away with its legs stretched out
like a pennant behind it. That was
a heron, who was breakfasting on the
shallows below. Perchance some
labourer going forth to his work
disturbed him ; perchance it was

another angler, though anglers at this
early hour are not common.

A little while ago there was a great
commotion on the other side of the
river. We saw many tiny fish leap
out of the water in all directions, and
in the midst of them was a turbulent
wave caused by master perch, who
was also breakfasting. Once indeed
he came right across the river after
some hapless bleak, and we saw him
quite plainly. He even inspected our
angler's float, but concluded that it
was not good to eat, and departed
back to where the fish-fry live.

But see, what was that came up
to the surface some ten yards out,
rolling mightily, and displaying the
tip of a dark fin and a fragment of
tail 1 That we believe to have been
a great carp, for there are a few in
the river ; and our friend seems to
think so too, for he takes up his big
rod and proceeds to change the bait.
He first takes off the hook, and
selects another from his tackle-case,
a small triangle with sharp bright
points. From his creel he takes a
little tin, and from the tin a little
potato, of the sort that makes lamb
and green peas a dish for a king.
Then he threads the potato on to the
hook with a small baiting-needle until
the hook is quite hidden, which is
the easier done because the potato
has been boiled and is soft. With
this new bait he casts forth his line,
and it is not impossible that the carp
may find it to his taste, for river-carp,
though very cunning, may sometimes
be deluded in the early morning.

And now his other float is gone
again, and another bream comes to
bank. After this he is royally busy,
for he catches seven one after the
other. That is the way of it, for
bream stay not always in the same
place, but rather wander up and
down ; and when they come to where
the angler is, then if he is adroit he

When the Big Fish feed.

271

may catch several ere the shoal has
passed him. But of these seven none
is so heavy as the first one, though
two of them are near two pounds
apiece. And after the bream he
catches some more roach, handsome
fellows of over half a pound.

All this while the potato has tran-
quilly offered its plump attractions in
vain. But just now we thought we
saw a slight movement of the float,
such as a sudden gust of wind might
cause. Yes, there it is again ; some
fish is without doubt curiously ex-
amining the bait. And now the
angler is placed on the horns of a
dilemma. Suddenly his little float
disappears : he strikes, and is fast in
a good fish ; and at that moment his
eye wanders off to the other float.
Where is it ? He cannot see it any-
where. Without hesitating he moves
the other rod to his left hand, and,
seizing the big rod with his right,
strikes hard. Now he is no longer in
doubt as to where his float may be,
for, as he strikes, the rod is almost
torn from his hand and the light
check on the reel screams loudly as
the line runs out. There is nothing
for it ; he must abandon the other
fish, whatever it be, and use all his
energies for the big one. There is no
doubt that it is a big one, for it has
already got twenty yards of line out
and is making straight for the bull-
rushes on the other side. The angler
is up and along the bank in an in-
stant, running down stream. Now
he can get a cross strain on the fish,
and only just in time, for two yards
more and it would have reached its
hold and then, farewell to it. But
now he has turned it back into the
middle of the river, and it fights
doggedly in the deeps with now and

then another dart for the bullrushes.
The battle is long and fierce, but the
fish is gradually weakening, and the
angler is shortening his line. Now a
dire misgiving seizes him ; how is he
to get it out 1 The carp must be
seven or eight pounds in weight, and
his landing-net is not nearly big
enough. But providence is on his
side, for see, along the bank another
angler is hastening to his aid. He
has been pike-fishing, and carries a
great landing-net which would hold
a fellow of twenty pounds. At last
the carp is brought close in to the
bank, and the newcomer has it safe
in the folds of his net. The scales
announce that it weighs seven pounds
and three ounces. Its bronze armour
gleams in the sun, and our friend
thinks, as he surveys it, that he is a
fortunate man. He is indeed, for
though the anglers in the river be
many, yet they that capture the
river-carp be very few. Some day
that carp shall adorn his chamber,
tricked out in a handsome case, and
confessing by his superscription who
killed him and how.

But time has meanwhile sped, and
the angler bethinks him of a further
breakfast, and packs up his tackle to
go. The other fish, needless to say,
has departed and taken with him
most of the line. But that cannot
disturb our friend's equanimity, for
with fifteen fish, weighing nearly
twenty-two pounds, he can go home
with a quiet mind and be not ashamed
to speak with his family in the gate.
His shoulders will surely ache before
he gets there, but that is as well, for
unlimited prosperity is good for no
man. And so let us leave him.

H. T. S.

272

RHODESIA AND NORTHWARDS.

AN extension of the British Sphere
of Influence in South Africa had
just been agreed upon. The Home
Government had long hung back, but
at last yielded to the persuasive pres-
sure brought to bear upon it.

" This sort of thing must not go
on," said one of the heads of that
Government. " Our Imperial respon-
sibilities are too widespread already.
It is time that we stopped. You
fellows out there must understand
that you are not to keep forcing our
hand like this. We don't want
any more territory anywhere."

The colonist, who had been the
chief instrument of the persuasive
pressure, and to whom this was said,
promptly replied : " My good sir, you
don't know your map."

" What ? " was the not unnatural
answer. "What on earth do you
mean?"

" I mean that if you knew your
map, you would know that our work
is finished. You need not warn us
about forcing your hand ; this last
extension finishes up all that can be
done. All the Spheres of Influence
of all the Powers are now defined.
We are only just in time to prevent
this last tract of the earth's surface
from being snatched up by some
other colonising government. There
is now not a morsel of unappropriated
territory left on the face of the
globe."

In making this sweeping assertion
the colonist took for granted, of
course, that the Soudan would ulti-
mately be brought into the Sphere
of British Influence. Taking this as
a foregone conclusion, he was right

in what he said. His statement,
in fact, became justified by Lord
Kitchener's crowning success at
Khartoum. The statesman probably
knew his map in other quarters of
the globe than Africa. He probably
knew that all the Spheres of Influ-
ence in those other parts of the world
were settled ; but he evidently thought
that in the Dark Continent there
were still left some antres vast and
deserts idle, and that the Imperial
authorities ought to forbid any exten-
sion of their responsibilities in such
places.

The map which this statesman did
not know ought assuredly to be of
deep interest to all of us. From the
Cape of Good Hope northwards we
now have two thousand lineal miles of
country under British paramountcy.
This great territory is bounded on
the west by the Portuguese and
German possessions which monopolise
the Atlantic seaboard from the Congo
River down to the Cape Colony, with
the exception of the tiny British
settlement at Walvish Bay. At the
northern limit of this stretch of two
thousand miles there is the Congo
Free State. Fortunately this coun-
try is open to British trade, having
been placed under the International
Association by the Congress of Powers
which met in Berlin in 1884; and
consequently it cannot be made a
coign of vantage at any time against
British interests. Coming down from
Egypt through the Soudan, the Sphere
of British Influence, consummated by
our capture of Omdurman in 1898,
stretches southwards till it joins
hands, through the free trade areas

Rhodesia and Northwards.

273

of Central Africa, with the British
possessions in South Africa. Its
eastern boundaries are too long
established, from Abyssinia down-
wards, to need particularising, and
the same may be said of its western
limits. But what, after all, is the
worth of it ? In what respect is
humanity the better for all the blood
and treasure which the Soudan has
cost 1 In what way were our colonists
working for good when they fore-
stalled other Powers in the scramble
for Spheres of Influence in the re-
maining African territories ?

As to British intervention in the
Soudan, the late Mr. Steevens has
made the worth of it vividly plain,
and most easy to understand. The
closing chapter of his book WITH
KITCHENER TO KHARTOUM pictur-
esquely and passionately sums up
the whole matter.

The poor Soudan! ... A God-
accursed wilderness. . . Its people
are naked and dirty, ignorant and be-
sotted. . . To put Egyptians, cor-
rupt, lazy, timid, often rank cowards, to
rule the Soudan, would be to invite
another Mahdi . . . From Abyssinia
to Wadai swelters the miserable Soudan
— beggarly, empty, weed-grown, rank
with blood.

Not a twice told tale, but a thou-
sand times told history, is that of
England's rule in Egypt : of Mah-
dism's devastating career in the
Soudan ; of the threatened engulphing
of all Egypt by that wave of murder-
ous fanaticism ; and of the final
overthrow of those long-conquering
hordes of Dervishes by an army
raised up out of nothing, — raised up
by British officers during sixteen
years of unremitting toil, sore trial,
and manifold disappointments. It is
only for the sake of the moral of it
that such a well-worn theme is now
referred to.

No. 496. — VOL. LXXXIII.

Sixteen years of toilsome failure, of
toilsome slow success [says Steevens] .
Blood goes by quality as well as
quantity ; who can tell what f uture deeds
we lost when we lost Gordon and Stewart
and Earle, Bumaby .... and Owen
. . . .? By sheer wear of work, the
Soudan has eaten up our best by hun-
dreds. ... If we were the sordid
counter-jumpers that Frenchmen try to
think us, we should have ruled a red line,
and thought no more of a worthless land,
bottomless for our gold, thirsty for our

blood. We did nothing such

We gave more money ; we gave the lives
of men we loved. . . . Now we can
permit ourselves to think of it in peace.

It is only of the breed of English,
Irish, and Scotch that words like
these can be said. It is only by this
breed that armies are raised up out
of nothing. It is only by this breed
that our former enemies can be
rapidly converted into valued and
trusty soldiers of our empire. And
it is not only by our highly placed
officers that these magic changes are
wrought. Here is what Steevens
says of another type, the sergeant-
instructor :

His passionate devotion to duty rises

to a daily heroism Stiffened by

marches and fights and cholera camps,
broadened by contact with things new
and strange, polished by a closer associa-
tion with his officers than the service
allows at home, elevated by responsibility
cheerfully undertaken and honourably
sustained, — he is a mirror of soldierly
virtue.

Thus we arrive at some very de-
finite benefits to humanity in each
extension of British rule. In all
quarters of the globe there has been
this rescue- work to do. It was
rescue-work in Egypt, and in the
Soudan, and in Matabeleland. Else-
where, too, it has always been rescue-
work when British paramountcy has
been established in distant lands. In
one instance there is some bankrupt
government that can neither fulfil its

274

Rhodesia and Northwards.

engagements with the outside world,
nor its duties to its own wretched
subjects, and whose condition is con-
sequently a menace to the peace of
mankind. In another instance there
is some fair land torn asunder by the
internecine wars of rival races, and
crying aloud for the firm control of
some civilised power. In a third
instance there is some hapless com-
munity writhing in the grip of a
savage invasion. When such momen-
tous events occur on the borders of
our possessions, the immediate safety
of those possessions renders it impera-
tive that the rescue-work be under-
taken, cost what it may.

Fortunately that work is always
pregnant with far deeper issues than
the mere safety of some existing
possession. It carries into ever-
widening regions the inestimable
blessings of an honest and able
administration. It blesses the nation
that gives, and the nation that re-
ceives. " The tools to him who can
use them " is the most practical of
all precepts. Judged by this test,
how does England stand? By this
test are we justified in our rule in
India, and in all our colonies and
protectorates 1

If we will but think for a moment
of our noble array of viceroys and
administrators, of their grand services
to humanity, their self-sacrificing
labours, their sagacious measures for
the welfare of those they governed, —
if we will but reflect on all this, we
shall be unable to sink to the bathos
of asking what good, after all, they
have done for us. Marcellus's ex-
postulation may well be applied to
any attempted carping at such in-
violable reputations.

We do them wrong, being so majestical,
To offer them the show of violence ;
For they are, as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.

In plain and sober truth we know

full well that no era of the world's
history has ever seen any govern-
ments equal to those of our expanded
England, and the men of our own
time have worthily maintained the
singleness of purpose of their honoured
predecessors. The science of right-
fully ruling subject races was never
before carried out so honestly, so
skilfully, and so unselfishly. Even
on the lowest utilitarian grounds,
never was there any such good busi-
ness done before. " The tools to him
who can use them " is a test whereby
the usefulness to humanity of all our
rescue-work is most satisfactorily vin-
dicated.

But its usefulness to humanity
does not prevent many of our free
and independent electors from pro-
testing strongly against it. They do
not see why they, the tax-payers, are
to be involved in the risks, expenses,
and serious responsibilities of these
Quixotic enterprises, as they call
them. Relief to the hard-working
electors is what they plead for, rather
than these foreign ventures for the
imagined good of humanity. Many
immediate boons to themselves, they
think, could be brought about by
a more whole-souled devotion to
domestic affairs on the part of the
nation. Less interference abroad,
therefore, is what they want. They
are aware, of course, that foreign
trade is necessary, and that their own
prosperity is due to the vast volume
of our over-sea commerce, and that
there can be no other way of sup-
porting our teeming millions at home.
They know all this, but they fail to
see what benefits to themselves are
to be derived from our rescue-work in
the beggarly Soudan, and from our
extensions of influence in the bar-
barous interior regions of the Dcark
Continent.

When once, however, they admit
the vital necessity of our enormous

Rhodesia and Northwards.

275

foreign trade, their objections to
special phases of England's expansion
cannot logically be maintained. It
has always been for purposes of trade
that our footings in distant lands
were first established. In all our
Imperial possessions, from India
downwards, this has been so ; and
each onward expansion has been
merely a necessary sequence of some
antecedent forward movement. In
this way has all our rescue-work been
justified ; to flinch from going for-
wards each time would have resulted
in losing some previous gain. Besides
this, the forward movements are sure
to be eventually remunerative, how-
ever unpromising the enterprises in
question may seem to be at first.
Apart from these mere utilitarian
considerations there is always the
supreme usefulness to humanity of
affording to oppressed races the
benefits of an honest and capable
administration.

If our free and independent electors
were only aware of the true bearings of
this complex phenomenon of colonial
expansion, their objections would
straightway vanish. If they were
only aware of the amount of grist
that it brings to their mill, they
would assuredly accept with grati-
tude every forward movement made
by our colonial pioneers. This grist
to their mill is in the form of an ever-
widening market for British products.
These forward movements are creat-
ing new markets for British manufac-
tures to the extent of many millions
of pounds sterling. By far the greater
part of the material for trans-continen-
tal railways and telegraph-lines comes
from home, and brings in enormous
sums of money to our manufacturing
classes. Much of the material for
thousands of buildings of all descrip-
tions, from hotels and warehouses to
public offices and churches, adds its
quota to the enrichment of the mother-

country. Harbour-works, bridges,
irrigation-works, mining machinery
and millions of pounds' worth of all
sorts of manufactured articles for our
new towns and farms and industrial
settlements all help to swell the
enormous total. Then there are huge
increases to our shipping, and to our
carrying trade and general commerce
in supplying the manifold needs of all
these new territories brought under
civilisation.

It has happened over and over
again that strenuous attempts have
been made by the Transvaal Boers to
possess themselves of the enormous
tracts of country now known as
British Bechuanaland and Rhodesia.
In 1868 the Boer President, Pretorius,
issued a proclamation extending the
boundaries of his Republic to Lake
N'gami. Emigrant Boers were scat-
tered all through Bechuanaland at
that time. The trade route to the north
from the Cape Colony was altogether
blocked by this Boer annexation of
Bechuanaland. There was no idea
at that time that Mashonaland and
Matabeleland would ever be brought
under British paramountcy. Bechu-
analand itself had no attractions for
British settlers. Consequently it
was a wonder, in view of our usual
supineness at that period, that any
remonstrance was addressed to Presi-
dent Pretorius. Fortunately this
wonder came to pass ; Queen Victoria's
Government refused to acknowledge
the validity of the annexation, and
President Pretorius had to retire
within his own boundaries.

Nevertheless it was easy for some
of the nomadic Boers to graze their
flocks and herds in Bechuanaland, and
to make hunting excursions there of
many months' duration. After the
Transvaal War of 1881 they grew
bolder, and did a deal of cattle-lifting
from the various Bechuana tribes.
They then went on to establish the
T 2

276

Bhodesia and Northwards.

freebooting Republics of Stellaland
and Goshen. This was rather more
than our Home Government could
tolerate. A military force of four
thousand men was organised in 1884,
under Sir Charles Warren, to clear
out the freebooters and to establish
peace and order. In the following
year the Queen's sovereignty was pro-
claimed there, and British Bechuana-
land came into being.

The short-lived Republics of Stella-
land and Goshen were never revived,
and this rescued land, cleared of its
freebooters, became most orderly and
quiescent under the benign administra-
tion of Sir Sidney Shippard. Happy
is the land that has no history. The
short and simple annals of the poor
were all the history that British
Bechuanaland had for many years.
The nearest railway was at Kimberley,
one hundred and twenty-seven miles
south of Vryburg, Sir Sidney Ship-
pard's seat of government. When
the Cape government had extended its
railway-system as far as Kimberley, it
rested upon its laurels. To have got
six hundred and forty-seven miles
from Cape Town was considered a
great achievement, and Kimberley was
looked upon as the natural terminus
because of its diamond-mines. There
were plenty of good business-reasons
why the railway should have been
brought to this flourishing industrial
centre ; there seemed to be equally
good reasons why it should terminate
there. It was considered that all the
regions to the northward would never
become so peopled as to afford pay-
able traffic for even the cheapest of
light railways. To have said in those
days that Matabeleland, the Zambesi,
the central African lakes, Khartoum,
and Cairo were all to be, within a
measurable period of time, united to
Kimberley by telegraph-lines and rail-
ways would have seemed nothing
short of madness.

In those sleepy days when colonial
expansion northward of Bechuana-
land was undreamed of, save by Mr.
Rhodes, I happened to witness some
scenes illustrative of the difference
between Boer and Boer ; that is to
say, between the freebooters of 1884
and the better types of Transvaalers
and Free Staters. Only a few years
after this freebooting era I fell in with
sundry deputations of Boers travelling
through British Bechuanaland. They
were remarkably fine looking men, tall
and stalwart, bronzed and bearded,
and perfect pictures of health and
happiness. They were very pleasant
fellows to meet, their bearing being
notably frank and simple and their
talk idomatic, racy, unaffected, and
interesting. They were all owners of
land in the Orange Free State, they
told me, and their present mission was
to look out for fresh pastures. It was
becoming a general experience in the
Orange Free State, they said, that
the farmers' families and cattle had
reached that stage of increase that
some of them must migrate to new
farms. No more land was obtainable
in their own country, and they had
therefore come to look at a number
of farms which were now for sale in
these ne\v pastoral regions of British
Bechuanaland.

Their idea of a farm was a tract
of about ten square miles of open
veldt, quite unfenced, and only
marked by corner beacons at long
intervals. There were plenty of such
tracts to be had just then, at
moderate prices, from the Surveyor-
General's Department of Bechuana-
land. The perfect absence of any-
thing like race-hatred was one of the
most striking characteristics of these
energetic sporting farmers. In their
friendships with their English fellow-
settlers in South Africa, as well as in
their honesty and straightforwardness,
they were of an altogether different

Rhodesia and Northwards.

277

stamp from those freebooters whom
Sir Charles Warren had so lately
dealt with. They were quite willing
to cast in their lot with our British
colonists, and to become loyal land-
owners in this new Crown colony.

There are thousands of Transvaal
Boers, of course, who are of the same
admirable type as this progressive
class of Free Staters. It is only when
they are misled by political mischief-
makers that these Boer friends of
ours can ever become opposed to the
fair-play principles of British para-
mountcy. As to this problem of
over-crowding, discussed by our Free
State delegates, a few words should
be said. According to the census of
1890 there were only seventy-seven
thousand seven hundred and sixteen
white men in the Orange Free State,
and one hundred and twenty- nine
thousand seven hundred and eighty-
two natives, chiefly Basutos and
Baralongs. The State has an area of
about seventy thousand square miles,
and is of great fertility and unsur-
passed salubrity in all its parts. Com-
pared with other countries of anything
like equal advantages it is but sparsely
peopled ; but the Boers, unfortun-
ately, love to keep to sparsely peopled
territories. In those days there was
a golden dream of future colonisation
much indulged in by these Trans-
vaalers. There was a goodly heritage
waiting for them, they fondly hoped,
and for their children ; not Bechuana-
land, but a far superior country. It
was a land of promise, richly stocked
with all that the Boer mind most in-
tensely loves. Many of their hunters
had made successful excursions there ;
some of them had spent long months
wandering in it, and had penetrated a
couple of hundred miles, or more, into
its alluring valleys and uplands.
They reported that the further they
went the greater were the attractions
of this coveted land. Vast herds of

large and small game roamed over its
rich veldt, and the condition of these
creatures gave assurance of what a
grand grazing- country this would be
some day for God's chosen people, the
Transvaal Boers. Only let us wait,
they said, for King Lobengula's death,
and for feuds among the then unre-
strained savages who now constitute
his too formidable army, and for King
Gungunhana's death too; then these
spacious game-carrying pastures and
forests will be ours. Matabeleland,
Mashonaland, Manikaland, and Gaza-
land will all be ours. It will be
for us to dispossess the heathen,
and to enter into this goodly heritage.
And to appease the legitimate earth-
hunger of our children's children
there will still be the vast territories
northward of the great Zambesi river.
As for the dispossessed heathen, it
is the Lord's will that we should
rule over them, and that they should
be our bondsmen.

Here was a threatened destruction
of much of the usefulness of England's
rescue-work in the Soudan and in
Bechuanaland. A threatened destruc-
tion, too, of the international useful-
ness of the Congo Free State, and of
England's Central and East African
Protectorates. If the Transvaal Boers
had accomplished all their cherished
projects in the country between the
Limpopo and Zambesi rivers, their
intrusion there would have been a
death-blow to our work of abolishing
the slave-trade in the Dark Continent.
It would have been a death-blow to
all designs for trans-continental tele-
graphs and railways, and for indus-
trial colonies, and for substituting
peace and prosperity for rapine and
savagery.

Naturally the chagrin of these
chosen people, as the Transvaalers
love to call themselves, was intensely
bitter when they found that they
were to be baulked of their coveted

278

Rhodesia and Northwards.

prey. King Lobengula's treaty of
peace and amity with Queen Victoria
in 1888, and the actual occupation of
Mashonaland in 1890 by the British
South Africa Company, were crushing
blows to their hopes of northern ex-
pansion. Nevertheless some of them
tried to make a fight for it by entering
Southern Mashonaland for the pur-
pose of founding an armed Republic
there, in defiance of England. The
leader of these freebooters was Com-
mander Ferreira, an intimate friend
of President Kruger. Force then
was opposed to force. The Chartered
Company's police mustered at the
fords on the Limpopo river, and pre-
pared to fight the intruders. Ferreira,
seeing his cause hopeless, allowed him-
self to be made prisoner, and was
taken to Salisbury, the seat of the
Chartered Company's Government.
His followers quickly dispersed, and
nothing more was heard of the in-
tended Boer Republic in Mashonaland.
President Kruger, with his usual cun-
ning, disavowed all connection with this
abortive defiance of England's power.

It is unnecessary to make more
than a passing allusion to the Boers'
final attempts to fight their way into
Rhodesia against Colonel Plumer's
troops, and their temporary over-run-
ning of Bechuanaland. These were
their last expiring efforts in a policy
they have always been pursuing ; the
policy of placing themselves astride of
the great trade-routes from the Cape
Colony to the interior of Africa ; the
policy of in this way throttling the
expansion of England from the south
towards Cairo.

England's mission is steadily being
fulfilled, despite these attempted
hindrances. The trans-continental
telegraph line is already at Lake
Tanganyika. No less than three
thousand six hundred and thirteen
miles of it had been erected up to the
end of 1898. Besides its progress

from Lake Tanganyika, it is also to
be constructed from the Soudan, and
there is to be a middle point from
which it is to be erected both north-
wards and southwards. A railway,
six hundred and seventy miles in
length, will soon be available for
bringing the material from the coast
to this central point, which is near
Lake Victoria Nyanza. The line was
commenced from the coast, at Mom-
basa, in 1895, and will soon be
approaching completion. The rapid
progress which is being made in open-
ing the Dark Continent is seen in
these works, as well as in a bridge,
thirteen hundred and eighty-three
feet in length, which was completed
in 1899 at Mombasa.

These six hundred and seventy
miles of railway from the Indian
Ocean at Mombasa take us to a point
on the north of Lake Victoria Nyanza,
only little more than a thousand miles
south of Khartoum. Going in the
opposite direction from this middle
point, we have only about seven hun-
dred miles of telegraphic construction
remaining to be done to where the
line is now in process of erection.
Thus there remains to be constructed
only some seventeen hundred miles of
telegraph-line, the material for which
can be brought simultaneously to four
accessible places, to connect Cape
Town with Cairo. Instead of carrying
the line through the Congo Free
State, Mr. Rhodes has preferred the
shorter eastward route which takes us
through a few hundred miles of the
German Protectorate, the Kaiser's
permission to use this route having
been duly obtained. It is not long
since we looked upon this connection
of Cape Town with Cairo as a Utopian
project not likely to be fulfilled for
another fifty years or so, if at all.
Now we find that another few years
of work will assuredly see the com-
pletion of it,

Rhodesia and Northwards.

279

Much slower, of course, are the
more costly and difficult works of the
great trans-continental railway. The
story of Mr. Rhodes's correspondence,
up to the year 1899, with our Colonial
Office on this most ambitious engineer-
ing proposal, is related in Mr. Hens-
man's newly published HISTORY OP
RHODESIA. Among the arguments
adduced by Mr. Rhodes in favour of
so truly an Imperial undertaking are
the noble uses to be made of it in
putting down the slave-trade. It
would enable much more effectual
means to be employed to this humane
end than the present inadequate and
expensive blockades of river mouths
by gun-boats. Then there are the
substantial benefits to British trade
accruing from the supply of railway-
material and rolling-stock, and other
home-manufactures, to the value of
many millions of pounds sterling.
Fortunately there are capitalists who
are supplying all the funds necessary
for the Rhodesian extensions from
Bulawayo and Salisbury of this great
trunk railway. Its ultimate connec-
tion with Cairo, by way of the Cen-
tral African lakes and Khartoum,
may now be regarded as well within the
range of practical politics and finance.
In estimating the future payable-
ness of this work, it is to be borne in
mind that there are regions of much
fertility awaitingdevelopment through-
out the course of the proposed railway.
In many places much preparatory
colonisation has been effected, and
useful works executed, some of which
date back to more than a generation
ago. There is the Stevenson road,

for instance, a monument of success-
ful missionary enterprise. It connects
the great water-ways of Lakes Nyassa
and Tanganyika, and is two hundred
and twenty miles in length. The
trade-route, of which this road forms
a part, between Nyassaland and the
Congo River, has long been a fre-
quented highway. Nyassaland was
once densely populated, but has suf-
fered in bygone times from the ter-
rible devastations of the slave-raiders.
Under happier conditions it is now
proving a most valuable country. It
is becoming so industrially settled,
and there is so much traffic through
it, that in the year 1895 no less than
three hundred and fifty thousand
letters and parcels were dealt with
by its postal officials.

One of the results of the pacifica-
tion of the Soudan, and the consequent
security of Upper Egypt, is that by
the expenditure of English capital,
under the direction of English en-
gineers, a lake of two hundred miles
in length at Assuan is now being
formed. Trans-continental telegraphs
and railways, bridges, roads, a new
lake of two hundred miles long,
irrigation -works, industrial colonies,
out-posts for repressing the slave-
trade, honest and progressive govern-
ment for myriads of helpless wretches,
and, as a mercenary make-weight, an
ever widening market for our home
manufactures, — such are the fruits of
our rescue-work in these distant regions
of the earth.

S. C. NORRIS, J.P.
(Late Mining -Commissioner
in Rhodesia,)

280

THE MISSIONARY IN CHINA AND ELSEWHERE.

DURING the last few months, since
the attention of Europe has been so
emphatically drawn to China, the
searchlight of the Press has been
turned full on that bewildering coun-
try; and as a factor in the strangest
convulsion of modern times, the work
of the missionary societies has not
been overlooked. Many people re-
gard the missionary at ordinary times
merely as an inconvenient and super-
fluous by-product of Christianity.
Their earliest impressions of him were
perhaps derived from the picture on
the cover of a missionary publication
specially intended for the edification
of youth, which depicted him as a
stiffly conventional person in a black
coat, standing under a palm-tree
holding up a small volume to the
respectful gaze of a man and two boys
dark in complexion and very scantily
clad. Years have altered the cover
of the missionary publication but not
the impression it made; and as they
saw the missionary then they see him
still, a rigid awkward figure amazingly
incongruous among the palms and
temples of the immemorial East. In
times of peace this rigid incongruity
provokes a smile; in times of diffi-
culty and danger it incurs rebuke as
well as contempt.

Fault is found less often with the
missionary than with his methods.
His critics as a rule give him credit
for good intentions, earnestness, devo-
tion to his work, and for considerable
self-sacrifice ; and they would generally
be willing to tolerate him if he did
not insist upon making himself in-
tolerable. If he were a little more
amenable to advice, more flexible,

more ready to adapt himself to his
surroundings, a use might be found
for him ; he too might have his niche
in the great political and commercial
scheme of the world. Some indeed
would prefer, with Mr. Thorold Dick-
son, for example, in a recent number
of this magazine, to abolish him al-
together, or at least to confine him
to the Near East, to such fields of
labour as Whitechapel and Bethnal
Green. But even they recognise that
the abolishing of the missionary in
the present state of public opinion is
a counsel of perfection on which it
is useless to insist, and all that can
be done in the circumstances is to
try and prevail on him to take a
reasonable view of his position.

The man who sets out with the
hope of evangelising China is invited
in the first place to realise that the
great majority of the Chinese are
already on the way to heaven, while
too many of our own countrymen, for
lack of guides, are pursuing a very
different path. Should the missionary
plead that though his countrymen
may complain of a lack of guidance
they cannot justly be said to suffer
from any conspicuous lack of guides,
and still persist in carrying his mer-
chandise to the land of his choice, he
is urged at least to be governed there
by one or two plain rules. In the
first place he should carefully refrain
from teaching any specific Christian
dogma. "The mysteries and metaphy-
sical inconsistencies of Christianity "
(which would have been so useful in
Whitechapel) are, it seems, wholly
unintelligible to the Chinese masses ;
partly because the Chinese language

The Missionary in China and Elsewhere.

281

is ill-adapted to convey ideas so
foreign to the Chinese mind, and
partly because the average Chinaman
is already stuffed so full of philosophy
and religion that he can hold no more.
The faith which found its way to the
heart and conscience of Greek and
Syrian and Scythian, of Celt and
Goth, has no message for China. A
still greater hindrance is presented in
the fact that Christianity is insepar-
ably associated in the Chinese mind
with the political projects which in
the past it has frequently heralded.

The first of these obstacles is not
so insurmountable as it seems at first
sight. The difficulty of acquiring a
complete mastery of the Chinese lan-
guage is no doubt immense, and yet
Europeans do contrive to learn it for
diplomatic and commercial purposes.
The religious teacher treads on more
delicate ground than the trader and
the diplomatist, but even this diffi-
culty may be exaggerated. It would
not be correct to say that Buddhism
is the religion of China ; but the
whole of China is penetrated by its
teachings, and every Buddhist is
familiar with the idea of sin, repent-
ance, expiation, the efficacy of prayer,
hell, and heaven. It is not easy to
believe that the tongue in which
millions have learned of the miracu-
lous birth of Gautama and of his
awakening after death, can find no
words in which to relate the Christian
story of the Incarnation and the
Resurrection. There are Chinese
scholars who hold that the Chinese
version of the New Testament re-
flects the original more faithfully
than our own. From the influence
of Buddhism in China, the mission-
ary may derive still further encou-
ragement. The Chinese, we are told,
have such an abhorrence of the
foreigner that we can never hope to
overcome the prejudices of that ex-
clusive race. But every one knows

that Buddhism itself is a foreign
religion in China, and the greater
part of Chinese Buddhist literature
has been imported from abroad. Its
victory might have been still more
complete had it not been for its
monastic basis which the Chinese, for
whom ancestor-worship is the key-
stone of the social fabric, regard with
a certain contempt.

Since the Founder of Christianity
was condemned to death as a political
agitator, there has rarely been any
religious persecution which was not
inspired or explained by reasons of
state ; and to this rule the recent
massacres in China have been no
exception. The gravest disadvantage
with which modern Christianity in
China has to contend is undoubtedly
the fact that it was presented to that
country at the bayonet's point, and
is closely connected in consequence
with past humiliations and acute
apprehensions for the future ; and it
is impossible to deny that this sus-
picion has some justification, though
for this the British Protestant
societies are not to blame. The
cause which the missionary has at
heart would be better advanced if
his Government could agree to
ignore him altogether, but this could
hardly be done without seriously
affecting the position of his country-
men in China ; since the Chinese
would find it difficult to discriminate
with any degree of certainty between
the European who might be mur-
dered with impunity and the Euro-
pean whose death would be reckoned
an international outrage. It should
not be forgotten, however, that
Christian enterprise in China does
not date from the Treaty of Tient-
sin. The city of Si-gnan-fu, whose
name has grown familiar to English-
men since it became the refuge of
the Manchu dynasty, was once an
outpost of Christianity ; and a tablet

282

The Missionary in China and Elsewhere.

still exists in that remote city which
records that in the seventh century
" the illustrious religion had spread
itself in every direction and Christian
temples were in a hundred cities."
There is no need to conclude too
hastily that the tide which over-
whelmed those early pioneers can
never ebb again.

But if the Christian missionary is
to preach no distinctive Christian
dogma, what is he to do? He is
to occupy himself with ethics. The
sacred books of the Chinese inculcate
honesty, charity, and an upright life,
and " to see Christians practising
these virtues in a higher degree
than themselves will influence the
Chinese." But will it make Chris-
tians of them ? That, after all, is
the question which concerns the mis-
sionary most closely. The English-
man living a life somewhat more
honest, more upright and more
charitable than his own, may strike
the Chinaman as an admirable and
elevating spectacle, but in order to
do this is it necessary to call oneself
a Christian missionary? Would not
a Christian merchant or a Christian
consul answer the purpose just as
well?

A French statesman with a dis-
like to vague generalities once de-
clared that there are social questions
but no social question. We may
reverse the saying and say that,
broadly speaking, there are no mis-
sionary questions but only a mis-
sionary question. The point at issue,
that is to say, is not whether the
missionary is a benefit in this locality
or in that, but whether he is wanted
anywhere. As we complain of him
to-day in China, we complained of
him yesterday in Uganda, and the
day before yesterday in India. His
chief characteristics have been the
same everywhere and in all ages, and
first among them is his faculty for

disturbing the traditional repose of
the lands he visits ; and what is the
lament to which we are now listen-
ing but an echo of that ancient cry
of dismay, These that have turned the
world ^lps^de doivn are come hither
alsol It is this which makes it im-
possible for many people, advocates
of order, respecters of authority, to
contemplate the missionary with any
patience. Whatever our neighbours
may say of our untamable ferocity,
we are still for peace at almost any
price, and so high is the value which
we set upon a quiet life that we
find much to commend in the Vol-
tairean conception of God as a great
permanent Chief of Police whom, had
He not existed, we must have in-
vented in the interests of decency
and good government. It follows
that no religion which makes a man
feel tolerably secure and comfortable
is to be lightly despised, much less
up-rooted, whatever name it bears.
" Some time ago," says Dr. Eitel
in his Lectures on Buddhism, " a
Chinese gentleman, a Confucianist to
the backbone, expressed in a conver-
sation with me his contempt for
Buddhism, but at the same time,
when I showed him a Chinese trans-
lation of a Buddhist Sutra, he owned
he had learned it by heart. When
I asked him how he came to study
a Buddhist book, he assured me with
the greatest seriousness that it was
universally known, and proved also
by his own experience, that the read-
ing of this Sutra was a never-failing
panacea for stomach-ache." Who
does not sympathise with the Con-
fucianist? What more satisfactory
test of the value of a religion could
one ask for ? If the Christian
Church could have accommodated
herself to this view, if she could
have decided that her first aim was
to make man comfortable, her highest
inspiration to let well alone, what

The Missionary in China and Elsewhere.

283

infinite suffering the "world might
have been spared ! She refused from
the first to adopt this tranquil
policy, and with that refusal her
character and destiny are bound up.

We are all familiar with the argu-
ments of the Little-England party in
politics (it is difficult to find a more
polite and equally intelligible term)
as opposed to the advocates of Im-
perialism. Are there no Hooligans
in Southwark, they say, that we must
needs undertake to police the Afghan
frontier ? Why labour to improve
the irrigation of Egypt while dwellers
in Shad well are short of water every
summer ? And the cost of these dis-
tant enterprises ! The millions spent
in righting the wrongs of a handful
of Outlanders in South Africa might
have settled the question of housing
the poor of London once for all.
The nation has chosen, for better or
worse, between these two policies ;
the Christian Church had no choice.
The Imperial ideal is for her the only
ideal. She has followed it down the
centuries often by miry and doubtful
ways, with garments torn and soiled :
she follows it now, we hope, with
cleaner feet ; but when she turns her
back upon it, it will be time for the
eagles to gather together. It is not
easy to find a name for the Little-
Englander of Christianity, but he
exists and has probably always existed.
When " the apostles which were at
Jerusalem sent Peter and John to
Samaria," when Gregory dispatched
his evangelists to Britain, how warmly
he must have protested in the name
of patriotism and common sense
against such reckless waste of means
and men while Jerusalem was still
unconverted and Rome a sink of
corruption. He may even have urged
that Samaria had already been for
many centuries in possession of a
highly civilised form of religion, and
that the tongue of the Ancient Briton

was ill-adapted for the exposition of
the subtle mysteries of an oriental
creed. Had his counsels prevailed
we should be living to-day in a pagan
Europe, with Christianity existing
perhaps as an interesting survival side
by side with Judaism behind some
Ghetto wall. It is open to anyone to
affirm that the Church's victory was
the world's misfortune, that pagan
Europe would have been a better
place to live in than Christian
Europe ; it is not open to anyone to
ignore the fact that the Gospel which
proclaims the Divine message of
reconciliation, holds also that mourn-
ful saying, — Not peace but a stvoi-d.

No one will maintain that the
individual missionary is invariably all
that a religious teacher ought to be.
He is sometimes narrow and ignorant,
sometimes wanting in tact, sometimes,
even, in charity. In this respect he
is not altogether unlike religious
teachers and others who stay at home.
It is true that what is a drawback at
home may be a disaster abroad, and
that the Church should choose her
ablest men for foreign service espe-
cially in the East ; and since mission-
work can only be effectively and
permanently injured from within, any
criticism which drives home to the
advocates of missions the sense of
their responsibility in this matter is
of the greatest value. The evangelist
whose equipment consists chiefly of
good intentions is perhaps less wanted
in China than anywhere else. But it
is not to the shortcomings of indivi-
duals that our attention has been so
frequently drawn of late, but rather
to the mission itself ; and it cannot be
said too plainly that in rejecting the
missionary principle we are in danger,
according to the German proverb, of
throwing out the child with the bath-
water. In arraigning that principle
we are arraigning Christianity itself ;
and before the missionary can be

28i

The Missionary in China and Elseivhere.

abolished it will be probably necessary
to abolish the Christian Church.

The native Christian in our own
dependencies has not much to do
with the missionary in China ; but
no attack on missions is complete
without a fling at him, and a few
words may therefore be said on Mr.
Dickson's last paragraphs. We are
told that the vast majority of Civil
Servants all over the East agree
" that as a rule the native Christian
convert is less admirable than the
native heathen " ; and the Civil Ser-
vants are the governing class and
may be presumed to know something
about their own business. Wherever
the creed of the governing class differs
from that of the governed, tempta-
tions to hypocrisy must always be
incessant and powerful ; truthful-
ness is not the virtue of the East,
and there are doubtless numbers of
natives who would be glad to com-
mend themselves to their superiors by
a purely complimentary profession of
the alien faith. But the uniform
does not make the soldier ; any one
can put on a uniform. The native
Christian convert does, however,
exist, and it must be owned that he
is not always a good witness for
the defence. Christianity has ever
been (among other things) the refuge
of the destitute. Her doors are set
wide to the slave and the outcast,
to the failures of all creeds and
races ; Despairing of no man is the
device written above her portals,
and no one ever hoped so largely
without being largely disappointed.
It is not in reality that the native
Christian is worse than he was as
a heathen, but that he is expected
to be so much better. Christianity
forbids a man to pilfer, to prevaricate,
to shirk his work; can he do these
things and yet profess himself a Chris-
tian without being justly denounced

as a hypocrite and an impostor?
Perhaps not; but the connection
between morality and religion is
nowhere insisted upon so strongly as
in the case of the Christian native.
The English housemaid breaks a bowl
and tells an untruth about it : the
English groom is caught selling his
master's oats ; and yet we do not
despair of Christianity in the West.
We are not, in fact, so much as-
tonished at the groom's dishonesty
because he is a member of the Chris-
tian Church as because he brought
with him an excellent character from
his last place. We are infinitely
more indulgent to those who have
been urged from infancy along the
path of Christian morality than to
him who sets his uncertain feet for
the first time upon that steep ascent.
Among those who have believed
very earnestly in mission work in
India are to be found such names
as Donald Macleod, James Thomason
(" one of the most successful English-
men," says Sir Richard Temple, " that
have ever borne sway in India ") who
translated the Psalms into Hindus-
tani for the use of native Christians,
and Herbert Edwardes whom Lord
Roberts has pronounced " one of the
most remarkable men the Indian
army ever produced " ; and there
would be no difficulty in adding to
them other soldiers and civilians, past
and present. " I believe," said Lord
Lawrence, " notwithstanding all that
the English people have done to
benefit India, the missionaries have
done more than all other agencies
combined." Did these distinguished
administrators deliberately encourage
the manufacture of hypocrites 1 Gl-
are we to regard them as exceptions
to the rule that the governing class
in India knows something of its own
business ?

H C. MACDOWALL.

285

SOMETHING ABOUT CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.

THE excuse for saying something
about this quaint old school is to be
found in the fact, the sad fact, that
it is about, so far as London is con-
cerned, to die ; indeed, so certain is
its death that several people fancy it
to be already dead, that is, to have
been moved from London. The
words that follow will be written by
one who has good cause to love
Christ's Hospital, as it is and as it
has been, and who is too old and
stupid to appreciate the wisdom of
transplanting the goodly tree that
has sheltered so many little lives.
It may be safely left for others to
foresee and sing the glories that shall
be elsewhere; the present writer
merely pauses at the parting of the
ways, not to look forward, but to cast
his eyes and memory backward to-
wards what has been. The young
men are certain to see visions, while
to the old men remains the sad and
most unprofitable privilege of dream-
ing dreams. This does not profess to
be a history ; there are many histories
already, and there will be, we may
fancy, many more; this is merely, in
the words of the title, "Something
about Christ's Hospital."

The site had been occupied by the
Grey Friars (the name that Thackeray
appropriated for his old school, the
Charterhouse), and was conveyed, if
civil language must be used, by the
Defender of the Faith. Edward the
Sixth's advisers, finding their world
in evil plight, decided to do some-
thing for the sick, the young, and the
sturdy vagabonds, respectively ; the
sick were to be nursed, the children
taught and fed and clothed (mainten-

ance preceding education in the old
folios of the Hospital), the idlers made
to work, or thrashed. It is some-
what of an error to suppose that
people were necessarily stupid because
they lived three hundred years ago,
or even more. Some people think
to-day that to nurse the sick and
teach the young are useful tasks, and
that it might be no bad thing to
make the path of the idler and the
vagabond less of a primrose path than
it is. But the present purpose is to
say something of the children. The
poor young King expressed his thanks
to God that he had been allowed to
live long enough to see the beginning
of the good work at Christ's Hospital ;
and Bishop Ridley, who advised him
in these matters, expressed in a
sermon his sense of the munificence
of a Mr. Alderman Dobbs, in a
paragraph beginning " Oh Dobbs,
Dobbs ! " After saying how much
gratitude is due to other members of
the London Corporation, he adds, "and
especially to thee, oh Dobbs ! " Thus
arose the royal hospitals, Christ's,
St. Bartholomew's, and Bridewell,
that attended to the young, the sick,
and the sturdy vagabond respectively;
and documents connected with these
hospitals are handed over yearly on
St. Matthew's Day by the chief clerk
of Christ's Hospital to the Lord
Mayor of London, and are by him
passed on to the town-clerk who
promises to place them in the City
archives. The occasion of this
delivery of documents is interesting,
it may be, in more ways than one.
It is of interest, perhaps, as showing
a process of decay, a retrogression in

286

Something about Christ's Hospital.

festivity, a process (or, rather, a
recess) that you might not expect to
meet with in the City. St. Matthew's
Day used to be the great day at
Christ's Hospital ; it was the speech-
day, the occasion of a sermon by
some famous Old Boy, and of a
banquet. One by one these fell
away ; the speech-day was put back
till the last day of the summer term,
the banquet faded, but the sermon
still goes on. The word faded is used
advisedly, because the process was
a gradual one. For many years a
bottle of wine, port or sherry, was
sent to each member of the Staff;
that practice has been given up now
for more than five-and-twenty years,
but a quarter of a century ago men
still lived who took in one way what
they could not in another. At the
dessert upon that day, which is still
provided in the Court Room, there
was one man at any rate who seized
a decanter of port, and, clinging to it,
gradually emptied it of its contents.
His father might have managed his
three bottles at a sitting ; his son
probably cannot with impunity even
drink one glass of port at four in the
afternoon. To-day two paltry bottles
suffice to slake the thirst of all the
guests ; many content themselves
with tea, and carry off, by way of
perquisite, a little bag of macaroons.
What a retrogression, from all the
ancient glories of St. Matthew's Day
to a cup of tea and a bag of biscuits !
A whole holiday used to be granted
on the following day, that all might
recover from the possible dryness of
the sermon and the probable damp-
ness of the dinner ; now the holiday
falls at another time.

The mention of a holiday recalls
the fact that within the memory of
living men the boys had no other
continuous holiday than one month in
the summer : between that date and
a quarter of a century ago the month

had grown into six weeks, and they
had also four free weeks in winter ;
but the Easter holiday was a matter
of days rather than of weeks, and was
of no use to those boys who lived far
from London. These days have now
been expanded into almost three
weeks, mainly by the transference of
single days, — whole leaves as they were
called — that used to come at about
the rate of one per month, and these
had in earlier times been substituted
for the Saints' Days, which had been
always free from work but came at
very irregular intervals.

Something has been said about the
original purpose of Christ's Hospital
(which men of Belial call the Blue
Coat School) but whatever was its
purpose, it soon became a sort of
Foundling Hospital ; babies were left
upon its doorsteps and others were
picked up outside. Many years ago
the writer saw some early records in
the old books of the Hospital, and
two points struck him, besides the
beauty of the writing, which would
naturally appeal to one to whom a
headmaster once observed " You were
never taught writing, I suppose 1 " :
one was, that children took their
names from the place in which they
were picked up, John Oldchange, for
example, Mary Milkstreet, or from
the absence of all knowledge of their
past, as Richard Nbmoreknowen and
Jane Thatgodgaveus ; and the second
was that the mortality was terrible,
dead being a not uncommon entry
after the registration of the name.
One infant got the surname of Gramor
from being found upon the doorstep
of the gramor-school. Poor boy ! he
grew up to be a master in that school ;
there he lived and there he died, and
near there, in accordance with his
last wish, his body lies. There is
a certain pathos in his birth and life
and death, but there is also another
side to such interments ; in the early

Something about Christ's Hospital.

287

days all people connected with the
Hospital might be buried on the
premises, boys, masters, officers, and
such interments were continued till
within the memory of men still living.
Another baby was left upon the
premises with a label attached to his
clothing that bore two prayers in
poetry ; one that, not being well
weaned, he might be given " by nites
a letel bear " (a little beer), the other
that he might be on the mathematical
foundation or, to quote his own poetic
words, "King Charles is bag I ffane
wold ware " : he meant the metal
badge upon the shoulder of some boys
which still attracts the attention and
sometimes excites the admiration of
the visitor. Charles the Second
founded this school as Edward the
Sixth founded the other, but in
neither case does the King appear to
have endowed the school ; the site
was lying waste, some people living
there as quasi- squatters. Pepys, as
an Admiralty man, was interested in
the Royal Mathematical School, which
was intended to prepare boys for the
sea, and did so, as it still does. From
some words of his about a public
supping held one night each week in
Lent, it would appear that that mys-
terious performance (a blending of
religious exercise, food, and feudal
service) was much the same in those
days that it is in these. The income
in the earliest days was most pre-
carious, depending partly, it would
seem, on Ward collections in the City,
and partly on the sums collected at
these public suppers : the collecting
boxes still survive.

Probably most of us have heard
or read warm words about the way
in which the pious purpose of King
Edward was frustrated, and the
money that he gave perverted or
diverted to the use of wealthy boys.
The present writer has heard much of
this talk, and when he has asked for

details, has been confronted with this
sort of answer : " Oh, I have heard of
lots of cases, but I do not remember
any special one just at this moment."
He can offer some little evidence of
his own on the point.

He was once present at a discus-
sion of this subject between two men,
one of whom had been a master at
Christ's Hospital for many years,
while the other, as boy and governor,
was likely to be well informed about
the school. The master said that
about a thousand boys had passed
through his hands, and he had known
something about the circumstances of
many of them ; he had had strong
suspicion of an abuse of the Charity
in one case, and was certain of it in
another, the father being a successful
actor. The governor had heard the
stories of abuse that all have heard,
had asked for details and had never
got them ; but from his own sus-
picions and enquiries he had found
out one case, and that was the one
discovered by the master. This
would seem to show that cases of
misuse of the old Charity were rare.
It is quite true that Christ's Hospital
does not take children from doorsteps
or from gutters as it did in early
days, but such people have been pro-
vided for in other ways. The people
who gave money to the Hospital (the
royal founders gave none) gave it for
the " maintenance and education of
the poor " ; but it was a higher educa-
tion, recognising the humanities of
life, and not merely the teaching
directed solely to the gaining of a
livelihood. The peculiar and old
names of the classes in Christ's Hos-
pital bear witness to this fact : the
Grecians and the Deputy Grecians
attest the study of the Greek tongue ;
and the next form, the Erasmus,
takes its title from the fact that it
derived its ideas of Latin from a
study of the COLLOQUIES of that great

288

Something about Christ's Hospital.

man. Some people seem to confine
the meaning of the word poor to
those among our brothers who spit
rather more and wash rather less than
is pleasant for those who chance to be
in their immediate neighbourhood ;
but there are some who recognise as
poor those, possibly of gentle blood
and decent manners, who by some
sudden stroke of fate have been
placed at a disadvantage in the world.
Special schools have been founded at
different times to deal with special
classes or professions. Maryborough
was meant to educate the children of
poor parsons ; it forgot its purpose
long ago, and much the same might
be said of Wellington and soldiers'
sons. It was, as some think, the
main glory of Christ's Hospital that
up to recent times it taught and
sheltered sons of poor gentlefolk as
well as other grades and kinds of
poor. One governor, perhaps, would
confine his presentation to the sons of
clergymen, another to the sons of
officers in the army, and so forth.
Ten years ago all this was changed at
the nod of an omnipotent Commis-
sion ; the claims of poverty gave
way to competition, education was
no longer absolutely free ; and had
it not been for a sum of about
£120,000 which eluded the grasp of
the spoiler, there would be now no
room for any relic of the old system
of presentation on the ground of
poverty.

For fear of waxing warm over this
topic, it may be well to move away
for a brief space from living boys, and
cool the heated brow on the stones,
the actual buildings that compose the
school. Most of these are new ; even
the great hall, which people reverence,
was opened only seventy years ago, in
1829, a ticket of admission being
among the possessions of the present
writer. There are bits of old wall
here and there to be seen by him who

knows where to look for them, but,
speaking generally, the only old part
is the Jiffs, as we call the cloister
lying on a lower level on your left
hand as you enter by the Christ
Church Passage out of Newgate
Street ; an entrance that was once
a joy to see, but is now a horror,
because the statues and good brick-
work have been carried down to
Horsham. In order to account for
the name Jiffs, the boys (with the
spirit of etiology which, according to
Professor Ihne, accounts for no small
portion of the early history of Rome,)
created a beadle whose name was
Jeffrey, and made him occupy the
lodge hard by ; but seeing that this
cloister is a part of the Grey Friars,
the modern theorist says that Jiffs is
no more than a corruption of G.F.'s,
the cloister being near the site of
what used to be the"] main entrance
of the monastery. The three main
divisions of the premises are the Hall
Play (subaudito Ground), the Garden,
and the Ditch ; these names live on,
although the Garden no longer is
ablaze with flowers, and the Ditch no
longer cheers the eye with stagnant
water. But now the glory has de-
parted ; the statues have been taken
from their niches, and the blazoned
panes have left the Hall ; King
Edward's effigy has been taken down,
packed in a wooden box, and sent off
this side up to Horsham ; the pretty
brick-work over the entrance at the
end of Christ Church Passage has
gone with him, and in its stead stares
the bilious brick beloved of suburban
builders.

Christ's Hospital has been going to
the country for the last half-century.
So often has the cry been raised that
it may be described as " going, going; "
but soon — for what is a year to a
school that reckons time by centuries ?
— it will be " gone ! " Soon will
every pupil,

Something about Christ's Hospital.

289

— twitch his mantle blue
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures
new.

There are some dreamers, — hated of
course by the really wise — who feel
sorrow at the coming change. It is
not that they think a crowded city
the best home for boys, nor asphalt
the best style of playground, nor are
they enemies of woods and pastures
new or old ; but they do think that
it might have been not altogether a
bad thing if the Hospital had moved
of its own will, at its own time,
getting its own price for its own site,
retaining some of its old privileges,
some of its old customs, perhaps even
some of its old dress. It is a curious
dress, well enough in the reign of
Edward the Sixth, but curious in the
good days of Victoria ; the bands,
the long blue coat, the leathern girdle,
the black plush breeches (if plush
they be) the yellow stockings. There
used to be a round head-gear blending
a pork-pie with a muffin in its form ;
it was of little use, for it was
always tumbling off, and was em-
ployed chiefly to convey water (being
of stout Irish frieze) into church on
the chance of having a dry sermon,
and it was sometimes suspected of
carrying infection which is now re-
cognised as germs. This item of
the vesture vanished long ago, and
another that went somewhere about
the same time was an inner garment
(a chiton, so to say), which discharged
the duty of a waistcoat in the upper
part and of a petticoat below, and
was of yellow hue as may be seen in
old coloured statues of young Blues.
While there yet is time a stranger
who feels interest in the old school
and its raiment might try to find
out by enquiry, ocular and oral, what
are the varieties of cloth, plush,
girdle, buckle, belonging to the vari-
ous grades throughout the school, the
Grecian, the Erasmite, and a mem-
No. 496. — VOL. LXXXIII.

ber of the masses whom the classes
might call a scrub. One small and
temporary badge has disappeared
within the last five-and-twenty years:
this was a little piece of paper bear-
ing the legend He is risen, which
used to be affixed to the breast of
each boy's coat on Easter Tuesday,
when the school marched off in order
due to the Mansion House to receive
money at the hands of the Lord
Mayor, and from his servitors a bun
to be washed down by drink virtuous
or vicious according to the taste of
each ; after which they came back
to hear the Spital sermon in Christ
Church, Newgate Street, their usual
place of worship. The boys still
march off on that day, still get a
guinea, or a half-crown, or a shilling
according to their position in the
school, still get some food and drink,
and still come back to hear a bishop
preach a sermon ; but the paper
badge has disappeared. No one
much deplores it ; when gummed on
to the coat it did not much enhance
the beauty of it, and when it was
torn off and blown about the play-
ground it did not greatly tend to
reverence or neatness.

This digression has been caused by
the use of the word dress among the
things which might have been pre-
served by a voluntary move into the
country. As things were, the Govern-
ing Body fought scheme after scheme,
was beaten in the end, had to move
when and whither others wished, and
thus lost money by the sale. The
Hospital, so far as it can be held to
have continuous life, will go to
Horsham, thus evicting cattle owned
by the Aylesbury Dairy Company.
The cows raised no objection, for they
may have found a site where clay is
less and water is more abundant ;
boys do not care about such things,
but cows are more particular. It may
be said that it is all a dream, this
u

290

Something about Christ's Hospital.

idea that things might have been
otherwise with some advantage ; but
after all, dreaming is still almost the
only solace and the only privilege of
old men.

Leaving dreams, let us move on
to facts. It has been already stated
that the basis of Christ's Hospital
has been quite changed, that nomina-
tion has given place to competition,
or, if you will, poverty to wits ; yet
in the old days some clever fellows
used to slip in somehow, and some
fools push in now. But the changes
in other ways, changes that are yet
to come, will be far greater. Hitherto
the masters have been really daily
tutors, living in some cases far away,
paid only to teach, but in others
doing unpaid work as well, work that
could not easily be paid for. Out of
school boys were theoretically in other
hands. In addition to the head-
master was a warden, usually an
officer and always a gentleman, with
officials under him. Now six hundred
boys are divided among fifteen wards,
each ward being, literally, beneath
the eye of a matron, a woman looking
after linen, discipline, health, and
much else besides. Of course this is
an old plan and has its drawbacks;
the drawbacks of the modern plan
have yet to be found out by the boys,
though some have been found out
elsewhere. Of course the modern cry
is that boys and masters must live
together and be great friends, and
so on ; but there is some cant in this.
Masters and boys may be good friends
enough without spending all their
time together, and masters are apt
to grow rather stupid if they live and
move solely among boys. All school-

masters have a tendency to dulness,
but at a school where they are not
only schoolmasters but beadles and
matrons as well, their talk is not,
indeed, of oxen, but of boys ; and
their modern habit of taking their
holidays by fifties in a boat will not
of necessity widen their horizon much
or vivify their brains.

Everybody knows that teaching is
unremunerative work. A headmaster
is paid, presumably, to organise, and
well paid ; but an assistant, if he is
to thrive as well as live, must take
(if he can get) a boarding-house.
Licensed victualling, in whatsoever
form, is profitable work, and so a
house-master can sell a pennyworth
of bread for twopence, or even for
threepence. At Horsham, however,
there will be no houses in this sense ;
the boys will all be boarded by the
school and live in barracks where
unmarried masters will live also, keep-
ing order and finding most of their
reward in board and lodging. For
married masters there will be little
or no accommodation, the idea being
that, owing to the large supply of
men who leave the Universities each
year with empty purses and with
vague intentions, a constant succession
of young masters will come on to
learn their trade and then to dis-
appear, no one caring or enquiring
whither. And no one outside the
school enquires or cares about the
future of the married masters at
Christ's Hospital, who are soon to be
evicted, and some of whom have
served the school for many years ;
but such things are a detail, and such a
detail is a despicable thing in the eyes
of the reformer or the philosopher.

291

THE POLICE-OFFICER'S TALE.

" I HAVE seen a good many things
in my time," said the Police-Officer.
" Before I came to Burmah I was
a shoeblack in Auckland, and before
that I herded sheep in New South
"Wales; but the only real adventure
that ever happened to me occurred
when I was an apprentice on a sailing
ship."

" A wreck ? " asked the Major.

" No," said the Policeman, " there
was no wreck ; but we abandoned our
ship in mid-ocean and had rather a
bad time in open boats till we were
picked up. It is not pleasant work
navigating the Atlantic in an open
boat."

" What made you abandon your
ship ? " asked the Naval Lieutenant.
" Had she sprung a leak, or was it
afire?"

" She was as tight and as firm
when we abandoned her as any ship
could be," said the Police-Officer
emphatically. "There was nothing
the matter with her alow or aloft,
except that which obliged us to leave
her."

"I do not understand," said the
Lieutenant looking puzzled. " I
never heard of a crew abandoning a
ship in mid-ocean if she was still
tight. Was it mutiny 1 "

" The captain was a favourite with
the crew," said the Police-Officer.

The Lieutenant stared. "Was it
disease, plague, cholera, yellow fever ? "

"No," said the Police-Officer, "it
was none of those things. In fact it
may be said to have been rather an
exceptional case. She was a barque
belonging to Aberdeen, the MARY
DOWN, a wooden ship, one of the last

of the old clippers and she had gone
to the Mediterranean ports with a
cargo of metal and hardware. The
last place we touched at was Alexan-
dria and there we filled up with bones
for New York."

" Bones 1 " ejaculated the Cavalry-
Officer.

" Yes, bones," answered the Police-
Officer ; " they are a very valuable
manure, you know. Bones to be
ground up into manure, and rags to
make paper, these composed a good
deal of our cargo. We had a weari-
some voyage out of the Mediterranean
which is always a tricky place to sail
about in. Sometimes we were be-
calmed, and sometimes we had to take
in sail in a desperate hurry when the
Levanter came up, so that we were
not sorry to pass the Strait and get
out into the Atlantic. Two days
from Gib we found the Trades and
went comfortably bowling along on
our course making a good ten knots
an hour all day.

" It was the second day out from
Gib when I noticed that something
was wrong. I was in the second
mate's watch, and that night we
happened to have the middle watch.
The ship was sailing easily upon her
course, and there was nothing to do.
Presently finding that I had used up
my matches I went forward to the
forecastle to get a box from my bunk.
Coming out I noticed three or four
hands clustered together by the
shrouds talking earnestly. They
stopped, and looked at me rather
strangely as I passed. I did not pay
much attention and . was walking aft
lighting my pipe when I felt a touch
u 2

292

The Police-Officer's Tale.

on the arm : it was Jackson the
carpenter, one of the men who had
been talking. ' We would like to
speak to you a minute, Flisher,' he
said.

" ' What's the matter, Jackson ? ' I
asked.

" He did not answer at once and
we went back to where the other two
men were standing by the shrouds.
1 Well 1 ' I asked.

"The three men moved uneasily
looking to each other to speak first,
but each seeming afraid to do so.

" ' Come,' I said, c what is it ?
Have it up.' They looked so serious
that I knew it was no little joke that
was on.

" Then Jackson, seeing that he was
expected to do the talking, took the
plug out of his mouth and spitting
deliberately over the side, said :
1 There's something wrong with this
'ere ship.'

" ' What's wrong ? '
" ' She ain't no ship for decent
Christian men to sail in,' he said
sulkily. ' If I'd ha' known when we
was at Alexandry I'm damned if I
wouldn't have left there. Skippers
has no right to ask men to sail in
ships with such a cargo as this.'

" I was considerably surprised at
this as the ship was a good one. The
forecastle was roomy and dry, and the
provisions sound and good. The old
man, too, was a capital sailor and,
though strict, was not a man to
worry his crew ; neither were the
mates. I had been two voyages
already on her and never heard a
serious complaint, at least one founded
on reason. ' I suppose she's too
slow for you, Jackson,' I said. ' You
ought to sail on a mail-boat.'

" Jackson shook his head. ' It
ain't that she's a bit slow,' he replied.
1 She's fast enough for me. Nor 'ave
we any complaint against the grog
or the old man or the mates. They

ain't so bad as times go. No,' and he
shook his head still more decidedly ;
' it ain't that at all.'

" ' What is it, then ? ' I asked, a
bit angry. ' You aren't afraid to
speak of it, are you ? '

" ' No,' said Jackson slowly ; ' I
aren't afraid.' Then he paused and
spat again meditatively over the bul-
wark. ' You aren't seen anythink
unusual on this ship, 'ave you, Fli-
sher?'

" I hadn't the faintest idea what
the man was driving at. ' Unusual,'
I answered, ' no, bar a rat or two,
and they can't be unusual, I think.'

" ' Ah,' he said with a tone of con-
viction ; ' well, we 'ave.'

" His tone roused my curiosity.
'What is it, Jackson? What's
wrong? Better tell me.'

" ' Ghosts,' said Jackson thickly
and glancing apprehensively round,
' ghosts ; ' and the other men nodded.
"I laughed. The idea of ghosts
appeared to me mere childishness.
Here were four great hulking men
looking as fearful as children.

" ' Oh yes,' growled Jackson, ' you
laughs. They don't come aft likely.'

"He spoke so savagely that I
stopped. ' What are the ghosts like,
Jackson ? ' I asked. ' Do you mean
to say that you've seen them ? '

" Jackson nodded. ' Aye, I've
seen 'em ; we've all seen 'em. Tell
him what like they are, Christian-
sen.'

" The man spoken to was a Dane,
a tall, scrambling fair-haired Dane
with a weak and wandering blue eye.
He was usually the butt of the crew,
and it surprised me to hear him
appealed to.

" ' Dead men,' answered Christian-
sen sepulchrally, ' dead men's ghosts.
Dere bones are down dere,' and he
tapped his feet on the deck, ' but
dere spirits, dey are here.' He
stopped and looked up into the great

The Police-Officer's Tale.

293

mass of white sails that swelled above
us. ' De men of all the nations that
have fought and died, — ah ! '

"He gave a nod forward with his
head and even in the dusk I saw his
eyes distend. We all started and
looked across the deck to where
Christiansen was looking. It was
a clear starlight night and the outline
of everything was plain to see; I
could even make out from where I
stood the break of the poop and the
outline of the rail against the sky.
I could see nothing unusual and
turned again to my companions.
They were all bent forward with
fearful faces, glaring over the fore-
hatch to the weather-side opposite
us. I followed their glances, and
again at first I saw nothing, but
suddenly I thought that something was
moving there. I could not make it
out, but there seemed to me two or
more figures moving down under the
shadow of the bulwarks.

"I ran forward at once to that
side but when I came to where they
had been they were gone. Near by
was the caboose and the carpenter's
shop, but the doors of both were
closed. I looked up and down but
could see nothing.

" ' It's one of the boys fooling,' I
said coming back to Jackson, who
had not moved.

" ' No it ain't,' said Jackson.
' That ain't no boy ; it's a ghost.
This place and the fo'ksel is just full
of 'em.'

" I confess that it gave me a bit
of a turn this sudden disappearance
of the figures, but I pretended to
laugh. 'They are harmless enough
anyhow,' I said. ' Your great lump
of flesh isn't afraid of the shadows
like that, Jackson? I wouldn't tell
the old man, if I were you, that
you funked the shadow of the main
staysail.'

" ' Look 'ere, Flisher,' said Jackson ;

1 we've just told you about this because
you, being better eddycated than us,
we thought you might have some
explanation. We did not tell it for
you young shaver to laugh at us and
say we're afraid. Never you mind if
we're afraid or no. These figures, and
more figures than them, has been
going up and down the decks ever
since we left Alexandry. Christiansen
seed 'em first, but now we've all seen
'em. We ax you, as one who's been
to school and brought up as a gentle-
man, if you can explain 'em.'

" I was impressed with the earnest-
ness of the men, and perhaps a little
flattered at their consulting me. ' No,
I can't,' I said. ' I do not believe in
ghosts.'

" ' Ah,' said Jackson, ' that's wot
they teaches you boys now, is it ?
Not to believe in ghosts? Well, we
sailor-men believe in 'em] because we
sees 'em. Ay, and we knows the
reason too, don't we 1 '

"Christiansen and the other men
grunted an assent. ' It's de bones,'
said Christiansen again pointing down
the deck.

" ' Bones,' I exclaimed. ' Yes, you
said that before. What the devil do
you mean 1 '

11 ' Ay, bones,' said Jackson ; ' them
bones as we took aboard at Alexandry.
They was in bags, but we knew well
enough. Some of the bags bust as
they came aboard and we seed the
bones. They was men's bones, skulls
and things ; we seed 'em.'

" ' Ah, we seed 'em,' said Christiansen
grimly. 'It was gut to put dem in de
bags, but ven de bag broke, den ve
see.'

"My blood ran cold at the idea. I
had seen the bags loaded, and had in
fact helped to tally them, but none
broke that I saw. ' Are you sure ? '
I asked. ' Were they really men's
bones ? ' None of the four sailors
condescended to reply and there was

294

The Police-Officer's Tale.

a pause. We stood there and looked
at each other.

" ' Dere's been a many battle dere
in Egypt,' explained Christiansen
presently, ' ever since ole Pharaoh's
time. Dere's been a many men killed.
Dese are de bones. Dere are de skulls
and arm and leg bones and all de oder
bones down dere. And de spirits, dey
are here.'

" He spoke funereally. Over head
the cordage creaked softly as the ship
swayed to the breeze, and there came
from forward the soft crash of the
bows into the seas. ' Look here, I
must be off,' I said suddenly, ' or the
mate will curse me. Damn your
ghosts ! ' and with that I turned and
went aft.

" I crept softly up the gangway to
the poop and looked round to see if
the mate had missed me. For a
moment I did not see him, then as I
came past the cabin skylight I sud-
denly discovered that the skipper was
on deck. He and the mate were
talking abaft the wheel.

" When the mate saw me he called
out to me, ' Flisher.'

" ' Yes, sir,' I answered.

" ' Come here.'

" ' Look here, Flisher,' said the
skipper, ' what's all this damned
nonsense the hands have got hold of
about ghosts ? The steward is scared
out of his senses.'

" ' I do not know, sir,' I answered.
' The men have just been telling me
that there are some ghosts about.'

" ' You haven't seen any, Flisher 1 '
and he looked at me curiously.

" I thought for a moment of the
shadows, and then answered, ' No,
sir.'

" The skipper nodded and went for-
ward with the mate, and I to leeward
again. The steersman was motionless
at the wheel and the ship surged
steadily forward on her way. There
came a rustle and a mutter from aloft

as the wind pressed into the sails and
the stars danced between the ropes.

" The next day there was no more
concealment about it. It was known
all over the ship that the forecastle
was haunted by ghosts who passed to
and fro all the night. It was Hans
Christiansen who had first seen them,
but by this time there was no one
of the crew who had not encountered
at least a dozen ghosts. All sorts of
tales were current as to their appear-
ance and shape and the stories grew
in horror as the day went on. At
six bells, as the sun was sinking into
a gorgeous sunset far ahead, the crew
came aft in a body and complained to
the skipper.

" ' Ghosts,' said the old man scorn-
fully when he heard what, they had
to say, ' ghosts ! Who's seen the
ghosts ? '

" There was a moment's pause
among the men and then a sort of
grumble. ' We've all seen 'em,' said
Jackson who was acting as spokesman
for the crew.

" ' Ah,' said the skipper ' you've all
seen 'em? And what like are these
ghosts that you've all seen ? Spirits
more like,' he sneered. ' You all
drunk enough at Alexandry ; a touch
of D. T., my men. Now, Jackson,
what like was the ghosts you seed 1 '

"Jackson rubbed his head a little
confusedly. ' Well, sir,' he said at
length, ( I dunno as I seed much.
There was something ghost-like I seed
pass the deck at night once or twice ;
but what like it was I don't know.
It made me skeered though,' he added
reflectively.

" ' They's the spirits of the dead
men whose bones are below,' drawled
a voice from the crowd, and there
followed a hoarse murmur of ' Ay,
ay.'

"'Dead men below?' asked the
skipper in surprise.

" ' Them bones, sir, as was loaded

The Police-Officer's Tale.

at Alexandry,' explained Jackson,
' They say as how they're no bones
of beasts but just bones of dead men,
skulls and things.'

" ' Say ! ' roared the skipper. ' Who
says that 1 Who says I've made my
ship a damned dead-house 1 Where's
the man 1 I'd like to see him.'

" The crew looked at each other
questioningly. Who was it who had
seen them? No one came forward.

" ' Now,' shouted the skipper, ' I'm
a waiting. Where's the lubber ? '

" Still no one moved.
' ' Where are the mates 1 ' said the
skipper, turning furiously to find
them both at his elbow. ' You
loaded these 'ere bones ; did you see
anything ? '

'' The mates shook their heads. ' A
bag broke,' said the second mate,
' but there weren't any men's bones
in that. I don't believe there are any
at all. It's just a lie, sir, a lie to
scare the men from their work.'

" 'Ay,' roared the skipper, 'and I'll
find the blackguard too ! I'll ghost
him ! I'll teach him to say I've got
a damned old graveyard on my ship !
Ah—'

" He stopped suddenly as Christian-
sen half walked, was half jostled
forward. 'What have you to say,
you milk-faced curd-headed son of a
Dutchman ? Did you see the bones 1 '

" ' Ya,' answered Christiansen, his
light blue eyes wandering nervously
from the skipper to the mates and
from the mates to the topsail . ' I
did the skulls see. Ya, dey are dere,'
and he pointed forward. 'Mein
Gott, yes ! I have seed dem.'

" The skipper's rage cooled before
this vacillating light-haired Dane
with the expressionless face. He
stared at him a moment in contempt.
' Oh,' he sneered, ' it was you, was
it, who saw the skulls 1 ' Christiansen
did not answer. ' Perhaps it was
you too who saw the ghosts ? '

" Christiansen looked about as if
meditating a retreat, but the men
behind would not let him pass.
'Speak up, Christiansen,' they said.
' You saw 'em ; tell the skipper.'

" ' You were afraid to be alone in
the dark, I suppose,' said the skipper
scathingly, 'you cur-hearted school-
miss. What did you see, you damned
long-shore loafer ? Are you afraid to
speak 1 '

" ' I saw the ghosts,' explained
Christiansen briefly, ' de ghosts of de
men that is dead. Dey haf all seen
dem,' and he waved his hand to the
crew, 'but I seed dem de first. I
was alvays gut at seeing the ghosts.'

" A sort of half -concealed pride
could be seen in his face, which roused
the skipper's rage again to red-heat.

" ' And you believe this Dutchman
and his damned lies, you men 1 You
chicken-hearted fools. I'll — ' then
he suddenly stopped. ' Open the
fore-hatch,' he said to the mate.

" The men went forward in a body
headed by the mate, and the tar-
paulins were removed from the hatch.
In a few minutes, the men working
very unwillingly, the hatch was open.
Down below in the obscurity could
be seen the bags in tiers and layers
as they had been loaded by the steve-
dores. Here and there in the dark
gleamed a white bone and a strange
charnel-house smell came up from
below. The men stood round and
looked suspiciously and timorously
into the hatch.

" ' Fetch up a bag,' said the skipper
to the mate. But none of the men
would go, and finally with a curse I
was ordered to go down. I went and
slung six bags into a noose, which
were drawn up.

" ' Now,' said the skipper as the
bags dropped on deck with a rattle,
' open them bags and let's see
Christiansen's skulls.'

" With a draw of his knife the

296

The Police-Officer's Tale.

second mate cut the lashing of a bag ;
I held up the end and the bones fell
out. There was a skurry as the men
fell back in terror towards the fore-
castle, their faces blanched and their
eyes starting; for out of the bag amid
a quantity of bones bleached with
age rolled a human skull. Slowly
it rolled along the deck turning
its eye-sockets this way and that
while we all regarded it with horror.
Then as the ship lurched it gave a
quick movement and stopped just at
the feet of Christiansen.

" There was a dead silence. Then
Christiansen, who of all present
seemed the only one neither frightened
nor astonished, stooped and picked
up the skull. He raised it carefully
in his hands and peered into the
empty eyeholes, turning it round and
round almost as if with pleasure
at seeing a friend. ' Ya,' he said
meditating ; ' see de large skull of
de dead man.' With his finger he
traced a mark upon the forehead
regretfully. 'Dey cut him dere and
he died. Poor fellow ! ' Then lifting
up his eyes he went on in his curious
singsong. ' He is de tall soldier dat
I seed last night with the great cut
upon his face where de blood poured
out. He was near the cuddy door ;
he was cursing dem dat brought his
bones out over de sea.'

"To say that the men listened to
him in horror would hardly express
their state. They were paralysed
with fear. I felt afraid myself when
I heard the man talking thus to the
poor white nameless skull, and even
the captain had remained motionless,
but as the Dane stopped he suddenly
recovered command of himself and
stepping forward he struck Chris-
tiansen down. The skull rolled out
of his hands, and the skipper picked
it up and chucked it overboard con-
temptuously. Then with an oath he
turned to his bewildered crew. ' You

white-livered lot of curs, you,' he
snarled ; ' you let a Dane funk you
with a nigger's skull. Suppose there
is a nigger's skull or two aboard, what
does it signify? I ain't afraid o'
niggers alive nor dead either. As to
ghosts, that's all his woman's folly,'
and he kicked contemptuously the
recumbent form of the ghost-seer.
' There ain't no such things. The
next man as sees a ghost goes into
irons ; you know me.' Then he
turned on his heel and went aft.

" For a day or two nothing more
happened. The crew went about
their work all day with sullen faces
and during the night-watches they
clustered together by the forecastle-
head and cursed. Christiansen was
in his bunk, for the skipper was a
strongish chap and he had let Chris-
tiansen have it for all he was worth.
The skipper was cheerful. ' Ghosts,'
he said to the mate with a laugh ;
'you try a handspike on the next
man who sees a ghost. A bishop
with bell and candle don't come up
to a marlin-spike in ghost-driving.'

" But the mate was not so happy ;
he was superstitious as are all seamen.
' Flisher,' he said to me, ' have you
seen any of these ghosts ? ' I told
him about the shadows under the
forecastle and he shook his head.
1 What were they like ? ' he asked.
I could not say ; indeed I doubted if
I had really seen anything at all. It
was that fellow Christiansen ; to hear
him talk gave one the creeps, and
when he said ' Look,' I was ready to
believe anything. But I did not
really believe in ghosts, I said.

" ' Ah,' said the mate, ' but there
is ghosts of course, Flisher. I don't
say that I've ever seen them, but lots
of my people have. My mother saw
a ghost once, a little man in white.
Then there's Bible-warrant for it too.
You remember that witch of Endor 1
You don't deny the Bible ? '

The Police-Officer's Tale.

297

" I could not do that, I said, but
may be there was good religious
reason for those ghosts; that time's
past now.

" ' And don't you call it reason for
these ghosts that we're taking their
bones across sea to be manure to
tobacco- gardens'?' he answered. 'No,
no, Flisher, my boy, there's ghosts
right enough.'

" I could see that the mate tho-
roughly believed in the ghosts. As to
the men their nerves were stretched
to breaking. You could not drop a
marlin-spike behind a man without
his jumping round with a scared
white face on you. And one night,
when we were taking in the main-top-
gallant sail, the man next me nearly
fell off the yard swearing a ghost had
touched his face ; I had to help him
back to the top. When they had
nothing to do on deck they collected
in little groups and told ghost-stories.
All the old ghosts of the sea were
resurrected and told of with fear and
trembling. The men became pos-
sessed, as it were, with ghost-mania.

" On the third or fourth night the
breeze suddenly fell. The sky had
been overcast all day, and the sun
set behind a great purple bank of
cloud that hung low upon the horizon.
The breeze fell till the sea was one
glassy sheet that rolled in league -long
undulations from horizon to horizon.
The night was hot and close like a
crowded room. Now and then a
great drop of rain fell heavily upon
the deck, and far down in the south
the lightning played fitfully, lighting
up the broken masses of cloud with
sudden vividness. It was a night
that unstrung your nerves and made
you unhappy and afraid.

" I could hear a man (Williams the
cook, I think,) telling a ghost-story in
low and stricken tones to the men. I
did not listen much because my nerves
were already as tense as I could bear,

but in the deadly stillness of the night
his words drifted every now and then
across to me. He was telling again
the old story of the saving of the
great ship's company.

" ' Steer Nm'-Nm'-Weat. Who had
written it upon the slate ? The mate
rubbed it out but when he came back
an hour later to enter upon his log,
it was there again : Steer Nor'-Nor'-
West. The mate rubbed it out a
second time and sat down in the dark
cuddy to catch the man who wrote it,
the man who was playing a joke upon
him. As he sat waiting, suddenly a
shadowy figure appeared. Whence
he came or how the mate could not
say, but he was there, writing on the
slate ; the mate heard the chalk creak.
With a bound he was up catching at
the man, and finding — nothing ! Be-
fore him was the empty companion
and behind him the empty cuddy, and
on the slate were the words again,
Steer Nor' -Nor' -West.'

" I had heard the story before, and
did not care to hear it again. I
turned away and looked out at the
sea, black as death save where the
fitful lightning broke. It was com-
ing nearer and nearer; in the dark-
ness between the flashes the heavens
seemed to press right down upon the
ship ; faint moans, as of dying men
came from far away.

" The lad had finished his story and
the men sat silently brooding upon it.
No one spoke. The creaking of the
cordage, as the ship rolled, made the
silence even more noticeable. Sud-
denly I heard a voice low and dreamy
come out of the dark close by me.
' Spirits of de dead men,' it moaned,
'spirits of de dead men.' It brought
the heart into my mouth, and I
turned abruptly. Very dimly I could
make out a figure lying on the break
of the forecastle peering over into the
main-deck. It seemed to be gazing
at something.

298

The Police-Officer's Tale.

" ' I see dem, the dead men,' it
moaned on. ' Dey come up in tens and
twenties; dey are dere below. Dey
have red coats and blue coats, dose
dead soldiers of the wars. Deir faces
are bloody with sword-cuts, and dere
are holes in dere bodies whence the
blood oozes out. Dey look at me mit
deir dead eyes.' A cold horror had
fallen upon us as Christiansen spoke.
My limbs were numbed, and in my
ears were strange throbbings. From
some inexplicable attraction I crept
nearer to the Dane and I found the
crew doing the same. No one spoke,
or looked except at Christiansen. We
became packed as a flock of sheep.

" ' Dere are more and more,' he went
on, still in that strange moaning voice.
'De deck is full of dem. Dere are
men with black faces and white eye-
balls which glare at me. De deck is
full of dem ; dey throng upon each
other.'

" In the pause I heard two bells
strike from aft, the sound coming to
me as out of a dream. The man next
me had caught my arm in a grip that
numbed it, but I hardly noticed. The
lightning flashed nearer, and in the
glare the men's faces, tense and
agonised, shone out with a deadly
paleness. My temples were bursting.

" ' Dey come up and up ; dere are
many thousands of dem now. Dey
cluster in de rigging. Dere are many
dead sailors of de great wars there.'

He now raised himself from his
recumbent position and half stood up
leaning upon the rail.

" ' Dey come more and more.' He
looked away out to sea. ' Dey are
passing upon de waters. Dey drive
their chariots upon de sea.'

" He rose to his feet, and there was
a movement among the men. It was
evident their nerves were strung to
breaking-point ; now and then one
gasped as if in agony.

" ' Dey gallop upon the sea. Dey are

all dere, de old Pharaoh and his men
that died so long ago. Dey look at us
with angry eyes as they pass.'

" There was a flicker of phosphorus
in a passing wave, glinting as if struck
up by horses' hoofs. Here and there
across that dark deadly plain there
suddenly flashed other phosphorescent
gleams. It seemed as if dim forms
passed to and fro ; I could see them.
' My God ! ' muttered a man next to
me. I would have given worlds to
have shouted, to have screamed, but
I was held as in a spell.

" Christiansen was standing now
leaning over the rail. His arms
waved as he spoke, and his voice
had become faster and more guttural.
' Dey shake deir heads at me ; dey
threaten ! ' he cried. ' Dey say,
" why have you taken our bones from
deir graves ? " Dere is hatred in deir
eyes.'

" He was holding now by a foretop-
stay ; a flash of lightning showed him
clearly, glaring down at the sea.
' Do not look so at me,' he cried ;
' it was not me ! What have I done,
den ? Mein Gott, to see deir eyes ! '
He began to gesticulate wildly to the
sea. ' Go,' he shrieked, ' go ! Dey
tear me down ! ' He planted his feet
against the butts in fierce resistance,
while the lightning played more and
more brightly. His shrieks became
wilder and more horrible. ' De dead
men take me ! Ah, ah, ah ! ' he
screamed, his voice passing far across
the sea in unutterable agony. The
darkness came down now dense as a
veil and we could see no more. We
were frozen to stone, while within a
hand's grasp of us Christiansen fought
with unseen foes. He stamped upon
the deck ; we heard the groans and
panting of the fight. And then the
darkness was suddenly lifted again.
From the vault above a violet light,
ghastly and cold, shone out in un-
endurable brilliance repeated in throb-

The Police-Officer's Tale.

299

bing waves of radiance. It showed
the ship clear to the trucks, every
rope and spar cut in black against
the fire ; it showed the decks below
us, and the sea black and smooth as
though cast in black marble, and the
stricken faces of the men. And by
the rail stood Christiansen, every
nerve and muscle strained, his feet
braced, his hands gripping fiercely at
the stays. He was the central figure,
and ere the light had failed, in a
moment of time, we saw him drawn
from his hold. His feet slipped, his
hands were forced from their grip.
With one piercing cry of agony he
fell before our eyes into the sea.

" Then the night shut down once
more, and there burst a roar of
thunder as if the universe had broken
up. The spell had passed. With
inarticulate cries of fear we leapt to
our feet and fled. Hither and thither
we ran, blinded in a paroxysm of
maddening fear. We fell, and picked
ourselves up, and fell again. Men
met and wrestled and parted ; their
faces streamed with blood, their
breath came hot and quick ; till at
last in an excess of frenzy they
burst suddenly down upon the main-
deck and rushed aft for the quarter-
boats.

" The first mate, who was on watch,
and the skipper hearing the rush of
men tried. to face them. They were
overborne and flung senseless to

the deck. With feverish haste the
quarter-boats were dropped from the
davits and the men fell in. Then
without food or water, without com-
pass or chart, they set to work to
row away from the ship, bending to
their oars like demons.

" All night they rowed. The light-
ning flashed and the rain poured
down, but the men never stopped.
They did not look anywhere; their
eyes were held to their labouring
hands, and thus they did not notice
behind them a red glare that rose
gradually upon the sky, a glare that
was not of the lightning for it was
steady. But as the boats increased
their distance it fell and fell, until at
last the horizon hid it.

" We were picked up two days later,
the men exhausted and almost dead.
The skipper and the mates were also
picked up by another ship. That last
flash of lightning had set the MARY
DOWN on fire, and the skipper and
first mate being disabled the second
mate could not put it out single-
handed ; but they had managed some-
how between them to launch the
remaining boat in time.

"The MARY DOWN was burnt to
the water's edge and then sank. She
lies now a thousand fathoms deep
beneath the Atlantic and let us hope
that the bones have peace at last.
They deserve it."

HENRY FIELDING.

300

VITAL STATISTICS.

(THEIR MEANING AND VALUE.)

SOME there are who " apprehend a
world of figures here " as much as
Hotspur did, though not in the same
sense. And such persons find little
compensation for the mental (and
moral?) disturbance caused by the
issue of the decennial census-paper in
the assurance that a periodical enu-
meration of the people is necessary
for the construction of Vital Statistics.
To the plain man, remembering the
familiar saying that anything can be
proved by statistics, the statistician
seems closely akin to the Father
of Lies. But does he also recall
the irreligious sneer, that anything
can be proved out of the Bible?
Neither statement is true, of course,
but this is true, that you can prove
nothing in economics without statistics.
They aflwd the data upon which the
economist, the sociologist, the politi-
cian, the philanthropist, and the
practical man of business, alike found
their reasoning and shape their
courses.

A start must be made from some-
thing, and therefore we need, first of
all, a counting of the people, and, next,
a classifying of them by sex, age, and
occupation. When Solon established
the earliest recorded census at Athens
one can imagine it was highly un-
popular, inasmuch as it was intended
to facilitate taxation. But King
David, as we know, numbered his
people (and, to be sure, paid pretty
dearly for it), as did also the ancient
Egyptians and the Romans. In the
Middle Ages the practice was de-
nounced and abandoned as irreligious,

and the first really scientific census
was not taken until 1749, by Sweden,
though in France there had been a
more or less rough enumeration in
1700. The first American census
was taken in 1790, the first trust-
worthy one in France in 1800, and
the first English census in 1801, just
one hundred years ago.

These have formed the foundation
of the modern science of Vital Statis-
tics, which has been aptly defined as
" an important division of the great
subject of Statistics, which deals with
the facts and problems concerning
population in one or more countries."
And statistics is defined as "that
branch of Political Science which has
for its object the collecting and arrang-
ing of facts bearing on the condition,
social, moral and material, of the
people." In international affairs and
in social relations no branch of study
is more important, yet it is so un-
familiar to ordinary persons that a
little explanation of the real meaning
and value of Vital Statistics seems
desirable.

Most people, of course, think they
understand figures, though many will
candidly confess that they abhor
them. The numerals in statistical
returns are certainly not attractive
arrangements in type for the average
mind, but the interest is to be got in
going behind the figures to the facts,
and in following these facts to pro-
bable and logical conclusions. Foolish
persons, again, sometimes sneer at
statistical science as inexact and,
therefore, not to be trusted. It is

Vital Statistics.

301

true that in Vital and International
Statistics mathematical accuracy is
impossible, at all events in the present
conditions of society ; but is no result
to be accounted valuable and instruc-
tive which is not mathematically
accurate ? It is as reasonable to
condemn statistics wholesale because
some returns are imperfect or incom-
plete, as it would be to condemn
grammar because some people never
master the difference between shall
and will, and others remain per-
manently doubtful of the relation of
a verb to its nominative.

One does not require much mathe-
matical knowledge to deal with
statistics. A very elementary ac-
quaintance with what the poor old
Miller of the Floss called " mappin'
and summin'," may suffice, if you
have a clear head and a logical mind.
You do not want statistics in order
to weave them into geometrical pro-
blems, but to afford illustrations of
vital facts on which to found a rational
theory of probabilities.

Now the first thing to be noticed
about Vital Statistics is the arrange-
ment of rates ; of birth-rate, marriage-
rate, and death-rate. What is meant
by these terms ?

Let us take the death-rate by way
of example, as that is a matter which
is being constantly referred to in the
public prints, at Town and County
Council Meetings, Parochial Boards,
and the like.

The healthiness of a town is to be
judged, not by the number of deaths
in it within a given time, but by the
number of deaths in proportion to
the living population and in relation
to age. These are essentials not
generally understood. Thus, many
people reading of the number of
deaths in one year in, say, Glasgow,
and the total number in, say, York,
might conclude that Glasgow is the
less healthy place of residence. But

this inference would be wrong unless
it is confirmed by a comparison of the
populations. You must first ascertain
how many persons died in each place
out of every thousand, or ten thou-
sand, of the persons living in each
town in the same year. The usual
comparison is on a rate per thousand
of inhabitants. Some statisticians
calculate per cent., and some per ten
thousand, but as a general rule, birth-
rates, death-rates, and marriage-rates
are calculated at so much per thousand
of living inhabitants per annum, and
this rate is assumed when the figures
are not otherwise expressed.

The labour of working out the rates
from the totals is very considerable,
but is greatly facilitated by the use
of logarithm tables and slide-rules, as
also by the use of the ingenious
arithmometer, the invention of a
clever Frenchman. This technical
work of the Registrar and Statistician
does not concern us here. What they
produce is a formula which shows at
a glance how many persons in every
thousand have died in any given year
in any given town or district. Thus,
when we say that the death-rate in
Lancashire was 2 2 '4 in 1893, we
mean that between twenty-two and
twenty-three persons died for every
thousand persons living within the
area of registration in that year.

A comparison of the death-rates of
towns is just and legitimate, whereas
a comparison of the total number of
deaths is not. But comparative
healthiness is not to be gauged merely
by the officially declared death-rates.
To get at the true facts of Vital
Statistics we must also have the age-
constitution, to consider along with
the record of deaths. In large popu-
lations the average of deaths may
maintain a pretty constant proportion
to the general health of the people,
but populations differ much in com-
position. There are wide differences

302

Vital Statistics.

between towns, not only as regards
the occupations and earnings of the
people, but also as regards the distri-
bution of ages and sex. Now, as
liability to disease differs with age
and sex, it is necessary in comparing
one population with another, to com-
pare also the death-rates at certain
ages, and to separate those of males
from females.

The greatest mortality occurs at
the two extremes of life, — that is,
under the age of one year and after
the age of seventy-five years. The
average death-rates for the whole of
England and Wales for the year 1898
showed that 175 '2 male infants in
every thousand births died in their
first year, while the proportion of
female infants was 145'0. But the
death-rate of infants under one year
in proportion to the whole population
was 60 '7 males, and 5 TO females per
thousand persons living. At the
other extreme in the same year, 142'1
males and 13T1 females per thousand
living, died at the age of twenty-five
and upwards. But the average of all
ages was 18'7 males and 16 '6 females.

The smallest proportion of deaths
is between the ages of ten and fifteen;
in 1898, for instance, it was 2'1 for
both males and females; and five,
ten, and fifteen, are the only ages at
which the death-rates of males and
females practically coincide. After
the age of thirty-five the death-rate of
males grows more rapidly than that
of females.

From the Registrar-General's last
report we learn further that in the
year 1898 the urban death-rate in
England and Wales was equal to 18 '3
per thousand, and the rural rate to
16'0 per thousand, of the respective
populations. The urban rate was
lower than the average of the ten
preceding years by TO per thousand,
and the rural rate was lower by 0'8
per thousand. The ratio of urban to

rural mortality was as 114 to 100,
and slightly below the average ratio
of the preceding ten years.

Vital Statistics reveal the remark-
able feature that after the age of
thirty-five females die much less
rapidly than males, the difference
increasing with age up to the highest
ages grouped by the Registrar-General.
A little consideration of these facts
will show how material they are to a
right comparison of the average death-
rates of localities. If we take the
Registrar's figures alone we shall find
for 1898 that, if deaths over eighty-
five be eliminated, the rates in the
other age-groups in Staffordshire, Lan
cashire, and Northumberland were in
excess of the averages for the whole
country. In London the rates were
in excess of the averages in all the
age-groups, except those between ten
and thirty-five years. In Warwickshire
they were in excess except between five
and twenty-five, and between seventy-
five and eighty- five. In Cheshire
they were in excess in all groups,
except between ten and twenty-
five ; in the West Riding of York-
shire in all except between twenty-
five and forty-five ; in the North
Riding in all except between fifty-
five and seventy-five. In Durham the
rates were in excess of the averages
except only in the group between
thirty-five and forty-five years. In
South Wales all the rates under
thirty- five years exceeded the aver-
ages, while all above that age were
under them. All the rates with a
few unimportant exceptions, were
under the averages of the whole
country in the Home Counties and in
the south generally ; and in the Mid-
land Counties there were few in-
stances of excessive rates in any of
the age-groups.

But to give an example of how
such figures are subject to correction.
In 1883 the recorded death-rate of

Vital Statistics.

303

Bradford was 18 '3 4, that is to say
1-20 below the average of all England
and Wales in that year ; but when re-
vised according to age and constitution
of the population, the true rate was
found to be 20'26 or 0'72 above the
average. Manchester, again, in the
same year, had a recorded death-rate
of 2 7 '6 4, but when revised on the
age-constitution principle, the true
rate was found to be the very high
one of 30 "80. Norwich, on the other
hand, had a recorded death-rate of
19 '6 4, being O'lO above the average;
but revised in the same way the
correct rate was found to be 18 '7 9 or
0'75 below the average.

As a rule the correction of recorded
death-rates by .age-constitution slightly
raises those of town* and lowers those
of country districts. The reason is,
that the towns contain a smaller
proportion of aged persons, and a
higher proportion of persons in the
prime of life and of females, than
the country. Against those advan-
tages there is, of course, the higher
birth-rate of the towns accompanied by
the larger mortality among infants, but
the balance is as has been stated.

Many interesting things are taught
by a study of the death-rate, such as
the effect of certain diseases at dif-
ferent ages, the general effect on the
whole country of epidemics, and so
forth ; but these are matters which
do not admit of discussion here. One
broad and very interesting result,
however, may be indicated. From
the year 1838 to the year 1875, our
national death-rate averaged 2 2 '3 per
thousand per annum ; from 1891 to
1895 the average declined to 19 '8 for
males and 17 '7 for females, average
18'7, the lowest till then recorded.
Now, according to a paper read by
Mr. Noel Humphreys before the
Statistical Society, it was proved
that if the low average of 1876-83
(20 '3) was continued, it would imply

that the mean duration of male life
is increased by two years, and that
of female life by 3 '4 years, as com-
pared with the estimates on which
life assurance is based. The rate has
not only continued low, it has gone
lower. In 1881 it was only 18'7;
in 1886, 19-3; in 1887, 19'0; in
1888, 18; in 1891, 20'0 ; and in
1898 17-6.

From 1881 to 1889 the death-rate
was the lowest till then recorded, and
the fall was due chiefly to the small
proportion of deaths among persons
under forty-five years of age. The
inference, then, «B that we are either
growing healthier as a nation, or are
more perfect in our sanitary arrange-
ments, or are more skilful in over-
coming disease and in restricting its
area in the case of epidemics.

The study of Vital Statistics may
be said to have begun in this country
in 1838, for it was only in 1837 that
civil registration was established ; but
the earlier records are very defective,
more so in the birth-register than in
the registers of marriage and death.
In 1838 the birth-rate recorded was
30 '3 per thousand persons living, and
from that year it rose with many
fluctuations to 36'3, while in 1888
it fell, curiously enough, to almost
exactly the same figure as fifty years
previously. In 1898 it was 2 9 '4.
But in 1838 the record was imperfect,
and it is only since 1875 (when
penalties were imposed for non-regis-
tration) that the recorded figures can
be taken as fairly accurate.

The interesting fact is further
revealed that in no one year has the
birth-rate increased more than 1 '4 per
thousand, while since 1895 it has
declined exactly 1 per thousand. In
only one year since registration began
has it fallen more than I'O per thou-
sand, as compared with its predecessor.
Nevertheless, the birth-rate for 1898
was I'l per thousand below the

304

Vital Statistics.

average rate of the preceding ten
years, and is the lowest rate recorded
since registration began. The only
other instances in which the rate was
below 30'0, are 1894, when it was 2 9 '6,
1896 when it was 29'7, and 1897
when it was again 2 9 '7. The lowest
birth-rates recorded in 1898 were 21 '9
in Rutlandshire and 2 2 '9 in Sussex;
the highest, 3 2 '5 in Northumberland,
35'2 in Durham, and 3 5 '3 in Stafford-
shire.

The birth-rate, it may be thought,
ought to rise and fall with the mar-
riage-rate, and so it does generally and
to a certain extent, but not invariably.
The marriage-rate shows very curious
fluctuations, periods of depression from
two to five years alternating with
periods of elevation. Once upon a
time it was a theory among econ-
omists that the marriage-rate fluctu-
ated with the price of wheat. If that
was once so, it is not quite so now,
but the rate is very directly influenced
by the course and condition of trade.

The student of Vital Statistics does
not confine his attention to rates.
He takes a wider view and considers
the effects of them upon the world at
large. Thus, he finds that England
and Wales alone add about one thou-
sand inhabitants every day to the
population of the earth. This is
ascertained by deducting the daily
deaths from the daily births. What
becomes of all this surplus of about
one thousand a day?

In the first place, London, which
has a natural increase of say one
hundred and fifty persons per day,
receives about fifty every day besides
from other places, chiefly the country
districts ; a group of nineteen large
towns has a natural increase of one
hundred and thirty-five and receives
daily twenty-one emigrants besides
from the country ; a similar group of
fifty-six smaller towns has a natural
increase of one hundred and forty and

daily immigration from the country of
sixty ; and the rest of the country,
including the small towns, sends at
the rate of one hundred and twenty
per day to London and to the large
towns, and of forty-six per day to
countries beyond the sea. This, then,
is how our daily increase of population
is distributed.

Emigration has of recent years
grown enormously, and tends to
further growth, with fluctuations de-
pending on variations of prosperity at
home and abroad. But, on the other
hand, the daily excess of births over
deaths tends also to increase. The
average natural increase for 1848-52,
for instance, was only five hundred
per day, as against one thousand now.

We receive, of course, a large
number of immigrants every year
who add to our own population, but
these are movements which do not
affect the total population of the
world. They are merely transfers.
At the prevailing rate of increase,
and with a continuance of the
method of distribution we have in-
dicated, England and Wales alone
are adding more than three and a
half millions per decade to the
population of the United Kingdom.

The natural increase of population,
then, is due to a high birth-rate,
which again depends on a high
marriage-rate, and this again de-
pends, to a large extent, upon long
intervals of prosperity. It is, in
turn, affected by the death-rate,
which depends upon a number of
things, weather, for instance, famine,
war, and pestilence. The weather
we cannot alter, and extremely cold
and extremely wet seasons will con-
tinue to increase the death-rate, while
mild seasons will diminish it. War
has become less frequent and has
affected our own Vital Statistics, till
now, less than those of any European
nation. Famine is dependent on

Vital Statistics.

305

season, and in the United Kingdom
operates more to check increase of
population (as in Ireland and in the
Highlands) than to raise the death-
rate, although, unhappily, it has done
that also in some past years. Pesti-
lence, in the form of epidemics,
now rarely occurs on such a large
scale as to appreciably affect our
average death-rate. Influenza carried
off ten thousand four hundred and
five persons in England and Wales
in 1898, being equal to three hun-
dred and thirty-one per million of
the population, and comparing with
an average of two hundred and fifty-
six in the previous ten years. What
may be called the natural or normal
death-rate, is, therefore, the chief
limitation there is on increase of
population, and that rate, as we
have shown, tends to become lower.

These are some of the most in-
teresting features of Vital Statistics,
but changes brought about by indus-
trial development and scientific im-
provements are so rapid and so
great, that more frequent data are
needed than the present appliances
afford. No doubt the system of
registration of births, marriages, and
deaths is now tolerably complete,
if not absolutely perfect, and the
Registrar-General's weekly, quarterly,
and annual reports are of inestimable
service. But they require periodical
checking by the complete enumera-
tion of the people commonly called
a census.

It is extremely doubtful if a
counting of heads every ten years is
sufficient for the rapid changes of
modern life. The value of Vital
Statistics is so great, not only in an
economic and social, but also in a
physical and moral sense, that we
should have greater accuracy than
the Registrar's returns compared with
a decennial census can afford. The
intermediate estimates of population,
No. 496. — VOL. LXXXIII.

for instance, are almost invariably
proved to be erroneous. At the
census of 1881 only some eight towns
came out with populations within 1
per cent, of their own estimates, and
several were as far wrong as from 15
to 22 per cent. Again, while the
total population of London was found
to have been under-estimated by 3
per cent., the districts of Paddington,
Kensington and Battersea were over-
estimated by 15, 27 and 39 per cent,
respectively. Such discrepancies as
these, arising from estimates based
on official records, show the need of
more frequent enumerations, — per-
haps every five years — in order to
obtain the'full value of Vital Statistics,
or at least as near an approximation
to full value as we can yet hope for.

Even a census, however carefully
carried out, never reveals the exact
number of the population of a country.
The errors in the American census of
1880 and of 1890, for instance, were
notorious. Errors will always occur,
and must be allowed for, but they
are small in proportion to the entire
numbers dealt with. There are more,
and more serious, errors perhaps in the
registration- returns, especially with
regard to the declared causes of death,
a very important feature in Vital
Statistics. There is this, however,
to be remembered, that deductions
may be more safely made from large
numbers than from small, and that the
statistics of a whole country are, in
their main features, more to be trusted
and more instructive than those of a
rural district. When collected to-
gether and re-distributed, figures
correct each other ; that is to say,
errors on the one side are fairly
balanced by errors on the other side,
so that the net result approximates
truth, although not mathematically
accurate.

BENJAMIN TAYLOR.
x

306

THE CARDINAL'S AGENT.

IT is one of the sorrows of those who
love romance that Dumas did not deal
more generously with the Comte de
Rochefort. The vague Sittings of
Rochefort through the pages of LES
TROIS MOUSQUETAIRES and VINGT ANS
APRES are, no doubt, quite in keeping
with the soldier's ideal of Richelieu's
agent, and with the stealthy nature of
his work as judged from the stand-
point of the Hdtel de Treville. To
have presented us with a palpable,
straightforward Rochefort in these
splendid gasconnades, — to have un-
cloaked the mysterious Man of Meung,
in fact — would have been a serious
artistic mistake. But Dumas might
have taken us behind the arras in
another story, or series of stories, and
given us Rochefort the hero in place
of Rochefort the villain. There is still
a romance to be written with Cesar de
Rochefort as its principal character,
and having for motive that masterly
scheme of plot and counterplot by
which the great Cardinal strove at
once to humble his bitter foes of the
haute noblesse, and to keep the eager
enemies of France at bay.

The world has seldom seen a better
organised or more successful system
of secret service than that of which
Richelieu was the master-spirit, and
Rochefort the adroit lieutenant. How
the superb imagination of Dumas
would have revelled in describing the
strifes and struggles of that devoted
lieutenant ! What pictures have we
not missed of midnight gallop and
duello, of great dames carried off, and
gallant gentlemen left cursing the
Red Duke in their death-agonies, of
the hero masquerading, now as priest

and now as post-boy, and riding
calmly through the enemy's country
with death on his horse's crupper, of
treasonable papers seized at the sword-
point, in the very nick of time, the
wanton traitor Cinq Mars brought to
justice, and the dying Richelieu's last
hours soothed by triumph, thanks to
the watchful courage of Rochefort !
A rich field lies fallow before the
romancer in LES MEMOIRES DE M. LE
C — DE R — , the very title of which
hints of state-secrets and deeds of
high emprise. That Dumas knew this
book we cannot doubt ; for not only
did he take his Richelieu and Mazarin
from its pages, but he was also to
it indebted for his account of Miladi's
early life, of the story of her marriage
to a great noble, and of the discovery
of the fleur-de lys branded upon her
shoulder. The real heroine of this
curious episode, by the way, was
Rochefort's step-mother.

The Rochefort Memoirs, with their
mysterious title, were first published
at Cologne in 1687, the editor of the
work having been Gatien de Courtilz
de Sandras, to whom we also owe
the biography of D'Artagnan. Their
general authenticity has never been
doubted ; and even in minor points
they can often be verified by reference
to contemporary documents, notably
the records of the Bastile and of
the judicial tribunals at Paris and
Orleans. The compiler of the work,
Courtilz, was (according to his own
express statement, since verified by
the genealogists) a near relative of
Rochefort ; and their family estates
were situated close together in the
same province of the Orleanais.

The Cardinal's Agent.

307

Courtilz, when proscribed and a fugi-
tive, was suspected of having sought
shelter in the elder Rochefort's chateau,
which was rudely entered and ran-
sacked in consequence, as may be seen
in these Memoirs, and (by way of con-
firmation) in the civil register of the
provincial court of Orleans. Rochefort
and his editor were in exile together
at Cologne, and for a time their
lodgings were in the same street.
Courtilz, therefore, had opportunities
of making LES MEMOIRES DE M. LE C —
DE R — at once intimate and accurate.
In his preface to the original edition
he says : " I publish here these Me-
moirs against the last will and inten-
tions of their author ; who, upon his
death, which happened a month or
two after his retirement, ordered me
to suppress them." Rochefort is not
the only autobiographer whose last
wishes to this effect have been dis-
obeyed, for good or ill, by his literary
executor.

Charles Cesar de Rochefort, the
secret agent of Richelieu, was born
in the year 1615. He came of a
house which could trace its descent
back to the year 1001, and which had
nothing in common, save the name,
with the family of Rochefort-Lu9ay,
represented to-day by the Marquis
Sans-culotte, Henri Rochefort. His
mother had died in childbirth, and
in a very few months his father began
to cast about for a new consort.
Negotiations were conducted secretly,
as he did not wish to offend the
Marillacs and other powerful connec-
tions of the lady just laid to rest.
As a result, the lord of St. Point was
cruelly trapped into marriage with a
convicted and branded felon. Here
it is that we encounter the germ of
the Miladi episode. A young priest,
or pseudo-priest, of his acquaintance
suggested to the simple Count that
he should be introduced to one of the
former's penitents, a young lady, so

he was told, of extraordinary beauty,
belonging to a great Huguenot family,
but who had fled from her people
with the view of becoming Catholic.
She was not yet twenty, added M.
1'Abbe, and vastly desired to ground
herself more thoroughly in the ancient
faith, by converse with noblemen of
understanding. M. de Rochefort
asked for the lady's name. After
some apparent hesitation, it was whis-
pered in his ear, — Madeleine de
Caumont. The Count whistled, as
well he might, for this implied that
she was a member of the great Hugue-
not house of De La Force, — a niece
perhaps, or even a daughter of its
celebrated chief, Jacques Nompar de
Caumont, who had cheated the bloody
sword of St. Bartholomew to become a
Marshal-Peer of France. Oue look at
the dazzling Madeleine completed the
work begun by the priest. A secret
marriage was hurriedly entered into,
under pretence of threatened interrup-
tion by the bride's powerful Protestant
kinsfolk ; and it may be supposed
that, as in the case of Athos, the
noble benedict's married life was for
a time sufficiently happy. When, one
unlucky morning, Rochefort discovered
the felon's brand upon his wife's
shoulder, he did not hang her out of
hand, as Athos did Miladi ; probably
he did not possess the right of High
Justice. But he at once applied for
annulment of the marriage contract ;
and he thus got rid of her, at the cost
of many pistoles, and no little ridicule
on the part of the merry gentlemen
of Berry and the Orleanais. Investi-
gation showed that her name was
really Madeleine de Caumont, in a
sense ; since she came from the village
of Caumont, where her father was a
respectable miller.

One would have thought an event

of this kind humiliating enough to

cool M. de Rochefort's matrimonial

ardour ; yet in a little while he was

x 2

308

The Cardinal's Agent.

once more wife-hunting. After nar-
rowly escaping the snare laid for him
by a Parisian of the worst reputation,
he at last found his fate in a lady
of no great beauty, but belonging to
a good family in Berry, one Anne de
Lucinge.

The first act of the new Countess
was to banish her little stepson to
his father's estate of St. Point on
the borders of Burgundy, where he
was placed under the charge of some
peasants. The Count seems to have
made no objection to this summary
method of dealing with his heir; from
the first he was completely under the
thumb of his third wife, who, in the
course of twelve years, presented him
with four additional sons and three
daughters. Meanwhile Cesar, by
right Vicomte de Rochefort-St. Point,
lived meanly in Burgundy, until by
a happy chance his godfather, M.
de Marillac, came to the neighbour-
hood and discovered him. Then it
was off with hodden grey, and on
with rich velvet. Righteously in-
dignant at the child's treatment,
Marillac had him well fed and hand-
somely clothed, after which M. le
Vicomte was sent back to his father
in a manner befitting his station. It
upset Madame de Rochefort's calcula-
tions not a little to have her stepson
return in this unexpected manner,
nor was her temper improved by the
stinging rebuke which Marillac saw
fit to administer. On the whole,
poor Cesar must have regretted his
life with the kindly peasants. He
was ignored by his father, forced to
eat with the servants, and scourged
publicly as if he were no better than
a lacquey himself. The only person
who showed him any kindness was
the village priest, who taught him
how to read and write.

At last the lad's spirit rebelled.
In his ninth year he heard that a
troop of Bohemians had camped in

the neighbouring forest of Orleans,
and with these wanderers the little
Viscount desperately threw in his lot.
To the gipsies he proved an invaluable
ally, for he knew the skirts of the
forest thoroughly, as well as all the
chateaux and farm-houses of the canton.
Geese, hens, and ducks disappeared
with extraordinary celerity thereafter;
and it was noticed that M. de Roche-
fort and his tenants were especially
favoured by visits from the marauders.
No doubt Madame had a shrewd idea
of the whereabouts of her missing
stepson, and was glad to get rid of
him at the cost of a few fowls, for
no attempt was made to capture the
Bohemians, and for months they lived
upon the fat of the land, with the
little Viscount as their guide and
protector. But the roving instinct
soon asserted itself, and, in spite of
their comfortable quarters, the gipsies
resolved to take to the road again.
Charmed by the free life Rochefort
resolved to travel with his new friends ;
and so, for five years, he roamed
hither and thither like an earlier
George Borrow, sleeping under the
stars and sharing the strange life of
this strange people. The ties of
brotherhood thus established after-
ward stood him in good stead, when
through his agency the Bohemians
became exceedingly useful to Richelieu
and himself as messengers and secret
agents. Thus, too, he gained an
exhaustive knowledge of French high-
ways and byeways, besides journeying
through Spain, Italy, Germany, and
the Low Countries. But, in the end,
while he was tramping across that
very Lorraine of which his ancestor
had once been chancellor, the authori-
ties made a sudden descent and
captured many of the band, hanging
them promptly without trial. The
remnant (including Rochefort, now a
sturdy fellow of fourteen,) fled through
Burgundy into France by way of

The Cardinal's Agent.

309

Dijon. Travelling only under cover
of night, sleeping in thickets during
the day, they reached Lyons ; and
thence they pushed southward over
Dauphine, into Languedoc, not resting
satisfied until, among the mountains
of Foix, they had put the breadth of
France between themselves and the
wrath of the Lorrainers.

The exceptional privations of this
flight, together with the aimless nature
of the life he was leading, now induced
Rochefort to take the second impor-
tant step of his career. He had heard,
as everyone in the country had heard,
of the wars which the great Cardinal
was waging north, south, east, and
west against the enemies of the
nation, as well as of the quick pro-
motion which awaited gentlemen of
brain and bravery in the Red Duke's
service. Accordingly he determined
to seek some sort of military employ.
It was the year 1628, and the Car-
dinal was busy putting an end to the
long siege of Rochelle ; but, on the
Pyrenean frontier, his lieutenants
maintained a constant garrison war-
fare against the Spaniards. Rochefort
bade good-bye to his Bohemians,
crossed the mountains by Capsi and
Villefranche, passed through Nar-
bonne, and eventually reached Locates
(now Leucate in the Department of
Aude) where he enlisted in the com-
pany of the governor, M. de St. Aunais.
Naturally swarthy, and tanned by
long exposure to sun and wind, he
was picked out by St. Aunais as
a suitable spy to send against the
Spaniards. Under the disguise of a
mountaineer he paid frequent visits
to the enemy's camp ; and in this way
he discovered that the commandant
of the Spanish garrison at Salses was
accustomed to steal out every evening,
slenderly guarded, to visit a fair dame
of the district. Rochefort surprised
tS^ lady's house at daybreak, armed
with a brace of pistols, forced the

governor of Salses and his guard to
lay down their arms, and single-handed
drove them before him into the French
lines, where they were made prisoners.
This exploit, as daring as it was
adroit, won the admiration of M. de
St. Aunais, who, on receiving assur-
ances of Rochefort's gentle birth, gave
the lad a pair of colours in the
Regiment of Picardy. Better still,
St. Aunais wrote to Richelieu, de-
scribing how this stripling of fifteen
had, without assistance, defeated and
captured a famous Spanish captain
and his veteran guard. The Cardinal,
fresh from his victory over Rochelle,
wrote at once to St. Aunais to send
the youngster to him without delay,
and enclosed a hundred pistoles for
the expenses of his journey.

One can well imagine the delight
with which Rochefort heard of this
characteristic command, and the
alacrity with which he made ready
for his voyage to Paris. His Spanish
prisoner brought him a considerable
ransom ; so that when he left Locates
M. le Vicomte de Rochefort-St. Point
had plenty of gold in his purse. He
bought a couple of horses at Narbonne,
invested in a valet, and set out for the
north with a light heart. At Briare,
on the borders of Orleanais, he could
not resist turning aside from the main
road to show himself in the paternal
domains, and air his new honours at
the expense of his stepmother. His
first visit, however, was to the good
priest who had taught him to read;
after which he rode to his father's
house. No doubt Madame was again
vastly disgusted at the sight of this
nuisance of a boy, who was not, appa-
rently, born to be hanged. At all
events the reception accorded to the
returned wanderer was cold in the
extreme; until, by chance, his valet
let fall that his master had been
specially summoned to Paris by the
Cardinal. Instantly the manner of

310

The Cardinal's Agent.

Rochefort's relatives changed. No-
thing was now too good for their
dear Cesar ; and his stepmother, with
an eye to a friend at Court, gave a
grand breakfast in his honour ; all of
which, however, only disgusted Roche-
fort, who took no pains to hide his
feelings.

Two days later he found himself
in Paris for the first time, and has-
tened to the Palais Cardinal to pay
his respects. His fame had preceded
him ; and it was flattering to his
vanity to find everyone talking of the
brave cadet of Locates and his remark-
able exploit. At the least, he looked
for a place in the Cardinal's guards ;
but a bitter disappointment awaited
him. When he entered Richelieu's
cabinet, the Cardinal laughed heartily
at his youthful appearance. " Why,"
cried the Minister, " this cannot pos-
sibly be the terrible cadet of Locates !
This is but a little, beardless boy.
St. Aunais has been trying to play
me a trick." Then, to Rochefort's
intense chagrin, he ordered the young
hero to don his livery, and become
one of his household pages. From
full-fledged ensign to page seemed a
sad downfall ; but Richelieu consoled
him by assuring him that, while as
yet he looked far too boyish for a
military uniform, he might hope for
better things to come. Thus dis-
missed, Rochefort went to arrange
with the master of the household for
a livery. He found that he was
expected to give vails right and left,
as well as to pay a large sum for
clothing and accommodation. During
his journey to Paris he had lived in
princely fashion, as young men with
fine prospects are apt to do, so that
none of the Cardinal's gift or of the
Spanish captain's ransom remained ;
while his two horses, if sold, would
fetch no more than fifty pistoles. The
master of the household demanded at
least four hundred crowns. Matters

might have gone ill with Rochefort,
had not his patron heard of the affair,
ordered him a free outfit, and refilled
his pockets right generously. From
the first he became a favourite with
Richelieu, who had set on foot a
thorough investigation into the young
fellow's antecedents, and found that
his story was substantially true. The
Cardinal, like Napoleon, while opposed
by circumstances to the great bulk of
the nobles, chose to surround himself
as much as possible with persons of
good blood. The Vicomte de Roche-
fort became his cup-bearer, stood
behind his chair, and ushered his
visitors in and out.

Rochefort clears up at least one
mystery connected with his patron.
The scandal has often been repeated
that Richelieu was in love with his
niece, Madame d'Aiguillon, because
he went so frequently and so steal-
thily to her house. According to
Rochefort this was merely a subter-
fuge. Richelieu used the Hotel
d'Aiguillon, not for purposes of
amorous dalliance, but as a safe and
unsuspected headquarters for his
system of espionage. Even at the
Palais Cardinal he was watched by
the agents of Spain, of the Queen,
and of the great nobles. But nobody
followed him to the house of his
niece, believing that he went thither
solely for his pleasure. Thus, while
keeping up a deceitful show of state-
craft in his own cabinet, the wily
Cardinal met all his more important
emissaries and friends, — Sauve, Father
Archer, the Scots Puritans, and others
— in a small chamber overlooking the
D'Aiguillon gardens. This chamber
was furnished with a private staircase,
and it was part of Rochefort's duty
to guide thither through the gardens
many mysterious visitors to his
master. They came, he says, in every
imaginable disguise, monks, friars,
secular priests, merchants, pedlars,

The Cardinal's Agent.

311

grooms, and waiting-women. Before
entrusting his page with this delicate
office, Richelieu had caused him to be
tempted. Madame de Sauve, wife of
the Cardinal's chief spy and a very
beautiful woman, was commissioned
to make love to the boy, and to see
if he could be induced to betray
any of his patron's secrets. It was
a serious trial for one so young ; and
Rochefort would probably have been
found wanting in discretion, had not
the lady luckily taken a real fancy
to him and disclosed the plot. The
report which she subsequently made
to the Cardinal of Cesar's prudence
removed all his Eminence's doubts;
and the cadet of Locates became
keeper of the ministerial door. As
such he officiated while the Cardinal
was laying his plans for the supreme
triumph of his career, that memor-
able eleventh of November, 1630 (so
aptly called the Day of Dupes) upon
which he utterly routed his enemies
and became the virtual dictator of
France.

As Rochefort grew older Richelieu
began to send him on secret com-
missions, chiefly connected with the
payment of foreign agents and the
reception of reports from such as
did not dare to venture into Paris.
Some of these errands make curious
reading. On one occasion the Car-
dinal handed his page a very heavy
bag, containing both money and
papers, with the following instruc-
tions : " You are to take this bag,
and to stroll leisurely along the road
towards Pontoise. At the entrance
to the hamlet of Sanois you will
probably see a Capuchin asleep under
a poplar-tree, with his hood hanging
down over his shoulders. You must
not say anything, but simply slip the
bag into the open hood, and then,
after a detour, you had better come
back by way of St. Denis." A few
weeks later he was sent with a heavy

purse that clinked suggestively, and
which he was ordered to place under
a certain broad flagstone on the St.
Denis road, about a furlong and a
half beyond Montfaucon. This done,
he was to return by another way.
And again, he was sent to Notre
Dame ; " where " said his Eminence,
" you will walk up and down, until
you see a man leaning against a tree,
with his face hidden in his left hand,
and with the other hand held behind
him. You will then place these
papers and money in the right hand
of the unknown, and come away.
On no account are you to look in the
man's face, or seek to penetrate his
identity." Gradually Richelieu sent
him further and further afield, now
to Brussels, now to the Spanish
borders. Once, when hastening back
through Dauphine with urgent mes-
sages from M. de Montmorenci, the
governor of Languedoc, his horse
broke down in the midst of the great
plain beyond Peage. It was night,
the barren waste was infested by
gangs of robbers, and, to crown all,
he knew that the Cardinal's favour
depended on his reaching Paris in
time. Rochefort lost his way in the
darkness, and was only saved by the
chance arrival of a sick gentleman on
his way to Lyons in a horse-litter,
thanks to whose assistance he managed
to reach Paris in the very nick of
time.

In the meanwhile, Rochefort's loving
relatives, learning that his fine ex-
pectations had apparently ended in
a page's livery, saw fit to flout him
once more. He was told that his
presence at home was not desirable,
and the letters which he wrote to his
father were left unanswered. It had
been his intention to ask his patron
for a small benefice on behalf of his
half-brother, Pierre -Antoine- Claude,
who was about to take holy orders.
But this sort of treatment determined

312

The Cardinal's Agent.

him that the gift might be better
bestowed elsewhere ; and he thought
of his kind old friend, the poor priest
who had taught him his letters. The
Cardinal, as generous as Mazarin was
to be niggardly, readily granted his
page's request, and the good man was
duly promoted, as much to his own
surprise as to that of Rochefort's
kinsfolk. Immediately M. le Comte
de Rochefort and his wife posted to
Paris, full of reproaches. Why had
a country parson of no birth been
preferred to Cesar's own loving
brother 1 Rochefort reminded them
of the neglect which he had endured
at their hands ; but he finally melted,
and promised that in future he would
look after the advancement of his
brothers. The fame of his influence
with the Cardinal was trumpeted far
and wide by his stepmother, and he
was assailed by visits from cousins
and connections in search of prefer-
ment. " They came," he says, " from
the far end of Berry. Some of them
I had never seen or heard of before ;
yet they insisted on worrying me by
the hour with the ramifications of
our genealogical tree, making it out
quite plainly (for aught I knew) that
they were my third, fourth, or fifth
cousins ; a fact which, in their esti-
mation, rendered it incumbent upon
me to get them fat appointments as
quickly as possible." So great was
their importunity, that the Cardinal
heard of it, and came to his favourite's
rescue by threatening to give some of
them permanent situations in the
Bastile. This had the effect of send-
ing the whole pack scurrying back
to the Orleanais and Berry, grumbling
savagely over the unnatural conduct
of their cousin the Viscount.

Very shortly after this affair, Roche-
fort's influence with his patron was
suddenly arrested, and came within
an ace of being terminated entirely.
In 1630 the Marechal de Marillac

(Cesar's near relative, and brother of
his godfather and earliest benefactor,)
was arrested on a charge of high
treason, and shut up in St. Menehould
to await trial. Probably with a view
to testing his absolute fidelity, Roche-
fort himself was chosen by the Car-
dinal to make the arrest. The page
carried the warrant into Piedmont,
and formally took possession of
Marillac's sword ; but, this much
dutifully accomplished, he conceived
that he had earned some sort of right
to intercede for a kinsman to whose
family he owed so much. Accord-
ingly he took advantage of a private
audience with Richelieu to implore
that Marillac's life might be spared.
Without turning from the corres-
pondence upon which he was engaged,
Richelieu tossed towards him a report
clearly showing that Marillac had for
years been conspiring with the Queen
Mother's friends and the emissaries
of Spain and England. Still Roche-
fort had the temerity to continue his
plea. Not a word said the Red Duke ;
but he raised his head, and fixed upon
his page one look which spoke more
eloquently than many words. " He
glanced at me from under his eye-
brows," says the culprit, " and it was
as if I had been stricken speechless.
I turned, and went down the stairs,
feeling like a man who has fled from
a pitched battle."

The Vicornte de Rochefort was in
disgrace, and no letter of dismissal
was needed to tell him so. For two
whole years he hid himself in the
lowest quarters of Paris, helped at
times by some gipsy friends, but
starving for the most part, and never
venturing near the precincts of the
Palais Cardinal. In 1632 he heard
of Marillac's execution ; and it speaks
strongly for his fidelity that he bore
all his sufferings without even think-
ing of offering his services to the
enemies of Richelieu, who would have

The Cardinal's Agent.

313

been only too glad to welcome a
recruit with such intimate knowledge
of the apparatus of government.
This loyalty did not go unrewarded.
Richelieu had never lost sight of his
former page, hide he where he might.
One day Sauve, his Eminence's Span-
ish agent, came to Rochefort's lodgings
with a message. If Cesar had re-
turned to his proper senses, he was
to grease his boots forthwith, purchase
a good horse with the money sent
by M. de Sauve, and carry a letter
of importance into Catalonia. The
Spaniards had so far succeeded in
hanging every French agent sent
among the Catalans, and M. de
Rochefort might decline the com-
mission if he thought fit. But M. de
Rochefort had no desire to decline,
neither did he tarry to ask any
questions. Within three hours he
was already well on his way towards
the southern frontier. Unable to
purchase a good horse on such short
notice, but confidently expecting to
pick one up at a Bohemian camp he
knew of in the neighbourhood of Sens,
he performed the first stage of his
journey on a wretched brute which,
from the description, must have
closely resembled the famous Butter-
cup which D'Artagnan afterwards
brought with him out of Beam. The
Spaniards did not catch Rochefort ;
and in a few weeks he found himself
carrying a satisfactory report up the
familiar staircase to Rochefort's
cabinet. The Cardinal welcomed
him back to duty with unwonted
cordiality, and handed him then and
there his patent of promotion to the
post of gentleman-in- waiting. Roche-
fort saw with amazement that the
patent was dated from the very day
upon which he had fallen into dis-
grace, which signified that the
treasurer of the household owed him
more than two years' back pay. His
first thought was to reward the poor

taverners and gipsy-folk who had
helped him in his emergency ; for this
young man seems to have been an
exceptionally fine fellow in the matter
of gratitude for past kindnesses.

Richelieu's shrewd policy had long
been to keep the foreign enemies of
France busy by fostering discontent
and rebellion in their own domains.
He helped the Catalans against Spain
with arms and money, and lent vigor-
ous aid towards the stirring up of the
Irish Catholics. There seems little
doubt, too, of his active sympathy
with the Scots Puritans from a period
long anterior to Leslie's victory at
Dunse Law on that memorable seventh
of June, 1639. At any rate, almosb
immediately after Dunse Law, while
Scotland was in the early stages of
war, Rochefort tells us that the Car-
dinal sent him with cipher letters of
the last importance to the Covenanters'
camp. He landed at one of the
northern English ports, probably
Newcastle, and passed himself off as
a young French nobleman travelling
for his own amusement. The letters
he hid in an ingeniously contrived
saddle, specially made for the journey.
The plates of this saddle were of
double pieces of iron welded together,
and between each pair of welded
pieces a letter was laid.

In spite of his pretence of travel-
ling for pleasure, Rochefort fell under
suspicion. Hardly had he crossed the
Scottish border when he was arrested
by a body of Royalist horse, and,
his angry protests notwithstanding,
he had to submit to being searched ;
even his saddle was ripped up, but
the double plates kept their secrets
well, and after five days' detention
(during which he was cross-examined
by several different persons), he was
at length released with apologies.
He made a feint of returning into
England, evaded the Royalist out-
posts, and eventually succeeded in

314

The Cardinal's Agent.

delivering his letters safely to the
Puritan chiefs. A fishing -vessel
carried him back to France, where
Richelieu rewarded him with two
thousand crowns.

The Cardinal's message was almost
immediately followed by the visit to
Paris of some person who is only de-
scribed as one of the greatest of the
Scots leaders. Rochefort received
orders to go to the Faubourg St. Mar-
ceau, over against the Conduit, where
he would find a small tavern with the
sign of a Headless Woman. He was to
ascend the stairs without knocking, and
to enter a room up two flights, where
he would find a gentleman in a large
bedstead with yellow curtains ; after
certain signals had been exchanged,
he was to bid the gentleman be at
the H6tel d'Aiguillon shortly after
eleven o'clock that night without fail.
Everything was as the Cardinal had
said ; and when Rochefort had entered
the room described and looked behind
the yellow curtains, he saw that the
gentleman there concealed was the
expected leader of the Covenanters.
With considerable discretion he does
not disclose the identity of the
emissary, beyond saying that he was
a person of high rank, and that he
had already met him in Scotland.
It is quite possible that the guest at
the Headless Woman may have been
Argyle himself. Whoever he was, he
obeyed the Cardinal's mandate, and
came at the appointed time to the
house of Madame d'Aiguillon, dis-
guised as a man crying jumbles
{publics) in the street. He was at
once ushered into the private cabinet,
and remained there with Richelieu
until four o'clock next morning. Great
caution was evidently observed in
these negotiations, for, after leaving
the Cardinal, the Scots nobleman at
once changed his place of sojourn
from the Headless Woman to the
Spinning Sow in the Rue de la

Hachette beyond the Conduit. Two
days later Rochefort was sent to him
at the latter tavern with a large chest
clearly containing money, since it was
given to the messenger by the Superin-
tendent of Finances, and accompanied
by a bill of particulars which the Scot
was to receipt. A waggon was needed
to convey the chest ; but he for whom
it was destined absolutely refused to
accept the gift, when he perceived
by the bill that only five hundred
thousand francs had been sent. Riche-
lieu, it appeared, had promised him
six hundred thousand and not a
centime less would he take. Roche-
fort carted the money back to the
Treasury, and reported the matter
to his patron. The result was that,
before nightfall, the canny Northerner
received his full due, without paying
toll to the officials. It is to be pre-
sumed that the money arrived safely
in Scotland.

Meanwhile the charmingly dan-
gerous Duchesse de Chevreuse, baffled
in all her plots by Richelieu, had fled
to Brussels, and there surrounded
herself by that atmosphere of intrigue
so dear to her heart. Rochefort was
ordered to disguise himself as a
Capuchin, and to follow Marie Michon
to her new abode. To this end he
was to place himself temporarily
under the direction of the Cardinal's
confessor, Father Joseph, who, a
Capuchin himself, would see that the
pretended friar was properly accredited.
We find full confirmation of this in

L'HlSTOIRE DU P&RE JOSEF, a WOl'k

written by the Abbe Richard, con-
fessor to Louis the Fourteenth and
Censeur Royal. "The Pere Josef,"
writes Richard, "advised His Eminence
to send somebody to Brussels, where
the Duchesse de Che'vreuse was stir-
ring up all kinds of conspiracies.
1 Good,' replied the Cardinal ; ' under-
take the work yourself, and send the
man as a Qapuchin.' ' Will you lend

The Cardinal's Agent.

315

me a sure agent ? ' asked Pere Josef ;
and the Cardinal, assenting, gave him
the Comte de Rochefort, who left for
the north at once, with orders to
obey the Capuchin father's orders to
the letter." Rochefort says that,
before proceeding on his journey, he
spent some time in the Capuchin
convent in the Rue St. Honore'. He
then set out on foot, in company with
some priests and novices, and reached
the Brussels convent of the order
after fifteen days' travel, sadly battered
by the long tramp, as well as by the
hard beds of the country, so that he
shocked the community by refusing to
leave his cell for forty-eight hours
after his arrival. Once recovered,
however, he allowed no grass to grow
under his feet, and managed to make
the acquaintance of Geoffrey, Marquis
de Laycques, the personal agent of
the Chevreuse. Laycques took a
great fancy to this unusually enter-
taining friar, and wished to make
him his confessor, an honour which
Rochefort, not being a priest, had to
regretfully decline. However, he in-
gratiated himself so well with Laycques
that the latter sent him to the French
border with papers containing com-
plete details of a plot to murder the
Cardinal. Rochefort found means to
send word to Pere Josef : the papers
were seized on their arrival in Paris ;
and Henri de Talleyrand, Comte de
Chalais, who had laid the plot with
Madame de Chevreuse, was brought
to the scaffold. No suspicion rested
on Rochefort, who remained for two
years longer in Brussels upsetting all
Marie Michon's little schemes one
after another. It was no doubt
wearisome that, in order to avert
•every doubt, he should have to dig
in the convent-garden like the other
friars, observe fast-days religiously,
wield the knotted scourge, pray till
his knees were sore, and beg through
the streets for the benefit of the poor.

He bore all these hardships with forti-
tude, until one day, when leaving the
house of Madame de Chevreuse, he
came face to face with two gentlemen
whom he had known in Paris. One
of them, recognising him, exclaimed :
"HJ maisl Tis Rochefort himself,
as sure as I live." Without waiting
to hear more, the pseudo-friar hastened
round the nearest corner, and took to
his heels. At the first tailor's shop
he came to he bought suit, sword,
periwig, boots, and cravat, having
taken the precaution to always carry
a well-filled purse concealed about
him in readiness for such an emergency.
Then, sauntering forth in his new
finery, he hired post-horses, and rode
out of Brussels. His Parisian ac-
quaintance had already given the
alarm, and orders had been issued to
seize the Capuchin spy ; but the
agents of the Chevreuse hurried to
the convent, instead of to the gates,
and while everyone was looking for
a friar on foot, the fine gentleman on
horseback escaped unnoticed.

After his return to Paris Rochefort
became a more important personage
than ever in the Cardinal's household.
Richelieu, feeling doubtless that his
own end was nearing, desired to re-
ward this most faithful of his ad-
herents before it became too late.
As a result, Rochefort obtained for
his brother, Pierre-Antoirie, the rich
parish of St. Martin de-Saumont, for
three other brothers commissions in
the Cardinal's Guards, and for a sister
admission without a premium to the
convent of Montmartre. Finally,
being bidden to ask for himself
rather than for his relatives, he ex-
pressed a wish for a small pension
to secure him against want ; and
Richelieu invested in the Bank of
Lyons a sum sufficient to ensure him
one thousand francs a year for life.

An untoward event put a stop to
this flood of good fortune. Encounter-

316

The Cardinal's Agent.

ing one of the English cavaliers whom
he had tricked with his false saddle-
plates while carrying the Cardinal's
cipher to the Scots insurgents, Roche-
fort allowed himself to be drawn into
a quarrel, and a duel in the Bois de
Boulogne ensued. According to the
fashion, the Englishman brought two
friends to keep him company with
their swords ; and Rochefort invited
his two older brothers to perform a
like dangerous office. Rochefort suc-
ceeded in bringing off his three adver-
saries' swords ; but the victory was
at the cost of one brother killed on
the spot, while the other died soon
afterwards of his wounds. Needless
to say, Rochefort's stepmother felt
the loss of her sons bitterly, and ac-
cused him of having seduced them
into a duel out of hatred of herself.
But the rage of the Cardinal was
more to be dreaded, for he abomi-
nated duelling; and for the second
time Rochefort was forced to hide
himself from his patron's presence.
This time, however, the term of
disgrace was much shorter, and a
reconciliation was effected after only
three months' concealment.

The Cinq Mars episode was at its
height, and Richelieu had fallen into
disgrace with the King. Suspecting
that his enemies were traitorously
plotting with Spain, his Eminence
sent the forgiven Rochefort to
Luxembourg, then a hotbed of in-
trigue, to discover if possible who
was acting as agent in the Spanish
negotiations. Rochefort tramped to
Luxenbourg disguised as a beggar,
and, to avoid suspicion, scraped an
acquaintance with many real mendi-
cants upon the way. Arrived in the
city, he took up his station in the
Rue de Tournon, not far from the
house of the Spanish agent. It was
not long before he saw the Grand
Equerry, Cinq Mars, enter the house ;
and this piece of successful espionage

gave Richelieu his first positive reason
for suspecting the King's arrogant
young favourite of treason. Through
his gipsy allies Rochefort next learned
that papers of importance had been
sent into Spain. These, as the Car-
dinal guessed, included the treaty
signed by the Dukes of Orleans and
Bouillon and by Cinq Mars, and for-
warded to the Court of Madrid for
ratification. This precious document,
as we now know, spelled nothing less
than the opening of the gates to
Spanish invasion, the ruin of Riche-
lieu, and the transformation of Cinq
Mars into another Buckingham. If
only the Cardinal could procure the
ratified treaty on its way back from
Spain, the King might yet be warned
of the truth, and France saved. It
was to Rochefort that the Red Duke
turned in this dire emergency ; nor
did Rochefort disappoint his patron's
trust. Learning, probably through
gipsy-sources, that the messengers to
Cinq Mars were likely to enter France
by the coast-road past St. Jean de Luz
and Bayonne, he hurried to the latter
town and hired himself to an inn-
keeper there as a guide for persons
posting to and fro. Many weeks
passed before any suspicious person
presented himself, but Rochefort's
vigilance was ceaseless. Day and night
he scoured the roads into Spain, os-
tensibly looking for travellers in need
of guidance across the Adour. No
wayfarer went north whose features
were not closely scanned ; and many
an honest merchant, or sturdy
smuggler, had his papers and effects
overhauled, while he slept, by Roche-
fort or his agents. For a long time
no fish came into the net ; but one
night the Flemish accent of a lonely
courier speeding towards the north
aroused the false guide's suspicions.
Probably he offered the Fleming his
services, and was denied, which would
have formed an excellent pretext for

The Cardinal's Agent.

317

picking a quarrel. At all events a
quarrel there was, out of which the
courier came second best ; and quilted
in his boots Rochefort discovered the
original treaty with Spain, with the
signatures of Orleans, Bouillon, De
Thou, and Cinq Mars attached.

No time was to be lost. The King
was at the siege of Perpignan in
Roussillon. The Cardinal, practically
banished from Court, grievously ill,
but still unconquered and undaunted,
waited silently in Languedoc. To
him went Rochefort as fast as horses
could bear him ; and at sight of the
incriminating documents the Red
Duke rose from his sick-bed, for he
knew that once more he held his foes
in the hollow of his hand. Hardly
had Rochefort time to change his
reeking horse for a fresh one, before
he was sent at the gallop to the
King's camp at Perpignan, with the
Spanish treaty enclosed in a reproach-
ful letter from Richelieu. History
tells us the sequel. Cinq Mars and
De Thou were executed as traitors :
the Due de Bouillon only escaped
death by presenting his principality
of Sedan to France ; and the Cardinal
came back to Court in triumph. This
victory was his last. An unconquer-
able enemy was upon him ; and in a
little while he passed away, with
Rochefort standing by his bedside.
" He told me as he lay a-dying," so
run the Memoirs, " that he had always
loved me above all his followers, and
that it grieved him greatly not to
have done more for me." Before his
death Richelieu sent a message to
the King praying him to employ the
Vicomte de Rochefort, or at least to
see that this trusty servant came to
no hurt.

Hardly had the breath left the
Cardinal's body, when Rochefort was
approached by the agents of the
Queen and of the Duke of Orleans,
offering him employment. He would

not trust either, fearing that they
only wished to betray him to his
arch enemy, Madame de Chevreuse.
For a time he attached himself to
the young Duke of Richelieu ; but,
finding him a very different person
from the Cardinal, left his train for
that of the Duke of Beaufort. This
step brought him into instant dis-
favour with the rising star, Mazarin.
Setting out from Anet to Paris, in
September, 1643, with a message to
Beaufort's bankers, he was suddenly
arrested and conveyed to the Bastile.
The name of the person who effected
the arrest was Charles D'Artagnan,
then a cadet in the Guards, but
afterwards the famous Captain of
Musketeers.

For nearly six years Rochefort
cooled his heels in the Bastile, his
stepmother preventing his father and
brothers from making any efforts in
his behalf. At last, hearing the roar
of the Fronde even in his cell, he
bribed a certain old book-dealer, who
visited the prison, into bringing him
a rope. With this he swung himself
into the Bastile ditch, swam as best
he could through the filthy water,
and succeeded in entering Paris
through the Porte St. Martin. This
exploit was performed under cover of
darkness, and Rochefort spent the
first hours of his freedom sleeping
under a stall in the markets. At
daybreak he found a lodging with
friends in the Faubourg St. Germain.
Paris was in an uproar, barricades
and chains being across every street.
The Duke of Beaufort, now the idol
of the mob, caused a bill of pardon
to be passed in favour of Mazarin's
late prisoner, and found for him a
lieutenancy in the Civic Guard. A
week or two later he was back at his
old trade of secret agent, sent by the
Fronde to Belgium to secure the aid
of the Archduke. But here he en-
countered Madame de Chevreuse, who

318

The Cardinal's Agent.

paid him back her old score by suc-
cessfully intriguing against him.

Meanwhile il illustrissimo Signor
facchino, as Conde nicknamed Mazarin,
had been practising a characteristic
revenge upon Rochefort. The Vis-
count's source of income, the money
lodged by Richelieu in the Bank of
Lyons, was seized by Bellinzani (the
Rochefort of the new regime) upon
forged evidences of debt. In order
to raise sufficient money to carry the
matter before the Privy Council,
Rochefort rode to the paternal home
in Orleans, but was flouted by his
stepmother. He next turned to his
brother, the Abbe Pierre-Antoine,
whose parish he had been the means
of securing. The Abbe kept three
packs of hounds, two huntsmen, and
a number of horses ; but he could not
spare one crown to the brother who
had made him what he was. Roche-
fort was about to sell his nag and
tramp back to Paris, when the village
priest on his father's estate, successor
to the old man who had taught him
to read, came forward voluntarily
with a loan of ten pistoles. By the
time the Viscount reached Paris,
Mazarin had fled with the Queen ;
and, through Beaufort's influence the
Bank of Lyons was compelled to
restore the full sum invested in
Rochefort's behalf by his former
patron.

In the fight at the Porte St.
Antoine, on July 2nd, 1652, our
hero led a company of the Civic
Guard ; but certain events causing
him to more than suspect the courage
of Beaufort, he took occasion soon
afterwards to make peace with the
devil, or, in other words, to offer his
services to Mazarin. The offer was
accepted, and he was sent to Bordeaux
to attempt to bring over the Prince
de Conti. In taking service under
the Signor Facchino, he informs us,
he was acting against the earnest

advice of two of his closest friends,
D'Artagnan and M. de Besmaux
(the latter afterwards governor of
the Bastile). Both of these worthies
warned him that they had served the
Cardinal for years without gain or
preferment, and that they had scarcely
enough to buy their dinner with, let
alone what would take them back
decently to Gascony. Yet, in spite
of sundry periods of disgrace (one of
them caused by a frolic highway
robbery, then a fashionable after-
supper amusement, in which Orleans
and the Comte d'Harcourt were ring-
leaders,) Rochefort appears to have
fared not ill at Mazarin's hands.
After a severe duel with M. de
Breaute', the Cardinal sent him his
own surgeon and a present of five
hundred crowns. He was given a
troop of horse in Turenne's army, but
only served two years, Mazarin send-
ing him to Brussels to detach M. de
Marsan from the Spanish service. On
this delicate mission he was captured
by the enemy, and remained a prisoner
at Rocroy until delivered by the
general peace on November 7th, 1657.
Reinstated in favour, he had the
misfortune to engage in a fatal duel
with one of Mazarin's Italian con-
fidants, and was forced to take refuge
in a convent (said to have been that
of the Capuchins) where he made
believe to enter the novitiate. After
the Cardinal's death, in March, 1661,
he emerged from the cloister, and
Louis the Fifteenth, hearing his story
through the Comte de Charost, restored
to him his troop of horse.

At the close of 1663 Rochefort
was summoned to the deathbed of
his father, and, in spite of his step-
mother's endeavours, some sort of
reconciliation was effected between
the two. After the Count's decease
in the following year Cesar entered
into possession as heir, and set his
seal upon the title-deeds, charters,

The Cardinal's Agent.

and other papers ; but, to everyone's
surprise, his stepmother suddenly
produced a number of acknowledg-
ments, signed apparently by her late
husband, of large loans from her
own sons, relatives, and certain
lawyers of her acquaintance. The
total amount of these alleged debts,
curiously enough, tallied almost to
a pistole with the Count's estate.
Naturally Rochefort took the case to
law, but, as his father's signatures
were genuine, Madame de St. Point
entered into possession of all, save
the bare title which remained to
her stepson. Not satisfied with this
victory, she got Rochefort clapped
into prison for the costs of the action,
which he could not, or would not,
pay. When he was released, it was
to go to the Low Countries in the
capacity of aide-de-camp to Turenne,
and he was recruitipg levies in Alsace
when his friend D'Artagnan was
killed outside Maestricht, on June
25th, 1673.

Rochefort was sixty years of age
when Turenne died in 1675 ; but he
did not abandon active service until
the signing of the Peace of Nimeguen
three years later. A small pension
from the King, and the income from
Richelieu's gift, enabled him to live
comfortably, and to cut a modest
figure at Court. His stepmother being
dead, her sons held out the olive-
branch, and acknowledged him as the
lawful head of the family. He was
soon able to do them an important
favour. His eldest nephew, (after-
wards Jean-Amedee, Comte de Roche
fort-St. Point,) had, through an error
of judgment, permitted some Spaniards
to slip through his fingers. For this
he was court-martialed, and sentenced
to be shot. Count Cesar hurried to
Paris, and interceded for the young
man to such good purpose that Lou-
vois gave him a free pardon.

And now certain twinges of con-

science began to afflict the old gen-
tleman ; "I commenced," he says, " to
frequent church, and to reflect upon
death." For his soul's sake he took
a trip to Gueldres, in order to hear
a sermon by the famous Capuchin
preacher, Father Marc d'Aviceno ;
but, unfortunately, while witnessing
the arrival of the holy monk, our
pilgrim fell from an insecure scaffold-
ing and broke his arm badly. Not
long after he had two experiences
which turned his thoughts more than
ever towards religion. In the first
place, he fell into the hands of the
notorious gambler and blackleg, the
Chevalier de Bragellonne, and was.
plucked of half a year's income ; in
the second, he fell in love, and love
at seventy is a serious matter. He
was accepted, for he was comfortably
off, and could not in the nature of
things live very long ; the marriage-
day had been fixed, when the aged
wooer accidentally discovered that the
young lady loved another. With his.
usual generosity, he released the girl,
presented her with a comfortable
dowry, and induced her parents to
consent to her union with his rival.
" And thus," conclude the Memoirs,
"ended this affair, which I should
still call unhappy, had it not very
much conduced to show me the vanity
of earthly things. Indeed, consider-
ing that nought is to be met with
here, save affliction, crosses, and dis-
content, I resolved to do that upon
which I had pondered so long. So,
at last, I am retired into a monastery >
where, burthened with years and
depressed with infirmities, I await
with patience the good time when it
shall please Almighty God to take me
to Himself."

The religious house in which the
shattered Comte de Rochefort found
refuge was, according to the anti-
quaries, that same convent of the
Capuchins in the Rue St. Honore" to.

320

The Cardinal's Agent.

which Father Joseph had sent him
to prepare for his campaign against
Madame de Chevreuse many years
before. He did not linger long at
this retreat. No doubt his reflec-
tions were for the most part upon
Heaven and eternity, but it is hard
to believe that the man's thoughts
did not sometimes stray from the
paths of pious meditation, that now
and then some flicker of fancy did not
light up for him the stirring past.
A stern face may have glanced at
him from beneath its red biretta, a
soldierly figure with spurs jingling
under priestly robes may have swept
through the penitent's dreams, and
brought back memories of Richelieu.
And the other Cardinal, Signer Fac-

chino of the close fist and furtive eye,
did not Rochefort think of him ?
Marie Michon de Chevreuse, was she
forgotten? Stout Charles D'Artagnan,
with his Gascon swagger, came he
never to curse Mazarin in the Capu-
chin's cell ? Be sure that all of them
were there, all the old foes and old
friends, to keep Brother Cesar's knees
from his priedieu, and to summon
forth his blood for a last sortie from
its beleaguered citadel.

During the early spring of 1687
the Comte de Rochefort died peace-
fully in his cell, and was laid to rest
among the brethren in the convent-
garden of the Rue St. Honore.

GERALD BRENAN.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1901.

QUEEN VICTORIA.

THE splendid simplicity with which
the mortal frame of Queen Victoria
was borne to its rest a few weeks
ago was wisely typical and nobly
appropriate. A more august assem-
blage could hardly be conceived. The
Queen's colleagues on the thrones of
Europe, her own great princely family,
the high officials of the realm, the
bearers of historic names, the flower
of English life, all came to celebrate
the obsequies of their Sovereign. But
far more precious than the stately
ceremonial was the heartfelt emotion
which thrilled the majestic concourse.
The pulse of personal devotion beat
strongly, almost fiercely, behind the
Imperial solemnity, and men bent in
grief and wonder and awe as at the
grave of a Mother in Israel. Happy
in life and death is the Monarch who
can thus deserve and win and retain
her people's love !

Greatness often defies analysis. It
may be impossible to define it, but
it is there. It does not consist in
genius, in intellectual ability, in rich
endowments of mind or body, in
worldly station, even in strength of
will ; though it may be found united
with each or all of these, it is some-
times independent of any of them.

How, it may be asked, did one
whose mind was more shrewd than
acute, who was distinguished more
for sense than for subtlety, who
framed no far-reaching schemes of
policy, whose ideal was precise rather
No. 497. — VOL. LXXXIII.

than wide, who was not endowed
with great gifts of personal beauty,
who never aimed at attracting or
impressing, how did such a one tread
so surely a path of danger and diffi-
culty, rise superior to all political
intrigues or social misunderstandings,
and attain unspoiled a height of
glory such as it has been given to
few if any mortals to hold ? The
answer is that this was done instinc-
tively and unconsciously, as all great
things are done. Queen Victoria
played her part so magnificently be-
cause she never played a part at
all. She was herself, — pure, mag-
nanimous, simple, loving, and sincere.
In that wise heart there was not a
particle of vanity, egotism, or personal
ambition. She looked and said, saw
and did, not what the occasion
demanded, but exactly what she felt
and thought ; and thus she made the
occasion, because she did not wait
upon it. There are different kinds
of genius. One is apt to demand of
genius that it should burn and glow,
that it should captivate and over-
whelm. But there is a secret and
patient form of genius, which reveals
itself slowly, not in audacious thought
or burning word, but in the simple
acts of daily life. No one that was
brought into contact with the
Queen ever doubted her inherent
greatness. She had the genius of
sincerity.

Much might be written about the

Y

322

Queen Victoria.

part which the Queen played in
politics. Of course theoretically a
constitutional sovereign has little more
than a right of veto, and it is as-
sumed that this is not to be arbi-
trarily used. Such a sovereign is
the representative of the people, the
interpreter of the nation's will, per-
manent and hereditary as representing
the stable element which lies beyond
and behind the shifting currents of
party politics. It is understood that
the monarch never inaugurates a policy,
and that the theory of the veto is
only that it might conceivably be
used when the sovereign, so to speak,
can read the people's mind better than
they can read it themselves. It could
theoretically be used, for instance, if
a nation were to be affected by some
violent gust of emotion or excite-
ment, and a wise sovereign might see
that the national representatives were
committing themselves to a course
that they would be bound ultimately
to regret. But such is not the tem-
per of the English people. Rather
they are characterised . by a certain
indolence of strength, which refuses
to act until it is absolutely necessary.

But the Queen never precipitated
political crises ; indeed it may be said
that the more her influence consoli-
dated itself, the more real and deep
that it became, the less did she care
to take any decided and independent
action.

In the lifetime of the Prince Con-
sort she even claimed and used the
power to dismiss particular Ministers,
but the tendency of later years has
been to leave the details of politics
alone in the hands of responsible
statesmen, and to be herself a gentle
controlling influence, vigilant, shrewd,
faithful, guiding rather than de-
manding, and imperceptibly affecting
the tendency of legislation rather
than interfering with the minutiae of
politics.

The knowledge that everything of
importance must be submitted to the
Queen, the fact that her own political
knowledge was so large and accurate,
the certainty that she would take a
decided view of certain proposals and
would ask penetrating questions, — all
these no doubt modified unconsciously
the form as well as the spirit of the
legislation laid before her for sanc-
tion.

In particular the influence that the
Queen has wielded in the cause of
peace cannot be over-estimated. She
had an instinctive horror of war, and
partly by direct means and partly by
the immense influence which she pos-
sessed, owing in part to family ties
and in part to native force of char-
acter, in various European courts, — a
force of which the devoted tenderness
shown for her memory by the German
Emperor is a touching and inspiring
proof — she intervened successfully at
many an acute crisis, in order to
throw the weight of her revered char-
acter and powerful personality on the
side of peace. In the TRENT affair,
for instance, in 1861, she caused
bellicose despatches to be remodelled,
in such a way that war, which might
have been rendered inevitable, could
be avoided by the Federal Govern-
ment of the United States without
loss of prestige. Again, in 1864,
when there was an imminent prospect
of this country being drawn into war
with Austria and Prussia by the
suggested intervention in favour of
Denmark, the Queen, by her private
influence with leading politicians on
both sides of the House, contrived
to avert what might have been a
national disaster, though the feeling
of the country was decidedly in
favour of war.

Yet the Queen's desire for peace
was no morbid prepossession. Once
convinced of the fatal necessity, once
clear as to the duty of war, she

Queen Victoria.

323

neither looked aside nor back, but
stepped out upon the path of destiny,
with unfailing tenderness for inevit-
able suffering, and with unceasing
emotion at the tale of any and every
chivalrous or gallant deed done in her
name by her soldiers and sailors.

It was a life of labour from first
to last. Not only was she officially
informed of all important political
matters both at home, in India, and
in the Colonies, but she mastered
them in all their bearings. Owing
to her mental grasp, her clearness of
view, and her extraordinary memory,
and to the fact that all her informa-
tion was first-hand, punctual, and
reliable, she was probably in her later
years one of the most learned politi-
cians in Europe. It was this know-
ledge of politics both wide and
minute that especially impressed Mr.
Gladstone. But all this could not
be done without industry and business-
like habits. The Queen was the soul
of method, and her day was laid out
not from the point of view of amuse-
ment or recreation, but all was sub-
ordinated to work, and all her
leisure-hours were spent so as to
minister to effectiveness and vigour.
Her work as a ruler together with
her attention to details of domestic
administration left her little time for
more leisurely pursuits. Moreover
the necessity for abundant air and
exercise, which probably contributed
much to her bodily vigour, made a
further claim upon the day. Yet she
loved literature and the arts. She
was widely read and fond of poetry ;
she was a competent artist in water-
colours, especially fond of music and
had a shrewd and critical judgment
of it. She herself wrote an original
and characteristic style, impressive
from its absolute directness and sim-
plicity. She was well advised when
she allowed some portions of her diary
to be published, because she thereby

gave many of her subjects, who must
otherwise have known her only as
an august figure moving in a certain
hushed seclusion, a glimpse into the
life and thoughts of an active, affec-
tionate, and religious woman. Her
social powers were great, owing to
her personal interest and her ready
memory. But she was instinctively
a shy woman; she expanded easily
in the presence of those who, with
a simplicity like her own, could be
natural and unembarrassed without
losing the respectful decorum which
was her due. For to anything like
familiarity she gave scanty shrift,
and could rebuke it with a natural
dignity which had no trace of per-
sonal resentment. It is characteris-
tically recorded of her that, in answer
to an indiscreet question about certain
historical treasures at Windsor and
the manner of their acquisition, she
replied after a short pause, which
gave point to the reply, " I inherited
them." And yet no one was ever
more ready to value a true and
respectful sympathy ; after the touch-
ing interview which took place
between the Queen and Lord Tenny-
son at Osborne it is notable to find
the Queen recording her gratitude for
" his kindness " to her.

In later days, indeed, she seems to
have soared into a higher region of
tranquil and serene goodness. The
vehemence of her nature died away,
but she did not lose, as the old so
often lose, her capacity for emotion.
She felt, it is known, the events of
the past year very deeply, but it was
without a trace of morbidness. She
would not have her house made a sad
house. No one brought into contact
with her can ever forget the adorable
sweetness and benevolence of these
latter years. Her beautiful smile,
her silvery youthful voice, the reality
which she infused into what might
have been but current compliments
Y 2

324

Queen Victoria.

the ever-widening circle of those for
whom she cared, — all this is like a
gracious aureole crowning a reverend
head.

The Queen combined with all her
tenderness and capacity for deep
and devoted affection a remarkable
tenacity of purpose and strength of
will. In her own court and in her
own household her rule was absolute
and unquestioned. Her orders were
meant to be obeyed, and were
obeyed, exactly, promptly, and pre-
cisely. She was capable of showing
a just and grave severity, tempered
in later days with a tender benevo-
lence, which made it impossible to
deviate a hair's breadth from her will.
She often preferred to communicate
her orders in writing so that the
record might stand for future refer-
ence. The result of this in all domes-
tic and family matters was to relieve
her circle of responsibility. What
she said was to be, was ; and she
was the first to value, as she was the
first to exact, strict and loyal obedi-
ence. It will be evident that this
might have led to painful and
strained situations had she not also
had the power of evoking an extra-
ordinary personal devotion ; and fur-
ther, what made obedience to the
Queen's will a delightful and con-
genial task was the example set in
this matter by those nearest to her-
self. It is known, and it deserves
to be known, that his Majesty the
King discharged his filial duty with
consummate tact and unswerving
devotion. He lightened the Queen's
heavy load by unceasing and unos-
tentatious unselfishness, and his loyal
deference to the Queen's authority is
not the least of his claims upon the
regard and admiration of his subjects.

Moreover the Queen united to her
benevolent firmness an extraordinary
grasp of detail. There was no house-
hold matter, however slight, but had

to be referred to her for decision.
Not only had she the royal memory
for names and faces, and the capacity
for summoning up in a moment the
personal history of anyone with whom
she was brought, however slightly, in
contact, but this minute knowledge
of facts extended to her subordinates
and servants, Nothing escaped her
notice. She knew exactly how every-
one was employed in her army of
domestics, and was acquainted with
the smallest detail of their life and
circumstances. The combination of
the two forces was irresistible. While
she could sternly rebuke any neglect
of duty, and viewed any moral lapse
among her dependants with severity,
she never for an instant forgot the
human interest, and there was prob-
ably no living person who was at once
so faithfully and devotedly served.

One word may be said of a marked
characteristic of the Queen, — her ex-
traordinary shrewdness. Her judg-
ments of people were acute, original,
and profound. She was seldom de-
ceived. She could penetrate behind
what was superficial, and was quick to
discern the native worth of a character.
All that she demanded was that there
should be reality and solidity of
temperament, and if her confidence
was given, it was given frankly and
unreservedly. She never hesitated to
criticise, and expected that her criti-
cism should be received in the candid
spirit in which it was given. This
gave the Queen her extraordinary
power as an adviser. She allowed
exactly enough, and not too much, for
public opinion ; she saw right into
the heart of a question, and she was
hardly ever wrong. She instinctively
divined the right way to act, and had
a unique power of foreseeing contin-
gencies. The result was that those
nearest to her consulted her fre-
quently, and never regretted following
her advice.

Queen Victoria.

325

It is interesting to note the changes
which time and eventful years wrought
in the Queen's face. In early days
there was great charm, sweetness
joined to vivacity ; latterly, since her
Majesty appeared more in public, the
superficial expression was that of great
sadness, especially at a distance. It
was the face of one who bore heavy
burdens with strength and dignity.
But seen nearer the expression was
rather of gravity than sadness, as of
one who stood in the centre of great
events and great problems, who pon-
dered deeply the issues of large things,
and who had been brought closely
into contact with the most sacred
mysteries of life and death. But the
vivacity that was so strong in the
Queen showed itself in her quick
gestures and motions, and her face
was wonderfully irradiated by a smile
sometimes of gracious kindness and
sometimes of acute and penetrating
humour. This latter quality the
Queen enjoyed in large measure. She
was a quick observer of men and
manners, and nothing escaped her.
There are many social occasions in
the lives of great dignitaries, when
the natural embarrassment which be-
sets humanity in the presence of
exalted personages becomes painful
and even grotesque. A sense of
humour is needed to rescue such
situations from the region of dis-
composure, and there is no quality
which helps people to become at ease,
or which unites humanity so simply
by a common bond, as the conscious-
ness of humorous perception ; it breaks
through conventional stiffness and re-
stores tranquility to awestruck nerves,
and the isolation in which the Queen
necessarily lived tended naturally to
increase the awe which her position
inspired. It was of great importance
that officials and others brought into
contact with the Queen should be
able to speak freely, openly, and

naturally. To combine this freedom
with perfect respect requires innate
tact ; but the task was made infinitely
easier by the Queen's eminently human
qualities, and by her interest in any-
thing which betrayed or revealed the
personal characteristics of her inter-
locutor.

The Jubilee of 1887 was not only
an event of wonderful historical in-
terest, but it revealed the Queen in
a new light. She found then that,
though age brings physical disabili-
ties, yet it removes a certain nervous-
ness and agitation which is apt to
beset sensitive and highly organised
natures when high and dignified
functions have to be discharged. She
recognised the intense pleasure that
her appearance gave to her devoted
subjects ; she also is said to have
found such appearances far less trying
and fatiguing than she had pre-
viously done. The love of privacy
is hard for a sovereign to gratify,
and at one time the Queen could
not bear the strain of public cere-
monies ; but, as we have said, the
year 1887 seemed to mark an epoch
in the Queen's life ; she emerged
from her seclusion ; she received more
guests ; she gave frequent little enter-
tainments, musical and theatrical, at
Windsor, and invited her neighbours
freely to attend them ; and though in
the last years the strain of prolonged
conversation became greater, yet the
actual effort of meeting and convers-
ing with strangers and taking part
in public ceremonies seems to have
diminished if not disappeared.

It is probably not an exaggeration
to say that no human being has ever
in the history of the world been more
widely known and loved than Queen
Victoria.

Photography, telegraphy, and the
press have made it possible for mil-
lions of human beings to have a per-
sonal knowledge, so to say, of great

326

Queen Victoria.

public characters. Moreover in nations
nurtured under monarchical institu-
tions there is an innate interest in
royal personages which is not inspired
by the greatest patriots or the most
brilliant statesmen. To comprehend
the greatness of political personages
a certain intellectual standard is re-
quired : a great soldier touches the
popular imagination very widely ;
but the simplest child in the great
dominion of England comprehends
however dimly what a Sovereign is.
Thus not only were her Majesty's
features familiar to the youngest of
her subjects, but her movements were
chronicled in the furthest part of the
Empire almost as soon as they took
place. Moreover her character, her
tastes, her views were exactly those
that appealed to the homeliest mind.
A simple tender-hearted woman,
crowned and throned in a splendid
isolation, keenly interested in the
domesticities of family life, and with
a heart for all, — a heart that re-
sponded instantaneously and instinc-
tively to any story of suffering or

grief — these were the elements of the
majestic triumph which the Queen
won over the interest and affections
of small and great.

The greatest things of life are also
the simplest. The thought .of the
great Queen is not only a fruitful
memory, an imperishable gain, but she
leaves an ideal behind her to which the
great Empire which mourns her will
do well to be true. We shall mourn
her best, and as she would have
wished to be mourned, if we go on our
way rejoicing that such an example,
such an ideal, has been left to us.
We shall think gratefully of that long
and vigorous life, filled with honour
and love, and crowned by what is the
supreme felicity of all. With no loss
of mental vigour, with a tenderness
which grew and blossomed in fairest
flower to the very end, she was called
in a moment, without suffering and
without fear, to the inheritance which
belongs to all the Children of Light
who have done their duty simply and
faithfully, and whose love has been
deep and wide.

327

THE COINAGE OF WORDS.

THE purity of our national coinage
of money is very carefully safeguarded
by the State. Standards of pure gold
and silver are prepared by the most
competent experts, and in comparison
with these the coinage of each year
is with infinite pains and skill tested
by a jury of the Goldsmiths' Com-
pany, who voluntarily discharge in a
most efficient manner a duty which
is of great service to the community.
The result is that the measures of
our commercial exchange are beyond
assail, and are admitted to be so in
all parts of the world. Not only our
sovereigns but our silver tokens also
are everywhere accepted as pure, and
the theoretical metallurgist joins with
the practical merchant in their praise.

Far different is the case with our
coinage of words. The maintenance
of the purity of our language is
the concern of no one. No experts
attempt any standardisation. In spite
of the fact that the language of Great
Britain is steadily and powerfully
invading all civilised countries, the
duty devolves upon no competent
authority of opposing the slightest
check upon the inroads made upon
its excellence by the carelessness
or ignorance of those who thrust
spurious coins of intellectual exchange
into public use.

And yet it is very important that
all new words should be created
with the greatest care. Exchange of
thought can only be usefully con-
ducted by measures with regard to
whose value there can be no dis-
pute. This is especially the case in
a language the grammatical construc-
tion of which contributes so strongly

to ambiguity as does ours. It is
very difficult to form a sentence in
English capable of only one inter-
pretation, even when the simplest
and clearest substantives are em-
ployed. The difficulty is far greater
where words are used the connota-
tion of which is open to any doubt.
Lord Salisbury, in a speech at Oxford
in August, 1894, said : "If competent
men of science seem to differ widely
from each other, it is because they
do not accurately understand the
meaning of the words they are respec-
tively using." I feel strongly the
importance of the mischief to which
he alluded. Commercial exchange
is facilitated by the purity of our
coins. Exchange of ideas is impeded
by the carelessness with which our
words are framed. As the spheres
in which the exchange of thought is
necessary grow with the increase of
knowledge, the development of new
sciences, and the cultivation of new
fields of learning, the evil becomes
greater, and the harm which is pro-
duced by the appearance of disagree-
ment, when all that exists is
misapprehension, becomes of more
and more consequence not to men
of science alone, but also to men
concerned with the practical adminis-
tration of affairs.

I fear that some of our competent
men of science are great sinners in
this respect. In the nature of things
they must invent, and freely invent ;
but there is no reason why they
should allow freedom to degenerate
into license, and there is every reason
for the exercise of far more caution
than they display. I first take a

328

The Coinage of Words.

few instances from the efforts of the
geologists. Many years ago I en-
deavoured to make myself acquainted
with the alphabet, I dare not even
say the rudiments, of their most
fascinating science. In early hours
I came across the words palaeozoic and
kainozoic, and whatever I thought of
a classification based on metaphor
(for for) is not a word which would
be applied to a rock), I fancied
myself capable of understanding what
was meant to be conveyed by these
predicates. Almost immediately I
was confronted with the word eocene
which puzzled me. What connection
there could possibly be between any
division of the earth's surface and
an evening meal in the East I failed
to grasp ; nor could I see why there
could be a sudden passing from Greek
to Latin as a source of phrase. For
a moment pliocene and miocene gave
me no light. Plio conveyed no
meaning and seemed to have no con-
nection with supper. A kind friend,
learned in conglomerates, relieved my
ignorance and I gathered that the
word that had been anglicised into the
first part of kainozoic was that which
was anglicised into the last part of
eo, plio, pleisto, and mio-cene, and
that from the first portion of two
of these four words an important
e had been omitted. Marvelling
greatly, but impressed with the im-
portance which I felt to be attached
to Greek origin, I soon lit upon
the word phonolite. Once more I
was at my wits' end. Vocal prayer
seemed to me to have no connection
with anything in which geologists
were interested, and I asked myself
whether any social or theological
incident could have given a special
name to a particular article or class
of articles. My conglomerate friend
once more came to the rescue and
pointing out the absence of an I
explained that the word merely meant

a rock which when fresh and com-
pact has a metallic (should it not be
vocal ?) ring under the hammer.

Now etymologically I object, and
I do not think my objection is
pedantic, to the form which these
words have assumed. Having adopted
kainozoic it would have been as easy
to adopt pleiokaine or even pleioctene
as to wander to pliocene, and if (^covrj
was to be used to describe a quality
of making a metallic sound under a
hammer, the word might with advan-
tage have been phonolith instead of
phonolite.

But this is not the gravamen of
the objection to the formation of the
words. Their main fault is in the
vagueness of their connotation. " One
of the chief sources," says Mill in his
SYSTEM OF LOGIC, "of lax habits of
thought is the custom of using con-
notative terms without a distinctly
ascertained connotation, and with no
more precise notion of their meaning
than can be loosely collected from
observing what objects they are used
to denote." Now what distinctly
ascertained connotation is there in
such words as dawn-new, old-life, more-
new, less-new, voice-stone 1 Geologists
wish their science to be as exact as
they can make it. One of the ablest
of them writes that " the geologist
will ascertain if he can the age of
the strata " he is examining. But
to what induction or inference does
the use of such a purely relative
phrase as miocene contribute any-
thing 1 " Every general name," says
Mill, "should have a meaning steadily
fixed and precisely determined." What
precisely determined meaning has
miocene or even palaeozoic ? If it
can be clearly laid down when paleeo
becomes meso and meso becomes kaino,
why not use some phrase which makes
the distinction clear ? If not, why
endeavour to veil inexactitude under
sonorousness ? Much the same objec-

The Coinage of Words.

329

tion applies to Jurassic and triassic.
Neither connotes any attribute ; the
former is local, and the latter numeri-
cal in its origin. Of both (without
any desire to be frivolous) I ask what
possible meaning is there in the termi-
nation 1 And of the latter I ask why
go to such an ambiguous word as
rplas when rpet? is equally available 1
I cannot help thinking that for tech-
nical experts it would have been
better if such important words as I
have mentioned had been more care-
fully coined ; and I am sure it would
have been so for the ordinary folk,
to whom a moderate understanding
of the rudiments of geological science
must be of immense advantage.

The electricians have necessarily
been inventive. Their science is still
young. Professor Perry, at a recent
dinner, described electrical engineering
as a baby the development of which
no one of its nurses could prophesy,
and it is a privilege of nurses to have
a special language of their own. Not
even the greatest purist has any
reason to complain if new terms are
rapidly introduced into a new school
of thought. All that he can reason-
ably ask is that the selection of those
terms should be determined more by
the judgment of competent authority
than by the peculiarities and idiosyn-
crasies of individual thinkers, and
that at the earliest possible moment
the precise connotation of every term
should be, as carefully as circum-
stances permit, defined by the best
available judges. Many of the
terms adopted by electricians in
early days had a purely personal
origin. Ohm, ampere, volt, watt,
are all taken from the names of
great men. To this no objection
lies ; but it was long before ohm,
ampere, and volt were authoritatively
defined, and it was, I believe I am
right in saying, in this country that
their meaning first received statutory

interpretation. For many years the
phrase electrical fluid was constantly
employed, and I venture to think
that no little confusion of thought
arose in consequence. At any rate
its use was abandoned. Even now
however the word current is habi-
tually used ; and it appears to me
open to the careful logician to ask
whether this term connotes in the
best possible way that which is one
factor in the operation of an energy.
In some fear too and trembling, and
not without dread of such a retort as
that of the professional cricketer who,
asked why a certain ball was called
a yorker, answered, " Why, what else
would you call it 1 " — I ask whether it
is quite clear that the adoption, at
the instance of individuals of great
ability, of such a word as electron
contributes to clearness of research.
Faraday was most careful, and took
high etymological as well as scientific
advice, before he adopted the words
anode and cathode. It is open to
question whether the inventors of
electron are agreed as to what they
intend to convey. The first idea of
the word seems to have been a minute
corpuscle having an electric charge ;
it now seems to be a charge without
a corpuscle. I cannot help recalling
Lewis Carroll's well-known question
whether any one, knowing of a cat
without a grin, ever knew of a grin
without a cat ? If electron were to
come into general use I am by no
means sure that it would not tend to
dominate the ideas of men, who em-
ployed it, in a very doubtful direction.
I am certain that this has been the
effect of the general use of the word
electricity itself. Such a phrase as
" the electricity passed safely to
earth," common enough even among
careful thinkers in early days, used
without hesitation even now by care-
less thinkers, has facilitated the con-
tinuance of an erroneous and mis-

330

The Coinage of Words.

chievous conception even if it did not
at first impede the practical develop-
ment of a valuable science. If I go on
twisting one end of a long rope until it
turns a slender bar placed across the
other end, I do not say, and I do not
think, that twisticity passes along the
rope.

But there are faults of omission as
well as of commission. No one has
discovered a word to express the Tinit
of supply of electrical energy which
is adopted in Acts of Parliament,
namely, one thousand amperes at the
pressure of one volt for one hour. It
is commonly called a Board of Trade
unit or a Supply unit, both incon-
venient if not cumbrous terms. Some
years ago I endeavoured to obtain
leave to refer to it in the Provisional
Orders of the Board of Trade as a
kelvin ; but for reasons which I was
unable to gainsay Lord Kelvin wished
that it should not be so, and in such
a matter of course his wish was law.
Nor has any word been discovered
to differentiate the movement of an
electric launch in water or an electric
carriage on a road from the movement
of a vehicle propelled by animal power
or steam. For a machine in which
the power of propulsion is self-con-
tained, the development of which may
in a few decades if not in a few years
entirely revolutionise our methods of
travelling, the unsatisfactory word
motor is rapidly obtaining currency.
It is better than the hopeless mongrel
automotor, but it is not a good word ;
and for my own part only I cannot
help thinking that some such phrase
as kion or autokion would have been
preferable, for tclcov is a good Homeric
participle. If motor remains it will
breed derivatives. Even now the
driver of a motor is in some parts of
the United States called a motoneer,
a word which I earnestly hope will
not swell our transatlantic imports.

I might multiply instances from

other sciences. In marine biology
for example the eggs of fishes which
are deposited low in the water of the
sea are called demersal, those which
are deposited on the surface are called
pelagic, a clumsy distinction with no
sound etymological origin. In medi-
cine the term catarrh is misleading ;
the use of such a general word as
influenza for a malignant specific
disease has contributed much to the
prevalence of the many evil influences
of fright on weak humanity ; such
a phrase as cachexia is another in-
stance of veiling inexactitude by
sonorousness, and several well-known
diseases, which for obvious reasons
I will not mention, are hopelessly and
incontestably misnamed. But I prefer
not to pursue further this portion of
the subject, first because highly tech-
nical terms are comparable to such
rare coins as the gold five-pound piece,
the two-pound piece, and the silver
penny, legal tender indeed and as such
to be kept pure, but not in general
circulation; and secondly because I
have no desire to be understood as
thinking that modern technical terms
are generally or even largely bad.
Far from thinking this the case, I
have the greatest admiration for the
care which has in many instances
been bestowed in the coinage of, for
instance, such new words as antiseptic ;
and though I think that Mill went
a little too far when he said, in
reference to technical terms, that the
complex frond of the fern Hymeno-
phyllum Wilsonii is exactly conveyed
by the phrase, "fronds rigid pinnate,
pitinse recurved subunilateral, pinna-
find, the segments linear undivided,
or bifid spinuloso-serrate," at any rat
if by exactly he meant perfectly, yet
1 have no general complaint to make
of the measures adopted by modern
men of science for interchange of
ideas between themselves. I only
plead for extreme caution when they

The Coinage of Words.

originate a word likely to pass into
general use. Thus I have no quarrel
with my chemical friends in regard to
betanapholtrisul phonic or even phenyl-
amidonapholmonosulphonic acid, nor
with my Welsh friends for calling
a village Llanfairpwligwngyllgoger-
chwynydrobullllandisiliogogerch. I
may think it a clumsy method of
word-making to pile up a long list
of ingredients, as did Aristophanes
when he laughed at such a method
in the ECCLESIASUZ^E ; but neither
word is likely to pass into general
use or become current coin of the
realm, and if a limited number of
persons determine to use solely among
themselves a peculiar method of ex-
change, they do no harm provided
they make no attempt to press it
upon other people.

Very much the same view applies
to what is commonly called slang.
If the limited circulation of technical
terms may be compared to the use
of cattle and sheep as measures of
exchange in more or less pastoral
communities, the use of slang may be
compared to the cowries of primitive
commerce. The cowries pass current
among people of limited experience
and small intellectual capacity. It
is very rarely that a slang word obtains
a permanent place in our habitual
language. A limited number of per-
sons have spoken and thought of
London policemen as bobbies and
peelers, and still a more limited number
speak of them as coppers ; but no one
of the three words is ever likely to
become a part of our regular speech.
The same may be said of pop, fizz,
the boy, and the warrior, all of which
terms have been during the last
quarter of a century applied to
champagne; their use is as evanes-
cent as the sparkle of the wine they
refer to. The position of the word
boycott is slightly different. It did
fill an empty gap, and it may there-

fore possibly last. But even so I
doubt whether any future revisers of
the New Testament will substitute for
the old reading, " The Jews have
no dealings with the Samaritans,"
the phrase, " The Jews boycott the
Samaritans," idiomatic though the
translation may be.

Some war-correspondents, and even
some officers in authority, have
lately referred to a certain class of
ordnance as pom-poms, and to another
class as quick-firing guns. The
former is a pure nickname with no
connotation whatever, except that
arising from a not very accurate
reference to sound ; the latter is an
attempt to designate a particular
class by an attribute which it shares
with many other classes. It is to
be hoped that neither word will
obtain a permanent place in our
language.

A journalist of great ability re-
cently defended an effort which he
had made to introduce the French
word camelots as applicable to street-
vendors of penny toys and trinkets.
I hope it will not be deemed incon-
sistent with the admiration I feel for
his journal if I venture the opinion
that the word is not likely to become
generally and lastingly current. The
word-making efforts of members of
smart London society have nowadays
little effect, much less than was the
case fifty or sixty years ago when the
literary influence of men and women
of high position was considerable.
The word luncheon, whether it is or
is not a corruption of nuncheon or
noonmeal, may have had some such
origin. A few years ago the word
five-o' 'docker seemed likely to be
permanently adopted in Paris, as
ennui has been here. But I cannot
suppose that the mongrel word
brunch for a meal combining break-
fast and lunch, which has recently
shown signs of temporary popularity,

332

The Coinage of Words.

is likely to be accepted as true coin
in either capital.

From the realm of sport our
language has permanently adopted
many useful words and phrases.
Goal, originally the end of a race-
course, is now the end of all sorts of
strife. To rise, or a rise, from angling
refers to the result of any lure. To
win off his own bat is applied to
many other forms of victory than
those of cricket. But there is no
reason why we should adopt from
golf the word bunker to express any
difficulty or niblick for the instru-
ment with which we escape it.

As I have said, there is little fault
to be found with the employment of
special words or phrases by limited
societies for their own exchange of
thought. The love of complicated
names which influences biologists of
all classes does not do much harm to
the language, unless an attempt is
made to introduce ill-chosen words
into common use. A British game-
keeper or a British naturalist may
study the habits of the woodcock
without being aware of or approving
the name Scolopax msticula ; but if
that name were pressed into general
use the epithet would be open to
comment, and the question would
arise whether any distinction was
intended between Scolopax rusticula
and Scolopax urbana. The study of
many sciences is perhaps rendered
difficult to the beginner by the some-
what arbitrary nomenclature used, —
for instance, it cannot encourage the
student to find that the North
American woodcock is not Scolopax
at all but Philohela minor — and I
cannot help suspecting that the
spread of knowledge would be greatly
facilitated were names selected more
carefully and with less absolute de-
pendence on individual judgment
than they are at present. But that
is not the point on which I desire

to dwell. The reckless nomenclature
of science, if reckless it be, does
not affect the general purity of the
language ; it may, and probably
does, impede the spread of accurate
knowledge, but it does no public
harm. If some ladies in London
society like to talk to each other of
such mysteries as undies, frillies, and
cossies, and to refer to favourite
persons or things as divey, they (pre-
sumably) amuse each other without
injury to the general language of the
realm.

So it is with various forms of
slang. Thieves or tramps may with
some profit to themselves use a
dialect largely composed of words
arbitrarily chosen and of no value
whatever except to a limited class.
The mischief of which I complain
only begins when men of literary
influence attempt to obtain general
currency for words not wanted, ill-
formed, and attractive only from a
temporary glamour of novelty. In
barrack-room ballads or stories there
is no particular objection to repeated
reference to Mr. Tommy Atkins ; but
when serious writers and speakers
show a tendency to call the private
soldiers of the British Army Tommies,
it is time to protest against a mis-
chievous, useless, and vulgar inno-
vation. Dandy, originally a slang
word, has obtained a currency which
maccaroni entirely failed to achieve.
Mash and masher, on the contrary,
after a brief and inglorious exist-
ence have passed into well-deserved
oblivion. The detestable word boss
had an unwholesome origin across
the Atlantic, and any effort to
make it legal tender here should
be sternly resisted.

I might multiply instances of
attempts to introduce new measures
of thought which have been care-
lessly and imperfectly framed ; but
I pass on to say a few words with

The Coinage of Words.

333

regard to another danger besetting
our intellectual exchange, I mean
the recklessness with which well-
defined words are used with a wrong
connotation. Time, change of habits,
and the development of new ideas
or even modes of thought, are factors
which must necessarily alter all
languages ; but our language has
reached so advanced a stage that
attempts to restrict or extend the
meaning of our current words should
be strenuously resisted. The limita-
tion of such words as pagan, priest,
ecclesiastical, prevent, is an accom-
plished fact : any restoration of their
original and more extended meaning
is past praying for ; but there is no
reason why changes should be lavishly
adopted without caution and without
care, or why the megalomania of
careless writers, or the subtle form
of exaggeration which apes restraint,
should operate unchecked.

To call an ordinary snowstorm a
blizzard is a mischievous exaggera-
tion, because it introduces an entirely
false comparison between two widely
different phenomena. The ignorance
which says of the greeting of a
popular hero, " It was not merely
a triumph it was an ovation," is also
baneful because it completely per-
verts the relation of two words of
well-known origin, the true distinction
of which it is useful to maintain, and
the meaning of which ought to be
easily understood, for it requires
little classical reading to know that
an ovation was an inferior triumph
granted in Rome when the circum-
stances did not justify the higher
honour. The use of transpire in
the sense of to happen is as wrong
as it is unnecessary. The compilers
of the 1886 edition of Webster's
Dictionary, after pointing out that it
was of recent introduction in the
United States, added that critics
both there and here censured its use.

It is not wanted, and in the in-
terests of the language it should not
be allowed currency. Useless also
and wrong is the employment of
distinct in the sense of clear or
decided ; nothing could be more
slovenly than to write a distinct
success for decidedly successful, except
to use interview as a verb and any-
way for at all events, perhaps the
worst out of many bad importations
the English language has recently
received from America. Many sound
critics have strongly condemned re-
liable as a synonym for trustworthy.
Its convenience, however, as appli-
cable to things while trustworthy is
applicable to persons, is likely to
prevail over the objections to its
form of construction, and the purist
who would reject it would probably
reject also available and lauyhable,
both of them coins of legal tender.
In a recent communication to an
evening paper I read that " the letter
of A. was punctuated with common
sense," a use of the word punctuate
for which there is neither authority
nor need.

My objection to the careless coin-
age or perverted use of words is
neither etmyological nor metaphysi-
cal. I plead for accuracy, and I
urge all those who, like editors of
our great journals, whether they be
technical or popular, exercise power
of control, to insist on accuracy, be-
cause accuracy conduces to mutual
understanding and thereby to the
spread of knowledge. Whewell, in
his introduction to THE PHILOSOPHY
OF THE INDUCTIVE SCIENCES, says,
" Common language has usually
something of vagueness and indis-
tinctness." Both propositions may
be true, and the truth of them is
a matter for regret; but surely it
follows that the more there is loose-
ness of common language the more
there must be vagueness of common

334

The Coinage of Words.

knowledge, and that therefore it be-
hoves all who have any influence to
diminish the looseness of the one
in order to discourage the vagueness
of the other. Men of science have
everything to gain and nothing to
lose by exact limitation of their
measures of intellectual interchange.
It is their absolute duty to the
public to take heed that all words
introduced by them into general
language shall be as rigorously and
carefully denned as the condition of
their superior knowledge will allow.
They fail, and I say they gravely
fail, in that duty if they allow
technical terms, framed casually
without set purpose and with little
regard to an intellectual and in-
telligible system, to pass into general
currency. Nor can I think the re-
sponsibility of the thousands of
thoughtful and painstaking men and
women who contribute to the higher
portions of our general literature is
less, if by carelessness or indolence
in the use of words they encourage
slovenliness or inaccuracy of thought.
The object which they set, or ought
to set, before themselves in writing
is to place at the disposal of others
the knowledge which they themselves
possess and which they believe to be
of general value, or to urge the de-
ductions derivable from that know-
ledge. This they cannot succeed in
doing if they use terms which they
do not take the trouble to clearly
understand themselves, and which
therefore cannot convey exact mean-
ing to others. As I have said the
English language is steadily per-
vading all civilised countries. Its
influence must vary directly with its
purity. The more intellectually exact
we can make our language the greater
will be the effect of the knowledge

which we desire to diffuse, and the
ideas, economical as well as scientific,
which we seek to inculcate.

From the dangers to which I have
ventured to allude it is not easy to
suggest an efficient safeguard. An
Academical Dictionary, such as has
been attempted elsewhere, is scarcely
possible in this country where no
Academy exists. I have sometimes
thought that such a body as the
Royal Society might do useful work
if they published annually sheets in
which new words intended for general
use were carefully denned, and checks
were imposed on observed changes of
connotation of words commonly cur-
rent. Possibly they might produce
some such effect as that arising in
a wholly different sphere from the
exercise of the discretion of the Com-
mittee of the Stock Exchange in
granting a quotation to the shares
of a new commercial or financial com-
pany. The Committee cannot veto
the incorporation of any new company
which complies with certain legal
requirements, but they can and do
impose a useful check by refusing
a quotation, and a stamp of no little
value by granting one. The idea,
if it were worth anything, would re-
quire to be worked out by more com-
petent minds than mine, especially
having regard to the wide ramifications
of our technical and the enormous
volume of our general literature.
Meanwhile all that can be done at
present is to impress strongly upon
the professors of sciences on the one
hand, and the army of able editors
and writers on the other, the import-
ance of keeping our measures of intel-
lectual exchange as pure as are our
gold and silver coins.

COURTENAY BOYLE.

335

SOME FRENCH PRISONS AND THEIR INMATES.

THE necessary difficulty which exists
in obtaining access to a prison (except
as a malefactor) will account for the
feeling of awe, tempered by curiosity,
with which such institutions are re-
garded by the general public. It is
seldom that this feeling is aroused
into anything approaching animation.
On occasions, however, when the ad-
ministration of English prisons is
criticised, whether by well-meaning
philanthropists or by men who have
had personal, though enforced, ex-
perience of its arrangements, a certain
amount of active interest is aroused ;
and the Man in the Street not
infrequently gives vent to that
anomalous sentiment, to which the
patriotic Briton turns when finding
fault with anything British, — " They
manage these things better abroad."

To such a one the similarity be-
tween the prison-systems of England
and France would possibly be a sur-
prise ; for they are very much alike,
the chief difference being found in the
rewards and encouragements for good
behaviour. In England the well-
conducted prisoner earns various pri-
vileges, and limited gratuities in
money, under what is known as the
Stage System ; in France, privileges
are the same for all, but skill and
industry are rewarded by larger earn-
ings, a portion of which the prisoner
may spend on supplementary articles
of food, and so forth, to be purchased
from the canteen. In both countries
separation is the rule for short terms,
and association for long terms of
imprisonment. Again, the amount
of remission to be earned is one-
fourth of the sentence, in France

after three, in England after six
months. The rule of silence obtains
under both systems, but it appears
to be more strictly enforced in France.
It certainly is so in the short-term
prisons, where the separation amounts
almost to solitude ; and in the others,
the day being spent in workshops,
there is closer supervision, and there-
fore less opportunity for surreptitious
talking, than among our convicts,
who work in parties in the open,
where they are necessarily more
scattered.

In the following short description
of three French prisons, which I have
recently had an opportunity of visit-
ing, my purpose is to set down the
points that struck me most particu-
larly, and thereby to show to anyone
interested in the problems of punish-
ment how a system, similar in general
principles to our own, has been
worked out in a country whose people
are so different from ourselves in
temperament and customs.

The prisons at Fresnes, Poissy, and
Melun, all within easy distance of
Paris, are representative of the three
classes of penitentiary existent in
France, for carrying out respectively
sentences up to one year, from one to
five years, and for periods over five
years ; and each affords an interesting
lesson in system and construction,
showing the somewhat erratic growth
of penal science.

In civilised countries punishment
for crime is either capital or second-
ary. The former is outside the scope
of this paper ; it is in the method of
carrying out the secondary form of
punishment, that is to say, impri-

336

Some French Prisons and their Inmates.

sonment, that divergencies between
different countries and between
different periods are so noticeable.
As to these divergencies, it is as well
to point out that a system may be
all that is admirable when applied to
one country, though useless or harm-
ful in another ; and that the methods
of dealing with criminals a century
ago may have been effective in the
circumstances of that epoch, though
they could not be tolerated to-day.
It is, nevertheless, interesting to
observe the methods of our neigh-
bours in the hope of perhaps finding
something which may suggest an
improvement in our own.

In France, as in England, the
prisons are under the control of a
central authority. There are depart-
mental (answering to our local)
prisons for short sentences, and other
establishments for the reception of
persons sentenced to long periods of
detention, corresponding in the main
with our convict prisons. In detail,
however, there are differences. Eng-
lish local prisons accommodate per-
sons undergoing sentences up to two
years, the convict prisons taking those
sentenced to terms of three years'
penal servitude and upwards. Under
French law criminals may be sen-
tenced to any period, from one day
to life.

In the short-term prisons the system
is strictly separate, and presumably
its perfection may be found at Fresnes.
This prison has been open for less
than two years ; it receives all the
short-term male criminals convicted
in the Department of the Seine, and
in every way is a striking contrast
to the now closed establishments of
Mazas, Ste Pelagie, and la Grande
Roquette, which it has superseded.

First then as to construction. The
star-shape, which held its own for
many years, though admirable for
purposes of surveillance, had one great

disadvantage, in that air and light
are excluded, more or less, from the
cells nearest the centre. At Fresnes
the plan adopted for the prison
proper, — that is, the buildings con-
taining the cells — has been to con-
struct three large halls, running
parallel to each other, connected by
a gallery bisecting them at right
angles. Between these halls are the
exercise-yards, separate compartments
to the number of sixty for each hall,
above each set of which is a bridge,
whence the warder on duty can
observe his charge, and at the same
time is himself under observation.
The cells- are more commodious than
one is accustomed to see, being
approximately thirteen feet by eight,
and nine feet nine inches in height.
They are furnished with an iron bed-
stead fixed to the wall, against which
it folds up, a fixed table, with a chair
attached to the wall by a chain. In
a corner is a convenience constructed
on the most recent sanitary lines.
Over this is the water-tap so placed
that, besides supplying water for
drinking and washing purposes, it
can be used for flushing the receptacle
below. The window is large, and,
although the glass is not transparent,
the light is ample. It can only be
opened by a warder who has the
key, but the top part is under the
control of the prisoner, who can
please himself as to the amount of
air he admits.

The flooring of the cells, as of the
whole building, is polished oak. The
walls are enamelled, and running
round the floor is a gutter of the
same material to prevent the water
or antiseptic solution, with which the
walls may be washed, from trickling
on to the oak Buildings and cells
are lighted by electricity, while an
electric bell can be used to summon
the officer on duty. There is an inlet
for hot air ; and ventilation is con-

Some French Prisons and their Inmates.

337

trolled by the dynamos. In each hall
are five tiers of cells, giving a total
accommodation of fifteen hundred and
twenty-four. In addition to this
accommodation there is a separate
department, where over four hundred
prisoners can be placed in association
in case of emergency ; and there is
also a department, — one hundred and
fifty-four cells, strictly separate — for
the temporary sojourn of men sen-
tenced to long terms, awaiting transfer
to other prisons, or transportation
across the seas.

Before reaching the halls one passes
through a large block containing on
different floors the offices, the recep-
tion-ward, the kitchens, stores, and
electric plant. From this quarter, in
the basement, commence the tram-
lines to all parts of the building,
along which the food and materials
for work are despatched on trolleys
to the different halls, for distribu-
tion. The system of lifts is complete ;
they are used for sending up infirm
prisoners, as well as the trays of food,
to the different landings.

Beyond the halls are the quartier
de correction for the badly behaved,
and the school-chapel. Neither of
these buildings appears to be much
used. The former contains thirty-
two cells ; the latter has two hundred
and fifty-two sittings, separate and
covered, from which the scholar or
worshipper, as the case may be, can
see lecturer or priest, but no one else.
This plan was abolished in English
prisons some years ago, but there
are a few chapels built on these lines
still in existence, though disused. One
may be seen in the abandoned prison
within the walls of the castle at
Lincoln.

So much for a description of this
wonderful penitentiary. My object
has been to give a rough idea of
the prisoners' surroundings. Anyone
who is interested in details can find
No. 497. — VOL. LXXXIII.

them all in the official description
supplemented by plans and drawings,
published by Aulanier et Cie of
Paris.

As regards the prisoners and their
daily life and work, this is what we
find. The system, as I have said, is
separate ; practically it is solitary.
With the exception of the very few
employed in kitchen and laundry they
never see one another, for no ordinary
prisoner is allowed to leave his cell
with head or face uncovered. The
head-covering is a capuchon, or hood,
of white string-like mesh, with
pointed apex, and coming down to
the shoulders, suggestive of the cen-
tral figure at an execution by hanging.
But it is not worn much, for a prisoner
only leaves his cell for exercise and to
receive a visit from his friends, and on
Sundays, if he so desires, to attend
mass or vespers. The latter is not
obligatory, and as the chapel-accom-
modation for two hundred and fifty-
two is found more than sufficient for
a prison-accommodation of fifteen hun-
dred and twenty-four, religious ser-
vices do not appear to attract. Work
occupies about eleven hours a day,
and the occupations are various and
lucrative. A man sentenced to a few
days' imprisonment can earn fifty cen-
times a day, even if quite unskilled,
and though these earnings are not
wholly his property, it is something
to encourage him ; while those with
skill, and knowledge of a trade, can
earn quite a respectable sum.

It may be as well to explain here
the system on which a prisoner's
earnings are divided between himself
and the State. In the case of a man
under sentence for the first time, the
State takes six-tenths, the remaining
four-tenths going to the prisoner. Of
this latter portion two-tenths may be
spent in the canteen, up to a maxi-
mum of fifty centimes a day; while
the remaining two-tenths are carried
z

333

Some French Prisons and their Inmates.

to the reserve fund, — that is, are put
on one side, and given to the earner
on his discharge — or, in certain cases,
the consent of the Minister may be
obtained to its being utilised by depen-
dent relatives outside. For each pre-
vious conviction recorded against a
prisoner the State takes one-tenth
more, up to nine-tenths ; but a mini-
mum of one-tenth is always reserved
for the worker. This rule obtains
generally throughout all French
prisons, whether they be occupied by
short or long sentence prisoners. I
understand that at Fresnes there are
men whose gross earnings amount to
something like five francs a day.

The canteen provides such luxuries
as wine (limited to about half a pint
a day), marmalade, charcuterie, butter,
cheese of all sorts — in fact everything
that a prisoner could reasonably, or
unreasonably, expect, at very low
prices. His wardrobe also may be
replenished on similar terms. Soap,
if required, may be purchased too ; it
is not supplied gratuitously.

This system of payment for work
done tends to industry, goes far to
make gaols self supporting, and en-
courages good conduct. Its feasibility
in this country is out of the question
so long as Trades-Unions are allowed
to maintain their exaggerated views
on the subject of prison-competition
with outside industries. I have seen
in French prisons men making papier-
mache" bodies of dolls, paper-lamp-
shades, chairs, and, in ironmongery,
all sorts of articles de menage.

As has been said, the kitchen and
laundry are worked at Fresnes by
prisoners in association. These are
selected from the men with shortest
sentences. The baking is done by
two free men, assisted by the latest
and most elaborate machinery.

Food is served twice a day, at nine
in the morning and half -past three in
the afternoon. Breakfast consists of a

soup maigre and bread ; dinners are
varied, tasteful, and sufficient.

For relaxation, there is a library of
five thousand volumes, consisting of
all sorts of literature, except romances.

Every prisoner may be visited by
his friends twice a week. These visits
are made in parlours, of which there
are twenty -six on the ground-floor of
each hall, separated from one another
by wooden partitions. The visitor is
introduced by a passage in the base-
ment, and is placed behind iron bars,
the prisoner being behind wire net-
work, and there is an intervening
space. These obstacles prevent the
passing of contrabrand articles, while
supervision is exercised by a warder
on a raised bridge overhead. The
length of the interview depends on
the number of visitors, and averages
from twenty to thirty minutes.
Thursdays and Sundays are the visit-
ing days, and on Sundays also every
prisoner may write a letter. Some-
times the librarians, of whom there
are four, have to examine as many
as five hundred letters.

The infirmary contains eighty-eight
cells ; and there is also a separate
building containing twenty-four cells
for the isolation of infectious cases.
Here again the arrangements are near
perfection. Warmth and ventilation
are obtained, the former by hot air
openings, the latter by the dynamos,
as in the main prison. It is the
prison-hospital for the Department of
the Seine.

Outside and round the walls are
quarters for the entire staff. At the
gate is a guard-room, the guard being
furnished daily from the garrison of
Paris and consisting of an officer and
twenty-four rank and file. Hard by
the gates are the stables and coach-
houses, for all the Paris prisoners are
brought by road from La Sante prison,
whither they are sent back on the
morning of their liberation. This

Some French Prisons and their Inmates.

339

service is performed by half a dozen
vans, built like the " Black Maria "
of London, and nine horses. A
carriage is also kept for the use of the
Director, horsed and driven at the
expense of the State.

So much for Fresnes. If contrast
be required pay a visit to St. Lazare.
It was a convent for a century and a
half, and for nearly a century has been
used as a prison. Its evils, in the
daily and nightly association of female
prisoners, are notorious, and have been
often described. The only other
prisons in Paris are La Sante and the
Conciergerie. The former, principally
for men awaiting trial, is gloomy and
business-like, the latter is more gloomy
but boasts historical associations, in
that both Marie Antoinette and
Robespierre were taken thence to the
guillotine.

Contrast too will be found in the
arrangements at the prison of Poissy
which stands within the little town
of that name, hard by St. Germains.
Like St. Lazare, this was originally
the abode of a religious order, but,
since it was turned to its present use
at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, it has been much altered
structurally. It is one of the six
prisons in France for men undergoing
sentences from one year up to five
years. Such terms are worked out
in association ; anything like a close
comparison with a prison such as
Fresnes is, therefore, out of the ques-
tion. It answers to an English con-
vict prison, — except in the very
important point that the work is all
done in workshops within the walls,
not, as in our convict establishments,
outside.

Here, as at Fresnes, the work is
lucrative : the canteen arrangements
are similar, except that wine cannot
be purchased ; and the prisoners'
earnings are similarly divided.

The system is theoretically good

enough, but structural deficiencies
are against it. Of the thousand in-
mates, six hundred sleep in cubicles,
supplied with a bed and only one
other article of furniture. These
cubicles consist of wooden walls about
six feet and a-half high, covered with
a strong wire netting to prevent
nocturnal wanderings, and the upper
part of each door is equally open.
The remaining four hundred sleep in
dormitories. Order is maintained in
both departments by selected prisoners,
who are denominated prdvots, and are
relieved every two hours during the
night. Comment on such a system
would be superfluous. It is, however,
but fair to say that these arrange-
ments are retained only through want
of funds for the reconstruction of the
buildings.

Meals are eaten in refectories ; the
occupants of each workshop being kept
together at meal-times, as well as at
exercise, and at night.

The library is well supplied, but no
romances are allowed. Prisoners
may not have their books in their
cells, but carry them in their pockets,
and read when they can, at exercise,
or at meal-times.

There are eighteen workshops scat-
tered about the buildings. Among
other industries are chair-making,
brush-making (this prison supplies
brushes for the Army), and tailoring.
Among the workers I was struck
with the large number of youths ;
old, or even middle-aged men, appear
to be in a very small minority.

The religious services at the long-
sentence prisons are popular (as a
distraction, my conductor explained,)
and considering that Sunday is spent
in the workshops when the prisoners
are not being visited, or being shaved
and bathed, or taking walking-exercise,
the explanation seems natural. A
prisoner may write once a month,
and may be visited once a week
z 2

340

Some French Prisons and their Inmates.

Books from the library are changed
weekly.

At the third class of prison which
I have mentioned, where are incar-
cerated men whose sentences are all
over five years in duration, the rules
generally are similar to those which
obtain at Poissy. The prison at
Melun, however, is modern in con-
struction, and, therefore, in organisa-
tion and detail far superior to that at
Poissy. There are but three others
in France, at Beaulieu, Thouars, and
Riom. When I visited Melun the
number of its inmates was about five
hundred, though there is accommoda-
tion for twice that number.

Here one is struck with the ex-
cellent arrangement of the workshops,
situated on either side of a corridor,
running down the middle of one large
building. Printing-work occupies
about one hundred and twenty men ;
the presses are worked by machinery,
and a very large amount of this work
is done for the Government. In each
shop is suspended a notice-board
giving the number of men employed,
and, among other items, showing the
average daily earnings of each man
during the preceding month. I
noticed that the average for the
printers worked out at something
over two francs, and that for the
tailors was about the same. Other
industries are as at Poissy.

At Melun, too, the sleeping accom-
modation is much superior. The
cells are small but they are of brick,
and the top part of each door is
glazed and barred. In addition to
bed and bedding there is a water-jug,
besides other utensils. The cells are
in tiers, in three halls which form
two right angles ; at least that is the
arrangement in the portion of the
prison at present occupied. As I
have said, the general regulations are
as at Poissy, but all the structural
arrangements, exercise-yards, chapels,

&c., are better and more conveniently
placed. The school is a feature here.
There are over one hundred scholars ;
the teachers are prisoners, and the
subjects taught comprise modern lan-
guages, in addition to all the standards
of the French public schools. One
hour a day is devoted to instruction,
and one schoolmaster presides over
the lessons. There is a small band,
which is practised once a week, and
supplies music for the religious ser-
vices. In respect of these, I noticed
that in the classification by religions,
there were nine shown as free-thinkers,
and one as an Israelite. The latter
is regularly visited by a rabbi, for
whose ministrations a small synagogue
is provided.

Passing now from these details to
wider subjects, it is unreasonable to
suppose that unanimity among special-
ists will ever be attained, even for a
time. There will always be two sides
on such broad questions as the relative
benefits and evils attendant on separa-
tion and association of prisoners, the
proportion of energy that should be
directed towards punishment, that is
to say, intimidation, as compared
with reformation ; whether the length
of a sentence should depend on the
crime or on the criminal ; the best
method of dealing with recidivists,
and so on ; these are merely samples
of arguable questions. At different
periods different views are temporarily
paramount, and one country, in its
reforms, follows another, accomplish-
ment generally waiting on the vary-
ing resources of the national treasury.

In France, so long ago as the year
1791, it was decreed that every con-
vict should be kept alone in a cell,
and prevented from all communication
during his sentence ; a decree impos-
sible, for moral and physical reasons,
to be carried out for any length of
time. Over a century later we find
in the prisons which I have described

Some French Prisons and their Inmate*.

341

that things have settled down into
a wide-spreading compromise. The
maximum of separation is nominally
a year, but, allowing for the remis-
sion of sentence usually earned, it is,
practically, only nine months ; on the
other hand, at Poissy, and in less
degree at Melun, freedom of asso-
ciation is recognised to an extent
that is dangerous. Here, in England,
the period of separate confinement is
two years, but we have discarded
the strictness of Fresnes, as demon-
strated in capuchon, and cellular
chapel, and separate exercise-yards ;
and the trend of opinion is towards
still more association.

How much solitude a man can bear
is a matter of individual tempera-
ment ; but laws are made for the
mass, not for the individual, and it
is for the law-makers to embody in
their regulations that which best suits
the average. Discussing this question
with a French prison-official, I men-
tioned the possibilities exemplified by
the years of solitude imposed on
criminals by Belgian law. " That,"
he replied, " may not harm a man of
the Flemish temperament, but for a
Frenchman it would mean insanity."

The same principles hold on the
question of the nature and extent of
relaxations. The library is, in these
days of universal reading, the chief
resource, and in England fiction is
well represented ; in French prisons
it is not allowed, although, curiously
enough, I was told at Fresnes and at
Poissy that an exception existed in
the case of the works of Sir Walter
Scott and Charles Dickens, in trans-
lations of course. But if the French
prisoner is debarred from novel-
reading, his penalty is alleviated by

visits and letters from friends, to a
far greater extent than is the case in
this country, and the solitude of a cell
at Fresnes cannot be so depressing as
it seems, when we recollect that it
may be broken twice a week by a
visit from the outside world.

From conversation with officials I
gathered that discipline in the two
countries is much the same, in both
principle and method of enforcement.
It seems to me, however, that the
native of a land ruled by officialdom
would adapt himself to the stringency
of prison-rules more readily, and
would find them less irksome, than
does the English gaol-bird.

These are the principal points that
impressed an Englishman conversant
with the administration of English
prisons ; on which the opinion is
based that the divergencies between
our system and that of France are of
detail rather than of principle, and
arise from the different conditions of
life in the two countries. In Eng-
land, a solid but uninteresting diet-
ary, observance of religious duties,
methodical reading, regular ablutions,
are characteristic of life outside, as
they are within the walls of prisons;
equally characteristic in the towns
and prisons of France are an intelli-
gent appreciation of good living, dis-
regard of religious ceremony, casual
reading on boulevard or prison
exercise-ground, as the case may be;
while in French prisons, as in French
hotels, soap is not regarded as a
necessity of existence.

I do not think that either country
has much to learn from the other.

CECIL EARDLEY-WILMOT,
Governor of H.M. Prison, Parkhurst.

342

THE SINNER AND THE PROBLEM.
BY ERIC PARKER.

CHAPTER XV.

ALONG the side of the cricket-
ground nearest to the house, and
opposite the walk where I met the
Dusty Lady, ran a path which I had
hardly as yet explored, except earlier
in my visit to note a strip of waste land
and an outhouse or so ; nothing, at
least for my paintbrush, and that is
the measure of most things for such as
I am. But on the afternoon following
my morning with the Lady of the
Lake, urged by some idle impulse,
I turned down this path and, almost
before I had looked ahead of me, met
the Sinner running in the opposite
direction. There was a hot sun on
the country-side that day, as indeed
there had been, praise heaven, most
of that summer ; and the Sinner,
following the custom of the school in
such weather, was attired in a garb
fitting the occasion. He was without
coat or hat, and his flannels were not
over-spotless ; but what struck me at
the moment was that his small sun-
burned arms terminated in two par-
ticularly muddy hands, and that he
carried a spade (also muddy) and a
watering-pot (bespattered with mud).
At the sight of me he pulled up short,
not, however, before the watering-pot
had left its mark. He sought in vain
for a handkerchief to repair damages,
not greatly bettering his appearance
by so doing.

" I didn't mean to splash you," he
said. " The water-can — I suppose it
wasn't quite empty ; it must have
been that little bit that always runs

back into the can when you have done
watering things. I never can quite
empty it, unless I turn it upside down."
Which he proceeded to do, wetting
his stockings appreciably.

" But the watering-pot, Sinner, and
the spade, and those splashed knicker-
bockers, and those very muddy hands,
— what do they mean? What are
you and the Problem doing with
yourselves? And now I come to
think of it, I haven't seen either of
you for two, — three days." For a very
good reason, thought I, and wondered
if the boys guessed it.

" You haven't been anywhere about,
though, have you1? At least, we
couldn't find you. We looked every-
where, the Problem and I. At least,
not to-day — we thought it wasn't any
good. The Problem said you were
down at the lake," he added. " Were
you ? "

" I've made several sketches down
there, as you know, Sinner. Of
course, when the weather's fine — "
But the Sinner looked at me so
earnestly and unsuspiciously that to
him of all people I found it physically
impossible to make excuse.

"Do you like my Aunt's cousin?"
he asked. "The Problem said you
did."

" The Problem ? Is he also among
the prophets ? "

The Sinner looked puzzled. " I
don't know," he said at last. And
seeing that I was laughing he coloured,
as one having shown inexcusable
ignorance.

" But what have you been doing

The Sinner and the Problem.

343

I asked again, and the fresh subject
chased away all thoughts of his un-
answered question.

" Oh, we've been making a garden,
down there, the Problem and I."

Then I saw that the dull strip of
waste land had clothed itself in blue
and green and scarlet ; in a day and
a night, as it seemed to me, for I had
not set eyes on that path since first I
noticed its barrenness, and that, after
all, was like yesterday to one as happy
as I had been. " The whole of that
strip, Sinner 1 "

"Oh no," said he. "Why, those
are the gardens of all the boys in the
school ; at least, all who want gardens.
You see, there's a prize for the best
garden, and the Problem and I
thought we would have one together.
We wanted to tell you, only we
couldn't find you."

" Did you want me to dig, then ? "

" You wouldn't have been allowed
to. It says the gardens must be dug
and planted by the boys themselves.
We wanted to ask you some things,
— at least, we did at first."

" Is it finished, then, the garden ? "

"It's not exactly finished," said
the Sinner ; "at least I expect it will
look better on the day. Of course,
it's been rather hard work, because it
takes a long time getting the water,
and the can is such a big one. That's
why my stockings are so wet, you see,
because the can bumps against your
legs, and then it splashes when you
lift it off the spout of the pump. I
wish I had a little water-can," he
added meditatively. "Some of the
boys have their own cans. Only this
one belongs to everybody, and I can't
always have it. I've done a good
deal of watering, though."

"You have indeed, Sinner. You
might be Apollos, from the look of
you. By the way, where is Paul 1 "

" Paul ? " said the Sinner. " Why,
he left last term. I was glad be-

cause— " he stopped. " But you
never knew Paul, did you ? " His
face became troubled, and I did my
best to look serious again. " I don't
know what you mean," he added
rather hopelessly.

" I meant to say Problem. I don't
know why I said Paul ; I must have
been thinking of something else.
But come, Sinner, I want to see this
garden. Which is it ? That one with
the sweet-peas and the geraniums ? "

The Sinner shook his head. "Oh
no ; that one has been planted a long
time. Ours isn't so far on as that."

A somewhat lanky youth, engaged in
plucking flowers from a well-stocked
plot of ground, glanced up from his
work at this moment, and seeing me
came forward with the offer of a pink
carnation. I accepted it with thanks,
and having made some suitable remark
on the prettiness of his garden, which
appeared to please him mightily,
passed on with the Sinner down the
walk. Almost the same thing hap-
pened a few yards further on, only
this time I was offered by a small fat
boy a sprig of larkspur, evidently in-
tended to join the carnation in my
button-hole. I should have supposed
this effect sufficiently hideous, but
was compelled, before I had extended
my triumphal progress a couple of
feet, further to decorate myself with
a marigold. The Sinner regarded me
in silence. Then he looked wistfully
at the monstrous combination of pink,
blue, and orange. " It must be very
nice," he said, "to be able to take
flowers out of your garden, and leave
it full enough for the day."

" Shall you not be able to do
that ? " asked I.

" No," said the Sinner sadly.
" This is our garden, you see."

We had stopped almost at the end
of the path, and the Sinner set down
the can and the spade. Opposite me
was an oblong piece of ground sloping

344

The Sinner and the Problem.

up to the wall, surrounded on the
available three sides with a border of
small round pebbles. Every inch of
it had been dug, raked, and watered,
— drenched with water ; in one corner
was a kind of hole, apparently wetter
even than the rest ; and in the exact
centre was a short, stoutish stick, to
which was fastened a piece of string
running out, so far as I could see, to
an abrupt end under a rhubarb-leaf.
The air was heavy with the scent of
damp, sun-warmed mould.

I suppose I must have stared at
it longer than I intended, for I sud-
denly became aware that the Sinner
was gazing at me with an expression
somewhat like one I had seen before
when he asked me to lend him three-
pence. " That's very nice," I said, —
judicially, I hope. " The, — the seeds
ought to do beautifully with the sun
and all that water."

I do not know what I should have
done if it had happened that there
were no seeds. As it was, the
Sinner's face brightened visibly.
" Oh, do you think so ? " he asked.
" That was one of the things we, — I
wanted to ask you. That and the
manure."

"Did you manure this, then, be-
sides watering it 1 "

"Yes. There were some rabbits'
insides, you know, that I got from
the cook, because I saw the gardener
burying a goat once, and I asked him
what it was for, and he said to make
the grapes grow. I believe some of
them are there," he observed, thrust-
ing a dead laurel-twig into the reeking
soil and examining the point. " Yes.
The gardener used a whole goat,
but I should think for a small
garden like this, rabbits would be
enough."

" Certainly, Sinner. And how long
have the seeds been planted ? "

"Three days," said the Sinner
promptly; "at least, it's over two days.

We sowed them in the morning of
the day before yesterday."

"But when is the day for the garden-
prize ? "

"It's, — it's a week to-day. You
see," he added hastily, " I thought if
it was hot, and I watered them a
good deal — " He stopped, and looked
at me with a recurrence of his former
anxiety.

I cast a searching glance at the
sun and the tumbling masses of white
clouds that rode near it. " I'm not
sure, Sinner, if it wouldn't have been
wiser to have used plants instead of
seeds. Seeds, you see, — of course
they are much more interesting, —
but, — but — by the way, what seeds
are they 1 "

tl Mustard and cress," said the
Sinner. It was fortunate that he did
not wait. " All except this row, that
is sweet-williams." Sweet-williams,
to flower in a week ! " You see," he
went on, "of course if we had had
more money we might have got better
ones ; but we only had fourpence, and
the mustard and cress cost twopence,
and the sweet-williams a penny. I
meant to buy some mignonette, only
I lost the other penny, so I couldn't."

Just then the rhubarb-leaf, or my
eyes deceived me, began to move,
proceeding in a circular manner round
the stick in the centre of the garden.
" Good heavens," I exclaimed, " what
is that ? "

" Oh, I forgot," said the Sinner,
lifting the leaf. " That's a toad ; I
put it there to keep away the insects
and things, like they do in hot-houses.
I was afraid it might go into some
one else's garden, so I fastened it
here. I've made a collar for it."

He picked up the creature to show
the method of its harnessing. It was a
matter of two elastic bands, one round
the neck of it, and a smaller one
encircling its middle. Both were
fastened above and beneath with a

The Sinner and the Problem.

:U5

thin string, and a thicker string
linked all to the peg. The Sinner
placed it on the edge of the hole. It
made a kind of half-step forward,
struggled lazily and fell in. Arrived
at the bottom it lay on its back for
a short time, displaying a mottled
underside, but it soon righted it-
self, and blinked at us with bright
eyes.

" Do you think it is a very old
toad ? " asked the Sinner. " The
Problem said it was. He had it in
his hand, you know, and looked at
its eyes, — right in he said he could
see — and then he put it down and
said it was so old it was beastly. He
threw it away, but when he went
I found it again. I like it rather."

" And is that its pond 1 "

" Yes. Well, it was full of water,
— nearly full — at one time ; only all
the water ran away. That was one
of the things I wanted to ask you,
because I can't make the water stay
in it anyhow. I did line it with
stones, but it wasn't any good. I
think the toad likes it, though, be-
cause it has gone in several times."

" Did you put it far from the
edge ? "

" Oh yes, — well, not so very far.
You see, there were two toads at first,
and I wanted them to meet, so I put
one in the pond and the other on the
edge, and then it fell in, you see. The
other one escaped, though. I thought
if I kept them they might have had
young ones," added the Sinner. " Oh
look, I do believe it's going to catch
a fly."

The tethered animal was gaping
dismally. I said that it was pro-
bably feeling unwell and had better be
released. The Sinner looked greatly
disappointed. " It seemed a very
strong toad," he said doubtfully;
" but perhaps it is really too old. I
dare say I could find a younger one
if I looked. I might find the one

that escaped ; that was a very active
toad."

I said that undoubtedly this one
was past work, and released it. It sat
perfectly still for may be a minute,
pushed out a tentative hind leg and
crawled evilly into the shelter of a
mignonette bed. The Sinner stooped
and parted the flowers above it.

" It looks all right," he remarked
dubiously. I know he had two minds
about letting it go. He glanced at
the string and the empty harness,
then at the smooth wet mould
" There's so little in the garden now,
he said.

I bethought me to ask another
question. " Did you make this pebble-
border ? "

" Yes. It says, you know, that
there will be two garden -prizes ; one
for the best flowers and another one
for neatness. We thought we might
get the one for neatness ; that was
why we had the toad." He was still
watching the mignonette.

"It is a very nice border," I ob-
served. " None of the other gardens
have pebble-borders, have they ?"

" No. It was the Problem thought
of that; I put in the stones, though. I
like our border better than any of the
others, I think." He glanced at the
other gardens in order, and his eyes
rested finally on one which was edged
with red daisies in full bloom. " At
least, that's rather a pretty one," he
said.

" Yes."

" Of course, that's an expensive
kind. I expect that cost over six-
pence."

" Did it, do you think 1 "

"I suppose ordinary white daisies
that grow on lawns wouldn't look
so nice ? "

" Not for a garden, perhaps."

"How do daisies become double-
daisies ? "

" I think it's cultivating them, that

34(5

The Sinner and the Problem.

and a good deal of attention, I should
fancy."

" You couldn't make single daisies
into double daisies by watering them a
good deal, I suppose, could you? Or
by manure, — wouldn't manure do ? "

" I think it would take rather a
long time, Sinner."

" Not if you got a good deal of
manure ? But there would hardly be
time, would there ? "

" Hardly."

" You see, the garden prize-day is
in a week."

" Yes."

" I wish I had some money," said
the Sinner.

An idea struck me. " What is the
prize? I mean, is it a spade, or a
book, or some money, or wha,t 1 "

'' It's a book ; I don't know what
its name is."

" But you would never read it,
would you ? "

The Sinner debated for a minute
before answering. " No, perhaps I
shouldn't. I might sell it, though. I
sold a book my Aunt gave me for
sixpence once."

" Dear me ! What was it ? "

" It — it was called Pilgrim's Pro-
gress,— about Christians."

" And who bought it 1 "

"My Aunt's cousin did. I asked
her if she would, you know."

" Should you sell this prize to her,
if you got it ? "

" I should ask her to buy it. She
would, I expect ; she's awfully rich."

" I know it, Sinner, I know it. But
what would you do with the money ?"

" Buy fishing-tackle," he answered
without a moment's hesitation; "a rod
and a line and some floats. I love
floats," he added ; "I used to make
them in school. But I told you about
that, didn't I ? "

" You did, Sinner ; it was very
disgraceful." But the Sinner was
past blushing for such memories. He

lifted the mignonette where the toad
had lain. " Why, it's gone ; it can't
be far, though."

" Sinner," said I, " suppose I were
to offer a garden-prize ? I mean, for a
different kind of garden from these ;
not for one with geraniums and sweet-
peas and stocks and asters and so on,
but one with just wild flowers in it,
daisies and poppies and buttercups,
that you could get anywhere." The
Sinner abandoned his search for the
missing reptile and gazed at me with
an expression of intense interest.
" You might even have a rockery
with ferns," I suggested ; " and the
Problem could make you a waterfall
or something of the kind. Then, you
see, you wouldn't have to buy plants
at all."

The Sinner drew in his breath
quickly as the notion presented itself
to him with all its possibilities. "Oh,
do you really mean it ? So that wild
flowers would count like the ones you
buy?"

" Certainly ; and then we might
have the prize in money, so that you
wouldn't have to sell it."

" Would it be enough to buy a
fishing-rod 1 A cheap one, I mean."

I was doubtful as to what would
be considered a cheap fishing-rod.
" What is the largest amount of
money that you have ever had at the
same time ? " I asked.

The Sinner reflected. " I think
one-and-threepence," he said at last.
" At least, I borrowed the shilling."

" Supposing I made the prize ten
shillings. That would be five shil-
lings each. Would that buy a cheap
fishing-rod ? "

But the Sinner was so dumbfounded,
as I imagine, by the glorious vista
which was thus unfolded that for a
short time speech forsook him. When
he did speak I did not expect the
answer he gave me. " Are you sure
you can spare it ? "

The Sinner and the Problem.

347

" I haven't had to pay it yet,
Sinner. You and the Problem will
have to work for it. By the way,
where is the Problem ? "

I was surprised at the consequence
of my question, for his face became
troubled. " Oh, I forgot," he said.

" Forgot what ? "

" About the Problem."

" What about him 1 "

He hesitated. "Well, he's gone
away."

" I suppose he'll come back ? "

His eyes became more troubled.
" I don't know. You see, if he knew
it was you offered the prize — "

"Well?"

" Perhaps he wouldn't work for it."

I did not understand. " But why
not, Sinner 1 Do you mean he doesn't
want a prize ? "

" Oh no. He would like a prize
awfully ; he's always wanting to buy
things, only he can't, you see, because
we never have any money hardly. He
would like the five shillings, I know.
Shall I say it's my Aunt's cousin's
prize 1 "

" But Sinner, why not mine ? "

The Sinner was silent, and I re-
peated the question. " You see, I
think he's angry with you for some-
thing. I don't quite know about it,
only he said he hoped you wouldn't
come, and if you did he was going
away. He did go away, just before I
ran into you. Perhaps he saw you
coming."

The Problem, of all people ! Absurd,
thought I, and wondered what the
Sinner was dreaming about. Yet I
must have let some faint expression
of displeasure cross my face, for the
Sinner laid a small brown hand on
my sleeve. " Don't be angry with
us. You won't, will you 1 You know
/ don't mind your liking my Aunt's
cousin, a bit."

Oho! That's the secret of all this
how-de-do ? I declare I could not

help laughing. " Angry, my dear
Sinner ? Why, of course not." And
then something serious in it struck
me. " You must let me think," I
added, and I walked up the path
pondering over the unexpected puzzle.
That an imp of thirteen in patched
trousers should be jealous of a man
of my age, and jealous for the love of
a lady — even of such a lady as my
Lady of the Lake — ridiculous ! No-
thing more than to laugh at ! And
when next I saw the Problem I meant
to shake him, — no, but to ignore the
whole absurdity. Indeed, I began to
wonder if the pair of them had left
me a rag of what is commonly called
dignity, when I could think of any
other possible ending to the matter
than silence.

But that he should have guessed it
all ! And if he, had others guessed
it ? And then, — had she guessed it ?
She, whom I was to leave within the
week, the word unspoken because of
my unworthiness — oh> and I had not
cared for that either, I know, but
would have spoken and chanced the
answer if there had not been — what ?
A red brick house and broad acres 1
And that thought settled matters. I
was to leave her in a week, and I
need think of nothing but that, —
unless that I was to leave her in
silence. Another dignified silence ?
That set me laughing again, and I
could laugh, for was there not a week
left, — a week of mornings such as
to-day's had been, — that given, and
what matter thereafter ?

In the evening from my window I
watched the two boys walking slowly
in the direction of their garden. I
made no doubt the Sinner had taken
some opportunity of explanation and
had converted the other to a more
sensible view of things. Indeed, I
hardly thought over it at all, except
that the Problem's figure recalled my
conversation with the Sinner ; for I

348

The Sinner and the Problem.

was occupied, as you may imagine,
with remembrances of the morning I
had spent in the woods, and counting
the hours till the morrow, when I
was to begin another picture, — my
last, but if she were to watch me
make it?

After an hour or so I strolled out,
and half instinctively to the gardens.
I came to them by a path opposite to
the one I had taken earlier in the
day, so as to meet the Sinner's end
of the gardens first. Truth to tell,
I feared another nosegay. Within
a few paces of the strip of ground
they had chosen I stopped ; a hedge
ran between us, and I could hear the
voices of the boys beyond. There
was a sound as of trodden clinkers,
and then a swish of water ; then
came excited cries from the Sinner,
and I turned the corner.

A vague pyramidal heap of clinkers
stood on one side under the wall.
From this ran a kind of conduit
consisting of a short gutter-pipe,
much bent and distorted, and poised
over a muddy course of reeking,
shifting mould, which took the
shortest road to the pond. The
Sinner, his knickerbockers bespattered
with mud, and water bright on his
dripping stockings and shoes, stood
astride on the pyramid, a nearly
empty zinc can fulfilling its last
obligations into the gutter-pipe.
" Dam it, dam it ! " he shrieked,
and had I not seen the can I should
not have taken in the spelling. As
it was, a child, three or four gardens
away, looked up from his work with
a startled expression on his face,
caught my eye (and I was laughing)
and his cheeks went the colour of
his carnations ; then the water-pot
came into his picture and he under-
stood and bent in confusion over his
flowers again.

The Problem thrust a well-meant
spadeful of earth to check the seeth-

ing whirlpool of the pond, which
already brimmed in a very menac-
ing manner. Alas ! it toppled over
with a sound of swallowing into the
scum, and in stepping back to avoid
the splash of it he caught sight of
me. For a moment he gazed at me
fixedly, and I perforce stared back
at him. In a flash my innocent offer
of a prize for a wild-flower garden
stood naked in the reality it must have
seemed to him — a bribe ! I do not
think his eyes dropped sooner than
mine ; and then he thrust the spade
into the pasty loam, his hands into
his pockets, and walked slowly down
the path round the corner and out
of sight.

I stood and stared at him. I was
recalled to a sense of the present by
the discovery that I was standing in
a pool of water. I looked about me
and saw that the pond had over-
flowed, as was but natural. The
muddy fluid that remained in it was
composing itself sulkily enough into
the saturated sides of the hollow,
leaving behind it a froth that hissed
and grew less as you looked. A
dozen odd daisy-roots, buttercup-
plants, and so forth were littered by
the side of it, and the spade lay on
all, stealthily fallen from the upright.
The Sinner regarded me with extra-
ordinary sadness. " I was afraid you
would come," he said.

" Have I, then, spoiled it all,
Sinner 1 " I asked.

But the Sinner turned away and
answered with his back to me after
a decent pause. " He said he would
help me, but not if you came. Of
course I couldn't tell you that, but I
hoped, — hoped — " The fishing-rod,
then, had faded from his horizon.

" Well, I am going indoors now.
And if you take my advice, you will
begin planting your flowers yourself.
Then, perhaps, the Problem will come
back." But I knew he would not.

The Sinner and the Problem.

349

When I reached the end of the
walk I looked over my shoulder.
The Sinner was kneeling in the
muddy path, his back turned to the
few other boys who were gardening,
and his head very near the ground,
engaged with a buttercup that would
not stand up.

I was laughing again over the
Problem's absurdities when suddenly
another thought flitted, — like a swift
scarlet bird through a mist — across
my mind's eye : as ivell be hanged
for a sheep as for a lamb ; and the
fascination of that thought occupied
me all the evening. And I know
it was early when I called down on
the Problem the blessing of every
saint in the calendar, knocked out
my pipe, and went to bed, to bring
the morrow quicker.

CHAPTER XVI.

As well be hanged for a sheep as for
a lamb. I woke up with the words on
my lips ; and it was not a matter of
much more than an hour before I had
shouldered my easel and so down the
path to the woods. And if I put any
definite application to the proverb, —
which I doubt, for when a man's
pulse gallops, he loses count of colder
reasonings — it was this. If the Pro-
blem (thirteen years old and patched
trousers) had guessed my secret, I was
not to expect that others were igno-
rant ; and if others, might not she
have guessed it? But then, if she
had, she came yesterday to me, and
might have come to hear me tell it
all. At all events, my good resolu-
tions went to the winds, and the
winds were blowing out to the sea.
I tell you, I began to sing, and my
breath played all manner of tricks,
and I could not utter a note, so that
I strode along silently, wondering at
the change wrought in me. For if I
was sane yesterday, I was mad enough

to-day, and I knew it : yet my mad-
ness was the most delirious joy I could
have fancied possible ; the most won-
derful throbbing of every fibre to the
wildest anthem of a dream ; the thrill
of every little pulse, every tiny beat
of blood ; a fever, a longing, a pur-
pose, and the purpose inspiring fierce
influences of passion into every move-
ment, every thought : ay, I was mad
enough, and the joy of the madness
argued it right and good, and a thing
to rejoice over, that a man might be
as mad as I was. Every sense in me
was a power, acute, keen, the acme of
sense : I saw everything, I heard
everything, I felt everything ; I saw
the broad leafage of the oaks tremble
and sway in the wind ; I saw the
rabbits scudding the covert, a tree-
creeper poised by the fork of its tail-
feathers on the bark of an elm, the
tiniest bronze beetle sunning itself on
a fern-frond; I heard the sharp cry
of jays, the crow of pheasants, the
whirring scrape of grasshoppers ; I
felt the turf resilient and firm beneath
me; and I can see that scene and
hear those sounds now as I saw and
heard them then. • I was buoyant,
tingling, alive through and through ;
I had never till that morning known
what it was to live.

Once, when a child in the North, I
was shown a large boulder, whether by
denudation of water, or by a landslip,
or from some other cause, so exactly
balanced on its sharper end that the
slightest touch sent it swaying for-
ward and backward, always to regain
its perfect equilibrium, — a rocking-
stone as we called it. I had wondered
then what would be the power re-
quired to overset it altogether, to
send it thundering down the hillside
to rest in the river ; and as I went
swinging down the woodpath I found
myself comparing my mental balance
to that of the rocking-stone, urged
out by a wild impulse of folly, pulled

350

The Sinner and the Problem.

dragged back by a reserve force of
wisdom, and finally upheaved, set free,
driven headlong by a power too great
to be resisted, sped to its goal by
latent properties of its own. And if
I were the rocking-stone, then the
external power were nothing stronger
than the influence of a fellow-mortal
I had not set eyes on three months
before, — a glance from the eyes of
one who saw the world as I now saw
it, the jealousy of a thirteen-year-old
boy with a patch on his breeches !

My picture I had chosen over-night.
A winding path that led down to the
lake, and earlier in the year was
clothed in a carpet of bluebells ; I
was to set my easel there, and thence
across the lake, I had the moorland
away to the horizon, gray rocks and
birches for the middle distance, the
lake below all, and the house to the
right, just a hint of red in the water.
I knew that from one window of the
house my Lady of the Lake could
make sure, if she chose, that I was
at work, and I stood for a moment
watching, with half a hope of a
glimpse of her wide straw hat even
then, but, — I cannot tell why — with
the certainty that my picture would
not be far advanced before she herself
were near me to give judgment on it.
So I set up my easel and out with my
pencil to shape an outline.

A king-fisher shot across the lake,
a streak of azure and orange. I
watched it flirt into a willow, and
then, — I cannot guess for how long —
waited for it to reappear. A dove in
a stone-fir beyond the water began to
purr, the sweetest croon of a sound it
was, and I listened as if under a spell.
Then a wood-pigeon in the larches
far away to the left struck up —
" Take two sheep David, take two
sheep David " — I never heard so
beautiful a monotone, and remembered
how I had been first taught to listen
to it by my uncle's old gardener, and

how the village loons set that phrase
to its complaining. Next a pair of
squirrels began chattering in a yew-
tree ; I watched them chase each
other, leap, climb, scramble, till half
the tree was dancing, and the bryony
and clematis quivered with the light
shock of their little bodies. And all the
while my paper was white and empty.

I set to work manfully ; but I had
to learn then, as I had learned at the
lake once before, and knew pretty
well before that too, that there are
times when a picture will not come.
The brushes, the box, the paper, the
will to make it, and even the skill,
for what that be worth, are there,
with you; but a picture, — that is
another matter. Every sight, every
sound took me away from my work :
these squirrels and pigeons and king-
fishers at any other time I should
have taken little heed of, unless may
be to work the atmosphere, the life of
them, into my picture ; but now I
must watch with intentness each
single movement, listen to each cry,
and get no good from it, so far as
a painting may be called a good. In
short, I was condemned to take every-
thing in, to get nothing out ; and all
the while Tell her, tell her, rang in my
ears, and her face came between me
and my picture, until I found that
my pencil was running away with me,
and myself sketching in a little curl
that lay on her forehead, and then —
oh, but the fire in my veins danced
and leaped again, and I was making
a picture of my Lady of the Lake, a
picture as beautiful and live as I saw
her last, so that each line and touch
gave me exquisite joy and pleasure,
and I began to believe, if I was
reasoning at all, that my brush had
disobeyed me over the landscape to
give me this delirium of a portrait
instead of it.

Never before had I worked, never
since have I worked as I worked then.

The Sinner and the Problem.

351

I had not believed the joy of creation
so magnificent ; I had not deemed it
possible that the labour of a man's
thought could be so intense an energy,
the activity of production so god-like
an emotion. Her eyes and the droop
of her lashes, the pure seduction of
her glance, the poise of her chin, the
entrancing curves of her mouth, the
great glory of her hair, — bold]y,
fiercely, rightly I painted, till she
looked at me from my painting, alive,
with words on her lips, and the scent
of her hair about me, and in her eyes
— ah, but in her eyes there was some-
thing which was not her, but myself,
the mingling into her of myself, the
life that leaped in me living in her,
ay, and something more than life.
I stared at it, drew nearer, and read
it, and knew it. It was I, I that
looked at me, I that loved me; the
hope and the soul of a man gazing
at him from flat paper.

I recoiled from it, and then there
was a little cry from behind me, and
my big wash-brush was lifted and
dashed upon the face before me, —
a blur of blue and brown. She stood
there, her lips parted, her eyes afire,
and made short, quick, terrified sweeps
at it, blotted it out, annihilated it.

" How can you ? How dare you ? "
she cried, — and yet her cry was a
whisper. She dropped the brush, and
stood there, her hands clasping and
unclasping.

I do not know when she went away.
But I believe it was hours afterwards
that I took the paper from the board,
quietly and mechanically, and down
to the lake-side. I dipped it in the
water and washed it to and fro, saying
to myself, " Water-colours, only water-
colours," till it was all white and wet
and heavy. And then I crumpled it
together and threw it far into the
water ; it sank, and I went up the
path to my easel again.

And so mechanically I returned to

the school. I do not think I saw or
heard anything ; but I knew that
I had lost some part of me, and that
she had taken it away.

CHAPTER XVII.

I MUST have slept for hours, though
it was little past three in the morning
when I awoke and found the first
greyness of the dawn creeping into
the room. I was wide awake, though,
at the very moment, and started up,
knowing that something had happened.
For the time I could not tell what,
but as the white light grew behind
the blind, and the shadows slid into
the corners, it came back to me slowly ;
the morning of yesterday, the wind
on my face as I strode down to the
lake, the wood-pigeons and the colour
of the water, and then in a flash
my picture of the Lady of the Lake,
the delirium, the madness of it all.
Tester evening I was as a man
crushed, emasculated, impotent, unable
for any but mere physical action, but
now I was thinking with admirable
clearness ; I could reason, question,
probe to the pith of things; never
had I possessed a serener vision,
calmer faculties ; never had I known
myself so well-balanced, never so
rightly poised in mind, in under-
standing ; never had I been so sane.

A sparrow woke in the ivy, and
through the open window I could
hear it shake itself, then another
sparrow, and faint cheepings and the
rustle of straw and feathers; soon
there were a round dozen twittering
and chirping. I went to the window,
pulled up the blind, and looked out.
I remembered doing so once before in
May, when the world woke differently.
For then it woke to the sleepless love of
the nightingales, — a wonder of song,
insistent, continuous, passionate, care-
less of anything save the need of
singing ; but now it woke from silence,

352

The Sinner and the Problem.

soberly, and then to singing as to the
day's duty. And my day's duty !
I began to plan out what it must be.
A forgetfulness of the three past
months, a cup of oblivion, a capful
of Lethe; and to me then all that
seemed as easy a matter as could be, —
nay, but I had forgotten it already.
I was to be no more than a painter,
a poor painter ; my day's care to cease
at sundown, and naught else to think
on but the critics and bachelor
waistcoat-pockets, full or empty. And
I know (impossible as I should have
thought it a score of hours earlier)
it was a relief to me to believe all
this ; I felt as if a great burden had
been lifted, an intolerable load taken
on another's shoulders, and myself —
in a word, free. Yet in the grey
dawn, that self -analysis was able to
be so merciless, that I knew also that
I had lost something ; some capacity,
capability, something which I had
not even the power of regretting, as
if I had never known what it was.
I could look at my being as at
another's : my existence became objec-
tive to myself ; and the consciousness
of this did not even puzzle me, so
clear it seemed.

I dressed and went out into the
garden. I took my painting materials
to a corner of the field beyond the
sunk fence that divided lawn from
meadow, and made out a sketch of a
corner of the terrace, grey stone and
lichen against a sky of rose-petals
(happiness coming for the farmers
that dry summer !) and in the fore-
ground a pair of peacocks, and green
patches slapped on dew-grey grass by
clumsy wings — a brilliant piece of
colouring it was, and I set it aside,
the work of four hours may be, well
pleased ; as indeed I was well pleased
then with all the work of that week,
and opened my portfolio later to find
in those pictures a curious difference
from the style of my usual work.

And to tell the truth I never sold
one of them ; but of that there is
more to be said.

Later in the morning I picked out
a wall of climbing roses, and did my
best to set the colour of them on
paper. Indeed, during that week I
found it was the stronger colouring of
life that I sought : a pair of peacocks
and a sky that meant rain ; a wall
of crimson roses and an Italian air
beyond it; a splash of poppies on
ripened corn. My usual taste has
been something quieter than that :
the peace of an English evening, the
chromes and sage and distant blue-
greens of a wide stretch of country;
but now, new colour-schemes, and the
bolder the better.

The Sinner spied me, as I had
expected, during the half-hour before
luncheon. He had recovered, appar-
ently, from the sadness of the evening
when I left him battling with his
buttercup-plants ; and to see him
come up to me, I wondered if there
existed a happier mortal. Evidently
the buttercups were doing well.

" Oh, what lovely roses," he said.

I cannot guess whether it was only
the sound of the child's voice, or
whether it recalled to me some pent-
up memory of sorrow, something in-
finitely far away, — I cannot tell ; but
I know there swept over me such a
wave of unhappiness that I was not
able to answer, nor so much as to
look round.

However, it seemed he noticed
nothing out of the common. " I
worked at my garden all yesterday,"
he went on ; " I've planted ever
so many daisies and buttercups
and things." I could think of no
reply to that either ; but in no
way discouraged, however, he con-
tinued, " They look awfully fine.
I've put all the daisies round the
edge, and the buttercups in the
middle, except the ones that hadn't

The Sinner and the Problem.

353

much root, and I put those at the
side, in case they died. But they
haven't died yet, and I think if I
water them enough they ought to get
some new roots. And there's the
manure, too, — I should think that
would help." No, there was nothing
to. say to that. " There's the gentian
off the dog's grave, too, the post-
man's dog, you know. I thought it
wouldn't matter, so I dug it up, and
I've planted it near the pond. Oh,
and the pond and the rockery, I for-
got. I've got a lot of moss and put
it on the clinkers the gardener gave
me out of the stoke-hole, and now it
looks just like a real rockery, and if
you pour water in at the top of the
pipe it makes a waterfall." I
managed to nod. " Of course, I'm
going to put back the gentian, when
you, — after the day, I mean. I
wanted to ask you if you thought it
would matter, only I couldn't find
you. You see, I've had to do it all
alone," said the Sinner with some-
thing of a sigh. "The Problem
wouldn't help me, because he said —
were you down at the lake all
yesterday ? " he asked.

I believe he thought I was laughing
at him. I knew that he had altered
his position, and was no longer be-
hind me ; but I could not look at
his face. I found I was making an
amazing mess of my roses. There
was an interval of silence.

" Have you got toothache ? " he
inquired, after (I imagined) a pro-
longed scrutiny of my countenance. I
nodded, and he stood there a minute
or so. Then a sudden idea seemed
to strike him, and he was off to the
house, running all the way.

I suppose that in the early morning
and during the first part of the day,
although all the mental faculties in
me seemed keen and alert and
polished, so to say, there was yet
something beyond these which had
No. 497. — VOL. LXXXIII.

been dulled, blunted, numbed. There
come such experiences to every man,
it must be ; but for women there is
the relief of tears, called forth, I dare
say, by nothing much more important
than the voice of a child.

Late in the afternoon the Sinner
came running from the house. I am
afraid the sketch had prospered little,
but I did not realise that until I
looked at it later. He was full of
what he had done for me.

" I've brought you this," he said,
very much out of breath. " I hope
it's all right. I got it from the
matron for you. You put it on with
a brush. I didn't bring one, be-
cause I knew you had a lot in your
box." My sables, doubtless. "Or
else, she says, you can get some
cotton-wool. Oh, but it puts all
about it on the bottle." Here he
handed me a small phial marked
Poison on a red label. It was quite
warm, almost hot. " I couldn't come
before ; I had my sentences to do
again. I can't do sentences, you
know."

" Can't you, Sinner 1 What are
sentences ? " So I had found my
voice at last.

" Oh, Latin sentences ; I thought
you knew. But aren't you going to
use some of that stuff? "

I held the bottle up to the light.
" There doesn't seem very much in
it, Sinner." In fact, it was stark
empty. I uncorked it ; laudanum in
some form it seemed to have been.
The Sinner gazed at it with appre-
hension. " How full was it at first,
Sinner 1 "

" Oh, quite full. The matron gave
it me just before dinner, and then I
was going to give it to you after
dinner, only I had to do my sentences,
you know, so I couldn't."

"And what did you do with it
then ? "

"I put it in my pocket." He
A A

354

The Sinner and the Problem,

glanced down. " Oh," said he rue-
fully, " I never thought of that."

" Yes," said I.

There was a vague brown patch
showing on the outside of the cloth.
He turned the pocket inside out.
Nearly all the contents of the bottle
appeared to have lodged in a rather
crumpled envelope, which seemed
endowed with spongeous properties
to an alarming extent. " I wonder
I never noticed it," he said. " I
thought the bottle was rather wet,
when I took it out."

" What is in the envelope1?"

"It's, — it's a biscuit," confessed the
Sinner with shame on his face. " It
— it was for the toad. That was the
other day ; I thought it would eat
it, so I saved it. Shall I throw it
away 1 "

I suggested it would be better in
its present condition to bury it. He
was gazing with sorrow at the offend-
ing pocket. " Oh dear," he said at
last, as if to himself, " the matron
will be angry. You see, I can't wash
it."

" No," said I, "I don't quite see
how you can."

" You know," he went on, " the
matron says I give her more trouble
than all the rest of the school put
together. She says my clothes are
always in rags, and if it wasn't that
she worked her fingers to the bone I
shouldn't have any at all."

"It certainly looks rather like it,
Sinner, especially when you turn
round, you know."

" I hate the matron," observed the
Sinner pensively.

" How about the Problem ? " I
asked after a little, by way of changing
the subject.

"I don't know where he is. At
least I think — "

" Haven't you seen him, then ? "

" I just saw him after dinner, and
he asked if you were down at the

lake, so I said no, and he seemed
rather surprised ; but he didn't say
anything." Without thinking what
I was doing, I held the empty
laudanum - bottle up to the light.
"Oh, I forgot. Is your toothache very
bad ? "

" I haven't got toothache," I said,
taken off my guard.

" Oh," said the Sinner. " I thought
you said — " He stopped, evidently
puzzled. " Would you like me to get
you anything 1 " he asked at last.

" No, Sinner, no; run away, there's
a good boy."

The Sinner obeyed at once, in
obvious perplexity. At the end of
the rose-walk there stood an open
tank, used for watering purposes.
He stopped at this, and, dipping his
handkerchief in it, began to scrub his
knickerbockers. If he thought about
it at all, he might have remembered
I had not thanked him for bringing
the laudanum. I was remorseful at
the thought of the trouble the child
had taken. " Don't, Sinner ; you'll
catch cold," I called to him. He
started and ceased his ablutions. I
meant him to come back ; but he
construed my tone into something of
a reproof I suppose, and after wring-
ing out his soused handkerchief and
replacing it in his pocket, he glanced
uncertainly in my direction, took a
half-step down the path, changed his
mind, and I lost sight of him.

CHAPTER XVIII.

I SPENT my evening alone. I was
in no mood for conversation, and
must have seemed a very ungracious
guest to mine host for the remainder
of that week, unless, as I more than
half suspected, he had a notion of my
reasons. For come to think of it,
with a charitable motherly body, like
his good lady, to wife, he must have
had a fairly clear idea of the cause

The Sinner and the Problem.

355

which took me so often to the lake,
and had not set it down to the colour
of the trees or the water. And it
occurred to me that it might be best
to hint again to him the subject of
my departure. I had more than once
alluded to this of late, and always
with misgivings, lest he should fall in
with my suggestion ; but on each
occasion 1 was met with a point-blank
refusal to let me go, at least until the
school-term was at an end, and I
acquiesced with a readiness not too
prompt, I hope, and thanked the
powers for the boon of another month,
another fortnight, another week even,
But now, — ah well, the world was
awry, and I began to think almost
with longing of my lonely studio ;
yet it was with a growing conviction
that some way or other, however I
might school my thoughts to the
present, these three summer months
must be more to me at the last than
a mere memory, past and done with.
You can see that I had not realised
it ; I mean, had not realised all that
was meant by my Lady of the Lake's
How dare you ? — the entire severance
that it must make for me from this
part of the world, if I valued my self-
respect at the price of a third-class
ticket to the next station.

I do not know how far the Sinner
and the Problem had discussed the
probabilities of matters ; but I fancy
that the latter, at least, knew pretty
well how the wind was blowing,
though I saw nothing of him. He
must have explained as much to the
other, for on the day after the
laudanum-incident I was sitting in
front of an easel-ful of bald colour,
my brush dried to a point, and I sup-
pose with a sufficiently melancholy
countenance, when I heard steps be-
hind me, and a small hand was laid
gently on my shoulder.

" Don't be miserable," said the
Sinner, and withdrew his hand the

moment he had spoken, in fear of
having said too much. " I've just
been burying a cat," he went on
hurriedly, — he had prepared this
story, I was sure, as something cheer-
ful by way of news — "a huge spotted
sort of cat, white and brown and
yellow. The garden-boy killed it
with a rake, — it was stealing a
chicken. He said it had stolen ever
so many chickens, and he had been
waiting there three hours for it, and
at last it came round the corner and
he hit it on the head and broke its
back."

" Dear me, Sinner ! Did you bury
the chicken too ? "

"Oh, it hadn't stolen the chicken
then ; it was going to. He said it
was sure it was that cat, — at least he
said so after it was dead. He did tell
me once he was sure it was a black
cat," added the Sinner thoughtfully.
" I expect he changed his mind. I
measured it with my handkerchief;
it was enormous, and tremendously
fat too. It's quite the biggest grave
there is."

Evidently this had been no pauper
burial. I inquired whether it would
be dignified with a slate.

" No," he answered ; " just a cross.
I can't think of a name though. Oh,
will you, would you mind, that is —
will you think of a name, — any name,
you know ? Because I must go in
now, it's time for school. Do think of
one for me."

I expressed my readiness to do
what I could by way of immortalising
the creature, and he pulled out a
French grammar, and ran off to the
school snatching occasional glimpses
at a very draggled page of verbs.

I could not help wondering how
the Problem was taking all this. For
that he should voluntarily forego the
society of the Sinner for three days
was no less inexplicable to me than
his attitude towards myself. But that
A A 2

356

The Sinner and the Problem.

he was a strange youth, and not to be
judged by mere mortal standards, I
knew ; and perhaps it was inevitable
after all, if he had bestowed upon one
person the blind affection commonly
given by a child to its parent (and
I knew him to be an orphan) that he
should be jealous with all the strength
of his original nature of the unlucky
wight who might seem to rival him.
And perhaps he had fancied the
Sinner in some way my accomplice.
Yet now that the hated rival (I heard
afterwards that was the term he
applied to me) was down in the dust,
would it not be magnanimous to
pardon him ?

In truth I began to regard the end
of term-time as a sort of goal, a happy
release from suffering. I fancied, —
nay, I was sure — that I could forget
it all in the din and hurry of town-
life, and though I knew that I should
part with mine host and his lady with
regret, and with something more than
that from the Sinner, and ah, with
unspeakable regret, desiderium, as we
used to turn it in the old days of
lyrics and elegiacs, and I know no
English word that so exactly expresses
the longing for something that has
been and can be no more — quo
desiderio, then, must I look for the
last time at the lake and the woods
and the red-brick house ; still, every
sight and sound — the Sinner's straw
hat, and mine host's cheery smile, and
the tinkle and clamour of the school-
bell so irresistibly called back to me
the happiness of the days before that
beautiful, terrible portrait stared at
me, that I instinctively cried enough,
and would have done with it all once
and for ever.

As for the Problem, the explanation
came on the following day. I had
named the Sinner's cat for him
(Emily I think it was) and he had
inquired with a certain amount of
shyness whether I would like to see

his garden. I assented, and we set
off across the cricket-ground. The
Sinner's countenance was expressive
of much misgiving, and I wondered
what he was going to tell me, a sud-
den blight on the buttercups, perhaps,
or an alarming landslip ; I imagined
the rockery choking the pond and his
daisies crushed by the gutter-pipe ;
but it was nothing of the kind.

"Are you angry with the Problem? "
I could hear that the question had
troubled him.

" Of course not, Sinner," I answered.
He seemed doubtful. " My dear
Sinner, I am never angry with any-
one. Will that satisfy you ? " It
should, I thought.

" Well, will you forgive him ? He's
awfully miserable, you know."

" Forgive him for what 1 "

"Oh well, for being beastly to you
— oh, you know what I mean, don't
you? — I can't explain things. Only
he won't ask you, I know. Oh do !
At least, don't say anything, only be
just ordinary, and then he'll know."

" My dear Sinner, if only I could
ever expect to be anything but just
ordinary, hopelessly ordinary, Sinner,
sour vin ordinaire."

" Well, will you 1 Because we're
just coming there. Oh, do be quick ! "
The Sinner's eyes were those of a
puppy about to be unchained.

And then I understood. This was
a reconcilation planned by the Sinner ;
doubtless the Problem was at work in
the garden. A kind of Jacob-and-
Esau business, and I the Supplanter,
presumably. " I will be just ordinary,"
said I. As I expected, the Problem
was occupied with some employment
which allowed us to advance as near
as possible without making it necessary
for him to look up. I complimented the
Sinner on the changed appearance of
his plot of ground, and he could with
difficulty restrain his delight and ex-
citement. " Oh, do you think we shall

The Sinner and the Problem.

357

get the prize?" he asked, oblivious appa-
rently of the fact that I had offered it.

I assumed a critical expression, and
pointed my stick sternly at a faded
buttercup. "I can't say for certain
till the day comes. I can't have that
sort of thing, though ; that will never
do. All the flowers must be perfectly
fresh and alive. And I shall not tell
you when I am coming round ; it will
be a surprise-visit, a sort of police-
inspection."

The Problem had uprooted the
offending buttercup at the word, and
that I think ended his quarrel with
me. After a sentence or two more
of advice on horticulture in general
I left them, putting themselves to
the utmost pains to correct the pos-
ture of some very despondent daisies.

Curiously enough (and I wondered
at it even then) I had slept these
three nights without ruffling the
pillow, as you may say. I had ex-
pected wakeful, disordered dreams;
and instead, each morning when I
woke I could hardly remember more
than my face touching the cool linen
the night before. I put this down
to exhaustion, an over-draft on
nature during the day, and much I
hoped matters need not change. But
that fourth night ! I suppose I had
half-forgotten some of my troubles
during the day, and they came back
to me.

I do not know how long I slept ;
it may in all have been hours. I
heard the cuckoo-clock in the hall
cluck out the half-hours till after two
in the morning, and fell to cursing
its cheerful mockery. And then came
short intervals of half-consciousness
between fevers of dreaming. I was
painting my portrait over again, and
watched it grow each time till it
glared at me and the brush swept
it out of existence. I started up
always as the face was blurred,
and always with a dull know-

ledge somewhere at the back of my
head that I could not wake enough
to know it was a dream, — and so
to dream again. Then came the pur-
suit ; a hideous pursuit of me by a
man whose face I could never see, —
tried to see and feared to see. Soon
the man became a face, and flitted
after me, miles away behind and at
a tremendous rate, — I was flying
across fields, ditches, hedges in an
ecstasy of fear, and always with a
cliff before me I must be over at
last. And then the face became my
own, and leered at me from behind
every curtain and wall and tree,
leered and was gone. The agony of
that inability to wake, to become
myself ! Never could I find a friend
during that long night ; it was a
desert-world I lived in, and myself
an enemy that followed me every
mile of it. Then after some time
there came the realisation of a guess
I was making as I fled, — I was
guessing this for hours, and at last
knew what the guess meant — that
some power was directing the pur-
suit ; and behold my Lady of the
Lake, the face of my portrait, and
in the eyes of it myself, again and
again. You knew, I said to myself,
that you must suffer ; these have
been easy days, these three, and
nights of sleep. You feared to lie
awake ; you know now that what
you have to dread is sleep and the
terror of sleep.

I must have been freed from it
all at some hour near the dawn. I
woke from a heavy stupor when the
sparrows were well into the day's
work, unable at first to do more
than bless the sunlight and deliver-
ance. But another night like this,
thought I, if indeed it was but a
night, for I did not make up my
mind to that without weighing
reasons. And if in these dreams
there was a measure even of truth ?

358

The Sinner and the Problem.

What if the Lady of the Lake, when
she made my picture a blur and a
smudge, had in very deed set free,
sent wild, some part of a fellow-
being, and that the complex Being
we call Man, as if I were a number
of egos, and she had loosed one of
them ? Nay, but she had done so ;
she held me by chains ; I was her
own, and she chose to torture me.
There was a hideous conclusion to
that ; and again I determined to
pack my goods, and be gone that
day. You may see that I was not
very logical when I was dressing;
if I had anticipated what was to
happen in the afternoon, I might
have made a saner argument.

I knew that there was distraction
to be found in work ; but I believe
that I spent most of that morning
dozing in a summer-house ; perhaps
it was inevitable after such a night.
Yet at times reason returned to me
in a measure, and I found myself
laughing at what was behind me,
and not much afraid of what lay
in front. Once, indeed, I compared
my position with that of the Other
Man, and wondered whether such
dreams as mine ever visited him.
I remembered something of what he
told me on the way back from a
certain garden-party. Well, he had
no cause to be jealous of me, at all
events.

Insensibly I began to speculate on
the future of the Chief Butler. The
Other Man, I knew, had money ; by
so much his lot was the easier.
But the Chief Butler, and his black
leather book? Was it possible that
he also kept in the background some
shrine at which he worshipped ]
There occurred to me his definite
answer when I suggested he would
need a wife to help him, when he
had realised that school-in-the-air he
was for ever building for our benefit.
He had said that he would be

married ; and I tried to imagine his
wife, — stout, coarse, florid, good-
humoured, a little top-knot, — oh, but
that was my old landlady Mere
Dindon : the butler marrying the
cook ; no encumbrance, — I was away
on another tack. And so on and
so on ; think coherently that morning
I could not.

I returned to the summer-house in
the afternoon, carrying my sketch-
book with me to avoid comment, and
lazily began turning over the leaves.
One of the first drawings that caught
my eye was the picture I made of the
Sinner that first evening at the
school. I cannot say how in a
moment it recalled to me the sights
and the sounds of that quiet hour
under my „ laburnum-tree ; the hint
of cowslips coming down the wind,
the vesper - hymns of thrushes, the
cool primrose-clumps, and the white
violets in the ivy of the terrace. My
thoughts must have gone far afield,
and the sun was at six or more when
I noticed almost with a start that
the entrance to the summer-house was
darkened.

The Lady of the Lake was stand-
ing on the grass beyond the gravel-
path. Her hand rested on the Pro-
blem's shoulder and her eyes were
alight with laughter. The Sinner
stood by her.

I believe I had determined, should
fortune throw me again across her
path, to treat her as if our meetings
had been those of the most casual
acquaintances in the world. I was
to ignore the past completely ; to hold
her as nothing more than a chance
friend, — no, but not even a friend —
and if I must speak to her (which
I considered the unlikeliest of impos-
sibilities) I was — heaven forgive me !
— to discuss the weather : yes, and
several other lunatic resolves I made,
of which there need only be said that,
so soon as she came into my life

The Sinner and the Problem.

359

again, I did not even know that I
broke them.

" Good afternoon," she said, and
nodded at me with her lips twitching.
I do not know what I said. " No,
I don't want to sit down, thank you.
Don't get up ; I like standing here."
And she stood smiling at me. " I've
been walking about with these boys
looking for you everywhere. This
one says you've been quite different
lately, and he doesn't know what is
the matter. I'm so sorry."

" A passing fit of the blues," I
managed to reply, recalling the colour
that was in my wash-brush.

"It doesn't improve the appear-
ance, does it ? " she answered. " But
I came down here to say something
interesting, which is this, — that I
have asked these boys' master if they
may spend the first few days of the
holidays with me. And it seems, —

after I had obtained his consent, and
thought everything was arranged —
that they had settled to spend Tues-
day morning with you."

" I don't remember — " I began.

" So this boy tells me," she said,
drawing the Sinner towards her.
" And the only solution of the diffi-
culty that I can see is that you
should bring them down to me on
that morning, and you can take your
affecting farewell in the woods. Will
that do, Sinner, — isn't that your
name 1 "

The Sinner hesitated, waiting, I
think, for me to speak.

" Then that's settled," she said, with
her eyes still going dark and light
with laughter. And putting out an
arm to each of the boys, she turned
the corner round to the house, and
I was left there, the maddest votary
of the Goddess of Contradiction.

(To be continued.)

360

A SKETCH FROM MEMORY.

As Bettina Brentano worshipped
and adored the aged Goethe, so I, an
English maiden, exalted in my youth-
ful soul the author of THE CAXTONS
and MY NOVEL. My Lord of Kneb-
worth loved adulation. He found it
pleasant to receive homage from the
fresh young mind of one who believed
him to be the presiding deity of litera-
ture. He encouraged me to enter
the arena of letters, — which, it is need-
less to say, I found more like the
Valley of Achor than the Parnassus
I had supposed it to be.

However, I wrote a novel. It was
published. It was dedicated to the
one great name which seemed to
be written in letters of gold in
my undisciplined mind. It received
the praise of my deity, — and then
came the disillusionment. His lord-
ship invited me to lunch with him,
and the invitation also included a
member of my family. We " should
find the Ogre alone in his den," he
wrote. It was a large den, being,
in fact, 12, Grosvenor Square, and
had only recently been delivered from
the hands of the workmen. There
was a sort of assumption of cold
splendour in the house, too much
yellow and gold everywhere, and the
furniture was arranged with stiff
formality. The large double draw-
ing-room into which we were ushered
conveyed the impression that it was
seldom used, that the presence of a
woman never adorned it, and it lacked
the fairy touch which alone can trans-
form a house into a home. I remem-
ber that I shivered, though it was a
warm June day, and I began to feel
a pity for this Ogre imprisoned in

gilding, and varnish, and satin, while
colossal footmen in livery, and other
men-servants with noiseless tread,
kept, as it were, a barrier between
him and the outer world.

" What would he be like ? " I won-
dered, for the godmother who accom-
panied me had failed to describe him
satisfactorily. I had not to wonder
long. He was standing by my side
with courteous welcome before I had
recognised that he had entered the
room.

Early and careful training in the
art of self-control came to my rescue
in that moment of great disappoint-
ment; for no idol of which I had
heard or read either in sacred or
classic lore fell more hopelessly and
utterly at the decree of Fate than did
his lordship of Knebworth in my
girlish fancy at this first meeting.
But it was only in external appear-
ance. I was still preparing all the
powers of my enthusiastic soul to
receive an overwhelming outburst of
genius from that glorious mind.

And first as to the outward ap-
pearance. He was hardly of middle
height, and I, his whilom admirer, liked
tall men. He had cold, bluish-grey
eyes into which it seemed the warmth
of affection could never have stolen.
His nose was large, and his features
generally not such as would attract
a lover of the beautiful. Whether
he wore a wig, or the abundant
masses of brown hair were his own,
it is impossible to say at this distance
of time, but the impression left was
that he had not had recourse to art
for those rich brown locks, unless it
was in the matter of colour.

A Sketch from Memory.

361

He invited me to sit beside him on
a couch, observing that he was slightly
deaf, and with the ease of a man of
the world and of the born courtier he
drew out the young mind with evident
pleasure to himself, and a great dismay
to the recipient of his attentions.

The novel, the child of my brain,
first came under discussion, and he
was at some pains to restate and
to accentuate the criticism he had
already passed upon it in several
pages of a long letter. This was kind
and instructive and had its weight
in after years, but, at the time, I was
more struck with the suddenness of
his abandoning a subject of such deep
interest to me, and beginning an
attack on THE ATHENAEUM and its
editor Mr. Hep worth Dixon. Such
scathing satire, such fine and bitter
irony it has never been my lot to
hear before or since. Until that
moment the name of the unfortunate
person who had so aroused his lord-
ship's rancorous hatred was unknown
to me, and when, later on, I found
him classed among the lesser literary
lights of the period, my wonder was
the more intensified at the acrimony
shown towards him by one really
great in the world of letters.

Mr. Hepworth Dixon, however,
after being thoroughly mauled and
left for dead in the den of this
literary lion, was happy, compara-
tively, in the treatment he had re-
ceived from the noble lord than the
higher prey to which that individual
now directed his attention.

But we were seated at luncheon by
this time, and the godmother took
her share in the conversation.

Thackeray and George Eliot came
under discussion (together with the
whitebait), and I, always by prefer-
ence a listener rather than a talker,
not having at that time made ac-
quaintance with the works of those
two great novelists, found my atten-

tions divided between observing the
dexterity with which his lordship con-
veyed the tiny fish to his mouth, and
the bitter, almost ferocious contempt
with which he spoke of the author of
VANITY FAIR, and dismissed George
Eliot with a sneer and a wave of the
hand to the limbo of puerile writers.

But Thackeray found a champion
in the godmother, who, though as
interested in the whitebait as her
host, yet paused in her consumption
of that delectable fish to show fight
for her favourite author. She was a
woman of middle age, had the courage
of her opinions, and loved Thackeray
next to Shakespeare.

"So great a scholar and student
of human nature as is your lordship,"
she observed, looking straight at our
host with her fearless eyes, " will
surely allow that the author of
VANITY FAIR is a master of his art ? "

" I allow nothing of the kind," was
the chilling reply, accompanied by
such a sardonic expression of counten-
ance as made him positively ugly.

" Nevertheless," continued the god-
mother, whose temerity in setting up
her opinion against that of Lord
Lytton so struck me with amaze-
ment that for the moment I forgot
my whitebait (a lapse of memory not
unobserved by one of the colossal foot-
men who promptly whisked away my
plate), "nevertheless I can but think
that when the history of the literature
of the nineteenth century comes to be
written the name of Thackeray will
be found side by side with that of
your lordship."

His lordship bowed at what he evi-
dently deemed a very qualified com-
pliment, and shrugged his shoulders
contemptuously at the prospect of
his name being coupled with that
of Thackeray as planets of equal
magnitude.

I am inclined to think, in later
years, that the godmother bracketed

A Sketch from Memory.

the two names together out of com-
plaisance to her host, for although a
great admirer of the works of Lytton,
she could not with any appreciation
of artistic merit have placed them in
her mind on a level with those of
Thackeray. For myself, I may re-
mark in passing that some little
time after I was induced to read
THE NEWCOMES, and never shall I
forget the wearisome task I felt had
been imposed on me. " Flat, stale,
and unprofitable," was my verdict as
with a sigh of relief I closed the
long story. I had found nothing in
it that appealed to any feeling, or
sentiment, or experience of life so
far as I then knew it. It was dull,
very dull to a girl who had peopled
her fancy with troubadours and
knights-errant, whose earliest friend
had been Merlin, and whose latest
(at that period) was Spenser.

But there came a time, (there come
such times in the lives of all of us, I
suppose,) when the reading of Thack-
eray was a revelation, not of anything
new, but of human nature as it has
ever been since its first heart-beat in
Eden. The scarified soul finds its
interpreter in Thackeray. He is a
cynic and we feel small in his pre-
sence. We redden with shame as he
reckons up the littlenesses and mean-
nesses of our nature, and then we take
his hand, in spirit, and reverently kiss
it, for it has touched our heartstrings
as few hands surely have ever touched
them and perhaps none again ever
will. But I must return to the ante-
Thackerayan epoch of my existence.

The whitebait was succeeded by
more substantial viands, but the sub-
jects of conversation became, in my
opinion, lighter.

His lordship spoke of Mr. Dickens,
and found unqualified praise for him.
In a few graphic sentences he sketched
the man and his career, his energy,
his unique unscholarly genius, until

the immortal Charles stood before us
as a picture in a very rare setting.

"Mr. Dickens stands alone," said
his lordship, "he invites comparison
with none ; he is unapproachable."

" Like Jeafl Paul Richter, the Only
One," I interposed rather inconse-
quently, turning crimson at my
temerity and the glance of strong
disapproval I received from the god-
mother. I know she was devoutly
wishing she had not chaperoned me.
A girl may write a silly novel, but
to have, and to express, an opinion of
such gods of literature as Jean Paul
and Charles Dickens was a height of
audacity from which she evidently
thought I deserved to be ignomini-
ously hurled.

But not so his lordship. With a
gentleness and courtesy I shall never
forget, he said : "I follow you j the
one is a poet, the other by no means
of even a poetical temperament, yet
they have characteristics in common
which might not strike every mind,
but which yours has evidently per-
ceived. In both are to be found two
traits of character rarely combined
in so high a degree, manliness and
tenderness ; and they are both gifted
with a sunny cheerfulness of spirit
which enables them, as it were, to
take the whole world in their arms;
they have an intense love for humanity.
The Germans may truly speak of
Richter as the Only One. We have
our Only One too, and it is Mr.
Dickens."

V Then he paused in his lunch and
leaned back in his chair a moment or
two, fixing a stony stare on the far-
thest window. But as he gazed, a
softness and beauty came into his
eyes, the sardonic lines and curves
of his countenance underwent some
sort of transformation, there were
subtle harmonies of real feeling in
the intonations of his voice as, hardly
above a murmur, the words dropped

A Sketch from Memory.

363

from his lips, " I love — Mr. Dickens."
It was very touching ; I felt quite
softened towards my deity ; he was
a creature of flesh and blood after all,
I thought. Yet I knew the glamour
was gone ; there was Nothing of Bet-
tina left in me ; I could not see
myself embracing Lord Lytton as
that young damsel did the venerable
Goethe. It was a day of awakening
in my life.

With regard to the Press he was
exceedingly bitter. THE TIMES, he
said, had not noticed a book of his
for nearly thirty years, and he did not
know if he had ever been reviewed
in THE STANDARD. He believed there
was a general combination of the
critics against him.

His lordship spoke again of George
Eliot, but with the same covert con-
tempt. It was in connection with
Mr. Dickens who had read ADAM
BEDE in manuscript before publica-
tion. Lord Lytton admitted that he
and Charles Dickens differed in their
opinion of the authoress, but he only
gave me his own impressions. " Her
writings will never live," he said ;
" her style is too heavy, her language
too ponderous for the matter. She
affects a masculineness of diction
which does not sit well on a woman ;
at no very distant date she will be
little read."

This prediction, I have recently
been given to understand, has been
literally verified. I, who class George
Eliot with Thackeray and range them
both in the foremost rank of the
novelists of the nineteenth century,
must confess to agreeing with Lord
Lytton that her language is ponderous.
With her admiration for Goldsmith
one cannot but wish she had adopted
some of his elegant simplicity of style.
And she was terribly overweighted
with learning. I think it was Mrs.
Browning who once said that if she
had her time to come over again she

would read less and write more. We
have not heard that George Eliot
ever made such an admission. She
seems to have studied as much, if not
more, than she wrote, and her acquisi-
tion of knowledge was so enormous
that our only wonder is she found
time to disseminate any. But Lord
Lytton was now dividing his atten-
tion between laying down a course of
reading for me, and the excellency of
some butter which met with his high
approbation. " Where did it come
from ? " he asked of the butler in an
undertone.

"From a farm in Hertfordshire,
my lord," was the low reply.

" Order some more," said his lord-
ship.

Then he mentioned the works of
Jane Austen and Mrs. Inchbald as
models of composition for me to study.
" In A SIMPLE STORY," he remarked,
" you will find all the qualities in
which you are not exactly deficient,
but in which you need strengthening.
Your first attempt at fiction shows
you have ability, I may say talent, for
the art at which you are aiming.
The first volume is decidedly clever,
the second disappointing." I did not
tell him the publisher had induced
me to alter the manuscript and
" make a happy ending," which my
sense of the fitness of things told me
was contrary not only to the rules of
art, but also to those of nature. " In
twelve years' time you will be ashamed
of this first flight of your fancy," his
lordship continued. I was ashamed
of it then and would like to have
trampled it under my feet. " Do not
be in a hurry to write another novel.
Bead the great masters of fiction, and
study Cervantes. I make it a rule
to read DON QUIXOTE three times
every year. There is no greater
novel in the world : let your mind
become saturated with it. But in the
first instance master A SIMPLE STORY,

364

A Sketch from Memory.

and observe how to pourtray the
natural action of individuals under
given circumstances. Life will give
you experience. Do not let it spoil
your freshness, which is at present
your greatest charm. And mix freely
with the world, for that, after all, is
the great workshop where you will
find the clay to be modelled into
shapes of beauty by the cunning of
your pen."

I have mixed with the world since
then, and found the clay in great
abundance, — but the shapes of
beauty ?

I must not omit to record Lord
Lytton's observations concerning Miss
Braddon. He spoke of her, person-
ally, as a friend ; of her works as
those of a clever woman, but not
exactly a genius. They showed ability
and cleverness, he said, " cleverness to
amuse, to while away an hour or two
when one's brain is tired. Nothing
beguiles or refreshes me more," said
his lordship, " than to fling myself
on a sofa and take up a novel of Miss
Braddon's when I come home wearied
out from the House ; her writings
relieve the strain more than anything."

Let me note in conclusion the im-
pression left by these words of a great
author on my young mind. I had
always heard he was in the highest
degree generous towards his fellow-
writers, altogether magnanimous. He
was, but only to the lesser lights, with
the exception, of course, of Mr.
Dickens. Those who stood on the
highest rung of the literary ladder,
side by side with his own great and
versatile genius, perhaps indeed a little
higher, for them he had no meed of
praise. I was sorry, I was disap-
pointed. Greatness of soul, I have
since found, does not always go hand
in hand with greatness of intellect.

But, personally, my recollections
of Lord Lytton are pleasing in the
extreme, and what small success I

had in those early days was in a
great measure due to the strong
interest he took in my career, in the
training of my intellect, in cautioning
me off the many pitfalls that lie in
the path of a young writer. " There
is a great future before you," said his
lordship at parting on this memorable
occasion, " a great future if you dis-
cover wherein lies your power, and
look on your work as an art to be
cultivated and brought to a high
perfection, never debasing it in order
to obtain popularity with the vulgar,
always remembering there is an aris-
tocracy of letters as well as of
individuals."

Then I went home, and after a day
or two collected my energies for an
onslaught on Mrs. Inchbald.

I hunted up A SIMPLE STORY, and
sat down to read it in my father's
study. My unfortunate parent (who,
by the way, was a fine scholar, and
who, if he thought of the matter at all,
wondered at Lord Lytton encourag-
ing an unlettered girl to spoil so many
quires of good foolscap), had a favourite
pair of spectacles through which he
was poring over a volume of Hugh
Miller. He was profoundly interested
at that time over the Palaeozoic
Period, whatever that may be, and
was so lost on this particular morning
in THE OLD RED SANDSTONE that,
when irritated by Dorriforth, and
still more so by the Jesuit Sandford,
I at last in an access of disgust flung
Mrs. Inchbald the whole length of the
room, he started so violently from his
chair that his spectacles fell from his
nose and the heavy volume of Hugh
Miller on the top of them, crushing
them to atoms.

He was a most amiable man. He
picked up Hugh Miller and smoothed
him down and put him on the table,
regarding his shattered spectacles
ruefully the while.

"I can't read that stuff," I cried ;

1

A Sketch from Memory.

365

" I can't understand it, this SIMPLE
STORY."

"I did not think you could," he
responded mildly ; " nevertheless it
is not stuff. Your mind is too un-
formed as yet to understand why
Lord Lytton suggested your reading
it. You had better put on your hat,
I think, and come with me to buy
another pair of spectacles."

So we went, and I remember that
he discoursed by the way of the
vastness of the Universe, its won-
ders and mysteries, its unfathomable
secrets, the tangled threads of the
scheme which science unaided by a
guiding Light would never be able to .
unravel. I remember also being much
interested in all he told me of pre-
historic man, but found the Old Red
Sandstone rather heavy, and was much
relieved when a lark, soaring up
into the blue heaven, attracted his
attention and, I think, turned his
thoughts to another " ology " than
that of the earth, for I can see him

now as he stood bareheaded in the
grassy meadow listening, it seemed to
me, with reverence to that joyous
song. I know he went home and
wrote an Ode to the Skylark which
my mother said. was beautiful while
starry tears fell in a little shower
from her eyes ; and then she gently
rebuked me when I gave Mrs. Inch-
bald a contemptuous kick as she lay
face downward in the corner to which
I had flung her, and said, " There
are more mysteries in the human
mind than in all the books of geology
that were ever written ;" and she gave
a little glance of superior knowledge
at my father which was, however,
quite lost upon him, for with a per-
fectly radiant countenance he had
adjusted his new spectacles, abandoned
his lark, and was once more delving
with Hugh Miller in the Old Red
Sandstone. " Your father's mind and
Lord Lytton's," added my mother,
" are of a different order, but you will
come to understand A SIMPLE STORY."

366

ROYAL EDWARDS. r
(A.D. 901-1901.)

ALL but ten centuries of English
history have bridged the period
between the accession of the first
King Edward of the House of Cerdic
on October 28th, 901, and that of his
descendant and successor King Edward
the Seventh on January 22nd, 1901.
The title of the first was, Angul
Saxonum Rex, and that is still the
proudest boast of Edward the Seventh,
King of Great Britain and Ireland
and Emperor of India.

A thousand years ago Alfred the
Great was reigning in England, and
his name is still a household word
among us. The millenary of his
death, which is to be celebrated this
year in England, has been marked by
the lamented decease of his Imperial
descendant and representative, Queen
Victoria, who by universal testimony
is acknowledged to have been the
best woman who ever wore a crown,
and the best beloved sovereign these
later centuries have seen. It is at
once a coincidence and a proof of the
continuity of English history that
each should have left a son and suc-
cessor of the name of Edward.

Alfred the Great's fame has over-
shadowed the greatness of his son
Edward, who was associated with him
in all his later glories, and the twenty-
four years of whose own reign were
a turning-point in the history of Eng-
land. The training and education of
Edward the Elder may be looked upon
as one of Alfred's greatest achieve-
ments, and for nearly a century after-
wards the West Saxon kings who
followed him form one of the most

brilliant lines recorded in history. It
seems strange that the name of Alfred
has never again appeared in the roll
of English kings, while that of his
gallant son and successor has become
a typical English name, and has been
borne by no fewer than ten kings of
England, and more than ten heirs
to the Crown who did not live to
wear it.

Edward (signifying the rich guar-
dian) is, perhaps, the most noted of
all our Anglo-Saxon names. Teutonic
names were almost all compounds of
two words, and families were often
distinguished by every individual
member bearing the same syllable
with a different affix or termination.
The royal line of Wessex seems to have
alternated between ^thel (noble) and
JEd (rich or happy), and in Alfred's
eldest son, the Etheling of a thousand
years ago, we have the first famous
English Edward.

Edward the Elder (901-925) was
the first prince who had any real claim
to be considered King of the English
and Lord of the Isle of Britain. His
immediate kingdom only reached to
the Humber, but it is recorded in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that, in the
year 924, he was chosen "for Father
and for Lord " by the Scots, North-
umbrians, and Strathclyde Britons.
Within a year after he had reached
this height of power Edward died at
Farndon in Mercia.

The relations of this first Edward
with the Continent, and the distin-
guished station he and his immediate
successors held among the monarchs of

Eoyal Edwards.

367

Europe, form a very interesting study
in the history of the tenth century.
No fewer than five of his daughters
made alliances with foreign princes.
Edgiva returned to France as the
queen of Charles the Simple (who had
taken refuge in England from the
storms of revolution in his own
country), and when he was finally
deposed in 922, she sought the pro-
tection of her father's court for herself
and her infant son, who afterwards
reigned in France as Louis d'Outremer.
Edhild married Hugh the Great, Duke
of the French (the rival of the House
of Charlemagne) and the founder of
a race of French kings which con-
tinued in the male line longer than
any other dynasty in Europe. Another
daughter was married to Lewis, King
of Provence or Aquitaine, and Edith
and Elfgifu were sent to Germany,
that the Emperor Otho the First
might make his choice between them ;
he chose Edith, and Elfgifu became
the wife of one of the princes of the
Empire near the Alps.

Between the death of the first
English Edward, in 925, and the ac-
cession of his great-grandson, Edward
the Martyr (975-978), there reigned
one after another, Edward the Elder's
three noble sons, Athelstane, Edmund,
and Ed red, and the two sons of
Edmund, Edwy and Edgar. But the
one vivid personality which dominated
England during the greater part of
those fifty years, was not that of
king or warrior but of a famous
monk. It was in the reign of Edgar,
(the king who submitted himself the
most unreservedly to the influence of
Dunstan) that the name of Britain
passed into that of Englaland. Dun-
stan's work was truly national, and
he has been called the Jehoiada of
the boy-king. It was Dunstan who
settled the disputed succession by
placing the crown on Edward's head,
and who watched over and counselled

him as a father during the four short
years before his assassination (or
martyrdom as it was called), exalted
him into a saint and hero, and made
the name of Edward more popular
than ever.

In 1016 England fell again under
the dominion of the Danes, and
Edmund Ironside, the brave son of
Ethelred, whose short reign of less
than six months was full of hard
fighting, died, leaving only two infant
sons, Edmund and Edward, who were
both sent by Canute to his half-
brother Olaf in Sweden, when Canute
was elected King over all England,
and crowned in St. Paul's by the
English archbishop. It has been
suggested that Canute would not
have greatly regretted the death of
these infants, but Olaf, who was the
first Christian king of Sweden, fearing
lest any harm should happen to them,
sent them to the care of St. Stephen
the first Christian king of Hungary,
whose brilliant court was then the
most civilised in Europe. The roman-
tic history of one of these boys will be
referred to later, but meanwhile we
must turn to another royal Edward,
the third and last king of the old
Saxon stock.

Edward the Confessor (1042-1066)
was the last surviving son of Ethelred
the Unready and his second wife
Emma, who had fled with her two
children to the protection of her
brother, Duke Richard of Normandy,
when Canute usurped the English
throne. She afterwards returned to
England and became the wife of King
Canute, but her sons were educated in
Normandy, and Edward was far more
Norman than Saxon in all his tastes
and predilections. For twenty-seven
years three Danish kings had occupied
the throne of England, and it was
partly as the heir of his half-brother
Hardicanute that Edward returned
to England, though it was on the

368

Royal Edivards.

full tide of popular feeling that his
father's crown was restored to him
in 1042. He wore it for three and
twenty years, and a halo surrounds
the name of the Edward whose body
is enshrined in the very heart of
England in his own great abbey of
Westminster, the building which was
the cherished work of his life. He
resided constantly in his palace of
Westminster, and though the last of
the historic rooms in which he lived
and died was destroyed in the fatal
fire of 1835, the solid foundations of
the Confessor still remain, and the
crypt of the chapel of St. Stephen
is the centre around which, from his
days to the present, has ceaselessly
ebbed and flowed the strong current
of the visible life not of the English
monarchy alone but of the English
nation. Many legends of his kindly
words and gentle deeds gather round
the memory of the childlike king;
but he was not strong enough to
rule a turbulent people, and he was
alternately swayed by the counsels
of his imperious cousin, William of
Normandy, and of his masterful
brother-in-law, Harold. The struggle
between the two represented the
Norman and the Saxon element be-
tween which Edward vacillated.

One effort he certainly did make
to retain the kingdom for the House
of Cerdic. In 1054 the King sent
Bishop Aldred to Cologne to the
Emperor, to seek his nephew, Edward
the Etheling, the son of Edmund
Ironside and the direct heir. Edward
the Exile grew up, we are told by the
old Chronicle, to be a good man, and
though he never became king of
England, he must not be omitted
from the list of English Edwards,
for it is through him that our royal
family claim their descent from the
first King Edward, the son of Alfred
the Great. When Edward the Con-
fessor sent for him, he was still

living in Hungary, where he had
married Princess Agatha, the young
sister, or niece, of Gisela queen of
St. Stephen and sister of Henry the
Second the last Saxon Emperor of
Germany. In response to his uncle's
invitation Prince Edward came to
London with his wife and children
in 1057; but he died a few days
after his arrival without even seeing
the King, " a rueful case and harmful
for all this nation," as the Saxon
Chronicler sadly records. He was
buried in St. Paul's Minster, and his
son, the child Edgar, remained the sole
representative of the family of Alfred
the Great. Edward the Confessor
died on January 5th, 1066, having
lived just long enough to see the
consecration of the famous Minster
which he had built on the banks
of the Thames, and which is now
known the wide world over as West-
minster Abbey. " Weep not," he said
to Edith his queen, " I shall not die
but live. ... I am going from
the Land of Death to the Land of the
Living." He was buried in the new
Minster on January 6th, the day
after his death, and crowds flocked to
the funeral of the last of the Saxon
kings of Alfred's line ; for although
the boy Edgar, son of Edward the
Exile, was chosen king after the
death of Harold he was never king
in fact, and on Christmas Day of the
same year William the Conqueror
was crowned in the new church that
Edward the Confessor had come to
Westminster to dedicate just one
year before.

Edgar Etheling fled with his mother
and sisters, intending to return to
Hungary, but they were driven to
take refuge (some say were ship-
wrecked) in the Frith of Forth, and
the Princess Margaret won the heart
and hand of the Scottish King,
Malcolm Canmore.

Queen Margaret's eldest son Edward

Royal Edwards.

369

would have been the next direct heir
of the royal Anglo-Saxon line, as
neither Edgar Etheling nor his sister
Christina had any children, but he
was slain with his father at the siege
of Alnwick in 1093. Three of Mar-
garet's sons were successively kings
of Scotland, and her daughter Edith
(Maude, or Matilda, as she was after-
wards called in deference to Norman
prejudice) became the queen of Henry
the First. " Never since the battle of
Hastings," it was said, "had there
been such a joyous day as when Queen
Maude, the descendant of Alfred, was
crowned in the Abbey and feasted in
the great Hall."

The melancholy death of the Ethe-
ling William (as the English delighted
to call the son of their own Matilda)
again endangered the succession ; but
in the conflicts with Stephen his sister
Matilda was magnanimously supported
by her uncle King David of Scotland,
and on the death of Stephen her son
Henry the Second ascended the throne
of England unopposed, notwithstand-
ing that he was the son of a foreign
count, an Angevin, and a stranger
alike to Norman and Saxon.

In the reign of King John Nor-
mandy, which had long been estranged,
was lost to England and became a
province of the French crown, and
though our Angevin monarchs fought
long and gallantly to retain their own
hereditary dominions, each successive
generation became less French and
more English, and in the person of
the next great Edward we see a king
who was English to the very core,
and whose proudest title was that of
English Edward. Henry the Third
gloried in his English ancestry. He
named his two sons after the two
beloved royal saints, Edward and
Edmund, the elder after the Confessor,
for whose memory he had a special
reverence. St. Edward was indeed
regarded as the patron saint of Eng-
No. 497. — VOL. LXXXIII.

land until superseded by St. George
in the thirteenth century. He was
canonised by Pope Alexander the
Second, and when his body was trans-
lated by Becket on October 13th,
1163, it is said to have been dis-
covered, in the grave before the high
altar of the abbey, in a state of
complete preservation, even the long,
white, curling beard being still visible.
The second translation took place on
the same day of the month, one hun-
dred and six years later; when the
corpse was placed in the costly shrine
adorned with precious stones prepared
for it by Henry the Third in the
finished church, then, as now, the
most stately in Europe. The Princes
Edward and Edmund, who were on
the eve of starting for the Crusades,
both assisted at the ceremony, being
among the nobles and princes of the
blood who bore the body of the
Confessor to its final resting-place
behind the high altar in his own
abbey.

Edward the First (1272-1307) was
indeed born under the shadow of the
abbey which his father was occupied
in rebuilding and beautifying during
the greater part of his long reign.
He was in the fullest sense a typical
representative of the race, linked to
his Saxon ancestors in more than his
mighty stature and English name.
He was a great statesman and a
brave soldier with all the national
love of hard fighting. He constantly
spoke English, his very temper, his
faults as well as his virtues were
essentially English. The purity of
his life, the warmth of his family
affections, his love of truth, and his
high sense of duty, were characteristics
of the best and highest standard
of Englishmen. He was a loving
son and a devoted husband. " I
loved her tenderly during her life-
time," he wrote to the Abbot of
Clugny after the death of his wife,

370

Royal Edwards.

November 28th, 1291, "I do not
cease to love her now she is dead j "
and the memory of that faithful love
is visible to this day in the remains
of the goodly crosses which he caused
to be erected at each place where her
body rested on the way to West-
minster, — at Lincoln, Grantham,
Stanford, Geddington, Northampton,
Stony Stratford, Dunstable, St.
Albans, Waltham, and Charing ; and
tradition has connected the name
which still distinguishes that busy
thoroughfare (then a mere village
between London and Westminster),
with the chere reine of the broken-
hearted monarch.

The worst side of Edward's char-
acter appears in his treatment of
Scotland. Scotchmen can never for-
give his destruction of their early
records, his carrying off the regalia
and above all the sacred Stone of
Destiny, the Lia Fail, on which all
the Scottish kings had been crowned,
and which legend asserted to be the
very stone which Jacob had used as
a pillow at Bethel. Edward took it
to Westminster, had it enclosed in a
stately chair, hard by the shrine of
the Confessor, and in spite of the
distich which is recorded to have been
engraved on it by Kenneth the Great
in the ninth century1 (but of which
no trace now remains) every English
coronation has since taken place upon
it. The claim of Edward to the
homage of the Scotch and Welsh, the
assertion of which cost England so
much blood and treasure, was, he
maintained, only the defence of the
rights of the crown which had de-
scended to him from his ancestor the
first English Edward. It is remark-

1 Ni fallit fatum, Scoti quocunque locatum
Invenient lapidem, regnare tenentur ibedem.

Or Fate's deceived, and Heav'n decrees in

vain,
Or where they find this stone, the Scots

shall reign.

able, when this is acknowledged and
remembered, that Edward Planta-
genet whose very name points to the
pride taken by his father in his
Saxon ancestry, should be universally
known and recognised as Edward the
First, instead of as he really was the
fourth English king of that name.
It is true that in speaking of this and
the two following Edwards as first,
second, and third, it was usual to
add " post Conquestmn (after the Con-
quest)," but by degrees that addition
was omitted.

Edward the Second (1307-1327),
the weak and feeble son of the
greatest of the Plantagenets, was the
first English prince to bear the title
since then so associated with the heir
to the English throne, the title of
Prince of Wales. He grievously dis-
appointed the hopes founded on his
noble stature and majestic presence
when he succeeded his father amid
general joy and applause at the age
of twenty-three.

Edward the Third (1327-1377)
is a much more attractive person-
ality, although his determination to
win the French crown for himself
in right of his mother, and in prefer-
ence to the claims of the House
of Yalois, involved a hundred years
of war with France. The Chronicles
of Froissart have thrown a glamour
over the age of Crecy and Poitiers,
of Chaucer and Wickliffe, which have
made its heroes household words.
Edward, the Black Prince, appears in
them as the very flower and darling
of chivalry ; the most illustrious and
accomplished prince he has been
called, whom England had ever pro-
duced. His death in his forty-sixth
year was the cause of general grief,
and the stately monument in Canter-
bury Cathedral bears witness to the
love and pride which the nation took
in their famous Prince of Wales.
Edward, his eldest son, having died

Royal Edwards.

371

in Gascony at the age of seven, his
younger son Richard became king on
the death of his grandfather in 1377,
thus making a break in the line of
Edwards, until it re-appears after the
three Henries of Lancaster and is
evidently the favourite name during
the Wars of the Roses.

Edward the Fourth (1461-1483)
was only nineteen years of age when
he began to reign, and he proved one
of the most unscrupulous, although
one of the ablest, of English kings.
His fine presence, handsome features,
and winning manners secured him a
popularity which had been denied to
nobler sovereigns. He was the founder
of a new monarchy, more absolute
than that of Norman or Plantagenet,
and which paved the way for the
Tudor despotism. Th« whole of his
reign was disturbed, as that of his
predecessor had been, by the fierce
contests of rival partisans, and the
bloody wars of York and Lancaster
abolished the last remnants of feudal-
ism, ruined the ancient nobility, and
arrested the progress of English free-
dom for at least a hundred years.
At the beginning of the reign the
dominating power in England was not
the King but the King-Maker, the
great Earl of Warwick, the Last of the
Barons as he has been picturesquely
styled, who was himself closely allied
by the ties of blood or marriage to
all the rival aspirants to the crown.
Edward, Prince of Wales, the gallant
son of Henry the Sixth, was be-
trothed, if not actually married, to
Anne, Warwick's daughter, by whose
assistance he hoped to restore his
father to the throne. When brought
into his conqueror's presence, after
the defeat of the Lancastrians at
Tewkesbury in 1471, the young prince
frankly owned that he was come to
recover his own inheritance which
had been unjustly usurped. Indig-
nant at his boldness, Edward struck

him on the mouth with his gauntlet,
and the defenceless youth was in-
stantly murdered by the bystanders
in cold blood. Many historians have
observed that the murder of the
King's own innocent boys in the
Tower twelve years later was the
retribution which followed this deed
of ruthless cruelty.

The next Prince of Wales only bore
the title of Edward the Fifth for two
short months, and his coronation,
which was fixed for June 22nd, 1483,
never took place. He was disinherited
by his uncle Richard the Third, and
the sudden disappearance of both the
sons of Edward the Fourth leaves
little room for doubt that they were
put out of the way with Richard's
connivance, if not, as is almost uni-
versally believed, by his orders. He
did not long enjoy the crown which
he had thus unjustly seized. In
little more than two years he met
his death on the field of Bos worth,
and the last year of his life was
rendered miserable by the loss of his
own fondly cherished and only son
Edward, created Prince of Wales at
York in September, 1483, in the
eleventh year of his age. His mother
was that Lady Anne Nevill, daughter
of the great Earl of Warwick, the
bride of the Prince of Wales slain
at Tewkesbury, who had afterwards
married Richard, then Duke of
Gloucester.

Edward Plantagenet, Earl of War-
wick, another grandson of the King-
Maker, was the only son of George,
Duke of Clarence and the Lady Isabel
Nevill. She died in 1476, leaving her
two children to the care of her sister
and co-heiress Anne, and the young
Earl of Warwick was brought up by
her and knighted the day her son
Edward was made Prince of Wales.
Richard would not acknowledge him
as his heir on the death of his own
boy, lest the son of his elder brother
B B 2

372

Boyal Edwards.

should prove a dangerous rival as
having a better title to the crown
than himself. He kept him a close
prisoner, and the day after the battle
of Bosworth, Henry the Seventh sent
the poor boy to the Tower, which
he was never afterwards permitted
to leave except on two occasions. One
day in 1487 he was paraded through
the streets of London and conducted in
solemn procession to St. Paul's, where
multitudes were permitted to see him,
in order to convince the populace
of the imposture of Lambert Simnel,
the son of an Oxford baker, who
pretended to have escaped from the
Tower and had been received in
Ireland, and actually crowned in
Dublin, as Edward the Sixth. This
rebellion was quickly suppressed, and
the pretender, having confessed that
he was not the Earl of Warwick, was
taken into the King's service as a
scullion and heard of no more. In
1499 another pretender personating
the Earl of Warwick was apprehended
and hanged ; and in the same year
Edward himself was brought before
the House of Peers, arraigned for high
treason, condemned, and executed on
Tower Hill, November 28th, 1499.

Edward the Sixth (1547-1553), the
idolised son of Henry the Eighth and
Jane Seymour, was not ten years of
age when he was crowned at West-
minster on February 25th, 1547. He
was a precocious child, quick, thought-
ful, and intelligent, and took a great
interest in public affairs. His early
death at the age of sixteen was a
severe blow to the cause of the
Protestant Reformation in England.
The foundation of eighteen grammar-
schools has perpetuated the name of
the young King, and the Liturgy of
the Church of England bears witness
to the piety, learning, and discrimi-
nation of his godfather, Archbishop
Cranmer. The first prayer-book of
Edward the Sixth (which was first

used on Whitsunday, June 9th, 1549),
is substantially the same as that now
in use, and superseded, as it was
intended to do, both the Latin ser-
vice-books and primers. It has passed
through several revisions, but its main
characteristics both as to style and
substance have been carefully pre-
served, and it is a trophy of that
reign for which Englishmen may well
be thankful. It was in this reign
that the Commons, who had assembled
within the walls of Westminster
Abbey for two hundred years, re-
moved from the chapter-house to the
beautiful chapel of St. Stephen, which
now gives its name to the present
Houses of Parliament, and is still a
connecting link between them and the
home of Edward the Confessor.

When the family of Henry the
Eighth became extinct on the death
of Queen Elizabeth, the inheritance
passed to James the Sixth of Scot-
land (the great-grandson of Margaret
Tudor, daughter of Henry the
Seventh), who was crowned as James
the First, King of Great Britain and
Ireland, in Westminster Abbey on
the Stone of Scone, thus fulfilling, in
the opinion of the Scottish nation at
least, the prophecy which had been
recorded on the Lia Fail. The Stuarts
introduced James and Charles as royal
names, but Edward was not forgotten
and was combined with them in the
unfortunate son and grandson of James
the Second.

James Francis Edward, Prince of
Wales, whose birth at St. James's
Palace was the occasion of such joy to
his parents, and whose long life, count-
ing from his father's death, covered a
greater period of time than the reign
of any English king, was the most
unhappy of princes ; an exile all his
life, and, though always called by his
faithful adherents James the Third,
known to history only by the bitter
and unjust title of the Pretender.

Royal Edwards.

373

His son, Charles Edward, was recog-
nised by the Jacobites, on the death
of his father, as Charles the Third.
He at least tasted some of the sweets
of his royal inheritance and played
part of his romantic and adventurous
career in his own country, where, for
a time at least, he attracted to himself
that unselfish and passionate loyalty
the touching traces of which still
survive in familiar Scottish songs and
ballads.

When the House of Stuart became
extinct on the death of Cardinal York
(Henry the Ninth as his name is
recorded on the Stuart Monument in
St. Peter's at Rome), the Protestant
Succession and the House of Hanover
had been established in England for
three generations, and George the
Third could afford to take a kindly
and pathetic interest in the latest
representative of a banished dynasty.

Edward, Duke of Kent, was the
fourth son of George the Third, and
it was he who more than eighty-one
years ago chose for his infant daughter
the auspicious name of Victoria, whose
glorious reign has surpassed every
other in English history, and who
died on January 22nd, 1901, mourned,
beloved, and honoured as no British
sovereign has ever been before.

Queen Victoria always showed a
keen interest in all that touched the
connection between the present and
the past. English Edward, Saxon
Alfred, and British Arthur were
remembered in the names chosen for
her own sons, and it is generally
believed that it was by her desire
that the eldest son of the Duke of
Cornwall and York bears the addi-
tional names of the four patron saints
of the four kingdoms, George of Eng-
land, Andrew of Scotland, Patrick of
Ireland, and David of Wales, — which
last name is also connected with many
very ancient traditions and legends of
both Scottish and Irish royalty.

Edward the Seventh was proclaimed
King of Great Britain and Ireland
and Emperor of India throughout his
vast empire in the last week of Janu-
ary, 1901. All the pomp and cir-
cumstance, the suppressed enthusiasm
and devotion this event evoked amid
the world - wide lamentation and
mourning for the loss of the beloved
Queen are too well known and too
recent to require recapitulation.

What would his famous ancestor,
the first King Edward, have thought
of the unparalleled display, and of
four hundred millions of subjects who
have acknowledged his namesake and
descendant " for Father and for
Lord " 1 One point of resemblance
we may note, — the connection which
existed between the royal houses of
Europe and the family of the first
Edward in the tenth century, and that
which exists between them and the
family of the seventh Edward in the
twentieth century, when, of the great
concourse of kings and their heirs who
gathered from all quarters to pay
the last tribute of respect at the
grave of Victoria the Good, so many
were drawn there also by those ties
of blood which bring sovereign and
subject to one common level of
humanity.

Albert Victor Christian Edward,
Duke of Clarence, his Majesty's late
lamented eldest son and heir, was
popularly known by the name of
Prince Edward, until the entire
nation mourned his early death in
1892.

Prince Edward, too, is the name
by which the little fair-haired, blue-
eyed grandson of Edward the Seventh
is affectionately known among his
grandfather's subjects ; and to him,
in his appointed time, the nation will
look with confidence to carry the
glorious name of English Edward
with honour and renown far into the
twentieth century.

374

THE PASSING OF THE QUEEN.

RENOWNED and reverenced of the wondering world

And of thy folk beloved ! Majesty

Ideal ! o'er the shining seas impearled

With wintry sunshine what remains of thee

They brought with mourning from yon Island-shore ;

And as the funeral pomp through that long lane

Of battle-ships ranked far along the main

Passed like a dream, again and yet again

The loud guns thundering boomed their last saluting roar.

And they have borne thee (nay, not thee, we cling
To fond delusion, grant it us awhile !)
In long procession, Emperor, Prince, and King,
Through the great central heart of all this Isle,
Whose beating labours 'neath the crowded weight
Of one vast sorrow. She is gone, whose sway
Was as a Mother's ; she is passed away,
And we who bowed around her yesterday,
We of all nations now are made most desolate.

But not in London, mid its throng and stir,

Wouldst thou be laid, nor in that ancient fane

Where sleep the crowned dead, in Westminster.

Nay, let them lead the long funereal train

To the great castle of thy royal race,

Where the broad Thames sweeps on with silver flow

Hound ample lawns, and where wide woodlands blow,

Thither, to Windsor, let the mourners go,

And let thine honoured dust find there fit resting-place.

And 'tis no high-plumed hearse, no funeral car,
Bears thy dear dust, oh far-descended Queen !
Fitting for thee in storm-swept days of war —
Ah, cruel war, that wrought thee bitter teen ! —
Head of our race, a simple soldier's bier ;
And fitting by thy sailors thou shouldst be
Through Windsor Town drawn thus right royally ;
For what a leader have we lost in thee,
Of all thy glorious Line most glorious and most dear !

Sleep, Majesty of royal England, sleep

In thy fair Windsor, loved of Queens and Kings !

Thy dust shall the Fourth Edward's chapel keep,

Mid gorgeous twilight of rich blazonings

And banners of its haughty knights outspread,

The Passing of the Queen. 375

Windsor, where Kings of yore their dwelling set,

Saxon, and Norman, and Plantagenet,

Tudor, and Stewart, — dearer memory yet,

Where thine own loved ones lie, the young, th' untimely dead ?

Nay, for thy woman's heart of tender 'truth
Willed that thy dust by his should sleep at last,
The Husband dear, the sweet, lost love of youth,
Now that thy long, long widowhood is past.
Ah, children are we, and still childlike try
To cheat our anguish, and to play with grief ! —
Even Death, that is of sorrows king and chief, —
Pass, wandering wind, and fall, oh withered leaf —
Should not the Soul rejoice to flee mortality !

Our Dead is gone. Dally with grief no more !

She that as Head of all this mighty realm

And Soul of Empire, — that from shore to shore

Circles majestic — swayed the nation's helm,

And bade the Ship of State ride on secure ;

Is called to other service, otherwhere, —

In such strong souls hath Death no part nor share —

She that with strict account and anxious care

Did all the weary weight of day's long toil endure.

And, kindest, simplest woman, to thy heart

Dear were our Scottish hills, each loch and glen.

Ah ! the rude North, whence sprang thy race, had part

In thee, and thou didst turn to us again

And dwell among us ; and 'twas thy sweet will

Bade Highland pipes their dirge, — that sad, wild strain

Which by the Modder, o'er thy soldiers slain,

Woke the far echoes of Magersfontein —

Fling, Lady, o'er thy grave their mournful music shrill.

Hail and farewell ! Great Britain hath thy dust ;

But to the Greater Britain thou art made

An inspiration, and a sacred trust,

A living presence that can never fade.

From Arctic snows to Australasian seas

They mourn, in many a clime and many a tongue,

The Mother- Empress, who around them flung

The segis of her love, to whom have clung,

To whom for aye shall cling our noblest memories.

L. I. L,

376

NORTH AND SOUTH.

(AN EXAMINATION OF THE TERRITORIAL CENTRES OP NATIONAL INCENTIVE
AND ACTIVITY.)

COMMUNITIES of men, like indi-
viduals, are modified by their sur-
roundings. Racial types and national
types are probably the results of the
accumulated and inherited changes
produced by the whole of the condi-
tions to which the ancestors of the
race or nation have been subjected.
The type once initiated reacts upon
its surroundings, and becomes itself a
factor limiting and directing future
changes. Endless migrations, wars,
conquests, and colonisations have in-
termingled the racial stocks and
branches of the long- civilised peoples
of the world in countless ways and
degrees, till almost every portion of a
modern nation's territory is occupied
by a complex and diversified popula-
tion. Such a population would be
diversely affected by even similar
conditions ; but the conditions are
hardly anywhere similar over any
moderate extent of habitable territory.
Climate, geographical position, the
nature of the surface, the natural
products, food - supplies, and other
conditions may vary greatly ; and
each variation tends to differentiate
moi-e and more each portion of the
population from a general uniformity.
In this differentiation some communi-
ties will attain a finer character, a
greater activity or efficiency, in a word,
a higher civilisation than the average;
they will become, as it were, nuclei
in the general tissue of the nation.
Such nuclei will reveal themselves by
a better development and a greater
efficiency, by, in short, a larger par-

ticipation in all that is highest in the
national life. At these places the
national activity, industrial, social
and political, will be greatest; and
here, too, will arise the national in-
centives to progress and reform of all
kinds. The districts occupied by
these nuclei will be those which have
been and are historically, industrially,
commercially, and politically most
important.

All this is applicable to the British
Isles ; or, better still, considering the
limits of our space, to England.
Ethnology and history combine to tell
us that the population is racially
complex. Though extreme variations
of physical surroundings are rare or
wanting, there are countless variations
of sufficient degrees to produce con
siderable diversity in the population,
while a long and high civilisation has
brought it into touch with an infinite
variety of social and political sur-
roundings. Moreover there is a fairly
full and accurate history extending
over a long period to supply us with
materials for the verification or other-
wise of our conclusions. Let us pass
it in survey, — broadly and cursorily
as our limits will alone permit.

The little that we know of Celtic
Britain relates to the south. The
inhabitants of the Kentish district
had some trade with the continent
before the arrival of the Romans.
They shipped tin for Gaul, from the
island of Thanet it is supposed, some
centuries before the Roman invasion.
This tin came from Cornwall and

North and South.

377

Devonshire, and was brought either
in boats or on horseback to Thanet.
Recent investigations make it doubt-
ful whether, until after the Roman
invasion, there was ever any direct
trade in tin between the south-west
of Britain and the Continent ; though
there was probably intercourse of
some kind between the inhabitants of
this part of Britain and those of the
nearest part of Gaul. Caesar says
that iron was found on the sea-coast
of Britain ; and Professor Boyd Daw-
kins believes that iron-mining was
carried on in the wealds of Kent and
Sussex before Csesar came. Gold
coins of a Gallo-Grecian pattern were
coined in the south of Britain, accord-
ing to Mr. John Evans, probably as
early as a century and a half before
the Christian Era ; and the first
coining probably took place in Kent.
Other southern tribes afterwards
coined money ; but though money
appears to have circulated as far as
Cornwall, there is no satisfactory
proof that any tribe occupying ground
west of what is now Dorsetshire had
a coinage of its own. At a later
period these coins circulated further
north ; but in the first century we
have the statement of a Spanish
writer that the further a British tribe
was from the Continent, the less it
knew of any other wealth than flocks
and land. And probably this is a
fair measure of the relative degrees
of civilisation in the different parts of
Britain.

The south of Britain naturally
came earliest under Roman rule, and
received most of the Roman influence
and civilisation. Though the prin-
cipal Roman cities were largely mili-
tary stations and placed at those
points from which the country could
be best held in subjection, they never-
theless lie mostly in the south. Of
the greatest only three, York, Ches-
ter, and Lincoln, lie north of a hori-

zontal line drawn from the vicinity of
the Wash ; while many more, London,
St. Albans, Colchester, Bath, Rich-
borough, Gloucester, and others lie
south of it. The chief streets cross
each other rather to the south and
east of the centre of the country ;
and, even more significant, the breadth
of the roads varied from eight to
twenty-four feet in the north, and
sometimes extended to sixty feet in
the great highways of the south.
There were great pottery manufac-
tories on the banks of the Medway ;
the principal iron districts were the
forest of Dean and the wealds of
Kent and Sussex ; while London was
the chief trading - city. The one
great political rising of the British
against the Roman rule occurred in
the south-east, the rebellion of the
Trinobantes at Colchester, London,
and St. Albans. The invaders suc-
ceeded to some extent in Romanising
the Britons in the south-east; but
elsewhere their influence was that
of a military occupation only. In
conclusion we may safely say that,
from the Celtic or the Roman point
of view, the south-east of Britain
was at this time the most important
part of the country.

The Saxon invasions came generally
from the east ; and though the con-
quest and colonisation of the south-
east and south took place first, those
of the midlands and the north were
not far behind. The first effect of
the invasions was to break up the
Roman unity into a number of tribal
kingdoms, each fighting for its own
existence and solely occupied with its
own affairs. In a disorganised state
of society the only effective superi-
ority is a military, gradually merg-
ing into a political one. It would
be futile to enter into the confused
record of early Saxon tribal warfare ;
we must seek rather for the indica-
tions of nation - building. One of

378

North and South.

the earliest signs of the growth of
political power is the establishment
of a small overlordship in the south-
east by Ethelbert of Kent. To him
Pope Gregory sent his Christian
mission, and in his territory and
under his patronage Romish Chris-
tianity was introduced into England,
and Canterbury received its first
archbishop. Upon the death of
Ethelbert, his power was transferred
to Redwald of East Anglia. Mean-
while Northumbria, under Edwin,
was rising into a great overlordship
embracing the greater part of Saxon
England. Irish Christianity was
being introduced into the north ;
yet Edwin bowed to a mission from
Kent, and forty years later the
southern Christianity triumphed over
the northern at the Synod of
Whitby. The Northumbrian over-
lordship and supremacy were suc-
ceeded by a Mercian supremacy, and
this again by the still greater supre-
macy of Wessex, which now repre-
sented the south and south - east
of England. The Danish invasion
threatened the West-Saxon supremacy
for a time, and it is worth noting
that there was even a moment when
Wessex alone represented the English
cause ; but it turned the tide of
foreign invasion and steadily ex-
panded until it embraced the whole
of England and enabled its king to
become the undisputed ruler of the
whole people, Saxons, Celts, and
Danes. Thus, in military and poli-
tical power the final and highest
supremacy in Saxon England was
West-Saxon. In material prosperity
Wessex was equally advanced ; its
literature was the most copious and
the wealthiest in the kingdom, and
its dialect is still considered the
classic type of Old English, though
modern English grew out of the
Mercian.

The Norman invasion seized upon the

south and took over the West-Saxon
supremacy as it stood. The Conqueror
found the extreme west and north
more difficult to subdue ; and in his
fury at a revolt of the north in 1068,
he laid it completely waste. By the
famine which followed this act of
savagery one hundred thousand per-
sons are said to have lost their lives,
and as the entire population of
England at the time was probably
no more than two millions, the
northern counties must have been
severely crippled by this fearful
harrying. For half a century they
lay bare, and a much longer period
must have elapsed before they can
be said to have recovered from the
injury. This must have helped the
south, the midlands, and the west
to take a great advance, compara-
tively, towards the attainment of a
higher civilisation. From the Domes-
day Survey we can gain a much
better idea of the general state of
the country at this time than is
possible at any previous one. The
bulk of the population was in the
southern and eastern counties. Forty-
one provincial cities or boroughs are
named, most of which are the county
towns of to-day ; while there are ten
fortified towns of greater importance,
Canterbury, York, Nottingham, Ox-
ford, Hereford, Leicester, Lincoln,
Stafford, Chester, and Colchester,
almost all, it will be noticed, in the
midlands. The south, the midlands,
and the north seem to represent
three stages in the work of subjuga-
tion. The south, the territory which
had been mainly West-Saxon, became
a sort of demesne to the Conqueror,
and was held without much difficulty.
The midlands were more disaffected,
and were held in check by fortified
towns. The north, too turbulent to
be ruled, was destroyed. A few
towns had a population of over
five thousand inhabitants ; they are

North and South.

379

London, York, Bristol, Coventry,
Norwich, and Lincoln, on the whole
south-central towns. The chief ports
were London, Southampton, Bristol,
and Norwich, none of which is
northern. The proximity of the
south to the Continent had already
brought it for a long time under
the influence of continental life and
thought, and its political union with
Normandy must have greatly in-
creased the influence. The southern
ports and towns must have assumed
a relatively greater importance at
once. The whole life of the south-
east would be stimulated to greater
activity ; and the growth of London
and Canterbury into centres of
political and ecclesiastical govern-
ment respectively would be greatly
accelerated

For nearly a century and a half
after the Norman Conquest there is
little that we need note. Foreign
wars, royal quarrels and alliances, and
withal the building up of a strong
central government by the outward
expansion, as it were, of the royal
authority, — these are chief events in
the history of this period. Merely
remarking that all the Councils were
held in the south or south -midlands,
we pass on to the struggle between
John and the barons.

In these early struggles the barons
represented on the whole, however,
imperfectly, the popular cause. On
this occasion they met first secretly
at Bury St. Edmunds, and after-
wards at Brackley in Northampton-
shire. Their support was fairly
general ; London, Exeter, and Lin-
coln opened their gates to them, and
the northern barons joined in the
march upon London. The King was
deserted, and, compelled to accede to
his subjects' demands, he signed the
charter at Runnymede, barely twenty
miles from the capital. Thus, how-
ever widespread the support of the

baronial cause might be, the issue
was fought out in the south-midlands
and south ; and, considering the
national character of the struggle,
these districts were by implication
the most important.

Simon de Montfort and the barons,
seeking to check the King's excesses
and his partiality for foreigners, un-
doubtedly represented a popular
cause. The Londoners were especi-
ally strong in. their support of the
Earl. They saved him from being
surprised by the King, upheld his
cause when many of the barons were
deserting him, and strengthened his
army at the battle of Lewes with
fifteen thousand of their citizens.
The contest was, as it proved, a
contest for parliamentary representa-
tion and control ; and though with
the death of Earl Simon the cause
was lost for the time, it quietly
triumphed in the succeeding reign.

When the battle of Lewes was
forced upon the Earl, he was march-
ing to the relief of the Cinque Ports.
Then, or a little later, they were at
the height of their prosperity ; and
this was such that they were bound
by their charter to keep fifty-seven
ships in readiness at all times for the
king's service. The chief ports were
still, however, London and South-
ampton. Besides these and the Cinque
Ports other important harbours on
the south coast were Dartmouth
Plymouth, Weymouth, Shoreham, and
Margate. On the east coast Scar-
borough was one of the most im-
portant ; Newcastle drove a brisk
coasting-trade in coal ; while Boston,
Hull, Lynn, Harwich, Yarmouth, and
Colchester were all thriving. On the
west Bristol was the only harbour
of any note. The distribution of
ports was thus mainly southern and
south-eastern, and those of the south-
east were the most frequented. The
industrial centres were of necessity

380

North and South.

small, numerous, and scattered over
the country, for there were no means
of quick distribution such as are
necessary before centralisation can be
carried very far. Kent and Sussex
formed the principal site of the iron
industry, while Norwich, the Man-
chester, as it has been called, of those
days, was the chief seat of the cloth-
makers. Lancashire and Yorkshire,
now so busy in this respect, were
then the poorest counties in England.

About the middle of the fourteenth
century John Wycliffe was preaching
the reform of Church and State at
Oxford. His connection with that
city was, in a sense, accidental. It
was a great centre of learning and
education, and he as a cleric and
teacher had found his mission there.
For four years (1361-5) he was
master of Balliol College. In a
political sense he found no support
at Oxford; but his teaching spread
and caught the public ear. A few
years later John Ball took it up, and
it found political support at last in
the revolts of 1381 against the poll-
tax and other popular grievances.
The revolts extended over nearly all
the south and east of England, and
there were some outbreaks in the
north ; but they began in Kent under
the leadership of Wat Tyler ; Essex
followed under Straw, and the effective
strength of the agitation came from
the south-east. The insurgents
allowed themselves to be deluded and
dispersed with vain promises at the
moment of success ; but later genera-
tions, by removing the grievances,
confessed to their existence.

It was again the men of Kent,
along with those of Surrey and
Sussex, who rose under Cade, in 1450,
in support of a complaint against
parliament. It asked "for adminis-
trative and economical reforms, for a
change of ministry, a more careful
expenditure of the royal revenue, and

for the restoration of freedom of
election ; " and looking at the dis-
astrous issues of the long war with
France, the complaint was certainly
not unreasonable. Its rejection by
the Council led to the Kentish revolt.
Kent was at this time, in the words
of Green, " The great manufacturing
district of the day, seething with a
busy population, and especially con-
cerned with the French contests
through the piracy of the Cinque
Ports." It was therefore well qualified
to express the popular opinion at this
crisis, and though the revolt collapsed
in a way very similar to that of 1381,
modern opinion acknowledges the jus-
tice of the complaint.

The suppression of the monasteries,
whatever may have been the motives
of those who effected it, will hardly
be regarded at the present time as a
national calamity, or as a political
change which it had been better never
to have effected. It appears to have
been accepted at the time without
much disaffection in the south-east,
where, as we have seen, a tendency
to advanced political views has all
along revealed itself ; but in the north
and west the change was most un-
popular, giving rise in the former
districts to the Pilgrimage of Grace.
If the suppression of the monasteries
was, broadly viewed, a step in political
reform, the north and west of Eng-
land favoured a conservative policy.
Possibly they suffered more by the
suppression ; at all events, to use again
the words of Green, they demanded
" the reversal of the royal policy, a
reunion with Rome, the restoration
of Catharine's daughter, Mary, to her
rights as heiress of the Crown, redress
of the wrongs done to the Church,
and above all the driving away of
base-born counsellors, in other words
the fall of Cromwell." In the light
of subsequent history this appears
anything but a progressive policy.

North and South.

381

The accession of Mary and her
marriage gave rise to two peculiar
illustrations of the localisation of
political incentive. The eastern
counties, probably faithfully repre-
senting the temper of the whole
nation, rose against the plot to put
Lady Jane Grey upon the throne, and
supported the constitutional succes-
sion of Mary. The Londoners were
not so enthusiastic, though they prob-
ably sympathised with the insurgents.
In any case, the cause of the latter
prevailed. But when Mary proposed
to marry her kinsman, Philip of
Spain, she roused the popular re-
sentment. The first risings in the
west and midlands were quickly sup-
pressed ; but at a new alarm, the
men of Kent rose in serious revolt
under Wyatt, and marched upon
London. London wavered a moment,
then passed over to Mary's side and
turned the tide of rebellion. But
had the men of Kent prevailed and
succeeded in placing Elizabeth upon
the throne, English history might
perhaps have been spared a few of
its most sombre pages.

In the Civil War the strength of
Parliament was drawn chiefly from
the south-eastern and south-central
counties. A glance at historical maps
showing the various districts held
respectively by King and Parliament
from time to time, reveals the greatest
change of side in the north. The
west, and especially the south-west,
was royalist throughout, while the
south-east was as unfailingly loyal to
Parliament. Mr. Frederic Harrison
has thus cleverly summed up the
territorial distribution of parties.

Broadly divided, the north and west
went for the King ; the south and east
for the Houses ; but the lines of demarca-
tion were never exact : cities, castles, and
manor-houses long held out in an enemy's
county. There is only one permanen-
limitation. Draw a line from the Was .

to the Solent. East of that line the
country never yielded to the King ; from
first to last it never failed the Parliament.
Within it are enclosed Norfolk, Suffolk,
Essex, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford,
Bucks, Herts, Middlesex, Surrey, Kent,
Sussex. This was the wealthiest, the
most populous, and the most advanced
portion of England. With Gloucester,
Reading, Bristol, Leicester, and North-
ampton, it formed the natural home of
Puritanism.1

Though the bulk of the population
was, as we see, in the south, the
north was at this time growing more
prosperous and populous, owing to
the extension of manufactures in that
direction. A century later the rela-
tive development of the north was
becoming very noticeable. While the
population of other districts was
scarcely increasing at all, that of the
north and north-west, especially Lan-
cashire and Yorkshire, was growing
rapidly. Between 1685 and 1760
the population of Liverpool increased
tenfold, that of Manchester fivefold,
that of Birmingham and of Sheffield
sevenfold, and the industrial activity
kept pace with the growth in popula-
tion. The coal-fields of Durham and
Northumberland were being rapidly
opened ; Lancashire and Yorkshire
were becoming the chief seats of the
cotton and wool industries, Stafford-
shire was becoming the pottery centre,
and Warwickshire the hardware centre.
Between 1760 and 1800 the popula-
tion of the pottery districts was
trebled, and the greater population
was better employed and more pros-
perous than the lesser had been.

With the battle of Sedgemoor in
1685 we have done with serious fight-
ing on English ground. Henceforth
political incentive shows itself in
comparatively harmless, but equally
effective agitation, rising at most to
rioting. It loses by degrees its mili-

1 OLIVER CBOMWELL ; by Frederic Harri-
son. London, 1883.

382

North and South.

tary character, and takes more and
more the form of party politics.
With better parliamentary representa-
tion political incentive is quicker and
quieter in its action. With the
growth of a press and other means
of disseminating information the re-
arrangements and re-distributions of
political impulse are quicker and more
frequent. And, on the whole, there
is an approach of the forms of political
activity to those of industrial activity,
quiet co-operation or competition.

In the early part of the eighteenth
century we have the beginnings of a
religious movement which grew to be
national. Methodism originated with
a small group of students at Oxford.
In 1738 the leaders of the movement
commenced work in London and
thenceforward made the capital their
centre. Thence the movement spread
quickly and quietly over the land
from Cornwall to Northumberland,
meeting with acceptance everywhere.

Thirty years later Wilkes was fight-
ing for the freedom of the press, the
freedom of parliamentary representa-
tion, and the publicity of parliamentary
proceedings. He was elected as mem-
ber of Parliament for Middlesex, the
large number of whose voters made its
choice, it has been said, a real expres-
sion of popular opinion. Parliament
expelled him, whereupon Middlesex
promptly re-elected him. Then Parlia-
ment took a further step, and resolved
that, having been expelled from the
House, he was incapable of being
elected. Again elected by Middlesex,
he was again expelled ; and Parliament
voted that the candidate whom he had
defeated was the true member for
Middlesex. Wilkes became a public
idol. London petitioned the King to
dissolve Parliament, and declared in a
remonstrance that the House of Com-
mons did not represent the people.
The persistence of Middlesex and
London prevailed in the end ; Wilkes

was allowed to take his seat, and the
rights which he represented were
quietly conceded. At first sight it
appears as though Middlesex, as a
constituency, fought for these privi-
leges against the rest of the country
represented by Parliament. But the
Parliament, which should have re-
flected opinion at large, was an unre-
formed one, and did not truly represent
the popular voice. Many large towns,
especially those growing up in the
north, were altogether unrepresented :
others had not their fair share of
representation ; and bribery and cor
ruption had probably made the nomi-
nal representatives of the remaining
towns and districts more indicative of
the King's opinions than of those of
their own constituencies. The electors
of Middlesex desired to be fairly
represented, and they used their con-
stitutional powers to attain their
object. They were widely encouraged
by other parts of the country, some
of which had at the time no parlia-
mentary representatives, and were
thus without the one great constitu-
tional means of making their influence
directly felt.

Parliamentary and electoral reforms
were forced upon Parliament by wide-
spread discussion and agitation, of
which the north of England claimed
the largest share. The industrial
predominance of the north was now
thoroughly established, and its popula-
tion was contributing the bulk of the
wealth which enabled the country to
bear the shock of its great struggle
with Napoleon and to recover so
speedily from it. It was only natural
that the great manufacturing towns,
which were helping so much to sus-
tain the nation, should feel most
keenly the injustice of being unrepre-
sented in Parliament. Hence in a
large measure the discontent which
found its expression in general agita-
tion and recurrent riot, appearing

North and South.

383

so misdirected and retrogressive until
we regard them as the efforts of a
vast and useful body in the State to
obtain a voice in the national delibe-
rations, and angry with an indis-
criminating fury against those whom
it regarded as standing in its way.
The Luddite, or machine-breaking,
riots of 1811 in the northern and
midland counties are an example of
this misdirected energy. Peterloo, in
1819, reveals the same spirit with a
nicer recognition of the object to be
attained. The Reform Bill of 1832
for the first time gave representation
to towns like Birmingham, Man-
chester, Leeds, and Sheffield. With
it and subsequent reforms the keenest
of the discontent passed away. Hence-
forth Parliament represented much
more truly the general feeling of the
country upon matters of national
importance ; and the north now took
politically the rank which it had
already won industrially.

The incentive power of the north,
about the same period, is well shown
in the initiation of the railway-
system. Railways, in the literal sense
of ways laid with plates or rails, were
known for nearly a century before
1830. They were mere industrial
improvements, adjuncts to many a
colliery in various parts of England
and Wales, but in no sense a system,
nor ever likely to become one. The
invention of the locomotive is asso-
ciated with Cornwall and with the
name of Murdoch in 1784. Trevi-
thick and Vivian took the matter up,
and the former placed a locomotive on
a tram-road at Merthyr Tydvil in
1804. Further improvements were
effected mainly in the north. In all
this, however, there is nothing of
national incentive, which begins truly
with railways as a system. The
earliest railway, in the modern sense,
is generally said to have been that at
Stockton and Darlington, of which

George Stephenson was the engineer.
Application was made to Parliament
in 1818 : the bill was passed in 1821,
after being twice rejected ; and the
line was opened in 1825. The
original intention was to work the
line by stationary engines and ropes,
but, by an after-thought, the locomo-
tive was adopted. We may note, in
passing, the non-political opposition of
the unreformed Parliament, represent-
ing, if only imperfectly, the general
intelligence of the country. The
Liverpool and Manchester line marks
the real birth of our railway-system,
in that it was the first railway made
by public money for the public benefit.
Though this line was opened in 1830,
it was not until some years later
that London felt any pressing need of
railway-communication with any other
part of the country. " When," writes
Mr. Wallace (in THE WONDERFUL
CENTURY), "I first went to London
(I think about 1835) there was still
not a mile of railroad in England,
except the two above named, and
none between London and any of our
great northern or western cities were
even seriously contemplated."

The Chartist movement is now well-
nigh forgotten, yet it agitated the
country rather seriously for ten years.
It began in a great meeting held at
Birmingham in 1838. Of the petitions
embodied in the People's Charter, two
have since become law, while the
others appear now to be either fatu-
ous or of very doubtful efficiency; a
modern Radical programme is a much
more revolutionary document. In
fact it was the temper of the nation,
or at least of the lower and poorer
classes of it, which constituted the
force and the danger of Chartism.

In the same year, 1838, another
movement came to the front. A
meeting was held in Manchester to
take steps for procuring the repeal of
the Corn Laws. It was not quite the

384

North and South.

initiation of the movement. An Anti-
Corn-Law Association had been formed
in London, and, after promising well
for a time, had collapsed. " London,"
as Mr. McCarthy has well said, " has
never been found an effective nursery
of agitation. It has hardly ever made
or represented thoroughly the public
opinion of England during any great
crisis. A new centre of operations
had to be sought." Transplanted
to the north, with its centre in
Manchester, the movement took new
vitality, and grew year by year until
the repeal of the obnoxious laws in
1846.

Before this result was attained,
another movement of a commercial
character, and destined to influence
society very greatly, was already set
on foot in the same district. In 1844
the Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale
inaugurated the Co-operative Move-
ment. Numbering at first twenty-
eight, which afterwards rose to forty,
of the industrial class, they accumu-
lated their weekly contributions of
twopence or threepence each until
they had a capital of £28, which they
embarked in shop keeping for the
supplying of their own wants, and
for their own profit should the adven-
ture prove successful. It proved
successful beyond all anticipation, and
the effort was imitated everywhere in
the north. Few recent movements
have gained so wide an acceptance;
few have exercised, on the whole, so
beneficial an influence upon the labour-
ing classes. It is a movement of
spontaneous and free growth, teaching
the benefits of self-help to a class
which has been, and is still being,
largely pampered and pauperised by
parliamentary legislation and the
protection of Trades-Unions. It is
giving them power in proportion to
lightly directed effort, and educating
them in the use of power as they win
it. It is, in reality, one of the most

effective antidotes to socialism and
anarchy ; and looking at the move-
ment broadly, we believe that its
political value has not been adequately
recognised.

The mention of Trades-Unions sug-
gests another form of social activity
exceedingly powerful for good and
evil. While they cannot be too much
deprecated for their interference with
prices and the natural laws of supply
and demand, in a word, for their use
of labour as a monopoly, it must, we
think, be conceded that as a means
of bringing widespread and scattered
workers into common agreement and
united action, they have effected much
good. Viewed on this side, they have
united fragmentary and recurring in-
dustrial discontent and rebellion into
great united efforts which, costly as
they have been, may yet have been
less costly than the alternatives.
Moreover, the consciousness of this
power must have often deterred one
side from provoking its use ; and the
consciousness of its appalling cost
must have sometimes made the other
chary of its use. And it must be
allowed that the entire absence of
such a power would have given free-
dom to forms and degrees of oppression
and injustice which ordinary legislation
could not have dealt with, or dealt
with only in an imperfect way. Into
the history of Trades Unions we can-
not go. They seem to link themselves
in form with the medieval craft-guilds
and trade-corporations which were
scattered, like the industries, through-
out the country. But the spirit
which organises national strikes is
entirely modern. The laws against
combination were only repealed in
1895, and the freedom legally per-
mitted, even then, was very much
restricted. Combinations of workmen
against employers were still illegal.
In 1834 the tailors of London braved
the law, and struck for an increase of

North and South.

385

wages. The weavers of Leeds and
the calico-printers of Glasgow followed
their example. From that time Trades-
Unions began to be a real and growing
force. It flourished especially in the
north. There the great industrial
centres adopted it, with its good
features and its bad, and fought for
freedom to do what they considered
to be wholly right, against a nation
which was convinced that they were
wholly wrong. Towns like Sheffield
and Manchester attained an unenvi-
able notoriety on account of the out-
rages and crimes which their labour-
combinations committed in their resolve
to be dominant. In their struggles
against public opinion much bigotry
and injustice had to be overcome on
both sides. The Unions especially
had to moderate their excesses and
qualify their demands. But that their
demands were, on the whole, just is
implied by the trend of later legisla-
tion, which has been conceding rather
than restricting, and by the change
which has come over public opinion.
Public opinion is now chary of inter-
fering with the rights of combination,
— perhaps, even, too chary.

One labour-organisation is especially
remarkable for its bearing upon our
subject. It is that of the agricul-
tural labourers by Joseph Arch in
1872. The movement originated in
Warwickshire, and is notable on two
accounts. It was effected by and in
the interests of a portion of the com-
munity lying outside the industrial
centres where such movements usually
originate ; and it took its rise, terri-
torially, about as far north as the
mainly southern distribution of the
agricultural population permitted.

In the earlier periods of our his-
tory, as we have repeatedly seen, the
bulk of the population of England
was in the southern part of the coun-
try ; it is now in the northern part.

We may fix the time when the
change occurred as about the latter
half of the eighteenth century, when
the north began to outstrip the south
in industrial importance. This change
of site, as it were, is thoroughly well-
known ; but it does not appear to
be so well recognised that the sites
of predominant social and political
activity, above all the sites of social
and political incentive, have also
changed. Till near the close of the
eighteenth century national progress
and reform had been forced upon
the nation by the southern, and
especially the south-eastern, popula-
tion ; throughout the late century
reform and progress have emanated
from the north, and especially the
north-west. The question may be
raised whether it has now found a com-
paratively permanent site, or is it still
moving northward ? It is a question
which we are not prepared to answer ;
but there are, at least, some facts
supporting the latter possibility. In
this survey we have confined ourselves
to English ground, but it is not be-
cause we consider the Cheviot Hills
an impassable political barrier ; it has
been rather to avoid complication and
indefinite results. We recognise that
Glasgow and Edinburgh have shared
in much of the progressive and reform-
ing energy of the north. They are
much more likely to initiate a domi-
nating policy in English national life
than many parts of England are.
Moreover the ubiquity, the successful
ubiquity, of the average Scot points
to a national vigour of physique,
intellect, and character, which, if it
be real, may easily rise to supreme
position. We are content, however,
to have asked the question. The
discussion of it, if it be worth dis-
cussing, we leave to abler pens.

W. A. ATKINSON.

No. 497. — VOL. LXXXIII.

c c

386

A PIONEER OF EMPIRE.

BY the death of Mr. John Davis-
Allen, which took place in London on
the 6th of January last, the country
has lost the services of a man whom
at this juncture it can ill spare. He
was comparatively little known to
fame : his efforts on behalf of the
Empire have been requited by no
public honours ; but he was one of
those whose unremitting energy and
statesmanlike views aid largely in
moulding, half unseen, the destinies
of nations. A man of scientific edu-
cation and wide experience, a pioneer
and explorer who had travelled
far and read much, he brought to
bear on Imperial problems a trained
and sober judgment, keen insight, and
large sympathies, animated by unsel-
fish devotion to patriotic objects and
high ideals. In regard to the South
African question, in particular, he
had gained on the spot a comprehen-
sive grasp of the political and econo-
mical situation, while his intimacy
with Afrikander leaders and his com-
mand of their language enabled him
to regard things from the Dutch as
well as from the British point of view.
But abundant knowledge did not, in
his case, spell indecision ; the conclu-
sions which he felt himself forced to
draw he supported with all the energy
and enthusiasm of his nature, — and
he was gifted with an unusual fund
of both. A clear and cogent reasoner,
he was tactful and considerate in argu-
ment ; with ready command of sarcasm
and irony, he never abused those two-
edged weapons ; equally adroit with
tongue and pen, he convinced without
crushing, and roused no irritation in
those whom he overcame. In many

ways the type and offspring of his
time, he represented to those who
knew him the best aspects of that
expanded patriotism which we some-
what vaguely call Imperialism. His
adventurous career, short as it was, —
he died at forty-nine — is worth re-
cording as that of a man whom world-
wide travel had taught how " little
they know of England who only Eng-
land know " ; who had played an
active part in the development of
Greater Britain, but to whom large
experience had brought home the con-
viction not only of the greatness but
also of the dangers and temptations
of Empire.

Born in 1851, the eldest son of
Mr. John Allen of Gloucester, he was
educated at Leipzic and Edinburgh.
At the Scottish University the esteem
in which he was held by his contem-
poraries was shown by his membership
of the Speculative Society — that select
little body, more or less corresponding
to the Cambridge Apostles, of which
Scott had been an early ornament,
and which, shortly before Allen's days,
included Louis Stevenson and his
friend Charles Baxter, both of whom
were among Allen's friends. At
Edinburgh Allen graduated in Arts,
Science, and Medicine ; and had he,
with so good an outfit, started on the
ordinary career of a doctor, he would
undoubtedly have attained wealth, —
and perhaps a baronetcy. But wider
ambitions and venturesome blood
drove him into another course.

He set out to see the world, and
travelled, partly on commissions for
engineering and other firms, in Mexico,
Morocco, Australia, and America. In

A Pioneer of Empire.

387

1881 he led an exploring expedition
from Axim, on the Gold Coast of
Africa, into the interior ; but his
companions died of fever, and he
returned to England. Next year he
married ; but marriage did not quell
his love of roaming, and in 1883 he
went to Mauritius with his wife.
After staying there a little while as
the guests of Sir John Pope Hennessey,
the pair sailed to Madagascar in a
small vessel, the GAZELLE. They found
the French attacking Tamatave, and
were unable to land ; but, after being
fired on by a French ship, they suc-
ceeded in running the blockade and
got ashore further up the coast. The
journey to the capital, made in native
palanquins, occupied a fortnight.
Arriving at Antananarivo, Allen be-
came doctor to the English hospital
there, and founded the native medical
school, which sends native physicians
and nurses into remote villages till
lately under the unquestioned sway of
the witch-doctor. The peace between
France and Madagascar was signed in
1886 at Allen's house by the two
French delegates, Admiral Miot and
M. Patrimonio, who were then his
guests; and he received a letter of
thanks for his share in the negotia-
tion from the Prime Minister, Raini-
laiarivony. The establishment of the
French protectorate, however, made
further residence in Madagascar unde-
sirable ; and, after some three years
of hard work and exciting adventure,
Allen and his wife left for South
Africa.

They settled first at Barberton in
the Transvaal, but after a few months
they migrated to Delagoa Bay,
crossing the lion-country in a waggon
drawn by ten donkeys. The Nether-
lands Railway had just been opened,
and Allen was a passenger in the first
train that left the coast. His health
had been somewhat impaired, but a
short visit to England set him up again.

In 1888 he settled with his wife at
Kimberley. There he became manager
of one of the chief diamond-mines, and
soon took up a leading position. The
calls of business did not prevent his
taking part in public affairs, and he was
active in promoting the annexation of
Pondoland in 1894. He was also
instrumental in bringing about the
amendment of the Joint Stock Com-
panies Act, and in the creation of the
Government School of Mines. In
1892-3 he was Executive Chairman of
the South African and International
Exhibition, of which Lord Loch was
President and Mr. Rhodes Vice-
President. Perceiving from the first
that one of the chief wants of the
country was an improvement in the
means of communication, he interested
himself in the extension of the railway-
system, and in 1893 visited Bloem-
fontein in order to obtain from the
Government a concession for a railway
connecting the capital of the Free
State with Kimberley. The scheme
he then drew out contemplated a
further extension to Harrismith by
way of Bethlehem, with a branch-line
from Bethlehem to Kroonstad on the
line from Bloemfontein to Pretoria.
This excellent plan, which can hardly
fail eventually to be carried out, would
have tapped extensive grain-districts,
connected the northern parts of the
Free State with their nearest port,
Durban, and given Natal an alterna-
tive route to Johannesburg. In Allen's
eyes Bloemfontein was the natural
railway-centre of South Africa. "You
have," he said, " the Transvaal on the
north, Natal on the east, the Cape on
the south ; and you hold the ke}Ts.
The Free State would sit at the meet-
ing of the ways, and prescribe the
railway policy of South Africa." For
the time this scheme fell through ; but
Allen did not relax his endeavours
to promote railway-extension, and in
1894 successfully advocated the can-
c c 2

A Pioneer of Empire.

didature of his friend, Mr. Francis
Thompson, for a place in the Legisla-
tive Assembly, on the ground of his
pledges in favour of railway com-
munication eastward from Cape Town
to Mossel Bay.

Meanwhile the political situation
began to interest him more and more;
and, in order to familiarise himself
with political opinions and economic
conditions, he travelled far and wide
in the Transvaal and the Free State,
as well as in Natal and Cape Colony.
Although he never attempted to gain a
place in the Cape Parliament for him-
self, he became thoroughly familiar
with the questions at issue and the
aims, open and secret, of the two
parties, and he was intimate with many
of the leaders of the Afrikander Bond
as well as with those on the other
side.

Without any intention of leaving
South Africa for good, he sailed, early
in 1895, on a visit to Ceylon, where
he passed some time with his wife's
brother, a tea-planter at Neboda. He
travelled about the island, and here
again he interested himself in railway-
extension, especially in the proposed
connection of Ceylon with India by
means of a bridge. On this subject
he read an important paper before a
distinguished audience at the Imperial
Institute in March, 1896. The breadth
and acuteness of his views on Imperial
questions was admirably shown in this
address, in which he pointed out the
importance of Colombo as occupying
a central position in the Eastern
Hemisphere, and commanding the
Indian Ocean. Colombo, he remarked,
is a chief link in the chain connecting
Egypt by Aden and Mauritius with
the Straits Settlements, and so with
China, Australia, and the Pacific;
and its great value should be recog-
nised by the completion of its harbour,
and by railway-connection with the
mainland, which he showed by expert

testimony to be a perfectly feasible
project.

Returning to England, he landed
in this country on New Year's Day,
1896; and the first news he heard
was the news of Jameson's Raid. He
recognised at once that this event had
radically altered the situation in South
Africa, and set himself to explain
to his countrymen the conditions of
the problem and the gravity of the
questions at issue. With this object
in view he joined in founding the
Imperial South African Association,
and became one of its chief advisers,
the editor of its literary publications,
and its most active lecturer. From
that time, until his fatal illness began,
he devoted all his energies to mould-
ing public opinion into the shape on
which, he was convinced, the safety
of the Empire depended. For this
end he worked with all the energy of
his nature, but without any trace of
bitterness or exaggeration. A strong
believer in Sir Alfred Milner, and
convinced of the necessity of firmness
in pressing just demands, he opposed
all pi-evocations and hoped almost to
the last that a peaceful solution would
be found. He travelled much about
the country, speaking at many meet-
ings, and writing many pamphlets
and articles. Early in 1899 he went
to Canada on behalf of the Associa-
tion, and delivered addresses on the
South African question in many parts
of the Dominion. One of the tangibl
results of his mission was the fon
tion of a Canadian branch of
South African Association ; and
loyal attitude adopted by Car
may fairly be attributed, in
measure, to his efforts.

His continued and strenuous lal
for the cause he had at heart,
bined with the anxieties of last
winter, now began to tell serious
upon his health. In the late summt
of 1900 he was ordered abroad,

A Pioneer of Empire.

389

got little profit from the change. He
came home ill, but threw himself with
unabated energy into the campaign
which preceded the general election.
He helped to win a seat in South
Wales, but the effort of speaking and
canvassing was too much for him,
and he came home to die. The seeds
of a fatal disease had already shown
themselves, and the progress of the
malady was hastened by this last act

of devotion to duty. He bore a long
and painful illness with characteristic
courage and patience; and the fire of
intelligent patriotism, which to him
was a very religion, burned bright in
him so long as he retained conscious-
ness. He died with his work un-
finished, but the fragment which he
was able to accomplish was of no
slight importance to the Empire.

G. W. P.

390

ON THE HIGH VELDT.
BY A CITY IMPERIAL VOLUNTEER.

IN offering these few notes on cer-
tain points which particularly struck
me while in South Africa. I do not
propose to touch the problems of the
conduct or organisation of the war, or
to harrow my readers with pictures of
thrilling incidents or appalling suffer-
ings ; and the lessons to be learned
from that interesting experiment, my
own regiment, may be better discussed
by more impartial judges. My idea
merely is that a few remarks on the
main features of the ordinary life of
our army, by one to whom they were
perfectly novel and unprecedented,
may help to bring home to the average
reader a clearer conception of what
that life was really like for the rank
and file in South Africa.

Before I went out I had no idea of
what it was to sleep every night for
months in my clothes on the bare
ground with no roof but the vault
of heaven, to be really hungry for
day after day, for weeks to be dirty,
to have no change of raiment, never
to sit on a chair or eat at a table,
to cook my own food, wash my own
shirt, darn my own rags, and to own
no property save what I carried on
my own back or on my horse's ; and
perhaps above all, never for weeks
together to have a book to read.
What all these things mean I now
know ; for on a campaign you are
brought very close to primitive nature,
and at home one does not realise how
completely nature is fenced out of our
ordinary lives. The very perfection
of the fence prevents us from being
aware of it. I say all this with no

intention of exaggerating the hard-
ships that I went through ; all these
things become in a very short time
quite tolerable, some of them even
pleasant, so soon as you get accustomed
to them. But I wish to emphasise the
greatness of the change felt by one
who is transported from the ordinary
life of a London citizen, with its own
peculiar comforts and discomforts, to
the life of a soldier on active service
with its entirely different advantages
and disadvantages.

In my own case the change was
very sudden. Instead of descending
by nicely graded steps from one degree
of ease to another not quite so easy,
I fell with a disconcerting rapidity
from the top of the stairs to the
bottom. Of the discomforts of our
last day and night in London I need
not speak. On the voyage we were
better off than we should have
on an ordinary troop-ship, but nothing
can make a troop-deck a really pi
place of abode. Few who have nc
tried can realise what it is never for
moment, in bed, in the bath, at me
or on deck, in the morning or in
evening, not to be reminded
various uncomfortable ways of tl
overwhelming proximity of one's
fellow-beings. I honestly think that
the time I spent on board-ship, goii
out, and still more coming home (wl
there were more of us), was about
most disagreeable part of my experi-
ence,— except perhaps the time spent
in the train on the way back to
Town, when we ate, slept, sat,
gambled, and squabbled each on

On the High Veldt.

391

same little square foot of truck-floor
for days and nights together, with
relief only when we were occasion-
ally turned out to push the train up
a hill, because the engine could not
pull it.

On the few days we spent at Green
Point Camp I will not dilate. To me
they are still a night-mare of broiling
sun, sandy horse-lines, crowded tents
(I only learned later, on a visit to a
field-hospital at Bloemfontein, what a
really crowded tent was), piles of new
saddlery, rampant horse-stealing, long
hours, food which even now I main-
tain to be the worst I ever tasted,
and a babel of orders, contradictions,
abuse, grumbling, and confusion. It
was very uncomfortable, but it was
apparently our way of settling down
to soldiering, and I suppose it was
inevitable.

After this purgatory, relieved only
by one or two visits and encouraging
words from Lord Roberts and Sir
Alfred Milner, which for the time
being set us all in heart again, we
were sent up country in comfortable
second-class carriages ; we only learned
later what coal-trucks were for. How
well I remember that journey — the
piles and piles of grapes thrust upon
us by generous loyalists and their
wives at the road-side stations, the
clamours of the children for buttons
and badges, the futile attempts to
water or feed the horses, packed by
dozens in their trucks, always with
their tails at the only available open-
ing, the way-side stoppages to cook
and eat dinner, the wild surmises
among excitable members as to where
we were going and how they should
like to get under fire for the first
time, the quiet game of cards among
those more sedate. But this soon
came to an end, and at two o'clock
one cold morning we were turned out
into a large camp at Enslin, I think
the hottest place I ever was in.

There was no shade, of course, — except
a large tent for the Soldiers' Home,
which being of a sickly green colour
cast a horrid pallor over the faces of
the prostrate forms which writhed on
the ground in uneasy slumber. All
that day we spent under a roasting
sun in shifting our lines from one spot
to another a hundred yards off, and in
trying to identify the various posi-
tions around us and the scenes of the
historic fights that had occurred in
the neighbourhood. I well remember
gazing at a distant line of blue hills,
and telling myself with awe that there
was the famous Boer position of
Magersfontein, and that now we were
indeed near the front.

Early next morning our first march
began. Our idea was that in a day or
two we should be back at Enslin or
thereabouts. As a fact we never
came back, and that day was our first
on the road that led to Paardeberg
and afterwards to Bloemfontein. I
did not myself take part in a fight till
much later, but war is not all fighting,
and this great forward movement
was incomparably the most interesting
and most important of all those in
which I, or any of my regiment
took part ; thus, though it may now
seem to be almost ancient history, I
shall hope to need no excuse for dwell-
ing more on this than on any other
part of my South African experiences,
especially as my object is to give not
so much a narrative of events as a
record of general impressions.

Our first day out was a good sample
of a day in the field. It began the
night before. Each man had brought
a kit-bag up in the train with him.
The problem now was, as all baggage
was to be carried on the horse, to
decide what to stuff into the wallets
and what to leave behind, and some
community of goods became necessary.
This sort of thing was heard on all
sides : " Have you quinine ? Then I

392

On the High Veldt.

won't take any." — "Have you got a
sponge ? oh, then I'll take only a piece
of soap." — " Shall I put in this tin of
Bovril, or this spare shirt ? I can't
carry both " — and so on. These
impromptu partnerships were not
much good, as they were almost always
soon dissolved by sickness, promotion,
detail-duty, or other accidents ; and I
may also add that the man who, in
packing his wallets, preferred clothes
or cleanliness to food very soon saw
good reason to repent his choice.

The full marching-order of myself
and my horse was as follows, — and on
this one point I will venture an
opinion that reform is urgently
needed. The saddle was of the
colonial pattern, something like an
old-fashioned English hunting-saddle,
but three times as heavy. The wallets
were both stuffed full, and over them
was strapped a heavy military great-
coat, and on to that a pair of light
canvas shoes. A waterproof sheet
with a spare shirt inside was strapped
on the fan-tails behind, a rifle-bucket
dangled on one side, a shoe-case and
nose-bag on the other. Add a man
with rifle, bandolier, belt, bayonet,
haversack and water-bottle, and place
the whole on the top of a fourteen-
hand Cape pony, and it speaks well
for the pony that he can carry it all
under a broiling sun over heavy
ground. In the case of cavalry add
a sword and lance, and the need for
reform of equipment becomes still
more obvious.

Reveille sounded at two o'clock in
the cold and darkness, so as to give
us ample time to make sure that each
man's saddlery and kit were complete.
Needless to say, they were not. One
had lost his horse, another an essential
part of his saddle, a third his rifle, —
all " commandeered." There was
really no need for such thefts ; it only
meant that in the dark Private A.
could not lay his hands on his own

stuff, but happened to stumble over
Private B.'s kit, and to save himself a
little trouble, quietly made it his own.
I myself suffered loss, for some one
privately carried off the cork of my
water-bottle, with the result that I
had to go waterless all that day,
except for the doles of friends. To
add to our discomforts, a camp-kettle
of hot coffee was brewed for each
section of from twenty to thirty men.
My section's went astray and we never
got any ; and any one who has been
in the Colonies knows what it is to
begin a day's work without the
morning coffee.

At last, still in the dark, the march
commenced. I and two or three others
were orderlies for the day to General
Hector Macdonald, which involved
much galloping to and fro to the old
camp and back; but our main use
was to tell the various regiments
where to camp, directing them by
such landmarks as, "Just beside the
third dead horse," or " Half a mile
beyond the only tree." The General
was very cheery and was soon dis-
cussing mutual friends in Scotland
with one of our number, a private out
there, but a Scotch laird at home.
We reached camp about three in the
afternoon to find that our unlucky
waggon had broken down on the
march, whereby we got nothing for
breakfast, dinner, tea, or eupper but
biscuit, which in the circumstances I
found it almost impossible to swallow.
It was only a bathe in a muddy
leech-infested dam which revived my
drooping spirits. Fortunately there
was also a well, or this same dam
must have been reserved for drinking
only, and a bathe in it would have
entailed C.B., — a grim piece of irony
which punishes a soldier in the field
by " confining him to barracks." The
last I remember of that day is wander-
ing about on a horse as weary as
myself, searching vainly for an elusive

On the High Veldt.

393

officer of the Army Service Corps,
whose whereabouts no one knew, but
whom I was bidden to look for till I
found him.

However, I am not writing a diary,
and I describe this day, not as an
especially hard one, but merely as
fairly typical, and one which impressed
itself particularly upon me as the first
I had spent in the field. I fear that
nothing that I can describe has not
been described already many times.
But in the first place, the narrators
have generally been war -cor respon-
dents who, whatever their descriptive
powers, could not always speak at first-
hand ; and unless you have been on
quarter -rations yourself, it is hard
to describe to others what quarter-
rations are like. I know that one
-of my amusements during the long
days at Paardeberg, when I had
chewed my lump of trek-ox, and had
only a few crumbs of my daily biscuit
and a quarter left, was to watch
one of the correspondents seated in-
side a most comfortable waggon and
making a most comfortable meal,
washed down by something that
looked aggravatingly like whiskey and
soda-water. For another thing these
details of everyday life are apt to be
obscured in the description of fierce
fights and brilliant movements, bullets
and blood, victories and wounds, with
which the letters to the newspapers
were naturally filled. It is not till
one has been out there that one realises
how comparatively small a part the
actual fighting plays in the general
life of the private soldier. I was not
at any of the great historic fights such
Modder River or Magersfontein, or

at Sunday at Paardeberg, so it is
rather presumptuous of me to say this,
but I think most soldiers would agree
with me. Fighting, except in a few
places and during a few terrible weeks,
is not an everyday occurrence even
for the most favoured of regiments.

When it comes it is a change. There
is something to do, — a change in the
proceedings ; there is something new
to think of, success to be hoped for
and death or wounds to be feared,
and the thrill of danger, whether it
be pleasant or not, is at least excit-
ing. But when there is no fighting,
the life becomes horribly tedious.
The same early reveille in the dark
and cold, the same slow laborious
march over the dull, monotonous,
featureless veldt, the same round of
irksome duties, the same unvaried
food, and the same depressing feel-
ing of dirt, discomfort, fatigue, and
drudgery. Not enough to eat, not
enough to drink, no shelter from rain
or sun, no amusements, nothing to
think of or look forward to but a long
succession of similar days, marked
only by the endless inconveniences
which must result to men who have
to carry all their property on their
persons, and have no chance of replac-
ing anything that gets lost or worn
out.

I do not say all this for the sake
of grumbling. I had a horse, and on
several occasions was detached from
regimental duty, and thus was often
more comfortable than the rest of the
rank and file ; but I think this is a
fair picture of the life of an ordinary
soldier, especially a foot-soldier on the
march, and I must say that one of
the chief lessons I learned from my
campaign was to respect and admire
the British soldier. While we were
camped at Paardeberg, and on the
subsequent march to Bloemfontein, I
had plenty of opportunities to see
him under the most adverse condi-
tions. At this time we had frequent
torrential thunderstorms, long marches,
and rations, sometimes half and some-
times quarter, but never full ; heat by
day and cold by night, always the
prospect and sometimes the reality of
fighting. Many of the infantry were

394

On the High Veldt.

sickening with fever ; most of them
had done some of the hardest fighting
of the war at Paardeberg ; all were
worn out with hunger, thirst, and
fatigue. It was a terrible sight to
see them plodding along, with hollow
cheeks, their faces almost black with
sun and dirt and hair, their clothes
in tatters, their boots often in shreds,
laden with their heavy equipment,
over rough, stony, dusty ground, full
of ant-heaps and holes so that every
step had to be taken with care.
Water, apart from the pestilential
Modder, was very scarce. Their own
water-bottles, even if full .at starting,
were soon emptied, and I have seen
men on their hands and knees lapping
from a stagnant pond which even the
mules would not touch, and they were
pretty thirsty. No wonder there was
an epidemic of typhoid ! I suppose
that, considering the severity of the
fighting, the length of the march, the
scanty supplies of all kinds of food
and drink, and the vast numbers
engaged, the great march from Modder
River to Bloemfontein entailed more
suffering than any other part of the
war — apart, of course, from Lady-
smith. I do not mean to say that
isolated regiments, detachments, or
even brigades, did not at certain times
endure equal or even greater sufferings.
But I do not think such a great
number, — thirty to forty thousand
men — ever endured such collective
hardships, and the time of trial lasted
for about five weeks. All through
this time the bearing of the British
soldier, — I speak especially of the
foot-soldier — struck an amateur as
being almost beyond praise. Some
grumbling of course there was ; the
British soldier grumbles (grouses he
calls it) everywhere, — he has nothing
else to talk of ; but there were in his
behaviour a certain steadfastness and
cheerfulness, a making light of hard-
ships and a readiness to help a com-

rade, which were incomparable. I
read in the papers descriptions of the
high prices paid, for instance, for
a single ration-biscuit. There were
hundreds and thousands of men will-
ing enough to pay any price for a
biscuit ; but I cannot remember ever
to have seen a soldier sell one, though
I have often seen a man whose daily
ration was perhaps two biscuits, give
one away to a comrade in worse plight
than himself. And throughout there
was a stoical disposition to treat all
hardships as a matter of course and
to make light of them, which seemed
to me to be the highest heroism.

Especially striking was the never-
failing sense of humour of which
instances constantly occurred. You
would see a man tramping along with
weariness and dejection painted in
every line of his face and figure.
Suddenly he would look up with a
smile and give vent to some quaint
exclamation or absurd comparison at
which you could not help laughing.
I do not suppose the Irishman who
accosted me as I returned from bath-
ing with, " I say, boy, does the river
flow up or down here 1 " thought he
was making a joke, but the man who
described his officer as a " qualified
V.C. -hunter," and the other who on
crossing the Vaal exclaimed, " Now
Mr. (adjective) Kroojer, we're in your
(adjective) garden at last ! " must, I
think, be allowed a certain humourous
vein. Much later, near Barberton I
was in charge of a flock of sheep for
a couple of days (a truly awful task)
and was constantly passing and being
passed by the band of a distinguished
Irish battalion in charge of a ram-
shackle waggon, which came to grief
about once in every mile. As they
toiled along with their battered brass
instruments, and burst into a chorus
of jokes and happy laughter at each
fresh break-down, their hilarity was
very catching. At Belfast, the day

On the High Veldt.

395

after the important battle of Bergen-
dal, there was a well-attended foot-
ball-match, though firing was still to
be heard.

To have spent ten days at Paarde-
berg alone I consider to be an educa-
tion in itself. We left the railway
along with the Highland Brigade, but
stopped some days at Jacobsdal (where
the few English women seemed to be
half-crazy with fright, while the
Dutch stolidly made money by selling
us bread) and did not arrive at that
historic camp till early in the morning
of the Tuesday after the Sunday on
which the battle was fought. All
Monday we were passing farms turned
into hospitals and ambulances full of
wounded, and heard stories of heavy
fighting ahead. We were escorting
some naval guns, and as we came
over a slight hill we passed by the
lines of the Cornwalls who regaled
us with accounts of the charge on
Sunday and their heavy losses. As
we topped the rise, the camp lay
before us, on a flat plain surrounded
by low hills. Through the midst of
the plain wound the River Modder,
and on a bare flat on the further
bank lay a disconsolate-looking square
of waggons, near to a tiny tin-
roofed house. This was the Boer
laager. Except for this, it was diffi-
cult to see where Cronje and his men
were. All along the river lay the
lines of the British troops, at one
point coming right up to the river-
bank, and more to the right receding
to some distance from it. Across the
river too could be seen the bivouac
of more troops. It seemed as though
the British camp filled the entire
plain. Close up to the river and a
little above the only respectable drift,
lay the few tents of the hospital and
the waggons of Lord Roberts's staff,
who had fashioned for themselves
picturesque green arbours, like those
in the gardens of a riverside hotel,

among the trees on the bank. The
drift was constantly crowded with
waggons and orderlies passing to
and fro, and as the river was in
flood most of the time, the drift
rough, and the descent to it, in spite
of the labours of the Engineers, pre-
cipitous, it was a matter of some time
and difficulty to get across. Just
across the drift stood a peaked hill,
above a ruined farm. This was
Paardeberg itself. On looking closer
one could see that, though the British
lines ran along both sides of the
Modder, at one point they were set
back a good deal. It was in the
middle of this open ring that Cronje
was entrenched in the river-bed.

Life at Paardeberg was not excit-
ing. We knew dimly that great
events were taking place, but we
seemed to have nothing very much
to do ourselves, and I fear we thought
more of the petty details of life, —
whether we should get two biscuits
or one to-day, whether we should be
on picket to-night, whether we were
for grazing-guard to-morrow — than of
how Cronje was to be induced to
surrender. Our duties consisted of
the ordinary camp-routine, with occa-
sional orderly-work. Twice a day
an armed party took the horses across
the plain strewn with dead carcases,
to water them in the river which was
stocked with the same, and on most
days an armed guard took them out
to graze, — not that there was much
sustenance in the long dry coarse
grass. Occasionally an armed escort
took the water-cart to a spring some
three or four miles off, where the
only decent water in the neighbour-
hood was to be found. That in the
Modder was, of course, unspeakable.
When we had to use it, we went
down to the muddy brink and poled
off the corpse of some ox or horse
which had come to anchor there,
before filling the camp-kettle. The

396

On the High Veldt.

hardest duty was that of horse-picket
at night. As we had no picket-lines,
the horses had to be linked head to
head ; sometimes, for greater security
the ends were fastened together so
as to form a ring. There were six
sections of us there, and consequently
six rings of horses with one man to
each. This arrangement of course
gave the horses no chance of sleep,
and the poor brutes were half-mad
with hunger (on some days their
whole ration was only four pounds
of oats), so that the rings were con-
stantly shifting ground in pursuit of
a delusive blade of grass, and running
into each other. If an empty nose-
bag was left on the ground, or on one
horse's head, it was the signal for a
scrimmage, and was soon torn to
shreds. It may be imagined that the
horse-guard had a pretty lively time,
tying up loose horses, and preventing
the rings from straying over the
saddles and sleeping men. Things
were still livelier when a thunder-
storm came on, and all the horses
simultaneously tried to turn their
tails to it. The result then was
pandemonium .

Our amusements were simple.
Chatting with the decimated Sea-
forths, whose lines were next to ours ;
climbing the signal kopje under
which we lay, and trying to find out
from the signallers what was going
on ; or washing in the fetid Modder,
— these were our chief relaxations.
The top of Signal Hill was rather a
favourite place, by the way, for there
you were out of the ken of the
sergeants, and in those early days
there was no roster for fatigue.
Everybody was new to the work,
besides being worn out by hunger
and discomfort, and, in addition, we
were deprived of our sergeant-major,
on whom so much must depend, and
who was wounded at Jacobsdal. Con-
sequently, you were cast for fatigue,

not because it was your turn but
because you were nearest. Con-
sequently, also, the wily ones retired
to the top of Signal Hill, and a
party who had just finished one
fatigue were pounced on for the
next, because there was no one else
handy.

But the principal subject of every
man's thoughts was food. When one
is on short rations, one developes an
extraordinary taste for sweet things ;
but sugar was very scarce, and jam
scarcer still. I remember one pot
(the first we had seen for many days)
had to be shared by sixteen men, and
the sergeant doled it out with a spoon
to the expectant crowd. Thanks to
an institution by which I have
benefited often, the liver, heart, and
kidneys of slaughtered beasts are the
perquisites of the butcher, who sells
what he does not want. Now these
are the only parts of the trek- oxen (on
which we then subsisted) into which
it is possible to drive your teeth ;
and consequently every morning there
was a long queue at the butcher's
shop waiting to buy his tit-bits. I
have even heard of one of our number
who milked dead cows; he certainly
milked his own mare so long as she
gave milk.

Of fighting we saw hardly any-
thing at Paardeberg. Some of the
outlying regiments had some, but the
attack on Cronje himself was not
renewed, and the infantry had more
or less of a rest. There were certain
places where, if you went, you risked
being shot, but for the most part
those were days of persistent shell-
fire on our part and sullen silence on
the part of the Boers. Night was
made hideous by the thunder of our
guns, and the ghostly flickering all
round the horizon of the distant
search-lights of Kimberley and Mod-
der River. It was also on several
occasions made exceedingly uncom-

On the High Veldt.

397

fortable by sudden and heavy thun-
derstorms. In those days we had
only one blanket each, and it was
not difficult to get wet through.

At last, in the night of Wednesday,
February 26th, I was awakened by
the sound of a heavy bombardment
and a terrific fusil ade. This was the
final attack and the fighting of the
Royal Canadian Regiment, Gordons,
and Shropshires in the trenches. I
went to sleep again. , When I awoke
on Thursday morning all was still.
As we were cooking our coffee we
heard the sound of distant cheering ;
but that might mean anything, — an
issue of rum, or an extra biscuit, in
some lucky regiment. Presently two
staff-officers rode past, and I heard
one say to the other, " How splendid
that it should happen on the anniver-
sary of Majuba ! " and so the news
spread that Cronje had surrendered.
I was on duty that morning as an
orderly at headquarters. When I
went there, an excited Kaffir cried
out to me that he had seen Baas
Roberts and Baas Cronje shaking
hands, and there I saw Cronje him-
self sitting under a tree. My duty
took me across the river to the
trenches which the Canadians and
Gordons had driven to within a
hundred yards of the Boers. There
I found them resting and reckoning
up their losses. Already stray
soldiers were strolling into the
laager, and sentries were being set
over it. A rather disconsolate High-
lander was seen wandering about with
a large marble clock which he had
found there and knew not how to
dispose of.

When I returned to headquarters,
I saw a dingy-looking crowd of Boers
squatting on the ground, with several
women among them, and a guard of
Highlanders over them, and I heard
that we had orders to start imme-
diately as Cronje's escort. Cronje,

with his wife, grandson, and secre-
tary, were placed in a covered four-
wheeled cart (popularly known as a
spider), drawn by a team of four
horses, and a native servant followed
with a Cape cart. General Pretyman
was in charge, and the escort con-
sisted of about a hundred of the
Imperial Volunteers under a captain.
We travelled pretty quick, and
reached Modder River station on the
afternoon of the next day, having
halted for the night at Klip Drift,
where lay the Guards Brigade. The
second day I rode just alongside of
Cronje and got a good view of him.
He is a heavily built man with a
thick brown beard, and not unimpos-
ing-looking. He wore a large felt
hat, and a shabby old tail-coat which
looked brown or black as the light
fell on it. He smoked incessantly a
large Boer pipe, and it was interest-
ing to observe, as we approached
Modder River, that by his gestures
he was evidently pointing out to his
companions the various ridges which
he had held during the past months.
Mrs. Cronje was a small, thin little
woman, and I do not think that in
England one would have taken her
even for a poor farmer's wife. She
wore a shabby old dress (certainly
not, I should say, one of Lady Sarah
Wilson's), and carried her luggage in
a sack rather like a soldier's kit-bag.
As we approached the railway Cronje
continued to smoke stolidly, but Mrs.
Cronje was visibly affected, as the
niggers began to hoot, and some of
the soldiers in the camp to cheer.
As we trotted up to the station, the
guard turned out, a bugle sounded
the general salute, Cronje went into
lunch, and our duties were over.
Needless to say we dashed off at once
to the two stores by the station, and
expended all our cash on tins of jam,
sausages, and preserved fruit. That
night we revelled in the luxury of

398

On the High Veldt.

full rations, bread, and our purchased
delicacies. There was even some
beer!

We stayed there three or four
days waiting for stores, with nothing
much to do except to bathe in the
river and try to avoid the dust-storms.
Modder River camp was not what it
had been three months before. There
were all the traces of a large encamp-
ment, but the troops actually there
were few, and all the trees, which
were said in old time to have made
the place the Richmond of Kimberley,
had long ago been cut down for fire-
wood, which was now very scarce.

At Modder River we had an
amusing meeting. A friend who was
with me had been at Cambridge.
Suddenly he was accosted by name
by a tall, bearded Guardsman, who
turned out to be a reservist and one
of the under-porters at my friend's
former college. This chance intro-
duced us to the hospitality of a tent
where some half-dozen Guardsmen of
various battalions had been left
behind, when the Brigade went to
Klip Drift, for various disablements,
generally lack of boots. We were
most kindly received, and spent several
evenings there, sharing our beer and
other unwonted luxuries ; and these
acquaintances were renewed in Bloem-
fontein. I have spoken of the soldier
in the field; at rest he is a most
amusing character, especially in his
language, which is original but un-
fortunately unreproduceable. One
curious point is the variety of names
by which soldiers address each other,
and I soon learned to answer to the
address of " Charlie " (not my real
name), " chum," " mate," " soldier,"
" townie," and " squad." The two
last names seemed to be used only
by the Guards Brigade, and puzzled
me at first. The explanation given,
on enquiry, was that the assump-
tion was in the first case that you

came from the same town, and in
the second, that as a recruit you were
in the same squad as your interlo-
cutor. Whether this was correct I
cannot say.

One thing that strikes one on thus
mixing with soldiers is the great
difference in social rank and general
position that is to be found among
them. Our friend the porter was of
better standing than most of the
others, and they evidently recognised
this, and treated him accordingly ;
but whatever the soldier's social
position, he was never either ill-
mannered or servile. It was certainly
never safe to offer a soldier money in
return for any help or service ren-
dered,— except of course by previous
bargain — but such help was always
most generously given. Altogether
they made delightful companions, and
one soon got used to being asked
whether one did not long to be
back at Marshall and Snelgrove's once
more !

We left Modder River after being
there about a week, and went back
with a mule -waggon and an ox-
waggon, containing stores for men
and officers. Each man of course had
also replenished his own little stock
of delicacies as much as possible, and
for the next few days most of us
had something to add to the meagre
rations which again awaited us. But
it did not go far, and I myself had
to mourn for a much-cherished tin of
sausages which slipped through my
hay-net, and was left to waste on the
veldt.

The waggons of course made our
return slower, and on the second day,
having left Klip Drift early in the
morning, we reached Paardeberg late
in the afternoon to find that the army
had all moved on to Osfontein, and
nothing remained to mark the place
but dead beasts and old biscuit-tins.
On we trudged the four miles or so

On the High Veldt.

399

to Osfontein, leading our horses, only
to be told that our own camp was
still about two miles further, and on
we plodded again. Meanwhile it had
been growing darker and darker, the
lightning more frequent and vivid,
and suddenly the storm burst in its
full force. Of course all the horses
plunged, and as it was now pitch
dark, before we could unstrap our
great-coats we were drenched. The
ground became all at once a lake with
deep holes full of water into which
we floundered in the dark, unable to
see a yard before our faces, hardly
even to the tail of the horse in front.
At last we got into camp, the rain
fortunately stopped for an hour or so,
and refreshed with a welcome, but
scanty, meal of rice we lay down to
sleep, each in his own puddle. I did
not hear of any rheumatism or other
evil effects, such as might have been
expected.

Next day the advance to Bloem-
fontein began, with interludes for
the actions of Poplar Grove and
Driefontein, which I only witnessed
from a distance. After some days of
weary marching, we heard that the
capital was ours. A small party of
us pressed on, determined if possible
to get in the same day as Lord
Roberts. At last as we came over
a hill, our eyes were gladdened by
the sight of a railway and a few
distant houses, — the southern suburb
of Bloemfontein. We urged our jaded
horses to their fastest walk, and at
last about six in the evening rode in
melancholy state down the principal
street. We did what we could for
our unfortunate beasts, and then
adjourned to the nearest hotel,
where we ordered dinner at once.
The joys of that meal will never be
forgotten but cannot be adequately
described.

400

VICTORIA.
FEBRUARY 2ND, 1901.

DEAR name, above all glory great,
Thou truest soul that e'er drew breath,
Victorious over self and fate,
Victorious to the gates of death !

To-day the thunderous guns, that told
Thy passing to the awe-struck crowd,
Are silent, but their voice is rolled
About the world in fire and cloud.

And men shall say : She is at rest,
That mighty Queen ivhom England loved.
They shall acclaim thee worthiest,
By Duty's sternest voice approved.

Since that far hour that saw thy birth
Such tender power to thee was given,
That love bewails thee here on earth,
And love awaits thee, stored in heaven.

Thy name is writ in purest gold,

A treasured joy, a sacred word ;

Thou shalt be mourned till Love is cold,

And praised while Honour's voice is heard.

And he who follows thee hath learned
To win the trust that thou hast won ;
And still the love that thou hast earned
Shall crown with sacred fear thy son.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

APRIL, 1901.

LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY.

IN the introduction to his history
of the century which is linked with
the name of Louis the Fourteenth,
Voltaire explains his view of that
epoch with his usual clearness and
certainty. For him it is, in brief, the
age of perfection. For every thinking
man, he says, there are only four
centuries in the history of the race,
and of these he reckons the one at
the close of which he was born as
undoubtedly the greatest. If it did
not surpass in every art the age
of Alexander, of Augustus, and of
the Medici, it yet reached a higher
standard of general perfection than
had ever before been attained. It is
not possible for us to take quite so
exalted a view as this of our own
times. All through the century we
have been subject to alternate spasms
of complacency and despair; at one
moment we have been ready to pro-
claim the millennium, and at another
we have questioned whether any mil-
lennium can possibly be in store for
our distracted world. But if in our
most optimistic mood we shrink from
describing it as an age of perfection,
we seldom hesitate to call it an age of
progress. This is its most generally
accepted designation, and it is the
happiest compromise between modesty
and hopefulness that we can discover.
We have not reached the goal but we
are proceeding towards it, and that
at no mean rate ; we may dwell upon
the first or second clause of the
No. 498. — VOL. LXXXIII.

sentence according as our mood is
arrogant or depressed.

In some ways we have every right
to felicitate ourselves ; in many direc-
tions,— in practical science, in material
prosperity, in philanthropic enterprise,
for instance — there has been an ad-
vance of a steady and very beneficent
kind. In preventive medicine alone
enough has been done during the last
five-and-twenty years to earn the
enduring gratitude of all those who
are concerned (and who is not?) in
the suffering of humanity. We have
certainly succeeded in making our-
selves far more comfortable than we
have ever been before, and to a
generation as sensitive to pain as ours
this is no small thing. It is only
when we turn from the practical and
material to life's other aspects that
we find ourselves in a less confident
frame of mind.

The age of which Voltaire wrote
was dominated by the prince who
gave it his name ; the epoch which
completed and crowned the system
of centralisation, for which Richelieu
had cleared the ground and dug the
foundations, was emphatically the
King's century. The rule of Louis
the Fourteenth extended far beyond
the general domain of government ;
he was not much more supreme in
questions of politics than in questions
of taste, and the intellectual and
artistic movements of the time can
hardly be viewed apart from their

402

Literature and Democracy,

relation to the throne. His crowded
reign of seventy-two years drew at
last to a calamitous end, and the
people he had ruined flung gibes and
curses at his coffin as it passed un-
wept to St Denis. But the litera-
ture of the reign survived the wreck
of the splendid fabric of which it had
been the stateliest column ; and the
greatest names in French letters still
shield from contumely and oblivion
the memory of the sovereign who
made their triumphs his own. He
was not wanting to their glory ; they
are not wanting to his. In spite of
the passionate loyalty which acknow-
ledged,— it could not repay — a life of
incomparable devotion to the nation's
service, we can perceive in our own
time no parallel to the influence
which was exercised by royalty in
the age of Louis the Fourteenth ; no
such harmonious atmosphere as that
influence produced, no such sense of
unity and coherence pervades the
period we are considering. Among
the shifting currents of modern ideas,
the democratic sentiment is the one
which may be traced most plainly ;
and diffusion, not concentration, is
the democratic aim. It is not un-
usual to speak of the Victorian Era
as though it represented a single
period (with sub-divisions) in our
literary history, but this appearance
of unity is only to be gained by a
rather arbitrary arrangement of facts.
To make a revolution in thought, or
a new development in art, fit into
such convenient divisions of time as a
reign or a century is a practice which
cannot but commend itself to every
orderly mind; and when to this
chronological instinct is added the
desire to link our age with a beloved
and very great name, the temptation
becomes almost irresistible. But the
practice is more natural than accurate,
since to the absence of any central
authority uniting or determining the

lines along which art and literature
have travelled, we must add an accel-
eration in the pace at which we
move. We are mentally and spirit-
ually more remote from the early
Victorian than might have been ex-
pected reckoning only by dates, and
the appearance of THE ORIGIN OP
SPECIES (in 1859) draws a sharper
line of intellectual demarcation across
the century than the Queen's acces-
sion or the appearance in the same
year of Lockhart's LIFE OP SCOTT and
THE PICKWICK PAPERS. The literary
splendours which make us feel so
content with ourselves in our retro-
spective musings belong almost entirely
to the first twenty-five years of the
reign ; we are living to-day upon
reputations which were made over
half a century ago.

The fifteen years which preceded
the Queen's accession were years of
transition, but they do not show any
definite interruption in our literary
sequence, or any very long pause in
production. Silence had fallen upon
the group of poets who had filled the
opening years of the century with
music. Keats died in 1821, Shelley
in 1822, Byron in 1824; and by
that date the task of Coleridge and
Wordsworth was all but done. But
Scott and Hallam were still at work,
and the new voices were already
audible ; those years which have
lately been described as the flattest
and most unproductive of the century
gave us not only QUENTIN DUR-
WARD, THE TALISMAN, THE FAIR MAID
OP PERTH, and Laudor's IMAGINARY
CONVERSATIONS, but also SARTOR RE-
SARTUS, Browning's PAULINE, Tenny-
son's first volume (POEMS CHIEFLY
LYRICAL), and fifteen of Macaulay's
essays. These heralded a wave of
extraordinary energy which reached
its height soon after the middle of
the century, — the year 1855 saw the
publication of Browning's MEN AND

Literature and Democracy.

403

WOMEN, THE NEWCOMES, MAUD,
WESTWARD Ho, the third and fourth
volumes of Macaulay's HISTORY OP
ENGLAND, and the completion of
Grote's HISTORY OP GREECE — and
receding a few years later left us all
the work of Thackeray, the Brontes,
Macaulay, Mrs. Browning, Borrow,
and Fitzgerald, and the best work of
Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Dickens,
Froude, Kingsley, Browning, and
George Eliot ; and to these we must
add the lovely cadences in which the
age heard a new note of vain aspiration
and vain regret with which (though
never again so exquisitely as in
Arnold's poems) it was afterwards to
become very familiar. If ever there
was a moment when we might have
been permitted to contemplate our
literary position with calm satisfac-
tion, it should surely have been at a
time when we had just been enriched
with such costly and various treasures
as those which are recalled by this
list of names. This brilliant period,
however, had not closed before we
were startled by a voice which
denounced in incisive tones not only
our greed and our stupidity, our
materialism and our narrow-minded-
ness, but our lack of literary taste
and intellectual conscience. The first
part of the message was not altogether
strange. The Victorian Era had
already had its prophets ; it had
listened more or less attentively to
Carlyle's resonant utterances and to
Ruskin's splendid phrase, to the one
preacher who bade us seek salvation
in lifting our eyes to the Eternal
and Infinite, and to the other who
prayed us to leave off contemplating
our trade-returns and cleanse our
minds by the vision of beauty incar-
nate in leaf and cloud. It had been
left to Arnold to suggest a third way
of combating the Anglo-Saxon vice of
materialism. " The way of intellec-
tual deliverance," said he, "is the

peculiar demand of ages which are
called modern. Such a deliverance is
emphatically the demand of the age
in which we ourselves live."

Considering what those twenty-five
years had done for us, it seems at
first sight as though the prophet had
made a mistake ; surely so far as
literature was concerned, it was not
the moment to reproach us with our
national shortcomings. And yet when
we look again we see plainly that
Arnold was right. The years which
had so greatly enriched our literature
had also produced a large class of
readers for whom literature had no
significance at all. A century ago a
comparatively small class was inter-
ested in letters, and writers of that
day addressed a cultivated and critical
audience. The circle had widened
considerably when Arnold wrote, and
the increase in the number of readers
had already resulted in the formation
of two publics which might then have
been briefly distinguished as the people
who read Tupper and the people who
read Tennyson, — those who liked to
see their own mediocrity reflected in
books, and those who sought in books
a refuge from mediocrity, — from their
own, as well as any other. The latter
was of course very much the larger of
the two, and it was to it that Arnold's
exhortations were chiefly, though not
exclusively, addressed ; it was in their
ears that he reiterated his assurance
that if we could only get to know on
the matters which most concern us
the best that has been thought and
said in the world, it would be impos-
sible to retain unamended the stock
notions and habits which he found
so extremely distasteful. Arnold's
influence upon his generation was
weakened by the too classic bent of
his mind, by a want of sympathy with
the attitude of others; it was hard
for him not to confound convictions
he did not share with prejudices he
D D 2

404

Literature and Democracy.

despised. The critic, it has been
said, may have preferences but no ex-
clusions, and he had many. Roused,
however, by his taunts, we attempted
to exchange materialism tinged by
religion for materialism tempered by
culture. Moved by a generous con-
cern for those to whom "the best
that has been thought and said in the
world" was unknown, and likely to
remain so without special intervention,
we have expended much energy in
writing primers and arranging epi-
tomes ; history has been sliced into
epochs and theology compressed into
magazine-articles ; we have enabled a
great many people to claim a casual
acquaintance with eras of literature
and systems of art ; we have not im-
planted in them, with any marked
success, either the scholarly temper or
the literary conscience. This is to
say that we have not yet found any
means of reconciling literary and
democratic ideals.

In the popular attitude as regards
literature, two defects are constantly
visible, — impatience of authority and
indifference to form. In their hos-
tility to the old order, the leaders of
the intellectual revolt of the eigh-
teenth century recognised one striking
exception; in their determined and
triumphant attack upon authority,
literary precedent was singled out as
the object of particular reverence.
Voltaire imposed his own sense of
the dignity of letters upon his con-
temporaries, and the disintegrating
theories of the age were let loose
upon the world in language of singular
restraint and precision ; the antique
bases of society were shattered, but
the dogma of the dramatic unities
was preserved intact. In the re-
action which followed the revolt, the
dethroned and mutilated statues were
hastily replaced upon their pedestals ;
men turned with relief from the
monstrous sentimentality of the Revo-

lution to a saner and sincerer view
of life. Chateaubriand's seductive
pages brought Christianity again into
fashion ; romance resumed and ex-
tended her sway ; souls, sickened and
dismayed by the shattering of high
ideals, sought healing for their wounds
in a sacramental communion with
nature. In the general revulsion of
sentiment the one authority which
the age of Voltaire had reverenced
was in its turn rejected or ignored ;
in its eager protest against threadbare
formality, literature lost something
of its regard for form ; in its new
ardour for liberty, it shook off too
impatiently its traditional reticence
and self-restraint. To these defects
the very wealth of the early part of
the reign contributed. In its be-
wildering diversity of gifts, there
were so many styles to admire that
style was a little overlooked ; and
though it may seem paradoxical to
accuse of neglect of form the epoch
which numbers among its achieve-
ments Lander's stately harmonies, the
deliberate and exquisite art of Tenny-
son, and the clear gravity of Newman,
to name no lesser names, it is still
certain that the influence of many of
our great writers has tended on the
whole to weaken the literary scruples
of their successors. Men of genius
have forced us to admire them in
spite of their style : it has been
proved to us very effectively that
a man may be slovenly, obscure, un-
intelligible, and yet a great writer ;
and our splendid years, unlike the
age of Louis the Fourteenth, have
bequeathed to us many masterpieces
but very few models. This har-
monises precisely with the temper of
the time which is more and more
disposed to estimate a writer's position
either by individual liking or by
popular vote ; and this is not to be
wondered at, since for the mass of
readers no other criterion is within

Literature and Democracy.

405

reach. They have no desire to violate
the canons of taste ; they are not
aware of their existence. For the
just appreciation of literature, as of
music and painting, the trained ear
and eye are essential. A man may
be born with the critical faculty, but
no man is born a critic ; and for
those who combine, as is the popular
habit, a feverish desire for knowledge
with a yet more feverish impatience
of study, whose wish to reach the
journey's end is united to an insuper-
able aversion to the fatigues of the
road, it is unfortunately impossible
to repair the omission. Sir George
Trevelyan has told us that, when the
first two volumes of Macaulay's His-
tory were published (in 1848), "at
Dukinfield, near Manchester, a gentle-
man invited his poorer neighbours to
attend every evening after their work
was finished and read the History
aloud to them from beginning to end.
At the close of the last meeting, one
of the audience rose and moved,
in north-country fashion, a vote of
thanks to Mr. Macaulay ' for having
written a history which working men
can understand.' " So diligently have
we cultivated a habit of restless mental
inconsequence that it would not be
easyat the present day to find any audi-
ence which would listen to a work as
long as Macaulay's History from be-
ginning to end ; a selection of enter-
taining passages would be all that any
one would .venture to propose.

With the immense increase in the
demand for something to read which
the last twenty or thirty years have
witnessed) the intellectual deliverance
for which Arnold sighed has grown
still more remote, and to our older
defects the last thirty years have
added a steady decline in creative
force and a continual narrowing of the
range of imaginative vision. They
are rich in essays and monographs,
in historical research, and in philo-

sophical and critical studies; that is
to say, in those forms of literary
activity with which the mass of
readers is in no way concerned ; but
between history and literature the
breach grows wider; and in fiction
and poetry what names have we to
set against those which have been
cited as belonging to the first years
of the reign? As the century
grows older it grows poorer. The
best work of Rossetti, William
Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and Coventry
Patmore was completed some thirty
years ago ; it is forty years since THE
ORDEAL OP RICHARD FEVEREL was
published, thirty since LORNA DOONE,
and twenty since JOHN INGLESANT ; a
long stretch of road divides UNDER
THE GREENWOOD TREE from JUDE THE
OBSCURE ; and Stevenson's sun went
down while it was yet day. We still
have Mr. Kipling, but no lover of
England and English literature can
help observing him with a somewhat
apprehensive eye. From THE MAN
WHO WOULD BE KING to THE DAY'S
WORK and STALKY AND Co. is a dismal
descent, and we watch with anxiety
for what is to happen next. Our
hopes for the future of poetry hang
upon a host of minor poets, each week
adding to their number, but not to
their quality. In fiction the absence
of distinction is so marked at present
that he who should undertake to
name the best half-dozen novelists
of the moment would resemble the
man who made a hole in the dyke
because he wanted a pailful of water,
and found too late that he had ad-
mitted the ocean. In connection with
the popular novelists, one circumstance
must be noticed at the risk of seeming
ungracious to those who have given us
a good deal of entertaining reading.
The popular author's first work is
almost invariably his best. We have
perhaps no right to insist that, because
a man has written one good book, he

406

Literature and Democracy.

must have it in him to write another ;
and still the fact remains that during
the last decade or two we have seen
a considerable amount of promise un-
followed by any fulfilment ; the first
book is generally not only fresher
and brighter than the second and
the twenty- second, but also less slip-
shod in construction and less meagre
in design. This is perhaps in part
the fault of the critics, whose kindly
anxiety to encourage rising talent
sometimes leads them to persuade the
climber that he has reached the
summit while he is still only on the
lower slopes of the hill. The young
writer who is assured (as has recently
been the case with a living poet) that
the quality of his work is ^Eschylean,
Shakespearean, Virgilian, Miltonic,
Sophoclean, Tennysonian, and Dan-
tesque, can hardly help believing, one
may suppose, that his climbing days
are done ; unless indeed these sonorous
epithets should rather set him won-
dering whether his reviewers' memories
of those great writers had not grown
somewhat dim. But those who are
tempted to blame the reviewers for
expressing a sense of general excel-
lence rather too emphatically should
remember that critics are hardly less
numerous than writers. We seem
indeed to have returned to that time
of which it was said, more pithily
perhaps than elegantly :

No town can such a gang of critics

show ;
E'en boys turn up the nose they cannot

blow.

And where a great many people are
talking at once, one must shout if
one means to be heard.

To the increase in the number of
readers we owe that curious incident
in literary history, the rise of the
novel. It was evident that without
some miraculous change in our intel-
lectual habits, if everybody was to

read, reading -matter must be pre-
sented in some shape that would
make no demand upon the mental
powers; and the novel and the news-
paper are the only means of meeting
this requirement. When, about a
century ago, Monk Lewis heard that
his mother had written a novel and
proposed to publish it, he was pain-
fully agitated at the tidings. Not
all the fame of EVELINA seemed to
him enough to compensate a woman
for the dangers entailed by an appear-
ance in print. " I do most earnestly
and urgently supplicate you," he
says, " whatever be its merits,
not to publish your novel. . . .
It would do a material injury to
Sophia ; and her mother's turning
novel-writer would, I am convinced,
not only severely hurt Maria's feel-
ings but raise the greatest prejudice
against her in her husband's family.
As for myself, I really think I should
go to the Continent immediately upon
your taking such a step." " We have
often been astonished," Jeffrey wrote,
a few years later, " at the quantity
of talent that may be found in those
works of fiction . . . which are
seldom regarded as titles to a perma-
nent reputation " ; and one of Scott's
objections to avow the authorship of
WAVERLEY was his doubt whether
it would be considered decorous for
a Clerk of Session to write novels.
These twin prejudices have dis-
appeared so completely that we can
hardly realise their existence ; at
the present time it is said that
novel is published in this country for
every day of the year, and for the
majority of readers literature and
fiction are interchangeable terms. In
comparing the fiction of the earlier
period with that of our own, we note
a difference in the writers' position.
"I was a bit puzzled," says Stevenson's
Will o' the Mill, "whether it was
myself or the world that was worth

Literature and Democracy.

407

looking into." We have for the
most part decided in favour of our-
selves ; the less introspective and
self-conscious generation for which
Dickens and Thackeray wrote made
a different choice. For Scott the
world was full of stories waiting to
be told ; for Dickens and Thackeray,
for Reade and Charles Kingsley it
was full of human beings so interest-
ing that they could not help talking
about them. Life seems to press
the stuff into their hands saying,
" Do what you will with it, there
is plenty more." This consciousness
of wealth explains, it may be said
in passing, the attitude of some
writers to plagiarism. Instead of
defending himself from charges of
plagiarism, Byron ought, says Goethe,
to have merely remarked, " What is
there is mine, and whether I got it
from a book or from life is of no
consequence." He thought Scott had
done quite right in borrowing a scene
from EGMONT for KENILWOETH ; he
had made a good use of the loan, and
no other question need be asked.
" My Mephistopheles sings a song
from Shakespeare, and why should
he not ? " For the climax of WAL-
LENSTEIN Schiller too went to Shake-
speare.

Gordon.— Er schliift,— O mordet nicht
den heiligen Schlaf !

Buttler. — Nein, er soil wachend
sterben.1

We should have torn Goethe and
Scott and Schiller in pieces for un-
scrupulous thieves ; we are too poor
not to be honest if we would preserve
our reputations. But the men in
whose quarries we are all wont to dig
thought nothing of carrying home
any good stone that pleased their
fancy to build into their own walls.

1 O.— He sleeps,— oh do not murder holy
sleep 1
2?.— No, he shall die awake.

In Mr. Kipling's earlier work we
find exactly this sense of being in
such close communication with life
that he has only to ask and have, but
the same thing cannot be said of any
other living writer of fiction. We
live in a somewhat impoverished
time when writers may be roughly
divided into two classes, one of
which has a creditable command of
pleasant and picturesque expression
but nothing very particular to say.
To this class belongs the novelist who
laments that the earlier comers have
used up all the plots and all the
periods ; like the needy knife-grinder,
he has no story to tell, and in default
he goes up and down searching con-
scientiously for effective situations
and convincing emotions, the straw of
which his bricks must be made. Since
life does not come to him, he goes
rather dispiritedly in pursuit of life ;
instead of writing of what he has
seen, he strains his eyes to see some-
thing that he may write about, no
matter what, — a drain-pipe or a dust-
bin may answer the purpose. If we
take, for example, the historical novel
which for some years past has been
so much in fashion, it would seem,
judging of course from internal evi-
dence only, that the novelist begins
by selecting his epoch ; he then pro-
cures the best hundred and fifty
books on the subject and reads them
carefully, notebook in hand ; when he
has learned the names of the principal
personages of the time and has jotted
down turns of speech and specimens
of costume appropriate to an archer or
a highwayman or a damsel in distress,
he adds a suitable proportion of scenery
and dialogue and if possible a plot ;
and so the thing is done. We seem
to observe, though not quite so plainly,
the same process carried out some-
times in the case of novels that are
not historical. First a becoming cos-
tume is selected and then a man is

408

Literature and Democracy.

found to fill it. Thackeray, we know,
took some pains, when he was writing
THE VIRGINIANS, to learn the colour
of George Washington's waistcoat, but
nothing in the book leads us to sup-
pose that his conception of George
Washington began with that historic
piece of material ; there is a differ-
ence not only in the goal but in the
starting-point. This want of any
intimate relationship to life is further
betrayed by the narrow range of
emotion which is dealt with in the
pages of our contemporaries. If we
are to believe these reporters, there are
rarely more than three characters in
the whole drama of existence, — the
man, the woman, and the other
woman ; or the woman, the man, and
the other man. Such a practice is
incompatible with any clear vision of
life and the meaning of life, and we
are grateful to Stevenson for remind-
ing us of this truth,— for this, and for
how much more !

Writers of another class justify
their existence on the ground that
they deal not with imagination but
with reality. Scott was a story-teller
pure and simple ; the generation that
followed him was a little more self-
conscious, a little more alive to the
fact that the novelist has at his com-
mand a vehicle that may serve more
than its primary purpose. Neither
Dickens nor Thackeray was averse to
improving the occasion, but the in-
struction or reproof which their stories
convey is not an essential part of
them. No one now reads Dickens, —
no one probably ever did — to learn
his views on the Court of Chancery or
the working of the Poor Laws. The
absorbing emotion of JANE EYRE and
of VILLETTE left no room for any
didactic motive, but Charles Reade
and Kingsley and George Eliot were
very much awake to their mission ;
and thenceforward we find the
moralist and the story-teller more

and more hotly disputing possession
of the novel. At present a large
number of people write novels only
because it is a convenient way of
acquainting the world with their
views on religious or social problems ;
they would just as soon write pam-
phlets or sermons if they had the
same chance of being read. These
works unfortunately labour very
commonly under a double disadvan-
tage : they are not pretty, and they
have nothing to do with art ; but
nevertheless, the public swiftly recog-
nised that this was just what was
wanted, and turned forthwith with its
anxious questionings to the writers
who undertook, like the correspon-
dence column in a ladies' journal, to
answer enquiries upon every section
of life on the easiest terms. Ought
women to marry? Ought men to
pray ? For the reply to these and
many other enigmas we have only to
subscribe to Mudie's ; and meanwhile
the preacher, who seemed in danger
of being ousted from his pulpit, has
deftly turned his rival into his ally
and takes the novel of the hour for
his text. " I must keep up with
them," says the breathless revolution-
ist as he hurries after the crowd ; "I
am their leader ! "

In this wide diffusion of what is
sometimes called literary taste many
critics discover reason for much satis-
faction. It is chiefly this circum-
stance which leads them to declare
that literature has never held so
proud a position as it does to-day.
For every one who made authorship
his profession at the beginning of
the century, hundreds may now be
counted. Everybody reads, almost
everybody writes, and most of what
is written is readable ; the halfpenny
newspapers alone enable millions to
keep up with the march of intellect
both at home and abroad. We cannot
open a magazine without lighting

Literature and Democracy.

409

upon verses which would put Mrs.
Hemans to shame : we are as inti-
mate with Maaterlinck and Bjornsen
as a fairly complete ignorance of
foreign tongues will permit ; and we
blush to think that our parents
revelled in THE CHRONICLES OF
BARSETSHIRE and made each other
birthday-presents of PROVERBIAL
PHILOSOPHY. If further proof is
wanted, look at the money that is
in it ! " The great prizes of the
profession," says Sir Walter Besant,
" are becoming every day greater
and more numerous. In every club
where men of letters are to be
found there appear every year more
who attempt the profession, and
with an exception here and there
they all seem to get on. The pecu-
niary prizes of popular success are
very substantial and are increasing
by leaps and bounds." What more
do we want? Should any dubious
spectator of these popular successes
venture to enquire how many pounds
of talent are a fair exchange for a
grain of genius, or how many minor
poets outweigh one major, he is in-
formed that the only hindrance to par-
ticular distinction lies in our general
excellence. In a less opulent age al-
most any one of our popular authors
would be recognised as eminently good ;
it is only because the majority of his
contemporaries are also eminently good
that the impression made upon us is
one of mediocrity.

Some such impression is undoubt-
edly made ; and with every wish to be
just to ourselves, it is hard to see
which of our minor poets, graceful
and charming though their verses are,
would have sat in the seat, say, of
Herrick or Gray, if he had only
arrived at the banquet a little earlier.
But there is no need to make our-
selves very unhappy on this account,
or to consider the position of English
literature desperate because for the
time being our writers are more pro-
lific than distinguished, more melan-
choly than serious. It may at least
be argued on the popular side, that
if a man has nothing very particular
to say, it does not matter very much
how he says it; and it is also true
that no carelessness is so exasperat-
ing as a pretentious and elaborate
arrangement of words under which
we can detect no flicker of thought.
Yet when we reckon up the gains
of the last sixty years, solid and im-
portant as they are, we must set in
the opposite column the fact that we
have taught a vast number of people
to read and to think, — to read what
is vulgar and slovenly, and to think
there is no harm in it. In the mourn-
ful estrangement between literature
and life we have lost much of the
serenity, the composure, the breadth
of view, the pure and deep delight
in something greater than ourselves,
which is literature's best gift to a
nation.

410

THE SECRET OF IRELAND.

1. MY NEW CUBATE ; a Story gathered from the Stray Leaves of an Old Diary ; by
the Eev. P. A. Sheehan, P.P., Doneraile (Diocese of Cloyne). Boston, U.S.A., 1900.

2. SOME EXPERIENCES OP AN IRISH KM. ; by E. CE. Somerville and Martin Boss. With
Illustrations by E. CE. Somerville. London, 1900.

A COUPLE of summers ago a party
of us in the west of Ireland were
idling through the vague interval
that divides Sunday breakfast from a
start for church. The house looked
north-west on to a bay so landlocked
that, for all one's eye could tell, it
might have been a lake. Over against
us, a matter of three miles off, rose a
mountain, which practically filled the
peninsula between our bay and the
next inlet on that indented coast. It
was an August day of blazing sun-
shine without a breath of wind ; the
surface of the water shone like glass,
and across it came clear, but mellowed
by distance, the sound of many voices
and of creaking oars. The bay
swarmed with curraghs, and every
curragh carried a full complement of
passengers ; for the lower slope of the
mountain was dotted thick with cot-
tages that shone white across the
bay under the sunlight, in among their
tiny patches of corn and potatoes, —
patches where the crimson of wild
loosestrife often over-mastered the
yellow or the green — and from all these
cottages the most devout of popula-
tions was streaming over to mass at
the little chapel near our house. On
the landward side the nearest place
of worship in the little town on the
coast-road would have been a matter
of five Irish miles from most of them ;
so, except in days when a rowing-boat
could scarcely live on the water, —
and it is wild water that the folk
there will not face in these contrap-

tions of tarred calico or canvas
stretched on a willow frame — they
cross the bay to their devotions.
And a pleasant sight they were to see
as the boat-loads entered the little
creek just under the house, and
pleasant their voices and laughter
sounded ; the men indeed were not
looking their best, for a good pro-
portion of them were black-coated, but
the women were splendid, with their
heads blue-shawled and their red or
dark blue petticoats. How they were
all going to fit into the little chapel to
which there would be already gather-
ing on foot the people from our side
of the water, it was not easy to
guess ; but all through Ireland folk
are used to be packed tight at mass
on Sundays.

When their procession of boats was
ended, we decided to follow their
example, and pulled round to the
shore within half a mile or so of
the church, — a much more important-
looking building than the chapel, and
a much more comfortable spot on that
baking day. There was good elbow-
room, although the congregation was
a large one, for that part of Ireland.
There were two or three coast-guards
with their families, a policeman from
Ulster, our own numerous party, and
the rector's belongings, and perhaps
a score of other people from the great
house five miles off. Dresses that
would have been appropriate enough
in Hyde Park on a summer afternoon
looked, I thought, a trifle incongruous

The Secret of Ireland.

411

in Connemara ; and the ladies' maids
and footmen were perhaps even more
exotic. But the most incongruous
figure of all was a stout square-built
gentleman in a frock-coat, whose
every gesture and angle spoke of the
English manufacturing town, just as
unmistakably as the whole dress and
bearing of two men in the next pew
testified to the retired British oflicer.
After service, when there was the
usual five minutes of assemblage out-
side the church-porch, the congrega-
tion was entirely innocent of brogue,
and the gentleman in the frock-coat
dropped something as he was speaking.
The same kind of an assemblage
might be found, I should say, at any
station in India ; and it would be
just about as much in touch with the
worshippers at the adjoining temple.

This was of course in Connemara,
where virtually the whole resident
gentry of the old stock has dis-
appeared, and their houses, where
they are tenanted at all, are let to
shooting tenants. To a certain extent,
I fancy, the same state of things can
be observed in the Highlands, — but
with differences. In the first place,
the west of Ireland does not rival
the Highlands as a game-preserve;
shootings and fishings there can never
fetch a reasonably good figure until
you get rid of the population that
crowds the chapels. In the second
place, the Highlanders are only sepa-
rated from the visitors who come to
live among them by blood, by im-
memorial habits, by speech (in part),
and by the great gulf of poverty.
There is not the barrier of religion,
the most difficult of all to surmount ;
a barrier that is felt, not in Conne-
mara, where there is really no contact
of the two persuasions, but throughout
the country where Catholic and Pro-
testant meet on equal terms and rub
shoulders daily. It would be hard
to exaggerate the separateness, the

cleavage, that runs through the whole
country. Even in Dublin, where
educated men of the two religions,
but often of the same political creed,
mix freely in their professions or
their business, there is little social
intercourse, little real intimacy.
Broadly speaking, at Protestant houses
you do not meet Catholics. They are
kept apart by instinctive antipathies,
— instincts maintained, no doubt, by
the deliberate policy of the Catholic
Church. But it is in the country
parts, not in the towns, that a person,
trying to understand what Ireland
really is, what it hopes, fears, loves,
or hates, becomes most acutely aware
of the aloofness. It would be hardly
too much to say that Catholics in
Ireland form among themselves, —
without intention and even without
knowledge — a huge secret society
amenable, like all secret societies,
to a special code.

The historic genesis of this attitude
is not hard to find. Throughout
Ireland, on the whole, Protestants
are the possessors, Catholics the dis-
possessed. They were dispossessed
not less for their religion than for
their race ; and their religion is to-
day in many cases, perhaps in most,
the only mark of their separate origin.
It has been the lasting bond, indeed
the one and only positive link of
union among them, — for hate is only
a negative tie. Persecution and
penalisation were directed against
the religion, and in their clinging to
what was attacked, they fell away
hopelessly from the attacking force, —
which was the law. And the secret
law which grew up among them
was so indissolubly bound up with
their religion, that the religion could
not, if it would, shake it off.
Catholicism is a strong religion,
perhaps the strongest in the world,
but to no people in the world does
it represent so much as to the Irish.

412

The Secret of Ireland,

It is the one thing they retained.
They lost their land, they lost their
language, and with it their traditional
culture, but they kept their religion ;
and when their religion ceased to be
attacked, they kept the habits and
the instinctive organisation that they
acquired in defending it. The Irish
peasant, who passes for an expansive
confiding creature, is in reality the
most reserved of human beings.

How much does the average
gentleman living in rural Ireland
know of the Catholic population ?
About the Catholic gentry I can
say nothing : there were none at all
in my own country when the
Catholics were in a large majority
of the voting population ; but I sus-
pect that the land-question has made
a barrier hard to surmount. The
gentry buy and sell with Catholics,
they let land to them, they employ
them ; but the kind of institutions
that upon occasion abolish class
differences in England are absent in
Ireland. Cricket is not played, ex-
cept in the towns and not much
there ; the Irish climate does not
conduce to cricket. Rugby football
appears to be taking hold to some
extent, but for the most part this
also only is played in towns ; the
Gaelic game is exclusively cultivated
by the peasants and shopkeepers, and
I question if anyone could find a Pro-
testant who had played Gaelic foot-
ball. There remains hunting ; and
generally speaking there is probably
more real intercourse over questions
connected with horseflesh than over
all other subjects put together be-
tween men of the two creeds. But,
taking it all round, throughout Ireland
wherever Catholics are in the majority
the upper class are Protestants, sepa-
rated from the lower class not so much
by any great difference in the posses-
sion of money (since the successful
shopkeeper is apt to be better off

than the average landlord) nor in
education, as by a radical divergence
in social code and religious creed.

Whoever has read one of the most
amusing books of the last year or two
will recognise that this is the state of
things portrayed in the EXPERIENCES
OF AN IRISH R.M. In the ordinary
parish there are three persons in the
upper class who have specially close
intercourse with all their neighbours,
— the rector (for the Church of
Ireland clergy as a rule do a deal
of ministering to the Roman Catholic
sick and poor), the dispensary doctor
(if he happens to be a Protestant,
which is increasingly rare in Catholic
districts), and the stipendiary magis-
trate. And the clever ladies who wrote
this book knew, as was natural that
ladies of a famous Irish family should
know, that the experiences of an Irish
Resident Magistrate might reason-
ably be made to embrace the life
of Irish society from top to bottom.
But practically it is apparent that
his experiences are of two distinct
kinds. There are those in which he
is an active participant, one of the
players in a comedy, moved by the
same sort of motives as the rest j such
are all his dealings with the ami-
able Mr. Flurry Knox, with Flurry's
grandmother, Mrs. Knox of Aussol
(a character no more exaggerated, I
would venture to say, than the i
disputable Flurry himself), and, gene-
rally, with the whole clan of Knoxes.
These dealings have all of them to
do with love or sport or horses, but
primarily with sport. The society
in which he moves contains the author-
ised sportsmen of the neighbourhood,
and its most intimate relations with
the other and larger society outside
it and around it are contracted in
the pursuit of sport. A gentleman's
most familiar associate among the
peasantry is apt to be some one like
Slipper of these stories, a personage

The Secret of Ireland.

413

who is poacher and gillie by turns.
Slipper is a reprobate, but very often
one's acquaintance of this kind may be
a perfectly decent, virtuous, and sober
person. The point, however, is this :
where Protestant and Catholic see
most of each other in Ireland is over
sport ; and in these cases, the Pro-
testant shoots, the Catholic carries
the bag; the Protestant hooks the
salmon (if he can), the Catholic gaffs
it. I should be the last to deny that
real friendship grows up out of this
relation ; but the mere fact that
people meet exclusively as employer
and employed, or patron and client,
stamps a special character on the
intercourse. It is not the same
thing as playing together on a side ;
rather the relation, in establishing
itself, marks the essential separation.

Thus what you find reflected in
this book, with an amusing distortion
no doubt, but still reflected, are the
manners of the Irish upper class.
In so far as the book relates the
magistrate's dealings with the Irish
who are not of his circle, the Catholic
Irish, the method of portrayal is quite
different. The light thrown on the
life of the peasantry is thrown from
outside, showing chiefly their exclu-
siveness, and how little the magistrate
really knows about them. Take for in-
stance the only tragic story in the book,
"The Waters of Strife." The magis-
trate has been attending a regatta in
which he witnessed a race between a
scratch crew in their shirt-sleeves and
the representatives of the local foot-
ball club, the Sons of Liberty, in
their green jerseys. In the progress
of the race the coxswain of the
shirt-sleeved crew had occasion to
strike an oarsman of the other boat
over the head with his tiller and was
cheered by a lad named Bat Calla-
ghan, who watched the contest from
the wheel of the magistrate's dog-cart.
Bat was pulled down by a man in

a green jersey, but the fight was pre-
vented by the police. Next morning
the magistrate was informed by his
factotum that the police were searching
for one Jimmy Foley. There had been
blood " sthrewn " about the road at one
point.

" Sure they were fighting like wasps in
it half the night."

" Who were fighting ? "

" I couldn't say, indeed, sir. Some
o' thim low rakish lads from the town, I
suppose," replied Peter with virtuous
respectability. When Peter Cadogan was
quietly and intelligently candid, to pursue
an inquiry was seldom of much avail.

The police-inspector, however, re-
ported that Foley's cap had been found
drenched with blood, and opined that
there must have been a dozen people
looking on when the murder was done.
No evidence was forthcoming, but
some days later the police, acting on a
hint shouted through the magistrate's
window one dark night, discovered
Foley's body in the river with' the
head battered in. About the same
time Bat Callagham was found to
be missing. Nothing else happened;
but a few months later Major Yeates,
the magistrate, was in the barracks
occupied by his old regiment when
a rifle went off. A recently joined
man was found in convulsions. On
recovering he explained that he had
fired his rifle at a face that haunted
him ; and then fresh convulsions came
on and he died. He was of course
Callaghan. There is nothing at all
hard to believe in this story, except
perhaps the effects of remorse. One
would like to point out to the English
reader that " the secret half a country
keeps " is kept all the same, when the
victim is not a bailiff, or the tenant of
an evicted farm, but a member of the
Sons of Liberty football-club in his
green jersey. There is nothing sur-
prising in the story of "The Holy
Island," — that delightful tale of hos-

414

The Secret of Ireland.

pitable Mr. Canty and the smuggled
rum. If barrels of rum are washed
ashore from a wreck, no doubt they
belong legally to the Crown, or to the
insurance company, or some other
vague entity ; but it is only human
nature to act as if the person who
picked them up might dispose of the
contents, and to refrain from informing
a meddlesome police where the picker-
up has bestowed them. And in Ire-
land, when one set of the people is
playing a game through life in which
the law and the police figure merely
as forces that must be defeated or
evaded, a kind of incarnate bad luck,
naturally there is a kind of popular
enthusiasm for the player who
smuggles off his rum in fish-boxes
under the very nose of the police and
magistrates, by attaching a van to the
special train that convoys the cortege
of a defunct bishop. All that is
human nature; but human nature
must be strangely bitted and bridled
by long custom when a man can be
hammered to death with stones in a
wayside fight, and his kith and kin in
the most clannish of countries will not
lift a hand to give the murderer up
to justice. It is exactly the attitude
of schoolboys towards the justice dis-
pensed by their masters ; just or not,
they will not invoke it. The criminal
law is a thing alien and hostile to the
whole body of the community. No
doubt, in a case like this, the Irish
make far greater allowance than the
law admits for the excitement of a
fight. The heart of the people goes
out in sympathy to combatants, as the
authors of these EXPERIENCES explain
in the phrase of a countryman, " In-
deed, if it was only two cocks ye seen
fightin' on the road, yer heart'd take
part with one of them." But chiefly
the reason is an instinctive hostility
to the law. Things are in a transi-
tion stage. In the old days the
matter would have rested till the

next faction-fight, and then the kins-
men of the Son of Liberty would
have taken exemplary vengeance on
Mr. Bat Callaghan, or failing him,
on some other Callaghan. Now, these
blood-feuds are mostly at an end.
Such homicides are punished only by
their own conscience, by the opinion
of the community, and by the priest.

There one says the name of the
strongest power in Ireland, — so long
as there is no such overmastering
personal ascendency as Parnell's was
— the factor of which least is known,
and assuredly the greatest fount of
knowledge if it were available. In
every Catholic parish the priest is at
the very heart of things. Quarrels,
reconcilements, love-affairs, money-
dealings, — all are familiar to him as
his own personal concerns. And that
is why any book about Ireland written
by a priest should command attention,
but more especially a book about the
Irish Catholic clergy. I would not
say that MY NEW CURATE is altogether
admirable as a piece of literature ;
but it is a pleasant book to read, and
it throws a new light on the life of
Ireland.

Father Dan, who acts as the nar-
rator, commentator, and chorus, is
seventy years old. Long ago he has
been sent by a kindly bishop to this
outlandish, seaboard, Gaelic-speaking
parish ; for, as the bishop said, Father
Dan "was a bit of a litterateur, and
there would be plenty of time for
poetising and dreaming at Kilronan."
Nevertheless Father Dan had come
to his parish with great resolutions.
Not only would he read and write
greatly, but he would put a new life
into the people ; he would build
factories, pave the streets, establish
a fishing-station, make Kilronan a
favourite bathing -resort. He tells
the result.

I might as well have tried to remove
yonder mountain with a pitch-fork or

The Secret of Ireland.

415

stop the roll of the Atlantic with a rope
of sand. Nothing on earth can cure the
inertia of Ireland. It weighs down like
the weeping clouds on this damp heavy
earth, and there's no lifting it nor dis-
burthening the souls of men of this in-
tolerable weight. I was met on every
side with a stare of curiosity as if I
were propounding something immoral or
heretical.

Gradually Father Dan, being no
fighter, succumbs and drifts like the
rest ; he sees himself in the evening
of his days with nothing to show for
his life but an absence of earthly
trouble and some few consolations :
" My breviary and the grand psalms of
hope, — my daily mass and its hidden
and unutterable sweetness — the love
of little children and their daily smiles
— the prayers of my old women, and,
I think, the reverence of the men."
The words are eloquent, and, what is
better, they ring true, and they apply
beyond the scope that is given them.
Not the priests only, but the whole
mass of the friendly, innocent, indo-
lent Irish in distant corners of the
country find the reward and the pur-
pose of their lives in the consolations
of human kindliness and sympathy and
in the great anodyne of their religion.
These things contribute their part,
more perhaps than the very air of
Ireland, to produce that inertia, that
indifference to material progress,
which is a form of mysticism. Side
by side with the most living faith in
the mysteries of Christianity goes the
conviction which was written up in
large letters over the mantelpiece of
Father Dan's old curate, 'Ttvill be all
the same in a hundred years.

But the old curate had received a
mandate from the bishop which trans-
ferred him from Kilronan to another
parish twenty miles off. He had gone
out among the tears of the villagers,
with his untidy deal furniture roped
on a cart, following at the tail of
three loads of black turf ; and Father

Dan, who had spoken lightly of the
bishop's powers, was to get a new
curate who would " break his heart in
six weeks." And with the new curate
came the first breath of a new order.
Father Letheby was Irish born, — the
son of a shopkeeper in a town not
far from Kilronan — and Irish edu-
cated ; but he had served for some
years in Manchester, and he an-
nounced his arrival by sending in a
card, to the amazement of Hannah,
Father Dan's housekeeper. He was
lodged at the presbytery, and the
first result of his coming was that
after breakfast next morning Father
Dan sent out his razors to be set. The
next was the insurrection of Mrs.
Darcy the chapel-woman, who flounced
in and threw her bunch of keys on
the priest's table.

"Wisha, where in the world did you
get him, or where did he come from, at
all, at all? The son of a jook ! [the first
impression produced by the advent of the
curate's furniture, including a piano in a
pantechnicon van] the son of a draper
over there at Kilkeel. Didn't Mrs. Mor-
arty tell me how she sowld socks to his
ould father? An' he comes here com-
plaining of dacent people ! ' Dirt,' sez
he. ' Where ? ' says I. ' There,' sez he.
' Where ? ' says I. I came of as dacent
people as him."

But next Sunday the floor of the
sacristy was waxed, the grate black-
leaded, the little altar-boys were in
snowy surplices, and Father Dan was
confronted with a stiff white amice
instead of the old limp and wrinkled
one he was used to ; and, to crown
all, Mrs. Darcy answered his summons
in a white apron laced at the edges
and pinned to her breast. That was
only the beginning. Soon the little
boys and girls came out of school
chanting their rosary together before
they broke up for play. Father
Letheby was a musician, and he
organised concerts and took the choir
in hand ; and though Father Dan

416

The Secret of Ireland.

kicked against the innovations, they
commended themselves to him in spite
of himself. He might preach quieta
non movere, as the only wisdom for
the west of Ireland ; he might counsel
his curate to moderate his pace ; but
still the young man's enthusiasms won
on him : they reminded him of his
own. Father Letheby was a scholar
too, and Father Dan had some one
to talk over his classics with. In the
parish the curate's prowess with the
ball, when he started the football
matches, ensured popularity.

So much for the effect produced by
the new curate on the priest and the
parish. But Kilronan was not less
strange to him than he to Kilronan.
Almost his first experience was of a
night call to a wild corner of the
parish, while he was still at the
presbytery, and Father Dan said a
word of regret. But the curate was
enthusiastic.

" I never saw anything like it. I had
quite an escort of cavalry, two horsemen
who rode side by side with me the whole
way to the mountain, and then when we
had to dismount and climb up through
the boulders of some dry torrent course,
I had two linkinen or torehbearers, keep-
ing on the crest of the ditch on either
side and lighting me right up to the door
of the cabin. It was a picture that
Rembrandt might have painted."

He paused and blushed a little as if he
had been pedantic.

" But tell me, Father, is this the custom
in the country ? "

" Oh yes." said I, " we look upon it as
a matter of course. Your predecessors
didn't make much of it."

" It seems to me," he said, " infinitely
picturesque and beautiful. It must have
been some tradition of the Church when
she was free to practise her ceremonies.
But where do they get their torches ? "

" Bog-oak steeped in petroleum," I said,
" It is, now that you recall it, very
beautiful and picturesque. Our people
will never allow a priest with the Blessed
Sacrament with him to go unescorted."

That impression of the fervour and
devotion of these worshippers is re-

inforced again and again ; yet with
it go strange slovenliness and irrever-
ences that terribly shock the new-
comer. The worst of all happens
after a Christmas celebration, at
which Father Letheby has for the
first time arranged a Bethlehem chapel
to the intense joy and edification of
the parish. The description of the
effect upon the fervid Celtic imagina-
tion produced by the group of figures
is too long to quote, but the writer
conveys a fine sense of its force and
depth. "It was as if God had carried
them back over the gulf of nineteen
centuries and brought them to the
stable-door of Bethlehem that ever-
memorable night. I think it is this
realisation of the Incarnation that
constitutes the distinguishing feature
of Catholicity." But next d&y was
St. Stephen's, when through all
Catholic Ireland the " wren boys "
go their rounds. Father Letheby
was passing a public house and from
inside he heard issuing the strains of
the Adeste in the voice of his best,
but his most drunken, chorister. He
entered.

Leaning on the deal table, with glasses
and pints of porter before them, as they
sat and lounged or fell in various stages
of intoxication, were the wren-boys ; and
near the fire with his back to the door,
and his fingers beating time to the music
in pools of dirty porter, was Jim Deady.
As Father Letheby entered, he was
singing

Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine,
Gesiant puellce viscera

It is easy to believe that Jim
Deady's unhappy instructor wanted
to abandon his mission next day, and
had to be roundly scolded by his
superior.

In short it is easy to glean from
this book some notion of a priest's
high moments of exaltation, and black
hours of discomfiture, over his purely
religious work in Ireland. And

The Secret of Ireland.

417

the social side of it Father Sheehan
is not less informing. The new
curate has not been long in the parish
before he runs up against men drilling
by night and he reports the matter to
the priest. Father Dan's attitude
towards the secret society is notice-
able. " I know," he said, " there are
some fellows in the village in receipt
of secret service money, and all these
poor boys' names are in the Castle
archives. But, what is worse, this
means anti-clericalism, and conse-
quently abstention from Sacraments
and a long train of evils besides."
Application to the police provides
the priests with a list of all mem-
bers of the society and the name
of the informer. Father Letheby
comes in on a drill and explains to
the boys that they are sold, and
Father Dan has a quiet interview
with the informer. It all passes
under the surface ; but Father
Letheby backs his argument by telling
the rebels that their newspapers (the
anti-clerical Nationalist journals) are
owned by Freemasons and Jews ; and
Father Dan hints that the anti-
Catholic agencies work in Ireland
by the dissemination of pornographic
literature. What seems to us the
nightmare of Catholics on the Con-
tinent is not less keenly dreaded by
the Irish priest; and that explains
many things in politics. Nationalism
that is to have loyal teaching from
the Catholic Church must be Catholic
first and Nationalist afterwards.

But there are other forces at work
in Ireland now than the merely politi-
cal ones, and the new curate enrols
himself on their side. He is appalled
by the Oriental languor of the Kil-
ronan men, who will stand long hours
together propped like posts against a
wall, their hands in their pockets,
scarcely opening their mouths to spit,
much less to speak ; and he goes into
Father Dan's old projects, but with
No. 498. — VOL. LXXXIII.

a new energy and a new backing.
There is a Board now that will ad-
vance part of the money to build a
boat ; and Father Letheby induces the
Board to do so, that his parishioners
may compete with the Frenchmen and
the Manxmen for the fish. Moreover
he induces the manager of a neigh-
bouring shirt-factory to send down
sewing-machines and work to be done
on them ; while he, on his own re-
sponsibility, takes an old mill for the
girls to work in. The result of the
two enterprises is a tragic failure.
The STAR OF THE SEA founders, un-
insured, on her trial trip, run down
by a French steamer, with the sug-
gestion of malice. .One may doubt if
in actual practice to-day such a thing
could happen ; the Board would see
to insurance, and the foundering
is not likely ; though, if the enter-
prise had been worked in Father
Letheby's way, and a big boat with
nets to match had been given to
line-fishermen, the result would have
been not much better : boat and nets
would have rotted. They manage
these things better now ; the work
of the priests is merely to induce
their people to avail themselves of
the chances offered, and very well
they do it in many cases. Some-
times, too, no doubt, they have to
back their recommendations by an
offer of security, and they may
perhaps have Father Letheby's un-
fortunate experience. But the matter
of the factory is more typical. The
manager who sent down the work
reported that it was ill done and
unsaleable; and the girls replied with
grumbling. Moreover when a press of
orders came in, the workers objected
that the day was a holiday, and went
off to keep it. The ill-conditioned
minority overruled the majority, and
hinted that " the priest was turning a
good penny by it." The result was a
demand for payment on the machines
• I

418

The Secret of Ireland.

and no money forthcoming. That is
extremely like the career of most
philanthropic experiments of the sort
in Ireland. Everywhere the peasantry
meet the efforts to provide work for
them with the suspicion that the phil-
anthropist is wanting to make money
out of them unfairly ; but never-
theless it happens again and again
that business men come in and erect
a thriving concern out of the wreck-
age left by the philanthropist.

This, however, wanders from the
point, which is that on the whole
throughout Ireland at present the
priest is apt to be the pioneer of
industrial enterprise, or at least a
potent aid. It would be truer to say
that the priest of the new generation
is so ; the older men, with noble and
notable exceptions, incline to Father
Dan's axiom of quieta non movere, and
his social pessimism. Perhaps the
most interesting chapters in the book
are those called " A Clerical Sym-
posium" and "The May Conference."
The latter sketches the different types
of belief at present existing ; the
discussions of ceremonial, the more
exciting discussion of Biblical criti-
cism, beginning with a young priest's
paper which, as Father Dan sums it
up, " left us to think that by some-
thing called Ritschlian interpretations
the whole Bible was knocked into a
cocked hat." Father Sheehan has no
sympathy with the higher criticism,
and his new curate defends with
fervour the theory of direct inspira-
tion ; but one did not realise that the
higher criticism had reached Kilro-
nan, or that a country priest in Ire-
land would speak of the Magnificat
as a "literary composition." The
changes have come with the last in
three generations of Irish priests that
an old man can remember. Father
Dan's early memories go back to
" polished studious timid priests, who,
educated in Continental seminaries,

introduced into Ireland all the grace
and dignity and holiness, and all the
dread of secular authority, with the
slight tendency to compromise " of the
French clergy. Upon these followed
the brood of Maynooth, fierce fighters
for the temporal as well as the
spiritual interests of their people :

Men of large physique and iron consti-
tutions, who spent ten hours a day on
horseback, despised French claret, loved
their people and chastised them like
fathers. . . . They had the classics
at their fingers' ends, would roll out
lines from Virgil or Horace at an after-
dinner speech, and had a profound con-
tempt for English literature. In theology
they were rigorists, too much disposed
to defer absolution and to give long
penances. They had a cordial dislike for
new devotions, believing that Christmas
and Easter communion was quite enough
for ordinary sanctity.

And behind these is " the coming
generation of Irish priests, clean cut,
small of stature, keen-faced, bicycle-
riding, coffee-drinking, encyclopaedic
young fellows," regarded with a
tolerant pity by the older men, who
"have as much contempt for coffee
as for ceremonies." And yet, as
Father Dan admits, the future is
with the young men, and in his
judgment they can make good use
of it ; they lack neither energy nor
devotion, whether to their faith or
their country. And they belong, every
one of them, "to that great world -wide
organisation of Priest Adorers which,
cradled in the dying years of our
century, will grow to a gigantic stature
in the next." On such matters a lay-
man and a Protestant has no right
to speak ; yet it is safe to say that if
Father Letheby, with his enthusiasm,
and his good will to use religion in
the service of outward decency and
material progress, stands for a fair type
of the new generation among priests,
then the influence of the Church is not
likely to weaken in Ireland. But it

The Secret of Ireland.

419

will remain ail influence that no lover
of freedom can altogether approve ;
and already, as the concession of Local
Government operates, there comes into
being a national life where the priest
must almost of necessity come into
collision with his people. Hitherto,
the political question has for the most
part been simple ; priest and people
alike desired and voted for a par-
ticular legislative measure which they
were powerless to obtain. They were
agreed that the Irish people should
have power over its affairs in Ireland,
but when it comes to using the power
there may be divergences ; the issue
grows complicated. And the priestly
conception of Irish society is one in
which authority everywhere prevails,
children being subject to their parents,
and parents being subject to their
priest. Father Dan and his curate are
at one in thinking that the Christian
ideal of marriage was best realised in
Ireland, at least up to recent times.

There was no lurid and volcanic com-
pany-keeping before marriage, and no
bitter ashes of disappointment after ; but
the good mother quietly said to her child,
" Mary, go to confession to-morrow, and
get out your Sunday dress. You are to
be married on Thursday evening." And
Mary said, "Very well, mother," not
even asserting a faintest right to know
the name of her future spouse. But
then, by virtue of the great sacra-
mental union, she stepped from the
position of a child and a dependant into
the regal position of queen and mistress
on her own hearth. . . . Married
life in Ireland has been, up to now, the
most splendid refutation of all that the

world and its gospel, the novel, preach
about marriage, and the most splendid
and complete justification of the super-
naturalism of the Church's dogmas and
practices.

One rubs one's eyes on reading a
passage like that. But facts are facts,
and by any generally accepted test
it must be allowed that the institution
of marriage works better in Catholic
Ireland than anywhere in Christen-
dom ; though the Irish peasant, in
taking a wife, acts generally on the
principle that there is not " the odds
of a cow between any one woman
and another." The cause assigned by
Father Dan is not that to which a
Protestant would assign the fact, but
his is apparently the view taken by
orthodox Catholics, a view of life so
unlike ours that we are left gasping
in conjecture before it. Yet if one
thinks a little, the very incomprehensi-
bility of such an attitude is in itself a
clue ; we begin to realise vaguely why
Catholic Ireland is so hard to under-
stand, and we can guess that the
priests inherit a knowledge of its
secret. They read instinctively the
heart of a country that has never
grown up, of a people that is still in
tutelage. What will be their place
and part in an Ireland that has
achieved a really national life, that
has ceased to believe in a millennium
brought about by legislative enact-
ment, must yet be seen. But for
the present they, if any class, are
the keepers of the secret of Ireland.
STEPHEN GWYNN

K E 2

420

STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORY.
IV. HENRY THE EIGHTH.

IT has been very generally held
that THE FAMOUS HISTORY OP KING
HENRY THE EIGHTH was not written
by Shakespeare, or at least that only
part of the play is his and the rest
the work of a weaker hand. There
are considerable grounds for this
belief. The play, compared with the
rest of Shakespeare's historical plays,
is so wanting both in plot and cha-
racter, especially after the fall of
Wolsey, that it is almost impossible
to believe that Shakespeare is wholly
responsible for it. There was, for
one thing, so much material ready to
his hand exactly suited to his genius.
The tragic fate of Katharine of
Aragon, or the life and death of
Wolsey, would naturally suggest them-
selves to him as subjects for a tragedy
in the style of RICHARD THE SECOND ;
and there is something very plausible
in the suggestion that he did devise
such a play, and had perhaps already
sketched its outline, when circum-
stances compelled him to entrust the
completion of his design to Fletcher
or some other. If it were possible
to believe that the play was written
during the lifetime of Elizabeth, it
would be easy to understand why the
natural treatment of the subject was
rejected. It would have been worse
than rash to speak plainly of Queen
Katharine's fate, or to question the
righteousness of her divorce under
Elizabeth ; a just appreciation of
Wolsey would hardly have been
tolerated in an England which, with
absurd blindness, regarded him as
the great representative of Romish

tyranny. Shakespeare himself would
not have dared to be so bold, and
might even have been induced to
append the concluding scenes of the
play, with their somewhat fulsome
eulogies of Elizabeth, to atone for
what there is of real feeling displayed
in the stories of Katharine and
Wolsey.

It is, however, certain from contem-
porary evidence that the play was
regarded as a new one in 1612, and
the fear of Elizabeth could not have
lasted so long into the reign of James
the First. Perhaps, therefore, the
most satisfactory theory is that the
play is a compilation of a number
of fragments written in the time of
Elizabeth, some by Shakespeare and
the rest by someone else, and that
it was put together in the reign of
James the First by some author
unknown.

The facts that it is included in all
editions of Shakespeare, even in the
first collected edition, that there is
much in the play which is Shake-
spearian in tone and feeling and of
permanent value and interest, and
that the denial of Shakespeare's
authorship is still heretical, are suffi-
cient justification for discussing it
among his plays. Indeed no stud)'
of the historical plays would be com-
plete without it. I shall, then, in
this paper continue to speak of
Shakespeare as the author, whenever
it is necessary to mention the author
by name.

It is an abrupt transition from
Richard the Third to Henry the

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

421

Eighth, from Bosworth to the king's
ante-chamber, from civil war to court
intrigue. Henry the Seventh had
done his work so thoroughly that the
twenty-four years of his reign were
sufficient to change entirely the
nature of English politics. Civil war
was no longer possible, the "over-
mighty subject " was suppressed for
ever, and England was handed over
from the anarchy of the nobles to the
despotism of the Crown. The futility
of any hope on the part of the nobles
to make head against the royal power
was shown by the execution of the
Duke of Buckingham, whom a few
wild words sufficed to ruin. The
possession of power involved not only
complete subservience to the royal will,
but the ability also and the want of
principle necessary to carry it out,
however foolish and however wicked ;
Wolsey, More, and Cromwell one
after another fell victims to the
exigencies of a position which no
minister could support.

In the building up of such a
despotism the political reformation of
the Church was an inevitable in-
cident. A semi-independent corpora-
tion, which, ever since the days of
Anselm, had carried on a chronic
warfare with the Crown for the main-
tenance or extension of its liberties,
was an anomaly which could never
have been suffered to exist within
the Tudor system. It was not only
a relic of popular liberty but a
nucleus, a cause round which dis-
content always could and, as a matter
of fact, did gather. It is this deter-
mination of Henry the Eighth to
achieve a complete autocracy, whose
symmetry should be marred by no
exception, which was the real origin
of the English Reformation ; the
question of the divorce was only the
occasion.

The subjects then of the play
HENRY THE EIGHTH are the King

and the Reformation, treated quite
generally, from no particular point
of view, and without any leading
idea to give unity to its episodes.
This very general disinterested treat-
ment goes far towards spoiling the
dramatic interest of the play ; its real
value lies in the grandeur of a few
passages, the power of a few situa-
tions, the insight, though only occa-
sionally displayed, into the characters
of the King and Wolsey. Henry the
Eighth is not himself the hero of the
play which bears his name ; his life
and character, entirely without any
element of tragedy or romance, wholly
unfit him for the position. The two
chief characters in the first four acts
are Katharine and "Wolsey; while
the last, being in the nature of an
epilogue and having little connection
with the preceding acts, is only
dramatic in form, its subject being
a panegyric on the Reformation
and a prediction of the greatness of
Elizabeth.

Wolsey naturally occupies the fore-
most place in the play, just as he
really did in the first half of the reign
of Henry ; he was more of a king than
the King himself, as Erasmus says.
He it is who cuts down Buckingham,
in his determination to allow no op-
position to his will. He was forced
to attempt the downfall of Katharine
in order to gratify his master's lust ;
and his failure to be of any real
assistance to Henry's plan brought
with it his own ruin. Shakespeare
appears not to have fully appreciated
Wolsey's character : his ambition and
his power he understood, and his
magnanimity in misfortune ; but the
true greatness of his character he
failed to see, nor did he understand
the wisdom of his statesmanship. To
combine what was best of the cautious
policy of Henry the Seventh with
the wider activity which a new age
and the young sovereign's ambition

422

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

demanded, to lead or bribe the King,
when possible, into wise courses, to
minimise the bad results of Henry's
follies when to influence him was
impossible, — these are only some of
Wolsey's achievements, but they are
sufficient to give him a place among
the greatest English statesmen. Yet
Shakespeare seems half to sanction
Buckingham's furious onslaught on
him, in which he accuses him of
arranging Henry's meeting with
Francis the First on the Field of the
Cloth of Gold,

Only to show his pomp as well in France
As here at home,

while he insinuates that Charles the
Fifth's interview with Henry at
Canterbury was only brought about
by the bribery of the Cardinal.

But when the way was made,
And paved with gold, the emperor thus

desired
That he would please to alter the

king's course,
And break the foresaid peace.

This is unjust. No doubt Wolsey
derived his own advantages from his
relations with the sovereigns of Europe;
the bribery of a minister was only an
ordinary incident in the diplomacy of
that day, and Charles the Fifth could
dazzle Wolsey with no less a bribe
than the hope of the Papacy. It is
also true that he affected great pomp
in all his public dealings. But his
policy was no more governed by con-
siderations of personal gain than his
display was due to personal vanity.
Henry the Eighth would have Eng-
land great, powerful and respected ;
so would Wolsey. But while Henry
hankered after conquests and military
glory, Wolsey saw clearly that such a
course could bring England no real
advantages. The position which
Wolsey desired for England was that
which James the First afterwards
coveted for himself, namely the office
of arbiter in European disputes ; but

while James had not the wit to fill
such a position, Wolsey's policy was
for several years successful. And for
success in such an attempt it was
absolutely necessary for him to trim
between the two great rivals Charles
the Fifth and Francis the First. The
meeting at Guisnes was arranged with
the object of preventing the outbreak
of war between Henry and Francis;
the interview at Canterbury was
intended to assure the Emperor that
England was still faithful to his
interests, and that the demonstration
at Guisnes did not commit her to
the French King's side. And the
Emperor's friendship was at this time
of more real value to England, as well
as to Wolsey, than that of France. As
for his love of pomp and splendour,
they were the custom of the day,
necessary for the dignity of a great
king's minister and not without their
value as a political asset.

In the second scene of the first act
Wolsey is still more unjustly used.
Queen Katharine complains to Henry
of oppressive taxation, imposed by
the Cardinal, which is causing discon-
tent all over the country, and then,
when the King orders the commission
of taxation to be revoked, Wolsey
bids the secretary see to it that the
credit of the revocation shall be his.
Throughout this scene Wolsey is made
to appear unscrupulous and extortion-
ate, while the King is full of generous
impulses and unknowingly is led into
tyrannical courses by his minister.

Q. Kath. (to Wolsey).

These exactions,
Whereof nay sovereign would have

note, they are
Most pestilent to the hearing ; and, to

bear 'em,
The back is sacrifice to the load. They

say
They are devised by you ; or else you

suffer
Too hard an exclamation.

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

423

King. By my life,

This is against our pleasure.

To every country
Where this is question'd send our

letters, with
Free pardon to each man that has

denied
The force of this commission : pray,

look to 't ;
I put it to your care.

Wolsey. A word with you. (To the

Secretary.)

Let there be letters writ to every shire,
Of the king's grace and pardon. The

grieved commons
Hardly conceive of me ; let it be

noised
That through our intercession this

revokement
And pardon comes : I shall anon

advise you
Further in the proceeding.

This is of course the orthodox
attitude of Elizabethan Protestantism
towards Wolsey. The Queen's father
was not one to be spoken lightly of :
some other must be made to bear the
blame of his tyrannical acts ; and
who so fitting as the Cardinal of
Rome who failed to procure that most
righteous divorce, which made the
daughter of Anne Boleyn not only
legitimate but Queen of England ?
It was doubtless also the attitude of
Wolsey's contemporaries towards him.
No minister has ever been so com-
pletely his sovereign's scape-goat as
he. Forced to carry out the King's
policy at all costs, he was constantly
obliged to make the best of actions
of which he thoroughly disapproved,
extricate the King from difficulties
into which his folly had brought
him, and take upon himself the un-
popularity of Henry's measures. The
King must have money ; Wolsey must
screw it out of the people ; and then,
when it is found impossible to make
them pay more, the King gracefully
yields to his subjects' will and ex-
presses benevolent surprise at his

minister's cruelty. Such was Wolsey's
true position and very different from
that which Shakespeare appears in-
clined to attribute to him.

The serious side of Wolsey's politi-
cal life during the time of his pros-
perity was perhaps misunderstood by
Shakespeare. It is when he draws
him as the splendid nobleman, the
magnificent host winning his sove-
reign's favour with gorgeous enter-
tainments, and when, in the story of
his fall, he emphasises the real
nobility of Wolsey's character, that
he displays a true appreciation of the
man's greatness, while he perhaps at
the same time reveals his own secret
opinion of King Henry's merits. It
is a fine piece of fooling, the arrival
of the masquers at York Place, the
Cardinal's pretended ignorance as to
who they are, the dancing and the
King's good humour, though there is
one lady among the guests to whom
he is too kind and who will one day
rue his kindness.

You're welcome, my fair guests : that

noble lady,

Or gentleman, that is not freely merry,
Is not my friend : this, to confirm my

welcome ;
And to you all, good health.

Could a welcome be offered more
gracefully or with more genial hos-
pitality 1 Well might the King
exclaim on unmasking :

You hold a fair assembly ; you do

well, lord :
You are a churchman, or, I'll tell you,

cardinal,
I should judge now unhappily.

Henry the Eighth had at least the
virtue of good-fellowship ; he loved
to take his pleasure in company. To
quote his own words ;

Company methinks the best

All thoughts and fancies to digest.

For idleness

424

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

Is chief mistress
Of vices all :
Then who can say
But mirth and play
Is best of all ?

But the man is an inveterate prig.
Notice how even in this song, in
which he expresses his real geniality,
he can never forget his morals.

Company with honesty
Is virtue and vice to flee.

He is the completely selfish man,
crammed full of principles, with a
thoroughly respectable mind, and yet
always desiring to do things which
are not respectable, and which his
really considerable faculty for casu-
istry has to bring into a forced
agreement with his principles. He
is like the man who must needs
always consider the commercial value
of everything; only with him the
commercial value is spiritual. Even
Froude was forced to admit that his
hero might have been a better man
if he had never studied theology in
his youth, and thus been encouraged
to consider himself an authority on
all questions of divinity and morals.
His conscience is so persistent as to
become wearying, and the skill with
which he argues himself into thinking
his worst actions virtuous only makes
those actions the more revolting. It
is sometimes almost impossible to
believe that he really did bring him-
self to think the eighteen years of
married life to his brother's widow
sinful, and that he was making his
sin any the less by cruelly divorcing
her when she was no longer young
and he no longer loved her. There
is something almost ludicrous in the
attitude of a mind which could believe
that the gratification of a passion
could be turned into a virtuous act
by means of the rejection of a wife,
concerning his marriage with whom
eighteen years before there might be

some small technical legal doubt. Yet
of the sincerity of his belief there
can be little question. Shakespeare
makes his hypocrisy the more repul-
sive by his pretence of constancy to
Katharine and unwillingness to lose
her. He cries to Wolsey :

0, my Lord,
Would it not grieve an able man to

leave
So sweet a bedfellow ? But conscience,

conscience !
0, 'tis a tender place ; and I must

leave her.

There are not many blessed with
such a convenient conscience.

But Henry was a clever man and
could argue plausibly in open court,
and there were no doubt many con-
vinced by him. He describes how
the doubt of the French ambassador,
who was treating for the marriage of
Mary to the Duke of Orleans, as to
the legitimacy of the Princess first
troubled his conscience ; the ambassa-
dor demanded a respite during which
to put the matter before his master.

This respite shook
The bosom of my conscience, enter'd

me,
Yea, with a splitting power, and made

to tremble
The region of my breast ; which forced

such way,
That many mazed considerings did

throng

And press'd in with this caution.
* * * *

Thus hulling in
The wild sea of my conscience, I did

steer
Towards this remedy, whereupon we

are
Now present here together; that's to

say,
I mean to rectify my conscience, —

which
I then did feel full sick, and yet not

well,—

By all the reverend fathers of the land
And doctors learn'd.

This exposure of the royal conscience

1

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

425

must have been very edifying to the
court, and he may even have con-
vinced others, as he certainly did
himself.

It is a curious double tragedy that
of Wolsey and Katharine, the fate
of each being apparently so gratuitous
and unnecessary, and each causing
the other. It was Wolsey who was
compelled by the King to degrade
himself at Rome and in the eyes of
all Europe by attempting to persuade
the Pope to grant the divorce ; and
it was he who, though against his
will, by working so long for the
divorce accustomed men's minds to
the idea of it and so made it easy for
Cranmer to take the final step. And,
just as Wolsey unwillingly ruined
Katharine, so did she involuntarily
bring about his fall. Shakespeare
attributes his disgrace to the acci-
dental interception by the King of
certain incriminating documents ; but
really it was his failure to secure the
Pope's consent to the divorce which
made Henry think that he no longer
had any use for him, and gratitude
for past services had of course no
weight with him.

Queen Katharine was probably not
a very attractive lady, cold, serious,
strictly religious, and somewhat
haughty. But she was a good woman
and possessed considerable intellectual
ability ; she was sincerely attached
to Henry, and it is certain that for
years he really loved her and was
much under her influence. It was
an unchivalrous age which could
tolerate his treatment of her ; for,
though his desire for a male heir was
a motive which all statesmen could
understand, the want of feeling dis-
played by the King towards her
might well have exasperated even the
politic selfishness of Francis. She
herself asserts her claims on Henry
in a passage of rare eloquence in this
play, in the scene in which Wolsey

and Campeggio try to persuade her
to submit to the King's will.

Have I lived thus long — let me speak

myself,
Since virtue finds no friends— a wife, a

true one ?

A woman, I dare say without vain-
glory,

Never yet branded with suspicion ?
Have I with all my full affections
Still met the king? Loved him next

heaven ? obey'd him '?
Been, out of fondness, superstitious to

him?
Almost forgot my prayers to content

him?
And am I thus rewarded ? 'tis not well,

lords.
Bring me a constant woman to her

husband,
One that ne'er dream'd a joy beyond

his pleasure ;
And to that woman, when she has done

most,
Yet will I add an honour, a great

patience.

The entanglement of their destinies
produced between the Queen and the
Cardinal an unnatural, yet inevitable,
hostility. The divorce was far from
being Wolsey's wish ; it was very
much to his interest to keep on good
terms with the Emperor, who was
deeply offended by Henry's desire to
divorce his aunt. But being com-
pelled to work in accordance with
the King's will, he drew upon himself
the hatred of the Queen as well as
the resentment of Charles the Fifth.
In the trial-scene in this play she
expresses her conviction that it is
Wolsey who has moved the King
against her.

Induced by potent circumstances, that
You are mine

I do believe,
instances, tha
e enemy, and make my
challenge
You shall not be my judge : for it is

you
Have blown this coal betwixt my lord

and me;

Which God's dew quench ! Therefore
I say again.

426

Studies in Shakespeare's History.

I utterly abhor, yea, from my soul
Eefuse you for my judge ; whom, yet

once more,
I hold my most malicious foe, and think

not
At all a friend to truth.

Katharine is here unjust to Wolsey,
as indeed she is throughout the play ;
but her dislike for him was only
natural. There was probably no one
who did not believe that Wolsey
desired the divorce; even the King
himself perceived it but slowly. In
his character of scape-goat he had to
bear the responsibility of her misery,
just as he had to bear that of the
King's misdeeds. And therefore it
is that the tragedy of his fate is not
only greater than Katharine's, inas-
much as his was a greater personality,
but also more terrible, because to
him even pity was denied, as to one
whose punishment all deemed well-
deserved. Of course on strictly moral
grounds he was very much to blame.
Recognising, as he must have done,
the iniquity of Henry's determination
to obtain a divorce, he ought to have
refused at all costs to assist him.
But such a course would have in-
volved his immediate ruin, if not
death, and to adopt it required a far
more ideal character than Wolsey's.
That which Cranmer's conscience did
not shrink from, Wolsey could hardly
be expected to refuse. Certainly his
refusal would have had little effect.
His obstinacy was one of the most
pronounced traits in Henry's char-
acter. As Wolsey himself said : " He
is sure a prince of a royal courage,
and hath a princely heart; and
rather than he will either miss or
want any part of his will or appetite,
he will put the loss of one half of his
realm in danger. For I assure you
I have often kneeled before him in
his privy chamber on my knees the
space of an hour or two, to persuade
him from his will and appetite ; but

I could never bring to pass to
dissuade him therefrom "

There is nothing admirable in such
a character ; it is hard to see the
attraction in a mixture of passion and
obstinacy, unredeemed by generous
impulses. And yet Froude made this
King the object of an admiration
which he tries vainly to make appear
judicial and considered. The preju-
dices of a historian are always inter-
esting, for it is they which give life
to his history. But one wants to
know the reason of such a bias ; and,
with respect, it is hard to resist
the suspicion that Froude, in his
reaction against Catholicism and
authority, fell in love with the English
Reformation, seeing nothing but good
not only in the Reformation itself
but in all those who helped to bring
it about. This would account both
for his very idealised portraits of
Henry the Eighth and Thomas Crom-
well, and also for his unconcealed
aversion to Katharine and the Church
and to all who espoused their cause.

Landor showed a far truer appre-
ciation of Henry's character in one
of his IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS in
which he describes an interview
between the King and Anne Boleyn
on the eve of her execution. The
combination of brutal cruelty, sen-
suality, and a sort of pedantic dread
of heresy, which he ascribes to Henry,
is exactly characteristic of the man ;
while Anne displays a piety, rather
ingenious than convincing, which well
befits the favourite of Cranmer and
the woman who could allow herself
to be treated with royal state in the
King's palace, while her own mistress
was still living there with the name
of Queen.

Shakespeare perhaps permitted him-
self to hint, with most delicate irony,
at his true opinion of Anne in the
scene at the close of which she is
created Marchioness of Pembroke.

Studies in Shakespeare's History

427

She really protests too much. Her
indignation at Katharine's misfortunes
knows no bounds : she " would not
be a Queen for all the world " ; and
yet a few moments later she accepts
the title of Marchioness, given to
her solely out of the King's " good
opinion" of her. Soon, indeed, like
the Old Lady in this scene, she does
not hesitate to risk her honour in
order to secure the royal dignity
which she had so spurned. But the
heartless cruelty with which she was
afterwards treated, guilty though she
may have been, more than atoned for
the faults she committed in " com-
passing the crown."

But the only two living figures in
the play are Wolsey and Katharine.
Their fates supply the tragic element
on which the play depends for its
interest. True that this tragedy is
obscured by much that is of merely
historical not dramatic interest, but,
as in the events in which they played
the chief parts, so in their dramatic
presentment they stand out as two of
the most striking, most tragic figures
in our history. For Wolsey was the
last of the great ecclesiastical states-
men of England, and not among the
least of them. He ruled England for
years under enormous disadvantages,
saving her from disastrous wars with

France and raising her to a high
place among the nations of Europe.
Moreover, seeing the urgent need of
reforms in the Church and that a
revolution threatened which he was
powerless to check, he prepared the
way for the coming change ; and it is
to him, to a large extent, that we
owe the moderation, the respect for
history and antiquity which charac-
terised the Reformation when it came.
As for Katharine we know more
of the pathos of her death than of the
dignity of her life; but she is well
described by Henry himself in this
play.

That man i' the world who shall report

he has
A better wife, let him in nought be

trusted,
For speaking false in that : thou art,

alone,

If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness,
Thy meekness saint-like, wife-like

government,

Obeying in commanding, and thy parts
Sovereign and pious else, could speak

thee out,
The queen of earthly queens : she's

noble born ;

And, like her true nobility, she has
Carried herself towards me.

That he could speak of her in such
terms makes his conduct towards her
the more unpardonable.

J. L. ETTY.

428

THE CENSUS-SCHEDULE.

IT is called the Occupier's Schedule
in England and Wales, the House-
holder's Schedule in Scotland, and the
Family Return-Form in Ireland. It
Avas introduced for the first time at
the fifth British Census in much the
same shape as it appears in 1901 ;
but it has been altered here and there
since 1851. The Schedule has been
also expanded from time to time,
especially in the compartment headed
Profession or Occupation. One-third,
indeed, of the space in the Schedule
to be filled up by the occupier or
householder is now devoted to details
regarding occupation ; and one-fourth
of the whole Schedule is filled with
precise instructions as to the stating
of employment. The particular branch
of the trade, or industry, and the
material worked or dealt in, have to
be specified, also, whether the man is
an employer (other than of domestic
servants) a worker for an employer,
working on his own account, or carry-
ing on a trade or industry at home.
To the non-statistical mind this pre-
cision may appear somewhat too
elaborate and detailed ; but it should
be borne in mind that the key to the
condition of a country lies in its lists
of occupations.

The final, and most difficult, work
of tabulating the information in the
Schedules, — the careful and intelligent
classification of occupations, with the
numbers and ages of those engaged in
them — gives results of the greatest
value. Statistics generally can show
only quantity ; but such figures reveal
something of a country's quality.
They picture the condition of our
country so clearly indeed that, on

comparison with the figures of pre-
vious decades, we can see at a glance
our industrial development. Electri-
city, for example, to-day employs
thousands, whereas twenty years ago
it gave occupation only to hundreds.
Thus, very effectively, do the Census
Reports make known what we all live
by, distinguishing those who obtain
their support from the land from
those engaged in trade ; and, in
detail, showing the number supported,
at the time of Census, by any par-
ticular profession, trade, or industry.

In the earliest Censuses, — 1801,
1811, and 1821 — there was a rough
division of the people under the three
headings of Agriculture, Trade, and
Others. It was in 1831 that the first
attempt was made towards a more
detailed tabulation. In 1841 all the
principal occupations were recorded ;
and in 1851 was originated the
method of tabulation now in use.

Introduced at the same time as
the Schedule to be filled up by the
occupier, the system used at the
central Census-office groups all occu-
pations into seventeen great classes,
with numerous sub-classes ; in all,
about four hundred occupations ; and
the persons employed are subdivided
by sex and quinquennial age-periods.

(1) Imperial and Local Government,

(2) Defence of the Country, (3) Re-
ligion, Law, and Medicine, (4) Art
and Literature, (5) Science and Edu-
cation, (6) Agriculture and Minerals,
form the main leading divisions into
which are classed the particulars as
to profession or occupation.

In classifying their occupations
women occasionally give some trouble ;

The Census-Schedule

429

and as showing the decrease in the
employment of young children, it may
be mentioned that in England the
dependent women and children in-
creased considerably in the three
decades preceding 1881, in the latter
decade by as much as eighteen per
cent., and the most of this increase
lies with the children. In the same
periods the whole population increased
by twelve, thirteen, and upwards of
fourteen per cent. But it is to be
noted that there was a considerable
increase in the proportion of children
in the population during these thirty
years ; and changes in the proportions
of age and sex are of fundamental
importance in regulating the strength,
development, and character of a
nation.

" A Census in which only the
numbers of a people are taken is
necessarily incomplete. For in time
man differs almost as much from him-
self as he does from the things around
him ; and the changes which he under-
goes are not wrought solely by ex-
ternal circumstances, but arise in the
ordinary course of his life. How
different is he in infancy, in the prime
of manhood, and in decrepit age."
So runs a passage in the Census
Report of 1851, the year of the
Great Exhibition, when exceptional
interest was shown in the returns.
The Census of 1901 is being taken in
the year of another exhibition, the
International Exhibition of Industries,
etc., to be opened in May at Glasgow,
in point of population the second city
of the Empire. The difference in
value to society between a mature
man and a child just entered upon
existence being so obviously great and
incalculable, it is accordingly very
necessary to have ages stated. There-
fore the fifth column in the Occupier's
Schedule asks boldly for your age last
birthday.

Statistics as to age were first at-

tempted formally in 1821 ; but the
answering of the question was then
optional, and the attempt was so
unsuccessful that, except for the
ancient, and almost Biblical, division
of males into those under and those
over twenty years, no notice was
taken of age in the following Census
of 1831. The Census of 1841 was
much more stringent ; it provided
that the numbering should be simul-
taneous, in one day, and required the
occupation, birthplace, and the exact
age.

It is in the matter of age that a
slight element of fiction appears now
and then in the Schedules, for a care-
ful study of the reports reveals that
there are more of the fair sex aged
about twenty-five than can be ac-
counted for. Women of twenty-five
in 1891 must have been fifteen in
1881 ; but the women entered in the
returns as twenty-five exceed the
young girls of fifteen, of whom they
should be only the diminished sur-
vivors ! It may be offered as an
explanation that twenty-five is looked
upon as the golden age for matri-
mony, to be older than, which means
the facing at once the possibility
of remaining an old maid ; and, in
spite of the opening of many occupa-
tions to the fair (the law, in Scotland,
is about, for instance, to be thrown
open to them), marriage is still looked
upon as the most desirable career for
woman. Competition is keen, for
the proportion of women to men in
England is, roughly, one thousand
and sixty to one thousand, and in
Scotland (whence male migration is
greater), one thousand and seventy-
five to one thousand.

Any person who refuses to give
information, or who wilfully gives
false information as to any of the
particulars in the Census-Schedule,
is liable to a fine not exceeding five
pounds. After all the Schedules for

430

The Census-Schedule.

Scotland had been centralised in
1891, a lady sent the sum of five
pounds, with half-a-crown for acknow-
ledgment in THE SCOTSMAN, mention-
ing that she had entered her age
wrongly. This instance is unique.
Payments for income-tax in this way
are not uncommon ; but prolonged
research has not discovered in the
United Kingdom a single other case
of voluntary payment of conscience-
money for a false return in the
Census.

More delicate even than the ques-
tion of age is the last in the Schedule,
which deals with the subject of in-
firmities. This question, which, it is
understood, is not meant to include
the natural infirmities of old age, re-
quires to know the precise nature of
the affliction, and also whether it
has existed from childhood. (1) Deaf
and Dumb, (2) Blind, (3) Lunatic,
(4) Imbecile, Feeble-minded, are the
words prescribed. The last word,
feeble-minded, does not appear in the
Scottish or Irish form of the Schedule.
Some persons may, indeed, consider
that to suggest recording mental
feebleness is carrying the Census a
trifle too far. On the other hand,
ardent sociologists would like the
Census to be used as a sort of Record
of Family-Faculties or Album of
Life-History, with statements as to
height and weight, colour of hair
and eyes, possessions, and principles,
and confessions as to religion.

To widen the Census in that way
would weaken it ; but at every
British Census ecclesiastics agitate
for the collection of statistics regard-
ing religion. The Irish Census Act,
indeed, includes a provision for taking
account of religions, with a proviso,
however, that " no person shall be
subject to any such penalty for re-
fusing to state his religious profes-
sion." Only about five hundred
persons refuse ; and it is concluded

therefore that the people in Ireland
(a gradually decreasing population)
do not regard the question as inquisi-
torial. The inquirjT, which has been
made successfully at the four previous
Censuses, is intended mainly to ascer-
tain the proportions of Protestants
to Catholics; and the former are
requested to name their " Particular
Church, Denomination, or Body."
Basing their proposal upon the suc-
cess of the religious Census in Ire-
land, and ignoring the different
conditions of the countries, enthusi-
astic statisticians (as well as ecclesi-
astics) have again and again urged
upon the Government the adoption
of a similar question in the Schedule
for Great Britain. In 1880 the sub-
ject was warmly debated in Parlia-
ment ; but the religious question was
not adopted.

It may be mentioned that in 1851
an attempt was made towards a
Census of religions in England and
Scotland. In that year the church-
accommodation was enumerated, and
returns were made of those attend-
ing the different churches on Census
Sunday, March 30th. Admittedly
imperfect, such figures were not
worth much, and a reliable religious
Census is probably impossible.

As the contents of the Schedules
are used only for making general
abstracts under the headings of occu-
pations, ages, &c., no use whatever is
made of the first column, for name
and surname. Nor do the details,
in Wales and Monmouth, Scotland
and Ireland, as to those who speak
Welsh, Gaelic, and Erse appear very
valuable or necessary. Welsh is on
the wane : Gaelic is going fast ; and
the attempt to introduce Irish as a
Parliamentary language has not yet
succeeded.

But the particulars as to houses
are of the greatest practical use.
That matter is tackled most tho-

The Census-Schedule.

431

roughly in the Scottish Schedule,
wherein the enumerator has to enter
precisely on each Schedule the num-
ber of rooms with one or more
windows. If the persons described
in an English Schedule occupy less
than five, the number of rooms occu-
pied by them has to be entered by
the head of the family. The Irish
Act requires an account to be taken
" of the number of inhabited houses,
and of uninhabited houses, and of
houses then building." Each coun-
try, it will be observed, deals with
the profound problem of housing in
its own way ; and this point well
illustrates the differences in detail of
their respective Censuses. The de-
cade ending in 1901 is several days
short; for, owing to Easter Sunday
falling upon April 7th, it is necessary
to take the Census earlier, in order
to avoid the holiday-movement of the
population. Otherwise it would have
been desirable to conform to the dates
of previous Censuses, which would
have resulted in the approaching one
being taken upon Easter Sunday,
when so many people will be away
from home.

Our Navy is enumerated specially
by the Admiralty. To take a Census
of all who go down to the sea in
ships seems impossible ; but the
subtlety of the Census mind is equal
to the emergency, and by means of
the officers of the Customs and of
the Coastguard it is easily accom-
plished. Persons on board vessels
in ports are enumerated by the Cus-
toms officials, aided, on occasion, by
the respective foreign consuls. Coast-
ing and foreign vessels arriving early
in April are to be enumerated.
British vessels reaching port up to
June 30th are included, in order to
take in the long-sea ships from China,
India, and Australasia. A special
Schedule is prepared, on which are
provided spaces for showing the

place at which the Schedule is de-
livered to the master, the position of
the vessel at midnight on Census
Sunday (March 31st), and the num-
ber of persons, crew or passengers,
who were on shore on the Census
night. Our ships have carried away
from these shores the seeds of many
nations. Maritime greatness has
moulded our destiny ; and each sur-
vey, each decennial and Imperial
Census, shows the unrivalled spread
of our race. True as the words were
when Daniel Webster spoke them
close upon seventy years ago, how
much more true are they now, that
her "morning drum-beat, following
the sun and keeping company with
the hours, circles the earth with one
continuous and unbroken strain of
the martial airs of England."

Double Schedules are supplied for
large households and hotels. For
public institutions and barracks or
camps, special enumeration-books are
issued to be filled up by the head of
the institution or the chief resident
officer ; and in barracks the paid
enumerator is generally the barrack-
master or quarter-master.

Five different forms are printed
specially for the enumeration of
similar places in Ireland, with head-
ings Barrack, Workhouse, Hospital,
Prison, or College and Boarding-School
Return. The distressful country also
devotes four forms to recording the
number of students or pupils " on
the books of each College or Boarding-
School on any day or days of the
fortnight ending the llth May,
1901;" and other similar informa-
tion, which the heads of educational
establishments in Ireland are re-
quired to give during the progress
of the Census.

Education is not now included in
the English and Scottish Census ; but
the Irish Family Schedule asks the
enumerator to ascertain whether each

432

The Census-Schedule.

person can read and write, read only,
or cannot read. The Royal Irish
Constabulary chiefly act as enumera-
tors, directed as to their duties and
the multiplicity of forms by fully
fifteen pages of Instructions to Enu-
merators.

A Census of the whole British
Empire, to be published in one
volume on the lines of the General
Report of the Irish Census, was
suggested by the Imperial Federation
League, for the reason chiefly that
Governmental relations between the
United Kingdom and its Dependen-
cies would be better determined by
a uniform Imperial Census. But
uniformity (save as to numbering,
sex, and age,) is impossible apparently
for so wide and diverse a popula-
tion, the varied climates and produc-
tions of which render a uniform
classification of occupations, for ex-
ample, an obvious absurdity. Such a
Census, however desirable, is accord-
ingly impracticable at present; and
the Colonies are continuing this year,
for the most part, to collect facts by
their Censuses, and to classify them,
in their own methods, — the methods
they believe to be most suitable to
their country and its stage of civi-
lisation. Total population, sex, age
(in different periods), and conjugal
condition are points included in every
Colonial Census-report ; while a few

Colonies attempt to ascertain an
astounding number of facts as to
possessions in the way of land, house-
property, sheep, and cattle. Those
places which follow most closely the
British Schedule seem to be the most
.successful in securing accurate returns.

The Imperial Census of India is
in magnitude and complexity difficult
to over-estimate. To enumerate its
population of about three hundred
millions is a Himalayan task — the
very Mount Everest of Censuses.
Eighty or ninety millions of Schedules
in seventeen different characters
(not counting dialects), and a million
arid a quarter enumerators constitute
the machinery for this mighty task.

In 1871 the population, in all
parts of the world, of the British
Empire was two hundred and thirty-
five millions, occupying nearly eight
million square miles. Estimates are
always subject to correction by Cen-
suses, but it seems reasonable to
accept four hundred millions occupy-
ing (so much has our territory ex-
tended in the last thirty years !) over
eleven and a half million square
miles, as a fair approximation to
the correct figures for 1901 of that
great Empire of which, as Lord
Rosebery has well said, " We are the
tenants in fee, and of which we in-
herit the responsibility and the glory."
GEORGE BIZET.

433

SCARNING HOUSE.

A SOLITARY traveller, after a summer
day's walking, came to a heathy up-
land, where huge and broken clouds,
reflecting hues of copper from the set-
ting sun, hove above a dusky barrier
of forest. In front the bleak road
ran over the shoulder of the hill ; to
the left a tributary road led alluringly
into the wooded valley. The traveller
had no purpose in hand, save to
gratify the impulse of the moment,
and he took the side road. Dr.
Jacomb had completed his time as
house-surgeon, and a lonely walking-
tour was his notion of a holiday. Of
a sturdy build, with a bold projection
of nose and chin, his ruddy, clean-
shaven countenance looked at you with
a shy solemnity. You would judge
him, at the first glance, to be a trust-
worthy doctor, as he was. But, re-
garding him in profile, you would
remark a certain faint suggestion of
the sheep ; and a further knowledge
of the young man would confirm the
impression of a sentimental strain in
him. You would discover that he
was addicted to the making of verse,
innocuously maudlin, a habit which
he would avow with a kind of humour-
ous self-pity.

The road ran through a wood of
pines, in whose solemn deeps the sun,
like an angry star, flitted from bole
to bole, transpiercing the gloom with
red lances ; then turning a corner, the
way led over a bridge, whose single
arch spanned a little, brawling river.
Children were fishing from the para-
pet ; a street of white thatched cot-
tages crouched at the feet of the
woods ; a tall sign in front of a low-
browed inn proclaimed the Seaming
No. 498. — VOL. LXXXIII.

Arms, from whose thick chimney a
spiral of smoke rose into the still
twilight. It was, perhaps, due to his
jaded condition, that the doctor had
the curious sensation, familiar to
many persons, of having beheld the
same scene before, at some unremem-
bered time. The impression deepened
as he entered the inn-parlour. The
diamond-paned casement that opened
upon the talking water, the pots of
musk upon the sill, the shining
mahogany furniture, the brass candle-
sticks upon the high mantelpiece, he
dimly recognised them all. Jacomb
was scarce conscious of the remem-
brance ere it had passed. The appear-
ance of this remote village pleased
him like a picture, and he had a mind
to stay there for awhile. As he fell
asleep, lapped in down, he heard the
owls calling one to another out of the
woods, like lost souls.

Wreaths of mist, like carded wool,
still clung about the valley when the
doctor awoke next morning ; but
above the mounded forest a flight of
birds wheeled and scattered upon a
sky of clear gold, and the voice of
the river rose like a song in the still-
ness. Jacomb stole from the house,
and along the sleeping street, following
the river until he came to a walled
enclosure, where a pair of great iron
gates stood open between piers of
lichened brick. The scrolled ironwork
was crumbling away, and the stone
balls a-top of the piers were hooded
with moss. None was abroad so early ;
and the doctor ventured up the trim
drive, winding between hedges of dipt
yew that led him to a paved fore-court,
the entrance quadrangle of an old red

434

Seaming House.

house. A collie, sleeping on the
stones, rose at his footfall, and, after
doubtfully surveying the intruder,
sidled towards him with an air of pro-
pitiation. There was a latent fear in
the creature's eyes, a fear (the doctor
thought) that dwelt there. Jacomb
stood with the creature pressing
against his leg, looking curiously
about him. He remarked that, while
the entrance-front of the place, with
its projecting porch (carved in armorial
bearings) and stone-mullioned windows,
was in good condition, the left wing
was falling into ruin. Ivy drooped
across the windows and smothered
the chimneys ; the battlements were
broken ; the gutters sagged, and the
cracked brickwork was all blotched
and weather-stained. Beyond, the
serried ranks of a pine-wood marched
upon the neglected garden.

The doctor went back to the Seam-
ing Arms with the picture of the old
mansion, lying so still in the deep
morning shadow, vivid in his mind.
He learned from the inn-keeper that
Scarning House was seldom inhabited,
save by its housekeeper. Miss Pierre-
point, who, it appeared, was the last
and only representative of the Pierre-
points of Scarning, came sometimes
to stay there. The doctor began to
discover an interest in Scarning
House. He presented his card to the
housekeeper, a dim creature in a red
shawl, who took him from the galleried
hall through room after room, oak-
panelled, set with time-worn furniture,
and hung with solemn family portraits.
The doctor carried away a confused
impression that all the Pierrepoints
werj alike. Sir Anthony in dark-
ling armour, Sir John in silk and
lace, Lady Elizabeth (painted by Lely
in languid negligence), Sir John and
Sir Anthony, in long waistcoats
and perukes, and their high-waisted
daughters, and the later lords of the
manor out shooting in a dreary land-

scape, attired in frock-coat and tall
hat, — a certain indefinable suggestion
of aspect was common to them all.
Here, it would be altered or obscured
for a generation ; and there, in the
next, it would leap to the eye.

Jacomb remarked that he had not
seen the eastern wing.

" 'Tis all covered in dirt and dust,"
said the woman ; " but you can walk
through if you wish." She led him
to a little room opening from the hall,
from which a second door opened into
the disused wing. The room was
hung with stamped leather, gilt and
glimmering ; there were cushions on
the broad window-seat ; a thick carpet
covered the floor ; a book-case, fitted
with new-looking books, stood in a
recess ; and two deep arm-chairs were
drawn to the tiled fireplace.

" Miss Pierrepoint, she uses this
room a good deal when she's ab home,"
said the housekeeper. She opened the
door which led into a bare, echoing
chamber, and left the doctor to explore
alone. The dog, which had followed
them through the house, started back
as the door opened, and slunk away.

The rooms opened one into the
other. Cobwebs, clotted with dust,
festooned the shadowy corners ; the
plaster had fallen in patches from the
ceilings ; the knots stood in knuckles
from the worn flooring ; the windows
were broken. The air was heavy with
the odour of a deserted house ; a com-
pound of dust and must and mildew,
and some indescribable savour of the
dead inhabitants, who had slept there
for so many years, and died at last.
Presently the doctor, passing through
a doorway, felt as though he had
walked into a dream. A green light,
filtering through the leaves that
pressed upon the pane, showed no wall
facing him, but a sandy bank of earth
with projecting gnarled roots. Never
in his life had the doctor that impres-
sion stronger upon him, of having

Seaming House.

435

seen the place before, than at that
moment. He knew that a stairway
opened downwards on the left side of
the room, against the wall ; and there
it was. He peered down the broken
steps, into a dusky, earth-floored
chamber. The chill of the place
made him shiver ; if he had been
there before, it was in a dream, a
dream which had frightened him.
He remembered the fright, but not
the dream.

Jacomb walked smartly back
through the sounding chambers, con-
scious of a certain icy pang in his
blood, and of a disagreeable fancy
that he was being followed by a noise-
less something, that dodged him when
he turned to look. Out in the sun-
shine, he reflected that this kind of
thing came from overwork. He had
a passing notion that the old house,
basking in the sunshine, its battle-
ments and twisted chimneys salient
upon the hard blue sky, as though
cut in cardboard, was looking at him,
from half-closed eyes, with the inscrut-
able Pierrepoint expression. The
collie crept up to him and licked his
hand.

Jacomb was a dabbler in water-
colours ; and the next day found him
loitering in the galleries of Seaming
House, satchel in hand. He had the
blind audacity of the amateur ; and
he contemplated the picture of a
Lady Pierrepoint in ringlets and point-
lace, with intent to transfer that
elaborate work of art to his own little
block. The half-closed eyes returned
his gaze sidelong ; the vivid lips were
parted ; the hand (the artist had taken
a pride to display that fine and soft
member) lay in conscious unconscious-
ness upon the silken knee, completing
the inuendo of the whole effect. The
doctor was at a loss to construe its
meaning ; but, as he turned his head,
he perceived, in the instant divination
of a first glance, the problem challeng-

ing him in living face and form. A
girl stood regarding him, framed in
the bright oblong of the door which
opened upon a space of sunshine.
The impression came and went ; even
as she stepped forward, Jacomb lost
the transient likeness of the pictured
expression.

"I hope," said the young lady,
" that you like my pictures."

The doctor, apologising for his
presence there, noted that her hair
was the colour of wheat-straw, con-
trasting with the brown eyes and eye-
brows. He thought her slight figure
too thin for her age, which might have
been twenty.

" Not at all," she said, in answer to
his apologies ; "I returned unex-
pectedly. Pray do not let me disturb
you."

She left him ; and Jacomb, after a
polite delay, quitted the house. As
he crossed the fore-court, Miss Pierre-
point, who was walking on the terrace
that lay below the windows of the
ruined wing, came towards him.

" Do you sketch ? I hope, if you
find any subjects in the grounds, you
will sketch there as much as you
like," she said, with a shy friendliness.
" Have you seen the outside of the
house as well as the inside 1 "

Miss Pierrepoint led him from the
terrace (where little flowering plants
sprang in the crevices) into the formal
garden of fantastic yews, leaden
statues of Cupids, and rose-alleys ; a
patterned setting in which the flower-
beds shone like jewels.

" The place is beautiful," said the
solemn young doctor. "But, — don't
you find it lonely 1 "

" It's not what I call a lonely
house. Houses are so different, you
know. Some have a kind of desolate
air, though they are full of people ;
but here, though the house is empty,
it never feels uninhabited. I don't
know why, — one has a feeling.
F P 2

436

Seaming House.

Besides," she added, " I do not live
alone; I have a companion. Poor
thing, she has just lost her mother,
so she has gone home for a few days."
Of those few days the doctor
resolved to make the most. How
easy to establish himself, sketch-book
on knee, in the shade ; how natural
for Miss Pierrepoint to pass that way ;
how facile the transition from a little
casual conversation to tea in her
boudoir, adjoining the disused wing,
and from tea, to an informal dinner
in the hall, the door open to the
summer night. And, indeed, so high
did the doctor, with a sober delight,
perceive that he had risen above the
initial footing of the casual traveller,
after three or four days.

They were leaning upon the stone
balustrade of the terrace. The sun
had gone down in a clear radiance
behind the wooded hills ; shadows
crept from the coverts of the garden ;
the noise of the river flowed through
the stillness, as a current through a
quiet lake.

" I love this hour," said Miss
Pierrepoint. "It is worth all the
long day to come to it at last, — to
' fear no more the heat o' the
sun.' "

Jacomb, who was no great reader,
admired the originality of the senti-
ment. " I suppose," he said, " you
often walk here in the evening ? "

" Not when it grows dusk. I am
afraid of the dark, in the country.
It is so large and mysterious and
solitary ; you can hear every little
noise, and you can see nothing."

" What should you see ? Is the
place haunted 1 "

" Yes, — by feelings," said the girl,
unexpectedly. " Sometimes, when
you are alone, feelings come to you,
quite suddenly."

"What sort of feelings?" The
doctor's eye had something of a pro-
fessional scrutiny.

" Oh, I don't know ; I am talking
nonsense. Let us go in. But Miss
Bonsor, — my companion, you know —
hasn't any feelings," Miss Pierrepoint
added, as they entered the house.
" That is why she is so good for me."
" When is Miss Bonsor coming
back?"

" Soon, in a day or two. I am
enjoying my holiday while it lasts."

The doctor thrilled at the words,
and then relapsed into doubt. It
must be that she liked him ; and yet,
would she have said as much, did she
mean more ?

They had finished dinner, and were
sitting at the red-shaded table, when
a moth flew into the lamp, and dropped
upon the white cloth, singed and
fluttering. Miss Pierrepoint drew a
pin from her dress, and transfixed the
struggling insect.

" Don't do that, — it's cruel," said
Jacomb, abruptly. He picked up the
moth, killing it, and tossed it out of
doors.

" It doesn't hurt them," said the
girl, like a sulky child.

" Wouldn't it hurt you, do you
think, to be thrust through with a
spear 1 "

" Insects are different," said she,
flushing.

" The difference in nervous sensa-
tion is one of degree, not of kind,"
returned the doctor sententiously.

" I don't know what you mean,"
said Miss Pierrepoint. Her scarlet
lips pouted, there was a spark of
anger in her troubled eyes. Jacomb
felt acutely uncomfortable, but he
would not speak. Miss Pierrepoint
looked up at him, sidelong, and an
extraordinary likeness to her pictured
ancestors peered from her changed
countenance. She rose and went to
the window, and the doctor, with a
conventional word or two, took his
leave. Vaguely disquieted, he told
himself it was but the trick of a

Seaming House.

careless schoolgirl, yet the disquiet
remained.

That night he dreamed that he
was standing in her boudoir, staring
at the locked door which led into the
disused wing, terror in his heart.
He was being hunted, it seemed, for
his life, by whom, or what, he knew
not. The girl's voice cried to him
from within. He broke through
the door, which fell about him in
flakes like tinder. The rooms were
lower and darker (he vaguely felt)
than he remembered them, and
crammed to the ceiling with lumber,
old furniture, musty straw, and pack-
ing-cases, through which he must
force his way, the pursuers hot upon
his heels. With incredible wrestlings
he came into the room where was the
earth-bank. Lilian Pierrepoint stood
there ; he cried her name and thrilled
at his daring ; he would have had
her in his arms, but that the feet
and mutterings of those who hunted
them were hurrying up the broken
stair. The dreamer awoke to an
exquisite relief.

Morning brought a new mind, the
gift of the new day ; and the doctor,
strolling contentedly through the vil-
lage, beheld Miss Pierrepoint walking
in front of him, her scarlet parasol a
spot of fire in the sunny prospect. She
stooped to a little boy who was playing
in the dust, and the child ran scream-
ing to his mother, who stood in her
doorway. Beyond a touch of vague
disappointment (Jacomb expected this
lady to be naturally beloved of all
children) the trifling incident made
no impression on the doctor ; but
afterwards it returned to him with
the significance of a red signal, open-
ing aloft in the dark and passed
unregarded.

That day they read in the pine-
woods together. Jacomb found him-
self stumbling among the crags of
Robert Browning's country. He

understood scarce anything of what
he recited with a careful elocution,
but, so long as the lady was pleased,
he would have gone on for ever.
Presently he became curiously aware
that his hearer's mind was, as it were,
watching his mind. He began to
feel that he ought to understand this
poetry ; he made an effort, and then
he was conscious that she was intent
to perceive if he attached a personal
signification to the words.

"Ere thus much of yourself I learn —

who went
Back to the house, that day, and

brought my mind

To bear upon your action : uncombined
Motive from motive, till the dross, de-
prived

Of every purer particle, survived
At last in native simple hideousness,
Utter contemptibility. . . .

I don't know what this means,"
said the doctor uncomfortably. " Let's
find something more cheerful." He
tried another volume.

" If at night, when doors are shut,

And the wood-worm picks,

And the death-watch ticks,

And the bar has a flag of smut,

And a cat's in the water-butt —

A water-butt is the last place a
cat— "

" Please go on." Miss Pierrepoint
was listening intently.

" And the socket floats and flares,

And the house-beams groan,

And a foot unknown

Is surmised on the garret- stairs,

And the locks slip unawares — "

" It's wonderful ! " said the girl.

" Do you know, I have felt that. I

wonder if there is anything in it —

really?"

" In the water-butt ? "

" You know what I mean."

" Nerves," said the doctor, " all

nerves."

438

Seaming House.

"No, but," said Miss Pierrepoint,
" it's not all fancy. Sometimes, in
a certain atmosphere, one has a sort
of impulse from outside. Now, last
night, for instance — " She turned
a face of such lively distress to the
doctor, that he was startled.

"Yes; last night 1 To what do
you refer ? " he said composedly.

"When I, — you remember — when
I — did that to the poor little moth.
That was nothing, nothing, but an
impulse — how shall I describe it ? I
was very unhappy afterwards."

" I think you are making much of
very little," said the doctor bluntly.
" Do you often have this, — this
feeling 1 "

" Yes, — no, — I do not know," she
replied uncertainly, after a pause.

" I would forget all about it, if I
were you," said the doctor.

His solid cheerfulness had its way
with her. "It's nothing," she said.
" There ! It's gone. Only I do
think life is so, — so cruel, sometimes,"
she added, presently.

"Oh," said the doctor. "Is it?
I suppose it is. I hadn't thought of
it in that light. In what way do
you mean ? "

" The things that should make
people happy, seem to turn to knives
in their hands. Look at the children
in the London streets, look at their
wretched fathers and mothers. They
must have married for love and hap-
piness. See what they come to."

" See what they started from,"
said Jacomb. " What else can you
expect? That's only one side, — the
wrong side."

" Ah, well, it's the one we see,"
said the girl. "We're shut in a
prison. The gaolers come in and
out, but there's no escape for the
prisoners."

" Who are the gaolers ? "

" Men, — always men."

"It's not so bad as that, is it?"

said the doctor, — rather feebly, he
thought.

" Some people," pursued Miss
Pierrepoint, "seem to pass by all
the wretchedness in the world with-
out seeing it. They can be happy
in spite of it. There must be some
sort of inner defence wanting in me.
Of course, sometimes I forget; but
one needs a strong sensation to make
one forget."

"Why worry about what is not
your fault ? " said Jacomb.

" You are a doctor ; you spend
your life alleviating pain," said the
girl; "you don't understand. My
people have lived here for genera-
tions ; I have heard much of their
doings, but I never heard of their
making a single person about them
happier or better. If ever they did
good, it is buried with their bones.
The harm they did goes on causing
other harm, while I have to look on
helpless. That is my inheritance. I
am responsible for a debt I can never
pay. I might become a nun, and do
perpetual penance ; but then, I'm
not a Catholic. So — I do nothing."

"Well, you have it in your power
to make one person happy, at all
events. And that's something,"
Jacomb ventured.

" I shall never marry, if that is
what you mean," said Miss Pierrepoint
composedly. " I have thought over
all that. No, — I shall just go on
living, and forgetting, and remember-
ing again, until I die."

The doctor saw little meaning in
her words ; they seemed to him the
empty talk of a girl inclined to
way to morbid fancies. "You are
very gloomy," he said.

" I tell you," she answered, " I live
upon sensation. If I stop to think,
I am sad. Who, that ever thinl
seriously, is not sad ? "

" Oh, lots of people," returned
doctor, with great cheerfulness.

Seaming House.

439

" They must have courage, then.
I have none. I am selfish, too. I
might give away all I have, and earn
my own living, but I don't, you see.
I live in idleness and luxury, and I
like it."

"Would it cheer you to know that
you yourself cannot live without giv-
ing pleasure to someone in this weary
world ? " said Jacomb, venturing a
little further.

Miss Pierrepoint flushed, and was
silent. The doctor was about to go
on speaking, but checked himself.
He would not disturb their mutual
understanding, so pleasant, so poig-
nantly alluring, until he knew his
own mind more certainly. They spent
the rest of that day, and all the next,
together, in a shining content, only
marred by the prospect of Miss
Bonsor's return on the day following.

The last day of their solitude
dawned, sultry but livid clear at the
zenith. The hills of wood stood away,
distinct and vivid, as if fresh-painted,
upon banks of thunder-cloud, towering
and still. Now and again thunder
muttered in the distance. Miss Pierre-
point was restless and uneasy; she
was wretchedly afraid of thunder, she
said. In the afternoon the bright-
ness died out ; the solemn pine-woods
held their breath, and a darker cur-
tain drew slowly across the grey pall
of the windless sky. They were in
the garden when the storm burst over-
head with a hissing discharge of rain
and echoing detonations. The doctor
wrapped his coat about Miss Pierre-
point, but they were both wet to the
skin when they reached the house.
The collie was crouched in a corner of
the hall, shivering; pendant streams,
like icicles, hung from his jaws as he
raised his head and whined.

Jacomb, cursing tqe storm for
robbing him of invaluable minutes,
hurried back to his inn to change his
clothes. The rain had ceased when

he returned, fevered and impatient,
through the twilight redolent of moist
earth and wet leaves. As he neared
the gates, he heard the howling of a
dog; as he entered them the cries
ceased. Walking up the sodden drive,
he saw a black object crawl beneath
the bordering yews. Jacomb pushed
through the wet branches, to find his
friend the collie stretched there. Its
eyes were filmy ; a dark stain soaked
into the gravel. Jacomb, a lover of
dogs, kneeled down and handled it
with his doctor's touch, and the poor
dying creature tried to lick his hand.
.". . . Presently the doctor got to his
feet, wiping his hands together, and
stood looking down upon the animal
with a very dark countenance. A
light, halting step crunched the gravel ;
Jacomb put aside a branch and peered
from his covert, and his sun-burned
face turned wax-colour. Miss Pierre-
point stood there, bending slightly
forward, her head turning from left to
right, like a cat questing for its prey.
Her lips and nostrils twitched, her
hands opened and shut. She turned
away, — and the doctor caught his
breath. He was afraid, but his train-
ing served his need ; he drew the
buckle tight upon his courage, and,
with a deadly surmise tugging at his
heart, marched stoutly into the house.
The door into her boudoir was open.
Jacomb walked into the room and
paused, listening and staring upon the
closed door that led into the disused
wing. So he stood for two or three
minutes, and the sweat broke out
upon him in streams. Then a light,
halting footstep tapped upon the
boards beyond the closed door, and
there came a little noise of singing.
At that the doctor lost command of
himself, and ran from the house.

As he gained the open air, he was
aware of wheels approaching. A
cab from the station crawled up the
drive, stopping as Jacomb went to the

440

Seaming House.

window. In the middle-aged, capable
face, with shrewd blue eyes that
looked into his, he saw his own ex-
pression instantaneously reflected.
" You are Miss Bonsor ? "
"There is something the matter ? "
Jacomb put his head inside the
cab, and told his story with medical
brevity. He offered professional help.
" If you will kindly stay within
call, that will be best. I do not
anticipate any difficulty. The truth
is, I ought never to have left her."

Miss Bonsor, short, square, and
business-like, briskly entered the
house, drawing off her gloves ; the
cab rolled away, and the doctor was
left alone in the thickening twilight.
The dog was dead ; Jacomb fetched a
spade and buried him where he lay,
grimly reflecting that it was his own
heart he was stamping the mould
upon. He was mistaken ; that sus-
ceptible organ was to beat as lively
as ever in course of time ; but how
was he to know that ?

He paced the drive amid showers
of rain, till Miss Bonsor came out.

The doctor would not enter the
house, so they talked in the porch.
It is probable that the lady divined
his state of mind.

" She is sleeping quietly,' said Miss
Bonsor, " and will be all right now.
Poor girl, she inherits a fatal predis-
position,— one does not like to call it
insanity, — a sort of cruel impulse, —
a craving for a strong sensation.
She comes of an old family, whose
records are — what shall I say ? —
consistently scandalous. I believe
you would like me to speak without
reserve. The Pierreponts lived very
freely, and that sort of thing has
its consequences. The sins of the
fathers, you know — Yes, we have
the best advice, and I assure you
we take good care of her."

Jacomb thanked her and went
away. His professional knowledge
told him that she spoke truth. There
was no more to be done, or said.
He went to his inn and packed his
knapsack. The dawn rose, splendid
and serene, upon a solitary traveller
plodding on the road to London.

441

IN THE ADVANCE.

(A DAY WITH THE MOUNTED INFANTRY.)

WE are lying down, dismounted,
behind the crest of a ridge. We
have been on the move since before
dawn, advancing, halting, extending,
closing, in obedience to orders which
come from we know not where, and
whose object we cannot see. An hour
ago we rode past the kopje which
was the scene of our losses in the
reconnaissance of two days ago, and
the line of our brigade now is far to
the north of that, which is so far
satisfactory as a proof that the enemy
must have been forced to abandon his
strong position. Against the sky-
line in front are visible the heads of
the gunners who are working a half-
battery, the guns themselves being
almost out of sight, being a little way
down the farther slope of the ridge.
The heads move incessantly, and with
that urgent, precise swiftness which
gives to artillery in action its place
among the more wonderful of the
works of man. A fresh breeze is
blowing from our right, but the guns
are firing so rapidly that the thin,
almost invisible vapour of the cordite
is replaced nearly as fast as it is blown
away. The enemy's artillery is firing
at the ridge, seeking our guns, their
shells plunging far in our rear and
throwing up red clouds of dust. Now
and then a flat short crack, like the
beginning of a thunderclap, sounds
high in the air as a shrapnel-shell
bursts. We cannot judge of the effect
of the fire of our side, and the enemy's
is, so far, without any at all. But
presently a patter of bullets shows
that the enemy is trying long-range

rifle-fire. Two of the gunners in front
of us are hit, and almost at the same
moment a wheel of one of our guns is
broken by a shell.

And now we get the word to move,
and mounting the horses, which have
been held in a hollow to our right,
we begin a forward movement, made
diagonal by continual extension to the
right. After advancing about a mile
we close in again at the mouth of a
wide sloping gully, the far end of
which is wrapped in smoke and flame.
It is the enemy's abandoned laager.
Our advance files start to ride down
upon it, but are stopped by an order
from somewhere ; a ruse is suspected,
and we halt while the artillery takes
up a new position and recommences
fire.

At last the whole brigade sweeps
forward. Our battalion is dis-
mounted, and I am in charge of
the horses of my section, with orders
to advance about half a mile in rear
of the line. Beyond the deserted
laager (composed of calico tents on
frames of sawn timber), the only
thing rescued from which is a
bundle of dress shirts, some half-
burned, we come to a white farm-
house, already flying the red-cross
flag. Inside are some wounded,
with a Boer doctor (an Irishman)
who gives news of some of ours,
wounded and captured in a previous
fight. The fences, of course, are
down, the wires cut, the posts
hacked away with axes, and gaunt
black pigs are ravening in the little
patch of vegetable-garden. We water

442

In the Advance.

our horses at the tank beyond, in
which a dead bullock is lying. Hides,
entrails, and other offal scattered
about, together with the remains of
many fires, show that the, enemy has
been here in force.

The valley opens out to a broad
plain, and we advance slowly in ex-
tended order. Far in front are the
swarming specks of our fighting-line
and supports, advancing under shell-
fire only. Presently shells begin to
drop in our immediate front, coming
nearer and nearer ; the Boer gunners
have sighted the line of horses. An
officer comes galloping from the front,
and orders us to take the horses into
a deep nullah. The stream winds a
good deal, but its general direction
is that of our advance, and between
its steep banks we creep along, splash-
ing through mud and water, for the
most part under shelter. The enemy's
guns are watchful, and whenever a
deep pool or a wide bend causes us
to expose ourselves our emerging is
the signal for renewed attentions. An
hour passes ; two horses get bogged
and have to be extricated with much
hauling and cursing; one flounders
into deep water and rolls over with
a man on his back. At last the
hostile fire slackens, swells again,
and then dies away altogether. Our
line is halted ; I ride forward, find
my section, and return to bring
up the horses. When we re-form
about half a mile further on, the
sun is sinking, and the day's work
seems done. The horses are given a
few mouthfuls of food, and then we
remount and ride forward in column
of sections. Everything is quiet
and peaceful ; on we go in parade
style, the officers in front calling out
to dress by the centre, the low sun
shining in our faces. Perhaps the
General is coming. We pull our-
selves together and sit up.

Suddenly, — whiz-z-z — bang — a shell

drops between the sections. Another
and another follow, as in obedience
to the hoarse shouts of our officers
we shoot out into line and dismount.
We are half-way down a gentle slope,
and the horses have to be taken some
seven hundred yards back up that
slope before cover for them (the all-
important thing in Mounted Infantry
work) can be reached. Again I am
in charge of the led horses, but this
time with my back to the enemy.
As the line of dismounted men behind
me begins to sputter with rifle- fire
directed at the place from which
(presumably) the shells are coming,
I begin to run beside my mare. The
groups of led horses spread out, and
half instinctively we take a zig-zag
course. No gunners in their senses
will waste time and ammunition
upon an invisible sprinkle of men
when they have the splendid target
offered by bunches of led horses
moving up a slope. Accordingly, as
we go to the right, the shells go to
the right also ; as we incline to the
left, the shells follow suit. Two pass
in rapid succession, like a double
knock, just above my head, and take
the ground about twenty yards to my
front. I seem to feel the wind of
their passage. One recognises, as it
were, the human element. It is no
longer the idly-questing bullet, the
brute, unreasoning enmity of the shell.
Somewhere over there towards the
red sunset sky are Dutchmen (whom
I have never seen) with their eyes
glinting along the sights of their
15-pounders, or fixed on me — me —
through a telescope.

I struggle on up the slope, which
grows steeper. The rifle-sling seems to
tighten across my chest. Another shell
falls a little to my right. Probably a
Dutchman is swearing now because
that one did not burst ; perhaps the
next one will. Crash, bang ! — another
takes the ground two or three yard

In the Advance.

443

behind my mare's heels. She throws
up her head, and at the same moment
I stumble over a stone ; the rein is
torn out of my hand, and the mare
trots away. With a smell of dust and
sulphur and fire in my nostrils, I look
round. Where are the others? I
can see no one ; the air is full of
dust and smoke ; I seem to be alone
in the world, — alone with shrieking
demons kicking up dense clouds of
dust. Bang ! — perhaps the last sound
for me in this world — ah, the level
ground of the ridge at last, and the
mare standing quietly. I catch her,
scramble into the saddle, and ride
down the safe side, signalling to the
Number Threes to close as they
appear over the crest. By a miracle,
as it seems, not a man or horse has
been hit.

As we sit chatting in our saddles
one of our pom-poms rattles up to a
position on our left, and, while we go
forward with the horses, it opens fire.
The light is fading, but there is no
doubt about the gunners having, with
their usual luck and skill, located
the enemy ; one can tell that by the
intensity of the fire. Another pom-
pom gets to work further to the left,
and the two together give forth a
throbbing roar. Halted again, one
can see with the glass the flashes as
the tiny shells strike and burst in the
gathering dusk on the rocky hillside
about two thousand yards away ; and
one can see, too, a movement of black
dots there that means the enemy is
clearing out, while far to the rear a
British field-gun is galloping on the
road that leads across the neck of the
valley to occupy the position just
vacated by the enemy's artillery.

Riding through the gloom of even-
ing to the place selected for our
bivouac, the signalling-officer of the
brigade was in front of me on the
flank of my section. Behind him,
and at my side, rode his orderly.

Picking our way slowly over the rocky
ground, we passed close to the dry
stone wall of the kraal of an aban-
doned farm-house, topped by a row
of dark objects. The orderly leaned
over in his saddle with arm out-
stretched, and recovered himself hold-
ing something black and white that
was a fowl. He raised it in both
hands and lowered his head ; there
was a despairing squawk as the teeth
sank into the bird's throat, a flurry of
wings, and then silence. The man's
action was exactly that of a bird of
prey. As the double files passed on,
hand after hand swung out until the
whole of the roost was gathered in
and its members despatched as silently
as might be. Respectable biddies,
innocents whose ordered lives were
thus rudely upset and ended by neces-
sity, grim handmaid of war, you
furnished forth a noble supper for
hungry musketeers !

During those unpleasant minutes
on the shell-sprinkled slope there was
at the back of my mind the conscious
desire to grasp the sensations of the
moment and record them, as I have
now done. And, tired as I was, I
did not sleep without going over
every remembered detail in my mind.
In the space of those minutes at least
fifteen shells must have fallen in the
area traversed by us ; and the appa-
rent miracle of our scatheless passage
was, doubtless, owing to the failure of
the greater number of them to burst.
It scarcely needs to be explained
(since every civilian now knows some-
thing of the matter) that the timely
explosion of a shell, the property
which makes it more effective than a
solid shot, depends upon the accurate
adjustment of that ingenious and
delicate instrument, the fuse. It has
always been remarked throughout this
war that the Boer gunners, with all
their skill, and though their smartness
and alertness gave evidence of careful

444

In the Advance.

training, seem to be incapable, as a
rule, of the proper performance of this
important part of the artillery-man's
work. Either this is the case, or the
most part of their shells are defective
in construction. It is difficult to
exaggerate the importance of this,
and we ought continually to bear in
mind that, though our infantry are
taught that the greatest power of
artillery lies in its moral effect, our
losses must have been much greater if
a fair percentage of the enemy's shell
had reached us otherwise than as solid
shot. I speak here only of their
field-artillery.

The foregoing faithful record of my
own sensations may serve to illustrate
what the moral effect of artillery-fire
really means. I make no doubt that
it reads a good deal like a confession,
and not being a soldier by profession,
I will go so far as to admit that
my emotions contained the elements
of what is popularly known as
funk. Upon which it falls to be
remarked that it was but two days
since I had been under fire for the
first time, — the less impressive but, in
this war at any rate, incomparably
more deadly fire of musketry. I
might, if I were not an Englishman,
say that I had given my proofs.

We had been more or less under
shell-fire all day, but the real point
lies in the fact that for the moment
we were retiring. It is extraor-
dinary, the moral effect (plague take
the phrase !) of this simple physical
condition. Mr. Joseph Conrad, — a
writer distinguished by a more than
common subtlety in handling the

springs of human conduct — says
through the mouth of one of his
characters, that man is born a coward.
I believe that this is so ; and that it
is the habit of keeping himself in
hand that enables man to face danger
with resolution. Observe the word
face, used in this connection without
any special intention. One's back
once turned to the danger, retire-
ment once begun, — even a tactical
retirement which has nothing to do
with the result of the combat — and
the nervous tension which restrains
in us the instincts of the natural
man becomes automatically relaxed.
In a strategic retirement under fire,
and still more in the retreat of a
beaten force, this relaxation would
of course be much greater, and its
effects more serious. The example of
officers, the memory of national tra-
dition, the religion of the honour of
the army, of the regiment, — all these
must needs bear their part if such a
retreat is not to become a rout, such
a force a helpless mob. And it is at
such a time that discipline is most
patently justified of her children, for
in the last resort it is discipline only
that can save them from themselves.
The monument erected by the French
to the memory of Sir John Moore
after the battle of Corunna, though
primarily a generous tribute to the
resolution and genius of that great
soldier, should appeal to us also as
a monument to the discipline of the
British Army.

ERNEST DAWSON,
Lumsden's Horse.

445

THE ISLAND OF THE CURRENT.

IT was the third time that I had
come to the grey village in a cleft of
the cliff-bound bay, to see if the dark
little island-mass, some two leagues
distant, might be approached without
undue risk of shipwreck. The men
of Aberdaron had said, " No, indeed,"
when asked some years ago if they
would run out to sea to suit my con-
venience. They mentioned the wind,
and they were eloquent in quaint
English about the current : it was
impossible; and truly, when I had
struggled with the south-west breeze
on the sandy shore and watched the
impetuous rush of the crested waves,
I also was not so eager about the
enterprise. The rain was fierce and
thick on the second occasion. It
dribbled upon me in the night I passed
in the small leaky bandbox of a bed-
room, hoping for better things in the
morning ; and it wailed at the window-
chinks and up and down in the pent
passages of the uneven old house in
menacing fashion. The morning that
followed was worse still, so that the
men of Aberdaron declined to vex
their tongues with more English in
further excuse of their prudence.

But the third time paid for all.
Once again I ran through the smiling
green headland of the Lleyn, with its
inkblots of black cattle, its bold
isolated hills (so garish in purple
and gold at the sunset-hour), its
orchids in the marshes, its honey-
suckled hedgerows, and its trim little
white cottages with their shields of
elder bushes and fuchsias planted to
the south-west, and their kitchens
uniformly furnished with alluring old
oaken dressers heavy with willow-

pattern crockery of the kind extra-
vagant and careless Saxons smashed
out of use half a century or more ago.
It is an exhilarating tract of country,
as it ought to be, with the sea on
both sides of it. Carriers' carts of
the slow, sociable order keep its
villages in touch with such civilisa-
tion as it may enjoy in the railway-
terminus town of Pwllheli. There
are frequent fairs and markets in the
various little rural centres, to which
you drop by surprising steep descents
and from which perforce you have
to climb seriously. THE DAILY MAIL
has bored into their midst, and the
scholars of the land exult in it ; but
it has made no mark at all on the
majority, who find the old undisturbed
routine of their life sufficiently absorb-
ing. The Lleyn milkmaids, as sturdy
as ever about the ankles, continue to
sing to their kine in Welsh ; and Dim
Saesneg still follows the puzzled and
by no means regretful look with
which half the old women to whom
you proffer a question compel you to
silence. How should it be otherwise
with these broad-beamed housewives
of the Lleyn ? There are no excur-
sion-trains to coax them to assume a
thin garment of cosmopolitanism to
keep their Sabbath bonnets in coun-
tenance on a week-day. Their lords
and masters, as traffickers in black
cows and fat little horses, have some
need to speak a foreign language ; but
they themselves are home-birds from
their hard heads to their useful feet.
Their pastor preaches to them in
"Welsh, and their pigs and poultry
would despise a command in English.
Only when the railway traverses the

446

The Island of the Current.

Lleyn to its very tip will they change
their rigid old ways, and one may,
without a slight to civilisation, hope
that day is yet far distant.

Aberdaron does not seem to have
built one new house in the last half
decade. Considering its marine
charms, that is really curious. It
has its same three stumpy small inns.
Most carriers' and other carts (the
former, as often as not, driven tandem)
draw up at the Ship, which may or
may not prove it the best of the
three. The Gegin Fawr, over the
•way, has a more individual sign-board,
but its broken window-panes are not
attractive. It is in the Ship that one
finds the brightest kitchen-utensils
and the most bizarre collection of
those china monstrosities which to
the Welsh of the Lleyn are objects
of art. In its small parlour a brace
of large white cats, with black
moustaches and red collars, grimace
at the visitor from the top of the tall
old clock. There are also dogs and
stags in china, and china cups and
saucers, presents from the uttermost
parts of the peninsula. These, with
prints of ships (plain and coloured),
make up its decorations. Its chairs
would please the Spanish Inquisition,
if it still existed ; they are of nothing
but wood, with dead level seats. As
everywhere else in the Lleyn, they do
not here use carpets to their floors,
but oil-cloth of lavish patterns ; the
result is cold, yet clean. And the
bedrooms are like the cabins of a
schooner for size, with the slightest
of lathe partitions between. You
may touch two of the walls at the
same time, and, would you consent
to do so, you may also (if you know
Welsh) listen intelligently to the
conversation of the married couple
in the next room while they talk
in bed in the argumentative Welsh
way for an hour or two after
they have blown out the candle, or

had it blown out for them by the
draughts.

As the high-water-mark of Aber-
daron's splendour, the Ship Inn de-
serves thus to be limned in detail.
There is perhaps nothing else in the
place that engrosses one, unless it be
the two-aisled church a few paces to
the south, with the worn old porch
and the significant new and strong
wall to its churchyard of blue slate
tombstones. They are at last deter-
mined here that the spring-tides shall
not continue to pare away the graves
of their forefathers, and play with
skulls as it plays with the pebbles of
the beach. This is the sole evident
witness of the awakening of Aber-
daron to the fact that it is a hamlet
with a rose-coloured claim upon the
regard of strangers. Anciently, say
a thousand years ago, it knew its
value. Then good men and timid
men drifted and hurried hither from
all parts of North Wales to seek a
passage to the high little island some
two leagues from its strand, They
were hale men, and they were broken
and dying men, and it seemed to them
that they could nowhere better live
tranquil days and die to more advan-
tage than in the Island of Saints
across the water. After the slaughter
of Bangor-is-coed, in Flintshire, Chris-
tian Welshmen fled from the horrible
Saxon and his red sword to all the
extremities of the land ; and Bardsey
was the most glorious and safest goal
of all. It were interesting to know
how many of these pilgrims lie in
Aberdaron's roomy churchyard. No
trace of them remains, however, and
scant indications of the antiquity
of the church of St. Hywyn. The
blithe old lady who curtsied with
the key of the church had no English
for explanatory purposes; nor would
it have mattered if she had, for plain
whitewashed walls, a holywater stoup,
and a dubious font were all the

The Island of the Current.

447

church disclosed, except a goody pile
of ancient, lettered coffin-plates, which
lay in the vestry and waited only for
the drying of the whitewash to be
rehung. It seemed rather a grim
kind of decoration, but Aberdaron
has got used to it. The grandchildren
of the persons commemorated by the
rusted tin plates are thankful that
time and the marauding sea have left
them even such testimonies to their

From Aberdaron we sailed at length
for Bardsey on a July morning, at the
cool hour of six o'clock, with a strong
north wind behind us. The boat's
master was asked if, being overcome
by circumstances and compelled to
pass the night on the island, he
would bring us home on the morrow,
a Sunday. He said " No," without
a smile. " I would not like to do
it, indeed. I am a member of the
Chapel. No indeed, I will not sail
my boat on the Sunday." One of
his colleagues became shrill on the
subject. It was not at all the thing
to do such, or indeed any, work on
the Sabbath : he feigned to marvel
that the thought could enter the
head even of an unregenerate Saxon ;
but he was consoled when he was told
that he would not in any event be
tempted to do such a wrong to his
conscience. The north wind swept
us obliquely across Aberdaron's bay
towards the point of Pen y Kil.
The ease of the passage seemed en-
chanting. "We accepted with grati-
tude the auspicious wind, and post-
poned all thought of the return. But
at the headland there was no summer
sea. Here we touched the famous
current, with its seven-knot stream
from west to east or from east to
west, according to the tide. And
here the strife began, with a rushing
and tossing and a whistling of the
gusts more than enough to make us
understand why it is that often, for

weeks in succession, the little island
enjoys no communication with the
mainland. Even in such weather
as we had, none but an expert may
make the two-mile crossing of the
current. Again and again the main-
sail was loosed to the end of its
tether. The waves and swell had
an Atlantic quality, and we seemed
a poor little craft indeed to be mixed
up in such a turmoil. So it was
until we once more got under the
lee of the land, this time the high
north end of Bardsey itself, a steep
slope of amber sward with vivid
green bracken patches to its summit
five hundred feet above us. Here
happened years ago one of the few
wrecks which Bardsey has in its
chronicles. An Italian barque, home-
ward bound from Liverpool, was
caught by the current and in thick
fog brought up against the base of
the slope. But no lives were lost;
the men scrambled ashore and over
the ridge to the comfortable stone
houses in which the islanders live
their secure days. More recently a
man from the Bardsey lighthouse
slipped and fell from the hill-top
while shooting rabbits. He died from
the misadventure ; and this is about
the whole tale of Bardsey's tragedies
for half a century or more.

Under a clear blue sky we sailed
placidly now into the little creek
between black weedy rocks which
is Bardsey's adequate make-shift of
a harbour. It was a fishy little
haven, with baited lobster-pots and
ugly carcases on its beach, and gulls
pecking at them. The sweet smell
of newly-cut hay came to us over
these putrid odours. The sunshine
on meadows and cornfields, and the
smiling southern side of the cliff
where it drops in sharp terraces to
the grey houses of the islanders, well
above sea-level, were good to behold.
Here the fierce roar of the current

448

The Island of the Current.

and wind was lulled. It was like
stepping in five minutes from
Piccadilly into the heart of Epping
Forest. Who would not wish to be
king of this little island-territory
some six and a half miles round,
with its romantic charms of high-
land and stern coast-rifts for the
surge to tear at, and its half-dozen
farms as self-supporting as any in the
Midlands ?

We ascended gradually to the north
through oatfields, potato-plots, and per-
fumed meadows. A couple of sturdy
horses threw out their tails at us and
ran before the wind. Then a slow old
man, with much grizzled hair to his
head and his chin, and the signs of
recent breakfast about his mouth,
came towards us with a scythe. " I
am the king," he said quietly, when
with a singularly gentle tone he had
asked about the passage as if it were
an adventure, and commented sen-
tentiously upon such news as we
could give him. He did not smile, but
spoke like one who would fain have
added : " I am a poor old man to be
a king, but the king I am neverthe-
less." And then, with a deferential
little bow, he went his way to cut
grass. The swishing of his scythe
soon joined the music of the larks, in
full choir above the neck of warm
lowland between the water on the
east and the water on the west.
Starlings in small bevies rose and fell.
Two or three black cattle stood in an
enclosed area, three parts dwarf gorse
and the rest close-clipped turf. Some
white dots on the slope told of sheep.
Behind, the white road ran through
the fields between snow-white gate-
posts towards the square white light-
house with red bands to it which
occupies the southern tongue of the
island. The north hill and the south
cape are the only parts of Bardsey
left pretty much to Nature. The blue
sea and the blue sky encompass all.

We sought the abbey, which at the
general overthrow of English monastic
houses seems to have had a revenue
of from £46 to £58. By that time
it had long served its turn. Its
adjacent graveyard has been filled
and filled again. The tradition of
the ground's sanctity remained, but
devout Welshmen did not continue
to press across the current for ulti-
mate quarters in it. The disestab-
lishment came as no great shock to
anyone outside Bardsey, and perhaps
even the islanders soon learned to
profit by an independence that was
hardly theirs while so stately a person
as an abbot lived and moved so
unavoidably in their midst. Four
or five substantial farmsteads with
pointed gables were passed, and one
rather humble cottage of the familial-
mainland kind. Though dispossessed
of its abbey, it was plain that no
poverty, as the rest of us know the
word, exists in the little island. The
men we met were strong-shouldered
comely fellows, one or two with the
genuine Celtic red to their locks ;
and the women we saw had the look
of the most capable of their hard-
working sex. There were approved
agricultural implements in the farm-
yards, flowers in the windows, dwarfed
shrubs in plenty about the houses,
geese and poultry enjoying the sun-
shine and insects outside. And round
and beneath each farm to the seaboard,
south, east, and west, the land was
all marked out in trim, fruitful en-
closures. Not a yard had run to
waste. The green and russet and
pale yellow patches, of an acre or two
each, pleased the eye in contrast with
the rough bulk of the hill which
screened them from the north. No
islet could make a more prosperous
show to the casual stranger on a
midsummer day.

And here, where three farmsteads
formed a cluster on an elevated slope

The Island of the Current.

449

of the hill, we found such of the
abbey as remains ; a mere three-sided
block of old walls with window-slits
and not one carved stone to it. It
was more like a broken keep than the
remains of a famous house of prayer.
They told us of big iron shot found
in the graveyard which surrounds it,
and these too were better visitors for
a castle than an abbey. But the
Frenchmen who fired them (or was
it one of Cromwell's frigates 1) had
ample excuse in the bold face with
which the abbey looked at them
athwart the edge of the current
which, perchance successfully, dared
the vessels to come nearer. It is a
very plain lump of ruin nowadays,
wholly severed from the abbot's house
which in Pennant's time was the
domicile of several of the natives, and
which is now transformed out of all
recognition. Bardsey has gone far in
these five or six score years. Under
the paternal administration of Lord
Newborough its lot has become enviable
indeed, and in Aberdaron its houses
are spoken of as something quite fine
in comparison with the cottages of
the Lleyn. And fine indeed they are,
and low are the rents they pay for
them. Imagine it ! A villa residence,
worth anything from £30 to £40 a
year within ten miles of London, and
ten or twelve acres of excellent cul-
tivated ground, to say nothing about
rights of grazing on the hill and un-
restrained fishing in waters renowned
for their whiting, lobsters, and crabs,
— all for the trifling rent of £10 !

The islander who thus expounded
his privileges was not blind to them.
He envied no man. But the farms
are few, and no yearning stranger
need apply to be registered as a can-
didate for the next vacancy. To the
late Lord Newborough Bardsey was
a precious and loved resting-place in
his old age. He occupied rooms in
one of his own farmsteads. Though
No. 498. — VOL. LXXXIH.

he died on the mainland, hither a
year afterwards they brought him
to the churchyard of the saints in
November, 1889, and here he lies
under a stately, if simple, British
cross of stone as high, or nearly, as
the abbey ruin itself. The old lord,
as the islanders fondly call him, has
raised a yet more worthy monument
to his memory in the prosperous
condition of his tenants. A crofter
from the Hebrides, set on shore
here without previous enlightenment,
would think he was in a colony of
lairds.

Two other fair high crosses of stone
are to be seen in this holy centre
of the Island of Saints, and a few
humbler tombstones and mounds.
The sceptic who comes here to smile
about the twenty thousand saints,
supposed to lie under the long grass
of the small enclosure, has to reckon
at least with the faith of Lord New-
borough, who raised the cross to
their memory. The sceptic will also
be interested to hear what the
islanders themselves have to say on
the subject. "It is all bones under-
neath, nothing but bones. I have
seen them myself, indeed. There
were womans with hair eighteen
inches long, and childs, and mans, in
such heaps as you could not believe,
— no, indeed, except you saw them
yourself. And their teeth, — oh, in-
deed, I never did see such full mouths
of them. Not one toothache in any
of them ! " This evidence was given
with no particular enthusiasm about
the sanctity of these dead thousands.
The islander who gave it, though
not the king himself, is in many
ways the first man in Bardsey. He
had not troubled to read up the
history and traditions of his ancestral
birth - place ; why should he, since
Bardsey is scarcely more to the rest
of the kingdom than the rest of
England and Wales is to Bardsey?

450

The Island of the Current.

He spoke according to his knowledge,
and left us to judge at our ease and
pleasure about the sanctity or sinful-
ness in life of the men, women, and
children of this preposterous charnel-
pit. Nor did I, for my part, trouble
him with the unkind retort of old
Fuller, author of the WORTHIES OP
WALES, when he was confronted with
the mellow tale of the island's holi-
ness : "It would be more facile to
find graves in Bardseye for so many
saints, than saints for so many
graves." The word saint itself, as
applied to men born of women, will
need more defining than the average
dictionary - maker has space to give
to it.

A little above the ruin is the very
plain modern chapel wherein Bardsey
worships on Sundays. It is rather
less than nothing to the antiquary,
though some moderately ancient carv-
ing has been imported and embedded
in its pulpit, and one sere morsel of
an abbot's tombstone finds shelter in
it from the salt winds without. The
pulpit is very large for so small
a chapel, as the delicate minister
promply admitted. But there may
be design in this, for there is room
for an increase in Bardsey's popula-
tion, and the time may come when
the chapel will have to be extended
for the island's needs. At present
the muster is some sixty-five men,
women, and children, all hearty, save
perhaps the minister. Even he may
well hope to live out his full span
in this pure air, with his parsonage
sheltered to east and north by the
big island-hill.

Rounding the chapel, we came to
Bardsey's public fountain. " Cold
from the rock," said a dame in her
native Welsh in praise of the fluid,
as she looked up from her bucket.
It is just a hole in the hill-side,
heavily draped with maidenhair
ferns ; a fairer fountain than any

in Rome, though not too bountiful
in a di-y season. Perhaps this short-
ness of the water-supply is Bardsey's
one weak point. At the lighthouse
there are reservoirs for a drought,
but the keepers' wives do not talk
gratefully of the stagnant pools thus
immured for their benefit.

From the spring to Bardsey's
pinnacle it is a bracing, brief
scramble, and from the roomy ridge
the crimsoned site of Our Lady's
Chapel and Our Lady's Well across
the Channel looks awkward in its
abruptness. Carnarvonshire's end
seems to mourn its separation from
the island. Below, the north wind
blew up the crests of the waves in
the race as when we were in the
strife of it, and the cat's paws danced
one after the other over the shining
blue water to the eastward. Choughs
nest on the hill, and rabbits burrow
in it. In the shallow recesses bracken
thrives as in an English wood. The
summit of the hill, where crags do
not outcrop from it, is weathered into
tens of hundreds of little grassy heaps
which might readily stand for graves.
Here, it seemed to us that we h*d
really run to earth the twenty thou-
sand saints of Bardsey. As an illu-
sion it is more than passable : but
there is no legend on the subject,
and though the island's romantic
charm would be heightened by such
an aerial cemetery (five hundred feet
above the water), the winds and the
rains must be judged sole creators
of the freak.

The whole of a summer's day might
be spent gaily on this sweet cliff-top ;
but it behoved us to slide down the
polished slope to the south and pay
our court to the king of the isle and
the princesses his sisters. Our
was willing enough to play the
of lord-chamberlain and sue on
behalf for a sight of the crown ;
he confessed, with a shrug, tl

The Island of the Current.

451

island-born though he was, he had
never itched to see, nor had seen,
the tinselled bauble with which a
Lord Newborough of three quarters
of a century ago had, in sport, for
consolation, or perhaps with secret
sentiment, crowned the grandsire of
the king-regnant.

The king's farm was as neat and
snug as any of the others. We were
received with pretty bashful ness by
the two elderly princesses, rosy as
ripe pippins, one of whom pinched
her cheeks with a thumb and fore-
finger to repress her smiles when the
object of our visit was declared.
They led us into a parlour of hard
chairs, with printed rules on the wall
for the maintenance of health, first
aid in accidents, drowning, &c., indi-
cative as it seemed of the king's
beneficent power in the land ; and
then they sought the crown. It was
a thing to smile at, the more courtly
of them demurred ; but if we in-
sisted— we insisted, charmed by the
modesty and deference of the prin-
cesses. They left us, and for minutes
we waited. Then they returned, the
one leading with the crown, borne as
if it were an entree to which exception
might be made but for which every
possible indulgence was entreated, the
other following and still dimpling her
wind-coloured cheeks with her thumb
and forefinger.

"This is it, gentlemans," said our
guide, with scarcely veiled derision,
as he took it from the princess and
set it upon the table.

For so small a realm it was a very
respectable crown. A thing of tin
and brass, fitly bevelled, with metal
rosettes, and onerous to -wear. Time
and neglect had dulled its first
splendour, but it would still look
regal enough, in a play or a photo-
graph. The princesses protested, in
Welsh, and their subject listened
kindly and comforted them. They

were assured by him that we had not
come to mock; and indeed he spoke
the truth in this, for where there is
no inordinate assumption of dignity
there is nothing to ridicule. The
king's farm is rented like the rest,
at about a pound an acre, including
his palace. And the king himself,
though an old man, cuts his own hay,
put out his lobster-pots, and catches
whiting by the hour from the rocks
in suitable weather. " He has no
rights, indeed," said our guide ; " he
is no better than the others." Then
he bade the princesses remove the
crown and wrap it up again ; and
we shook hands with the timid old
ladies, thanked them and went our
way, sunned by their shy smiles
until we were behind their goose-
berry-bushes. The king's garden,
like the other gardens in Bardsey,
is prolific in gooseberries, but his
stunted apple-trees, all cobwebbed
with caterpillar blight (the continued
labour of years), were a mournful
sight.

One farm in Bardsey is like another.
We did not therefore call on all the
island. We did not even visit the
fortunate finder, many years ago, of
the five and twenty thin gold-pieces,
as large as a half-crown, all of which,
save one, have been dispersed about
the mainland. The treasure- trove
came from the wall of a dismantled
cottage, and has ever since been a
source of anxiety, as well as of rap-
ture, to its discoverer. It proves what
placid days they live in the island
when I say that our guide, in spite
of his wish to humour us in the
matter of this one surviving rial, or
gold noble, or whatever it was, hoped
we would not press him to bring us
within reach of the coin. He thought
the lord of the manor might hear of
it and claim his rights. One may
give the lord of the manor credit for
no such harshness at so late a season.
G G 2

452

The Island of the Current.

The lighthouse at the south end
was, in our guide's opinion, an object
that no visitor ought to neglect.
Yet, in fact we did not not enter it :
the north wind cried loud against it
and set the sea fretting into the
black channels at the island's ex-
tremity; and the lighthouse itself is
only one of a crowd of brethren all
pretty much of a pattern.

We preferred to wander back
through the swaying oats and barley
and clover grass to the farm set
highest on the hill-slope, and there,
in the heat of the day, we rested.
The guest-room had the inevitable
marine atmosphere. There were en-
gravings of ships on its walls, and
rude copies in wool-work of the
same engravings hung by their side.
There was a stuffed puffin here, shell
and seaweed trifles there. The photo-
graphs in the album were of seasoned
old sailors and their families. The
books were simple tales of the sea
leavened with a manual about birds'
eggs (the pages devoted to guille-
mots, cormorants, puffins, &c., marked
appreciatively by honest thumbs),
and a colossal brass-bound Bible.
We had a peculiar interest in the

atmosphere, for they were preparing
for us a large crayfish, taken from
its locker in the creek, alive, and
flapping out reports as of a pistol
under our very eyes ! It was a fish
to grace any luncheon-table, some
four pounds in weight, worth to Bard-
sey a shilling or fifteen pence ; but
I regret to say that it came before us,
with tea and bread and butter, piping
hot. Never was a noble crayfish so
maltreated ! And our disappoint-
ment was well proportioned to the
insult itself. We had the return
voyage before us, against the wind,
with certain rocketing in the current,
and hot crayfish as a stand-by for the
ordeal !

It may be a weakness to confess it,
but in the cross-water between wind
and tide, on the return voyage, that
hot crayfish was too much for us. I
fancy it would have vexed even an
admiral. Nor had we the heart to
spoil the pleasure of our boat's crew
by suggesting that, since we preferred
not to smoke, they also might have
kept their pipes in their pockets.
The Aberdaron tobacco is coarse.

CHARLES EDWARDES,

453

BOOK-HUNTING.

THERE is a certain series of books
which, in a greater or lesser degree,
no gentleman's library is without.
Some men have them all, some have
three or four, some have only one, but
rare is it indeed to find a man who
has none at all. They would pro-
bably have come into Lamb's category
of biblia abiblia, books that are no
books ; we say probably, but we can-
not speak authoritatively, for they are
a later development. The series, to
which be all honour, is TUB BADMIN-
TON LIBRARY, which deals exhaus-
tively and in a scientific spirit with
all manner of sports and pastimes.

It is significant of our national
character that these books should
exist at all, still more so that they
should be practically universal. For
they are, after all, only a well-defined
type of a very large literature. If we
go into the matter we shall find that
the demand for such books, at least
for such as have any literary or prac-
tical merit, is at least as great as the
supply. It shows that we are a
nation of sportsmen, and not merely
a nation in which sportsmen are to be
found. If we turn to France or Ger-
many, which seem rather to answer
to the latter description, we see
that in both countries the literature of
sport, at any rate the modern litera-
ture, though it exists, is rather an
unknown and unappreciated quantity.
With us, on the other hand, it has
a distinct and very important place
of its own. We are all sportsmen
according to our lights and opportu-
nities. Some of us spend our lives
in the pursuit of big game, others in
the extermination of rats; in both
cases the principle is the same. It is

the instinctive love of the chase handexl
down to us from our rude ancestors
whose raiment was a coat of blue
paint, whose weapons were moderately
sharp flints, and whose lives were one
long happy hunting. Sometimes they
were the hunters, sometimes the
hunted, and in both cases no doubt
they enjoyed it. They certainly had
greater opportunities than we now
have. They knew no rights of
property, no game-laws and no close
season. If they met a bear they were
at liberty to kill it, if they could ;
equally of course it was at liberty to
kill them. But now if we meet a
rabbit, we have to consider many
things before we attack it. In the
first place, whose rabbit is it ? In the
second place, whose land is it on?
Have we permission to shoot on that
land? And finally, have we a gun-
license? If our answers are not
satisfactory to our conscience and,
more important, to the conscience of
other people, then we are defenceless
and at the mercy of the rabbit ; we
may not even offer any resistance if
it attacks us.

Times alter, our necessities increase,
and with them our powers of inven-
tion. Probably, even if it were still
open to us to put on a coat of blue
paint and to attack a bear with a
moderately sharp flint, we should
hesitate to do so. We should in all
likelihood make use of our enlarged
resources and send out an armoured-
train and a Gatling gun, since the bear
is, all things considered, vermin and
harmful to crops. But the point is
hardly worth considering. We have
no bears, and according to the farmers
we have no crops.

454

Book-Hunting.

Since then we have no bears and
may not hunt rabbits, other species
of hunting have been invented to fill
the obvious gap. In the country the
hunting is still after creatures more
or less animate, such as rats and
butterflies ; it will be understood that
we are only discussing the hunting
that is free and open to all, nor do
we desire for an instant to infringe
on rights of property, even in words.
This, of course, is the natural progress
of evolution ; the bear has given place
to the rat, the wolf to the mouse, and
the aurochs to the butterfly, much in
the same way as man is descended
from the angels, — for let it here be
said that we entirely reject the Dar-
winian theory.

But in great cities we have no ani-
mate objects of the chase for, as we
observed just now, we are strenuous
in defence of the rights of pro-
perty. Therefore the sportsman of
the city must hunt inanimate objects ;
and very interesting it sometimes is.
There are many classes of objects, all
desirable and all much hunted. Some
men, for instance, when forced by age
or circumstances to give up the butter-
fly-net, by a natural transference of
their affections take to hunting blue
china. But the hunting to which we
would call particular attention is that
of books. The branch of country sport
to which it is most akin is angling.
Angling, of course, is not hunting, for
it is the contemplative man's recrea-
tion, and booking (if we may for once
use a word in its proper sense) is of
its nature much wilder and more
thrilling. Yet there are many points
of resemblance between the two. Old
clothes are essential to both ; why they
are necessary to booking will be made
clear later. Both pursuits require a
large amount of practice and patience,
and success is as rare in the one as in
the other. Finally both are ruined by
vile and innumerable poachers.

We will deal with the latter first.
The novice in booking will naturally
turn his attention to street-stalls and
to small, dingy and, as he thinks,
little frequented shops. There surely
he will be able to pick up wonderful
bargains for very trifling sums. Let
us watch him awhile and learn from
his inexperience. Observe his cos-
tume. His frock-coat is a miracle
of the tailor's art; his silk hat
obviously new and cheap at a guinea ;
well-cut trousers, well-fitting boots, a
spotless collar, new gloves, and a gold-
headed umbrella give him the appear-
ance of an evidently prosperous man,
not one to spare his shillings. He
stops at a little bookshop, in the
window whereof he has spied a most
desirable book. It is a fine tall copy
of Plautus from the Aldine Press, not
exactly a rare book or a valuable, but
a good one to have. It evidently
catches his eye, and he steps inside
to ask the price. In reply to his
polite question the shopman explains
all the beauty of it, lays great em-
phasis on the fact that it is uncut,
and finally demands a guinea for it.
The novice is much alarmed. Who
would have thought that any book
could have cost a guinea in such a
little shop? Evidently he has fallen
into a specialist's hands, and the best
thing that he can do is to get out of
them again. So he leaves the shop
without more ado, and with alarm
expressed on every line of his coun-
tenance ; had the man asked ten or
even twelve shillings he would have
bought it, but a guinea was altogether
too much.

While we have been watching the
novice another man has taken up his
stand before the window. This is a
man of paltry appearance with the
face of a ferret, and in costume
a striking contrast to the first
comer ; the principal features of it
are an ancient greasy felt hat, a

455

dilapidated overcoat (once black but
now mostly green), an unutterable
collar, and very dirty hands. This
man also notices the Aldine, and
hearing the bookseller price it at a
guinea, a knowing smile crosses his
face as he turns away. In a few
minutes, however, he is back again,
and entering the shop proceeds to
nose round it like a terrier-dog.
Among other books he takes up the
Aldine, only to put it carelessly down
again. Presently he picks it up a
second time with three other volumes
and takes them all to the bookseller.
" Fifteen for the lot ? " he asks. The
bookseller demurs ; they haggle about
it for a minute or two, and finally
agree on seventeen and sixpence.

The ferret-faced man pays and de-
parts with his purchase. If we follow
him we shall find that he goes straight
to another bookshop, a larger and
more important one ; but he does not
go there to buy. He produces the
four books which he has just bought
and offers them for sale for twenty-
five shillings, which he gets. Thus
for little more than half an hour's
work he secures a profit of seven and
sixpence. We may mention inci-
dentally that the second bookseller
prices two of the books at ten shillings
a-piece and the other two at seven
.and sixpence a-piece. And so every-
body is satisfied, — except the novice.

The reader will wonder why the
first bookseller demanded a guinea
for the Plautus when he was evi-
dently willing to take a quarter of
that amount. The novice was too
smartly dressed. There are some
booksellers who have no standing-
price for their wares, but rate them
according to what they think each
customer will give. This one judged
from the costume of the novice that
it was worth while asking a guinea,
though he would have taken five
shillings. If the novice was fool

enough to give it, so much the better;
if not, he would have no difficulty in
selling it to someone else for five
shillings. He was nearly right, but
he extended his price too far.

The ferret-faced man is of course a
poacher. Perhaps he would prefer to
be called a bookseller's agent, but the
result is much the same. Like all
poaching it is a precarious means of
subsistence ; but unlike other poaching
it is not punishable by law. The
poacher may on a good day turn over
several pounds, but on a bad day he
may have to realise at a loss. In any
case he is an unmitigated curse to the
amateur book-hunter, as he is always
on the spot, always on the alert, and
wonderfully sharp-nosed for a bargain.

Now the reader will understand
why old clothes are necessary for the
book-hunter. It is necessary to com-
pete with a poacher at his own
weapons. Even as when one is trout-
fishing, one gets hints from, and
copies the flies of, the nearest local
expert, so must one in book-hunting
copy the outfit of the bookseller's
agent. The costume which we re-
commend would be as follows : a
hat of the pattern aforesaid ; a very
ancient overcoat with large pockets ;
a flannel shirt ; trousers frayed at the
hem, and baggy at the knee. With
the collar some care and preparation
is necessary. It should be of the old-
fashioned sort which turns down at
the corner; wear it for a week and
then keep it out of the clutches of the
washerwoman for another week. Put
it on without a tie, if you can bring
yourself to do so, and you will be
complete at all points. Then, having
carefully mislaid your gloves, you can
set out, and you will have the satis-
faction of knowing that you look as
much like a book-poacher as art can
make you ; and moreover you will be
given credit for some knowledge of
books and their value.

456

Book-Hunting,

That angling is a pursuit which
requires a good deal of patience will
readily be admitted; but we do not
hesitate to say that book-hunting
requires every bit as much patience
if it is to be taken up in a proper
spirit. There are so many things
that combine to try the temper. It
is a common experience to go into
a shop and find lying before you the
very book that you have been hunting
for years, and then on enquiry to
find that it has just been sold. Pro-
bably you will never come within
speaking distance of it again. The
first edition is another fruitful source
of annoyance. It is so elusive ; one
thinks one has it, and lo ! one has it
not. In some cases, for example, one
has to rely entirely on memory to
ascertain whether a book is a first
edition or a later one, because the
book itself does not reveal it. We
might cite many instances in which
the amateur may easily be deceived.
Gray's ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCH-
YARD is one. The first edition was
printed in 1751, the second followed
in the same year, which in itself
might cause mistakes (there is a
difference of nearly fifty pounds in
their values), and there were many
others in the course of a few years.
Some of these bear no sign-post to the
collector in the shape of an edition-
mark, and the enthusiast whose dates
are to seek may, therefore, be mis-
led into paying a fancy price for an
eighth edition in the hope that it may
prove to be a first. It is the nature
of man to assume that if a book
does not announce on the .title-page
that it is some other edition, it is
therefore a first. Other common
traps for the unwary are Sterne's
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY and Thomson's
SEASONS.

The worry of finding that a book is
incomplete is also often to be expected.
Often most respectable-looking books

have a page missing somewhere. One
cannot trust even a folio that has been
connected with religious houses all its
life. It may be invincibly bound in
the strongest calf ; it may have passed
all its quiet unread days behind glass,
and be as clean as on the day on
which it was issued, and yet page 341
may have vanished. We once knew
a man who had a firm belief in the
devil, and for this reason. He said
that he could hardly count the im-
perfect books by which he had been
misled in his time, and in nearly
every case these books had a highly
respectable past. They had grown
mellow in monasteries, or had been
carefully tended in great libraries,
where they were never touched
except to be dusted. It seemed
morally impossible that harm could
have come to these books, and yet
each one had a page missing some-
where. Therefore he was reluctantly
forced to the conclusion that the devil
was in it. He supposed that when
the devil was in need of some more
quotations he abstracted a page from
some little-read book, choosing it both
in order that he might obtain a repu-
tation for wisdom, and also that he
might not be found out. We do not
uphold this theory, but we do recom-
mend the book-hunter, so far as pos-
sible, to collate every book of any
importance which he may contem-
plate buying.

The book-hunter should not labour
under the idea that he will be laying
out his money to good advantage, and
that if a rainy day comes he will
receive his initial outlay tenfold into
his bosom. That would indeed be
grievous error. When the rainy day
comes he may think himself fortu-
nate if he sells his books for half
what he gave for them ; for, when
all is said, second-hand booksellers
have a very considerable knowledge
of their own business, and on the

Book-Hunting.

457

whole they manage to sell their books
for quite as much as they are worth.

Voltaire says somewhere that
books are made from books. It
would be as well for the novice to
remember this remark, at the same
tune reading a new meaning into it,
for the truth of it is certain some
day to strike him forcibly. Let us
imagine a chain of circumstances
which will impress it on him. In
the first place, he has to catch a train
in a quarter of an hour, yet he can-
not resist stepping into that small
book-shop just on the chance of find-
ing something. He does find some-
thing which he has long coveted ; a
most captivating book in appearance,
bearing on its cover the legend
COUNTRY CONTENTMENTS, 1611. The
title-page reveals the fact that it is
also THE HUSBANDMAN'S RECREATION
and that it is compiled by one Ger-
vase Markham, whose name is not un-
known to the novice because he has
a friend who makes a specialty of his
books. A little knowledge picked up
from this friend has made him aware
that first editions of Markham are
very rare ; therefore, after satisfying
himself that the end of the book
seems all right, he gladly pays the
two guineas asked for it and hurries
off to catch his train. In the evening
he takes it round to the friend who
is learned in Markham and asks his
opinion. The friend examines it
carefully and finally says, " This book
is made up ; " and even so it is. He
proves to the novice's complete dis-
satisfaction that it is only the eighth
edition of 1649 adorned with the
title-page of the first edition.

We have said that second-hand
booksellers have a very fair working-
knowledge of their trade, and this is
perfectly true; but here and there
may still be found one or two whose
knowledge is less than even the know-
of the veriest tyro among

collectors. At this we imagine we
can see the veriest tyro pricking up
his ears and making him ready for
a bargain; but let him not be pre-
cipitate, for not even among the men
who know nothing about books can
he hope to turn his own comparative
erudition to account. The people who
sell books in ignorance of their real
value are mostly those who keep old
curiosity-shops in country towns. We
regret to have to record it, but, from
bitter personal experience, we know
that it is almost impossible to cheat
them in these matters, nay more, that
it is well nigh hopeless to attempt to
buy a book from them at all, even,
we may say, when one is prepared to
buy it for a fair price. The following
dialogue may perhaps help to explain
what we mean.

Confirmed Bibliomaniac : — " May I
have a look round among the books ? "

Provincial Shopkeeper : — " Cer-
tainly, sir. Might you be in want
of anything in particular ? "

Con. Bib. : — " Oh no, thanks. I
only thought I would like to look at
them."

He does so, and routs about for
some minutes among many volumes
of theological works of the Paley's
Evidences type, a task that would
crush any but a maniac really con-
firmed. At last, at the very bottom
of the heap (books are always in heaps
in old curiosity-shops) he comes
across a book of a different sort ; for
the sake of our illustration let us say
a copy of the 1772 edition, in quarto,
of the miscellaneous poems of that
pleasant Latin versifier Vincent
Bourne. Such a book might possibly
fetch as much as ten shillings in the
metropolis ; in the provinces there-
fore, it would be reasonable to offer
three shillings and sixpence. As it
happens, the bibliomaniac does not
possess it, and he wants it. He
therefore makes a violent effort to

458

Book-Hunting.

appear unconcerned with the usual
result, — that he looks a very demon
of covetousness.

" How much do you want for this ? "
he says, holding it up.

" It is a very old book," remarks its
owner.

" Yes," says the maniac ; " but how
much is it ? "

" It is vei-y old indeed. I should
say it was quite one of the first books
printed ; wouldn't you, sir ? "

" Well, it is not quite so old as all
that."

" I had a gentleman in here the
other day looking at it, and he said
it was a very old book. Perhaps
you know him, sir1? Mr. Jones the
butcher."

" No, I haven't the pleasure. What
did he say about it ? "

" He said it was the oldest book he
had ever seen, and he wished he could
afford to buy it."

" Did he indeed ? "

" Yes ; he said you never see books
like that nowadays."

"That is quite true. What else
did he say 1 "

"He said that in London they
would give a lot for a book like that."

"Yes?"

" These old Greek books are very
hard to come by now."

" Are they ? "

" Yes ; you see it is on account of
the printing."

"Why?"

" Well, Mr. Jones said there had
been no printing done worth speaking
of since the days of the Greeks and
Romans."

" Mr. Jones said that ? "

" Yes, and he said I was veiy lucky
to have such a book."

"To come to the point, how much
do you want for it ? "

" Well, sir, being such an old book
and having been printed in the times
of the Greeks, and Mr. Jones having

spoken so highly of it, I couldn't in
fairness to myself let it go for less
than ten pounds."

Our illustration is fictitious, but we
can assure the hopeful beginner that
it is in no way exaggerated. We
remember once coming across two
books in a little shop in a country
town, one a bible and the other ti
prayerbook. What their exact dates
were we do not know, as they had
both lost their title-pages and were
very incomplete in other particulars,
but neither of them can have been
earlier than 1700. Above each was
a large card announcing that they
were to be had for the moderate
prices of fifteen and ten pounds
respectively. This happened not so
very long ago, and we imagine they
are in that little shop still. Of course
it gives an air of prosperity to a shop
to be able to charge for its goods
exactly two hundred and fifty times
what they are worth, but it is not
cheering for the collector.

Only once do we remember getting
a bargain in a provincial town. We
bought a book for fourpence, which
even at the time we thought reason-
able. When we returned to London
we showed it to a bookseller, in whose
opinion we confide, and asked him
what he thought it was worth. He
considered it for a few moments and
finally announced that it was worth,
— fourpence. This of course was
very satisfactory, because, as we have
pointed out, if a man buys a book for
fourpence he must not expect to be
able to sell it again for more than
twopence.

It must now be clear to the reader
that, whether the bookseller be well-
informed or ignorant, whether he live
in town or country, by no chance
he be induced to sell his books
less than they are worth. The
the collector can do is to buy a book
for a fair price, and tell his friends it

s can
most

Book-Hunting.

159

is worth the largest sum that a copy
of it has ever fetched in the market,
possibly ten times what he gave for
it. He need not tell them that the
copy which fetched so much was one
of three printed on vellum ; they will
eventually find that out for them-

We trust that our description of
the difficulties that beset the collector
has not given the novice the idea that
to form a library is as hopeless a task
as to become a poet. On the con-
trary, we can assure him that nothing
is easier or cheaper. There are thou-
sands of books that may be picked up
almost for nothing. We would not
pick them up ourselves, — now ; but
that is no reason why he should not.
He can specialise if he likes. Suppos-
ing that he decides to collect works
of fiction, he will have no difficulty
in getting together a splendid assort-
ment of estimable works, not paltry
modern effusions at six shillings, —
perish the thought ! — but good honest
serious fiction of the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries. These are,
for example, the haunted volumes of
Ann Radcliffe, once known as the
Salvator Rosa of British novelists ; it
were a positive crime to be without
THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, THE
ITALIAN, and THE SICILIAN. We
will not cite those altogether de-
lightful histories, THE FAIRCHILD
FAMILY or SANDFORD AND MERTON,
because they are hard to come by ;
but the man who owns these monu-
ments in their entirety can afford to
disregard such latter-day necessities
as THE LIBRARY OF FAMOUS LITERA-
TURE. Then there are the works of
Mrs. Hannah More, which could not
fail to make any library respectable.
Mr. Augustine Birrell has put it on
record that he once paid eight shil-
lings for a complete set ; but the
novice must be content to wait till

he has attained Mr. Bin-ell's fame,
and meanwhile to pay twopence a
volume for them.

A more serious mind may choose
rather to devote itself to early edi-
tions of the classics, in which there
is a wide field for the purchaser.
Books from the university presses
of about 1700 are common and cheap,
and useless enough for any library.
Then there are editions from that
indefatigable institution the Plantine
Press in Antwerp, which turned out
books for over three centuries. Those
dating from 1600 to 1700 are for
the most part extremely common.
There was a myth once current, now
happily exploded, that books from
the Elzevir Presses were all rare and
valuable ; most of them may now
be obtained for about five shillings
a dozen, and hideous cropped little
things they are. Books printed by
Janson of about the same date, and
even by Stephanus of a century
earlier, may be bought for very little.

The collector who specialises in
poetry has perhaps the best time.
The occasional poems of Pomfret,
Bloomfield, Montgomery, and others
of equal fame, need never cost him
more than sixpence a-piece ; Pomfret
in particular is expensive at three-
pence. But why should we say more ?
It is quite clear that with all this
admirable material ready to hand, no
man can fail to amass as large a
library as he wishes in spite of the
booksellers all leagued together against
him.

We began this paper with a
reference to THE BADMINTON LIBRARY :
and we ought therefore to mention
a few books, which bear the same
relation to booking as the Badminton
bears to other sports. Books on books
are innumerable, but there are one
or two which stand out prominently
and cause the novice an infinity of
woe. First among them is Brunet,

460

Book-Hunting,

the ultima spes of the ordinary col-
lector. His bibliography is a very
complete affair, so complete that the
magic words not in Brunet are quite
enough to add some shillings to the
price of any book one may contem-
plate buying. Oddly enough, if one
desires to sell the same book, the fact
that it is not in Brunet seriously
detracts from its value ; it then
becomes obvious that it is not in
Brunet because it is not worthy to
be there, and that it is in truth
a poor volume of no esteem. The
learned Frenchman is invaluable to
the collector who desires to know all
about a book that he has just
acquired. This is the sort of infor-
mation that he gives : II a des
exempt, imprimis sur velin. It is
not much, but it is all, and it is at
least enough to show the collector
that his own copy, not being printed
on vellum, is not worth anything.
Sometimes the information varies :
the book is assez rare or peu commun
or vendu 2fr. la Valliere, or edition
faite avec soin ; but it is seldom that
Brunet is communicative about any
book that the collector possesses, or
perhaps we should say, it is seldom
that the collector possesses any book
about which Brunet is communicative.
There are many other books like
Brunet, and they are all reserved on
the subject of the books which one
possesses oneself. Books of reference,
however, are not of very great interest
to the novice ; there are too many
facts in them. What he requires is
a book that ambles lightly round the
subject, that prattles about the joy
of picking up a rarity, without touch-
ing on the subsequent and inevitable

agony of finding that it is no rarity
after all. He requires a book that is
stimulating and suggestive, the sort
of book in fact that Mr. Andrew Lang
writes, whereby he is partially in-
structed and wholly fascinated. These
offices Mr. Lang performs to perfec-
tion ; but let not the novice be led
away by his charming optimism, an
optimism which might almost make
us believe that LE PASTISSIER FRAN-
COIS of 1655 may even now be picked
up for six sous, or that the legend
which we heard a few years ago, of
Caxton's GAME AND PLAYE OF CHESSE
having been purchased at Oxford for
fourpence, is true history. The novice,
however, who is really bitten with
bibliomania should certainly read THE
LIBRARY and BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.
He should also read Burton's BOOK-
HUNTER and find out what serendi-
pity is, and whether he has it himself.
But, unless he has colossal patience
and a love for epical spaciousness and
euphuistic magnificence (which is very
dull withal) he should avoid that
most voluminous person Dibdin.

It may happen that in the end the
collector has succeeded in gathering
together a few books of which he
need not be altogether ashamed ; but
it is improbable that he will feel
inclined to boast of them, when he
reflects on the humiliations, the dis-
appointments, and the myriad troubles
which he has had to endure in their
acquisition. Rather will he be in-
clined to glance round his shelves
without prejudice, and candidly con-
fess that, as Goethe says, " Books
generally do little else but put names
to our errors."

H. T. S.

461

THE SINNER AND THE PROBLEM.

BY ERIC PARKER.

CHAPTER XIX.

IT was a wonderful night. The
hay was stacked, the veriest stranger
could have told you, in the corner
of the field nearest the house ; the
jessamine glowed faintly in the light
of a half-hidden moon, and the wind
that fanned it was heavy with the
odour of mignonette and roses. The
landrail had taken her brood out on
the fallows, so that the windows
lacked her stick-and-comb chatter,
but there came to you the purr of
nightjars and the long hoot of owls,
white monsters that sailed and
swooped ; or you looked out over
the valley, and about you was the
flap and squeak of bats, and the
boom of beetles, and the whirr of
moths, and all the million sounds and
scents of a night in summer. And
the Chief Butler slapped me on the
shoulder as I leaned against the
shutters, and asked if I intended
doing anything particular that even-
ing.

The days following my last inter-
view with the Lady of the Lake
had found me influenced by an un-
accustomed longing for inactivity.
True, I had made a sketch or so,
well enough so far as colour went,
for that was easily seen, and needed
but a surface-trick or so to make
what some might call a picture ; but
they were open books, to be read
running, made by a mechanician more
than by any one else. And there
had been the Sinner's garden-prize,
and his whole-hearted joy at receiv-
ing the few shillings that make a

boy of his likes happy. But it was
a passive existence ; everything was
centred in that word to-mwrow, when
I was to see again the shadows of the
oaks in the lake, as I saw them
three months ago, — no, but dif-
ferently, for there had happened
much since then.

I had occupation enough with my
thoughts, perhaps ; but the Chief
Butler meant something of an atten-
tion to me, and with as good a show
of willingness as I could command I
put myself at his service.

" I thought we might have a bit of
a chat up in my room," said he, caring
little for my bats and jessamine.
"T'other chap's out, and there ain't
much doing on a muggy night like
this." I suppose I looked regretfully
at the warm wet darkness beyond the
window. He filled in his own picture.
" I've a weed or so you might care to
try, and a bottle of good whiskey ; at
least I gave four bob for it, and it
ought to be drinkable at that. What
do you think ? "

I thought that the existence of
the tobacco and spirits was suffi-
cient reason for accepting his in-
vitation. The Chief Butler buying
four-shilling whiskey for other people,
thought I, but I wondered what
might be coming.

" Take a pew," said he, and shut
the door. Something strange in his
manner struck me, an unaccustomed
joviality, a curious elation. He pro-
duced a cigar-case and proffered it ; I
selected a biggish cigar with some
misgivings. " You'll like those, I
think ; at least, they ought to be

462

The Sinner and the Problem.

good; I gave — however, see what
you think of them. Havannas are
getting scarcer, they tell me."

"It's excellent, quite excellent,"
quoth I, reproaching myself for my
misgivings.

" I thought they were pretty fair.
Well " (he laid the case open at my
elbow), " help yourself to another
when you've finished that. And now
for the whusky."

Whusky, thought I; but the
change of vowel suited his mood, you
could see. " Don't you ever smoke 1 "
I asked him as he produced a brand-
new corkscrew.

" No, I don't ; I used to, but gave
it up." Whip came the cork, and he
smelt it with an air. "I hope this
is all right. You ought to get pretty
decent stuff for four bob, oughtn't
you ? "

The question was asked off-hand,
but he waited eagerly for the inevit-
able answer. There was obviously
vast pleasure in anticipating a com-
pliment ; and I declare (for at one
time I would not have believed it)
that it was a pleasure just then to
answer truthfully.

" Well, you mix it as you like," he
went on. " There's soda here ; you
prefer that to water, I suppose ? " I
did not, but there were reasons for
•the falsehood. "And what's that
like1?" he asked. The question had
been on the end of his tongue for
three minutes, and he found employ-
ment in a pretended search for some-
thing ; a book presumably, but he
looked on the floor for it among other
places.

" The whiskey is excellent, too ; in
fact, as good as the cigar. Are you
not going to try some ? "

He looked doubtfully at the bottle.
" Do you know, I think I will," he
said, and filled a glass. Presently he
sipped it, sat down and became con-
templative. "You knew we break

up to-morrow?" he said at last. I
nodded. Indeed, had I not been
thinking of it for a week past ? He
held his glass up to the light and
gazed leisurely at it. " Heard any-
thing about me 1 " he asked slowly.

" I don't think so."

" I've kept it pretty dark, pur-
posely." There was a pause of a
minute or so. " Fact is, I'm leaving
this term."

I was meant to express great sur-
prise, and did so. He seemed waiting
for something more. "You will be
very much missed," I ventured at
last.

" Yes, I think I shall," he answered
with decision ; "I think I shall.
The old man told me so, in fact."

" However, I suppose I may con-
gratulate you ? " His face showed
that it was the right question.

" Congratulate me ? On the whole,
yes, I think I am to be congratulated,
— not exactly on leaving this shop,
you understand, but — , well, I've
done what I set out to do — that's
what it is. I think I'm to be con-
gratulated on that."

" And that was ? " I began inter-
rogatively.

He settled himself in his chair and
crossed a long leg over his knee. I
remember noticing that his boots
were particularly good ones. He
saw me glance at them, and on any
other occasion would have told me
the cost ; but this was not an ordina^
occasion. " It's a long story," said
he. " How's the cigar going ? "

"Admirably, and the whisky; and
the longer the story the better."
Truly, there was something different
in the man. I could not have said
that a Aveek earlier.

The Chief Butler took up the cigar-
case and handled it curiously. Then
he pulled out a cigar and rolled it
between tentative fingers. " Not very
strong, are they ? " he asked.

The Sinner and the Problem.

463

"There's a pretty good flavour to
them ; you couldn't call it mild
tobacco."

" Oh," said he, and laid it down
with something like a sigh, I thought.
Presently he took it up again and
examined the label. " You don't
smoke cigarettes, do you ? " he asked
at last.

" Caporal, if I can get them, I do ;
Algerian, sometimes. I generally
carry some kind of cigarette, though."

" May I look at them, if you've got
any on you 1 "

"Why, of course," said I, and
handed him my case. They were
Americans ; I hate your Turkish and
Egyptian stuff.

He regarded the open case with
interest. " Do you know, I think I
should rather like to try one of these,"
he said. And again, I would not
have believed it possible that my
answer could have given me so much
pleasure.

He lay back in his chair, and blew
the smoke gingerly at first, almost as
a schoolboy smokes. Presently he
seemed more at home, — took hold of
it, as it were. When I glanced at
him the third time he was inhaling
the smoke quietly, almost dreamily.
" Odd," he said, " damned odd it
is."

I am not squeamish with regard to
the possibilities of the English lan-
guage, but I had often before arrested
myself in mid-speech in the Chief
Butler's company, fearing to offend.
Yet the expression did not startle me
then, for this was not the Chief
Butler, but more of a human being,
as who should say.

" Odd ? " I asked.

" How it brings it all back.
Twenty years ago," he said slowly,
"twenty — years — ago." And he
blew a mighty cloud to the ceiling.
" My father was a clergyman," he
went on after a little. " He died

just after I left college, died in debt."
He nipped the ash off his cigarette,
and for a time was silent. Then he
spoke deliberately and in short sen-
tences. " When a man of twenty-two
with no relations finds that his sole
possessions in the world are a mathe-
matical degree and five pounds, there's
only one course open to him. At
least I figured it out pretty clearly,
and it seemed so to me. Mind you,
I wasn't a man of accomplishments.
I couldn't turn my hand to scribbling
for papers, or painting pictures. I
couldn't act worth twopence a week,
couldn't sing, not a note in tune. I
knew that then, and I've often been
sorry about it. No, there wasn't
much choice, with only five pounds.

" It's so darned easy too. Just get
a note or so from your tutors and call
on an agent, and the thing's done.
First shove off I got a post, not a bad
one either, as posts go ; forty pounds
a term ; I've had worse since.

"There were eight of us at that
place — biggish school by the sea, it
was ; some of them were decent chaps
and some were bounders. I wonder
what's become of them all now.
There was Swain, — thundering great
bullock of a man he was too. I
remember him carrying a fellow called
Tomlin under his arm round the com-
mon-room, and spanking him, because
Tomlin told him he couldn't sing;
said he'd make Tomlin sing, and he
did too, like one o'clock. And Taff,
he was a funny devil ; used to rot his
arithmetic class ; asked 'em if fourteen
gooseberries grew on three bushes,
how many cats there were in a beef-
steak-pie. The Head came in one
day and found him in full swing, —
class gaping like so many cod-fish,
and a picture of a meat-pie on the
blackboard. He went that term.
And Kippers, too, old Kippers, — he
was a queer chap. That wasn't his
name you know ; we called him

464

The Sinner and the Problem,

Kippers because he was always cheap.
Lord, Lord !

" I was only there two terms ; but
— I don't know, Kippers and I. We
used to get down in the town and go
the rounds. I was some use at bil-
liards in those days, and so was he.
When we'd finished the lot,— still,
most of the bobbies knew us, if there'd
been any row. Kippers used to turn
up late for breakfast, — couldn't touch
a thing ; said he thought he could toy
with a devilled sparrow's leg. The
masters used to breakfast at the
college, you know, not at the school.
Then I'd come in, worse than Kippers.
And there was Swain gulping down
great shovelfuls of porridge, and
Tomlin letting into the cold bacon
like a good 'un. Of course, there'd
have been a row if we hadn't turned
up to breakfast at all, and as it was,
Carver (he was a sort of head-usher,
and a confounded prig at the price we
thought him) used to sit up and snort
a bit when we weighed in with hock
and seltzer instead of tea. Still, he
wasn't a bad sort after all, for he
never said a word to the Head about
us; and he might have made things
deuced unpleasant. Taff, for instance,
— Carver knew all about Taff and tried
to have it out with him, said it wasn't
playing the game to rot your arith-
metic class when you were paid to
teach 'em two and two, and so on ;
and some other things he said, too,
because Taff didn't play football with
the boys as we were supposed to do.
Well, Taff got angry then ; I think
he was a bit ashamed of himself
really, but he went on rotting his
class to rile Carver, and hadn't been
at it ten days before the Head nailed
the whole show, pie and all. Taff
couldn't get work after that. Carver
lent him a fiver.

" Kippers was only there one term ;
he quarrelled with Carver before he
went, like most of us. Carver got

rather touchy because Kippers liked
to play the piano when he came in at
night, and he didn't always come in
as early as he might have, either.
Kippers said it wasn't Carver's or any
one else's business how he spent his
evenings ; and Carver said quite
quietly he didn't care how Kippers
spent his evenings, or where he spent
them, or whether he spent them at
all, — didn't care enough about him in
fact — but he wasn't going to be
waked up at two o'clock in the morn-
ing by a tipsy puppy trying to sit
straight on a music-stool and playing
the piano with his foot and a gin-
bottle. That riled Kippers, because
he could play and it didn't matter if
he was drunk or sober, — he seemed
sort of at home with it, if you know
what I mean — so he chucked the
milk -jug at Carver and went out in a
tearing rage, and wrote his resignation
bang away. The Head wasn't sorry,
I should fancy. Kippers ! I wonder
now —

" Then there was Larson. He was
a rum cove, always thinking about
his health. I don't believe there was
anything the matter with him, except
that he ate too much. He said he
wanted to build up his constitution or
some such rot, so he used to swallow
buckets of rice-pudding and prunes at
lunch, because rice-pudding was starch
and prunes were pills ; I forget
exactly how he put it. Then he was
fearfully particular about tea and
tannin and stewed leaves, and wouldn't
drink the stuff unless he'd seen it
made, so to speak. In the evening
he'd swill great cups of cocoa and go
to bed holding his stomach with both
hands, and hoping he'd feel a bit more
built up the next morning. Then at
breakfast Swain would whisper to
Tomlin that Larson was looking ter-
ribly pulled down, poor devil, and
Larson would cheer up like anything
and go for the porridge all over agam.

The Sinner and the Problem.

465

And what an appetite he had. That
rice—

" Of course, Carver and Swain and
Tomlin, they were all right. Carver's
got a school of his own now, and
Swain's a parson; his people gave him
a living I think. Tomlin came in for
some money. They were all right —
steady I mean, and so on. But the
rest of us, — bar Larson, and he was
always thinking about his diges-
tion— "

The Chief Butler stopped, looked
at me, and astonished me with this
apparently irrelevant question. ' ' Ever
done anything with a revolver, potting
at a bottle, I mean, — anything of that
sort ? Well, I dare say you know it
isn't as easy as it looks. The thing
seems as if it must be built crooked,
and you get humbugging with the
mechanism of it — looking down the
barrel and so on, and then the
jury—

" Eh ? Oh, well, it was this way.
There was a school near us we used
to play at football, and we got to
know the masters there through meet-
ing them down in the town, and at
the club. There was a chap there
named Mellish who was rather older
;han the rest of us ; in fact, he was
some way over fifty, though we didn't
;hink he was so much just then, for
used to humbug about with us a
good bit, and sometimes you'd hardly
:iave thought he was much older than
we were, unless you caught him in a
t>ad light, or when he wasn't remem-
bering. Once at the club he saw me
staring at him when he looked like
that, and I suppose he knew what I
was thinking, for he gave a little
jump and a smile and spanked Carver,
who was trying a nastyish losing
iazard. Carver swore because he
missed it, but when he saw who it
was he just laughed and said it was
after he'd made the shot and it didn't
baulk him. I think he knew Mellish
No. 498. — VOL. LXXXIII.

was feeling pretty bad : we just
thought he was an ass.

"Mellish seemed to cotton to me
more than to the others ; we used to
go out walks together, and that was
how it all came about. Mellish, you
see, knew one or two of the farmers
round the place, and he got one of
them to let him put up a revolver-
range in a field there was, and he and
I used to pot about there, bottles,
you know, and sardine-tins and apples;
an apple don't look very big at twenty
yards. / couldn't hit the things.
We used to put up six in a row
on lathes at different heights and
then walk up to them from catch
distances, firing as quickly as you
could, — same as if men were running
at you — because Mellish used to talk
about going to California and said it
would come in useful. He brought
an old coat one day, and amused him-
self firing through the side-pockets ;
it was rummy to see him. Then
another day Carver came, and I
thought he looked a bit queerly at
Mellish now and again, but he never
said anything at the time. Well, one
Saturday Mellish asked me to go with
him to this farmer's, and on the way
he got talking about his prospects and
so on, said he was an old man and
he'd never get another post, and that
he didn't know what he should do,
because he hadn't any money or any
people to go to ; he was only fit to
teach quadratics and irregular verbs,
and couldn't take to another business
at his time of life. I asked him what
he was driving at, and then it came
out he'd had notice to go; at least,
he'd been advised to resign, as the
Head wanted a younger man for his
work. Well, it seemed he'd tried
mining-shares to get a bit of capital
together to start again, and the mine
had gone wrong. He asked what he'd
better do. He was beastly melan-
choly ; I'd never seen him like it

H H

466

The Sinner and the Problem.

before, and I said people had been in
worse holes than that before, — I don't
know what I said. However, before
we carne to the farmer's field he
cheered up wonderfully, and laughed
at me for missing a great tin kettle
we put up to shoot at, till I thought
he'd never stop. He knocked the
spout off the thing himself, and
laughed at that too. Then we stuck
up the lathes and the apples, and I
had my six shots and got two of
them, and jolly proud I was, for I'd
never got more than one before and
not often that. Well, I put up the
apples for Mellish, and he went and
blazed away at them. When he
stopped he hadn't hit one, — he was a
first-class shot — and he seemed puzzled
by the set of his face. I saw him
looking pretty hard at the revolver,
and he said something about its being
foul ; he was squinting down the
barrel when he spoke. It never
occurred to me to stop him, for I
thought he'd fired all six. Well,
there was a bang and he dropped ;
that's all I ever knew about it. The
bullet went in at his cheek —

" You've seen dead men before ?
Well, I hadn't. I didn't think he
was dead, because he seemed looking
at something, — something miles and
miles away it was — staring and
staring. Of course, I got the far-
mer's wife, — said there'd been an
accident. She called some of the
men, and between us we carried him
in. But his eyes — they got set I
suppose.

" Have you ever been in a real
thundering funk ? If you had asked
me that once, I shouldn't have known
what you meant. It was that face ;
it used to come round me and stare
at me ; it wasn't so bad in the day-
time, though it would come then,
sometimes ; but at night — God ! I
had to go up-stairs in the dark to
get to bed, and all the way it kept

jigging in front of me, going a little
way back and then coming at me
again, right into my face, — white it
was, and the eyes staring and the
jaw dropped. Have you ever noticed
what it looks like when the jaw of
a man drops as far as it will go 1
And when I got to my room I
couldn't find the matches. It took
me ages to find them, and all the
while I was saying, 'That terrible
face, that terrible face,' over and
over again, though I didn't know
it till there was a light. I tell
you, for days I saw that thing. I
dreaded being alone. I used to in-
vent all sorts of excuses for being
with people. Once in broad day-
light it came ; it was on a horribly
tall body, and it came and stooped
over my shoulder and looked at me
upside down. That was a week
afterwards. I hoped it would have
gone, you know. I got drunk that
night, — it took a long while — and I
put out the light. After that it
didn't come again.

" I left the school that term, and
went for another place. You see, I
wanted to save. I've been saving
ever since, steadily. It has changed
me, I know ; because one has to give
up a lot of things, whiskey, for in
stance, and tobacco. I couldn't makts
up my mind about tobacco for a long
time ; but I'm glad I did — I'm glad
I did. And shaving too, — I grew a
beard once, but it wouldn't have
paid, because it made me look older.
That shows you what little things
I've thought about.

" But it has changed me. For one
thing, I've found it awfully hard to
think about anything else ; and the
younger men have always laughed at
me when I've begun gassing about it.
That's only natural, I suppose, but
it's their game to save, you know ;
it's their game, and they none of them
doit.

The Sinner and the Problem.

467

" Of course, it has been hard work.
I've been very thorough about it, very
thorough, calculating things before-
hand, you know. Here, I'll show
you something."

The Chief Butler arose, went to a
drawer, unlocked it and produced —
the black leather book.

" I'm not going to bore you with
all of it," he said. " Let me see ;
yes, July 31st." And he pointed to
an item which read : cigars 4s. 60?. —
whiskey 4s. — two siphons soda-water
9<2.— 9s. 3d. "I calculated that a
fortnight ago," he said. "I knew
you wouldn't be out to-night, because
of your packing." He looked at the
figures pensively. " It may seem a
lot," he said, " for one evening, —
nine-and-threepence — but I meant to
spend it, and I think I'm justified.
I've done what I set out to do."

" And that was, exactly 1 "

" To save a certain sum of money,
a thousand pounds, in fact. I've
saved that, and a little over."

" You are a very wonderful man,"
I said.

" In some ways I think I am," he
replied ; " yes, in some ways — ^>ne
way, at all events." He picked up
the book. " I've had this for twenty
years now," he said, " and during
those twenty years I've never made
a real miscalculation. Everything
lias cost what I thought it would ;
I've always been able to ink in my
figures, so to speak. Everything I've
set out to do I've done, — in the first
part of the book."

"The first part?"

" It's divided into two parts, you
see. Part one, while I'm still an
assistant-master, and part two, when
I've got a school of my own. The
lease of that school-house, for in-
stance ; I made it out worth so much,
and I got it for that much, after a
bit. Yes, I've always done what I
set out to do in the first part, — all

except one thing I haven't been able
to try yet."

" What is that ? " I asked.

He hesitated. "I meant to tell
you. Somehow, — I think I'll wait
till to morrow," he said at last. " If
it comes off all right, I'll ask you to
drink my health."

" Good heavens," said I, " I for-
got ; " and I raised my glass, but he
stopped me. "No, wait till to-
morrow." He strode across to a
cupboard and opened the door. " See
there," he said ; there was a bottle of
champagne. " Wait till to-morrow,"
he repeated, and he bade me good-
night.

I went to my room and leaned out
over the sill. The moon was high,
and there was little doing between
me and the sky, — indigo powdered
with a dust of brilliants. Down
wind and up the house-wall came the
scent of mignonette and the warm
breath of hay and meadow-sweet from
the sloping field, and I drew in large
draughts of it, and let my thoughts
run riot back through the three
summer months I had spent in that
happy countryside. I thought of the
first evening I had sat under my
laburnum tree and looked out over
the valley; of the guileless pair of
urchins who had installed themselves
as my companions from the outset ;
of the wonderful nights when the
nightingales called up the valley to
me to come and see what secrets the
primroses and bluebells by the lake-
side could tell me ; of the strange
story of the Other Man, and then of
the quaint history I had heard that
evening. And I fell to guessing at
what might be the one thing in the
first part that the Chief Butler had
reserved until to-morrow. But that
word to-morrow set me thinking of
what the morning held in store for
me also, and over that I fell

2

468

The Sinner and the Problem.

CHAPTER XX.

LITTLE did I dreain (of all things !)
who was to precede me to the lake ;
nor much of that bottle of champagne,
though that had stirred my curiosity
not a little. But at ten o'clock the
next morning, looking out of my
window, I beheld the Chief Butler,
top-hatted and grave as of yore,
setting out — lake-wards ! And I
watched him till he disappeared in
the trees.

If I was astonished at this at the
moment, and if I began to wonder at
his reason, and had almost decided
that he had deferred until to-day the
farewell necessary to be taken from
so near a neighbour, I was saved from
further speculation by the appearance
on the scene of the Sinner. He and
the Problem also had witnessed the
Chief Butler's departure.

" Did you see 1 " said the Sinner.
11 Isn't it a nuisance ? He's going
down to see my cousin's gardener ; on
business, he said ; I heard him say
so at breakfast."

" Is that so, Sinner 1 But why is
it a nuisance 1 "

" Because we've got to go and get
him a cab. You see, we're the only
two left, because all the boys go away
early on the last day ; and it takes
ever so long to get cabs."

" I'm very sorry, Sinner. But
isn't the inn where you get cabs on
the way to the lake?" The Sinner
confessed that it was. " Then why
not order the cab on the way ? "

" But, — but I thought you were
coming with us down to the lake.
And then, if we came back here, it
would take — "

" I see. Then I'm the nuisance
really, it seems ? "

" I didn't mean that," said the
Sinner doubtfully.

The obvious solution of the diffi-
culty was for me to finish my packing

and to follow the boys alone, a course
of action which appeared to commend
itself to them, and the last I saw of
them was a wave from the Sinner's
hat ; he was shouting at me from the
corner to be quick with my packing.

Before I had finished that, the
Chief Butler returned. He walked
slowly, whipping at the poppy-heads
with his stick. When he neared my
window he looked up, caught my eye,
and looked down again. He entered
the house. Presently a cab drove
past, bound for the school. The
Chief Butler hailed it from the door-
step ; there ensued a short altercation
(I imagined a lapse in the Sinner's
memory) and the Chief Butler's hand
went to his pocket. Presently there
was a little procession of lackeys and
servant-maids bearing portmanteaux
and boxes. The procession took ten
minutes or so, and I watched it from
my window. There was a final search
for possible oversights, and the coach-
man climbed upon his box. It
occurred to me to go down, and then
I remembered that the Chief Butler
had seen me at my window. I
hesitated, and the cab drove away.

I turned to my packing. When I
thought about it, things came clearer.
I thought of all the Chief Butler
had said to me the evening before ;
especially, of course, of his reference
to the one thing in the first part of
the book which, unlike the rest, he
was unable to ink in, as he put it.
I called to mind his hesitant answers
to my questions when first I inquired
of him concerning the inmates of the
red-brick house in the valley ; his
meditative acquiescence when I had
asked him if he would not need a wife
to help him keep his school-in-the-air
going ; his self-assurance with regard to
his calculations for the future. There
was no doubt about it ; he had asked
the Lady of the Lake — no, but it was
absurd ! Why, he did not speak to her

The Sinner and the Problem.

469

once a month ! He had been twelve
years at the school ; she must have
been a baby of — but it was absurd !

Yet was it not possible that the
man, accustomed for twenty years to
regard the future as something to be
mapped out exactly, forecast with pre-
cision and inevitably inked in, had
somehow built his wish into his ac-
counts,— had dated in his acceptance
hardly so much as a future possibility,
rather as a future fact1? I could think
of no other conclusion ; and then, —
the bottle of champagne.

That set me on another train of
thought, for the Chief Butler had not
said good-bye to me, not a word of
farewell in any shape or form. Per-
haps the cab, — perhaps he was taking
away his goods in instalments. I went
down to his room ; it looked bare
enough, but then, there was never
over much furniture to boast of. The
cupboard was empty ; he had taken
away what was there last night, and
there were no healths to be drunk after
all. There was not a doubt about
anything ; and as if to clinch matters,
before I finished my packing, his cab
(you could not mistake the sorry
fleabitten white) came rattling back
through the gates as I idly stared out
over the valley.

That reminded me of the time.
Doubtless the Sinner and the Problem
were even now playing havoc with the
trout and the butterflies ; and I set off
down the hill, and I know, — though
I felt a strange hesitancy in going —
that there was but one thought worth
thinking then. Had not to-morrow
cornel

The sun was on the woods, and the
sun was on the water just as it had
been that day when first I saw the
Lady of the Lake among her swans.
And there lay the Problem among the
bracken, reading, just as he lay among
the primroses on the day when I drew
my picture of the Sinner ; and the

Sinner was over knees in the brook,
rejoicing with a net and wet knicker-
bockers. And the Lady of the Lake
herself stood on the bank of the
stream and turned to meet me as I
came.

" We are here, as you see, all three
of us. We look happy enough, don't
we 1 " She picked up a pebble and
dropped it neatly in front of the
Sinner, who paused to greet me cheer-
fully. " Look at that child ! Is there
a happier mortal in the world at this
moment, do you suppose ? "

"Oh, I nearly got it," cried the
Sinner, and saved himself from perils
of deep waters by an over-hanging
bough.

" And the other, too, — but he is a
quaint little person. He came down
here this morning, and almost the
first words he said to me were to beg
me never to leave him, — never to go
away, I think he put it."

" And you said ? "

"Oh, I told him that I should
be here always, and that he should
come whenever he liked, and that he
was a good boy, and lots of other
things. Then I made him a nosegay
and he is as happy as the day is
long. Aren't you 1 " she called. The
Problem looked up questioningly.
" You're quite happy, aren't you ? "
she repeated.

The Problem said " Yes, thank
you," (he was ever of a polite habit),
and returned contentedly to his book.

Just then the Sinner uttered a cry
of joy, splashed out of the brook and
stood exultant before us. " I've got
one, — a real one, isn't it 1 — a trout."

It was a very small speckled being,
and it flapped in a disheartened way
at the bottom of the net.

"It is indeed. But my dear Sinner,
look — you're standing on your stock-
ings. Run and put the trout in the
can."

The Sinner, after a doubtful glance

470

The Sinner and the Problem.

at wet footprints on a black stocking,
repaired to the edge of the brook, and
searched among the reeds. Then he
brought his capture to us, restored
to its natural element.

" Why, Sinner, that's my paint-
water bottle. Where did you get it?"
" Oh, is it yours ? I found it by the
lake. I thought it was like yours,
but then I didn't think you would
have forgotten it." So I had left it
by the lake, when that miserable
portrait — but I was resolved to think
no more of that. The Sinner regarded
it wistfully. " Shall I put it away 1 "
he asked.

" No, Sinner, no ; you may have it,
all for your very own."

" Oh, thank you," said the Sinner.
" I think it likes it, you know," he
added, examining his prisoner with
attention.

" That reminds me," said the Lady
of the Lake; "I picked up what I
think is one of your brushes." She
produced from her pocket my wash-
brush. My paint-water bottle, then,
was not all I had forgotten. " What
in the world is a brush of that size
used for 1 " she went on.

"The work I am most fond of,
skies chiefly, — heaven, if you're
poetical."

"Wouldn't it do for washing out
rather well ? Washing out something
you didn't like, for instance 1 "

"It was not last used for that,"
I answered, looking into her eyes.
I thought she dropped them for the
fraction of a second. I declare I had
forgotten the boys altogether.

" It must have done a lot of work
in its time," she observed, looking at
it critically, and then back at my-
self.

" If I were to tell you all the Avork
that brush has done, I should be

telling you a long story. And part
of it — supposing of course that it
concerned anyone who was of the
slightest importance to yourself, which
I have every reason to believe is not
the case — part of it might be con-
sidered interesting. You might even
find it amusing."

The Sinner was listening in rapt
silence. " Oh, do tell us," he said ;
and I am sure the Lady of the Lake
started at his voice.

"You see, Sinner," said I, "this
brush belonged to a very old friend
of mine." I took it from her hand as
I spoke. "And once he painted a
very wonderful picture; indeed, I
believe he hardly knew himself how
he had painted the picture, it was so
wonderful. And some one, — he nevert
could tell why — hated this picture,
and took this brush and daubed it all
over until you couldn't tell there had
ever been a picture at all."

" And what did he do ? " questioned
the Sinner with breathless interest.

" What did he do, Sinner ? Really,
I hardly know ; in fact I'm not sure
that he did anything particular. I
think he was so dumbfounded by the
fact that the picture he had painted
was gone, — for he loved it, you see,
all the time he was painting it — that
for a little time he went mad." I
heard the Lady of the Lake catch her
breath. " And then he recovered ;
but he knew he could never be the
same afterwards, because he had lost
this picture; unless, of course —
unless —

" Unless what ? " asked the Sinner.

But at that moment a black and
white butterfly floated lazily over the
bracken to a thorn-bush. The Sinner
forgot my story ; and I was left with
the Lady of the Lake, who stood
facing me.

THE END.

471

THE MAN IN THE RANKS.

IT has been for some time obvious
that many changes must be made
in the composition, organisation, and
training of our military forces, if any
real benefit is to be drawn from the
lessons taught us by the course of
events in South Africa. That many
changes are to be made the Secretary
for War has now promised us ; but it
is not here proposed to attempt any
criticism of those changes, partly
because this paper was practically
written before they had been made
public, and partly because its main
theme comes only incidentally within
their scope. It is an extremely im-
portant feature in any scheme of mili-
tary reform, and will need to be most
carefully considered, as Mr. Brodrick
is doubtless well convinced ; but it was
of course impossible to labour every
point in so comprehensive a scheme
within the compass of a single speech.

If events at the theatre of war
have proved one point beyond all
others it is that our existing military
organisation is inadequate to the
needs of the Empire. While the
British army, stiffened by its re-
serves, backed by the enthusiastic
loyalty and material support of the
Colonies, and assisted by its own
auxiliary forces, is engaged in a
struggle in one part of the globe,
troubles arising in other quarters
serve to point the moral that it is
unwise to have all our eggs in one
basket. It would be absurd, of
course, to suggest that the resources
of the Empire have been exhausted
by the necessary display of strength
in South Africa; to believe that we
can rely in the future upon our small

standing army alone to keep the
British flag flying in all quarters of
the globe would be equally chi-
merical. The present campaign has
also afforded incontestable proof that
the British as a race have not de-
teriorated in any of those qualities
that go to the making of first-rate
soldiers, and, in consequence, that a
rich material exists and may be
drawn upon, under satisfactory con-
ditions, for the purpose of increasing
the strength of the Imperial army.
That the existing strength, at least,
of the army must be maintained, on
the withdrawal of the strong incite-
ment to patriotic fervour which the
stress of present circumstances has
created, needs no demonstration ; the
difficulty will be found in devising the
satisfactory conditions.

The additional strength supplied by
the colonial and auxiliary forces will
of course be withdrawn with the
pressure of the occasion, and one can
only accept the fact while regretting
that the ordinary conditions of mili-
rary service do not afford sufficient
inducement to these splendid fellows
to throw in their lot with the trained
troops they have so ably re-inforced
at a critical period of our history.
Nobody could expect the majority of
those who responded so nobly to the
Nation's call for volunteers to look
upon life in the ranks as a desirable
career in the piping times of peace.
Yet it becomes clearer every day
that without their assistance our
small standing army would have
found it a terrible task to reach Pre-
toria, whether by way of the Tugela
or across the Orange River ; not, let

472

The Man in the Ranks.

it be said, through any want of pro-
fessional capacity in either officers or
men, but from sheer lack of numbers.

Assuming our present system of
voluntary enlistment to be the only
possible one, let us consider to what
extent it is responsible for the diffi-
culty which we shall be compelled
to recognise on every occasion that
land-operations on a large scale are
forced upon us, — the difficulty, that
is to say, of numbers. Much has
been said and written with regard
to the rival claims of long and short
service systems, but it is very ques-
tionable whether the arguments for
or against either can affect the main
consideration before us, that of the
sufficiency or otherwise of a volun-
tary army. To exactly grasp the
position it will be necessary to go to
the root of the matter and to con-
sider at once why men enlist at all ;
and despite a popular belief to the
contrary it may be said that a reply
to this momentous question could
not be given in a single concise
sentence.

Those who accept the shilling differ
so widely in character, early training,
and social position, that the impossi-
bility of assigning a general reason
or cause for their action is obvious ;
but whatever difficulty the subject
may present, it is absolutely neces-
sary to a comprehensive study of
this matter of voluntary enlistment
that we should ascertain how it
happens that in the course of a single
year upwards of twenty-eight thou-
sand men offer themselves for military
service. Is it not a surprising fact
that in this prosperous country so
many young fellows are to be found
ready, of their own free will, to cut
themselves adrift from all domestic
ties and associations, discarding oppor-
tunities for securing a comfortable
competency in peaceful avocations, to
enter upon the life of vicissitude and

danger presented by a career in the
ranks ? It is to the explanation of
this fact that the authorities must
look in their anxiety to provide
means for ensuring a steady, con-
stant, and increasing supply of
recruits for the army.

The explanation is not to be found
in the influence which many will sup-
pose to exercise the greatest power,
— the influence of patriotism. It is
rarely indeed that a man becomes a
soldier in time of peace under the
influence of this motive. The patriotic
sentiment may be present in all cases
to the extent of a belief that a man
cannot engage in a more honourable
service than that of fighting his
country's battles, but in ordinary
times, when we are not engaged in
fighting or in preparing to fight,
there is no call for such an exhibi-
tion of patriotism as that which we
have proudly witnessed in recent
days. It almost invariably happens
that an immediate increase of re-
cruits marks any threat of war, and
that is, so far, a satisfactory proof
of patriotic feeling; but we cannot
afford to wait for the opening
of hostilities before gathering an
army together. Recent events tend
to prove (if proof were needed) that
the military instinct is inherent in
the British race, and even before
the call to arms we had ample
evidence of that fact in the spread
of the Volunteer movement. Nothing
is more striking to the stranger in
London than the number of men to
be seen about the streets in uniform
on any Saturday afternoon ; it is a
half-holiday, and the youthful citizen
is keen upon the enjoyable relaxation
to be obtained in the exercise of
arms. Take again the evidence pro-
vided by the military camps that are
formed on established holidays ; you
find men from all parts of the king-
dom, from town and rural district

The Man in the Ranks.

473

alike, assembling for training as
soldiers ; they know of no better
way of spending a holiday, these
men of peace, than by coming to-
gether, often at much expense and
personal inconvenience, to obtain in-
struction in the art of war and fit
themselves for the duty of defending
hearth and home.

There is indeed no lack of patriotism
in these islands; but in times of peace
we must not look for such a display
of the quality as would indicate a
preference for barrack -life over all
other pursuits.

In popular belief there seem to be
but two causes that send a man into
the ranks, — destitution, and the at-
tractions of a smart uniform. While
taking exception to this belief as a
whole we may admit that want and
a love of display are two strong
supports of the recruiting-market.
Temporary depression in trade in-
variably results in an increase of
recruits; indeed it has been affirmed
that the supply of soldiers is entirely
regulated by the state of the labour-
market. If this view of the matter
be correct then the periodical dis-
turbances of business that result from
the strikes and lock-outs which are
now so deplorably common are not
altogether unmixed evils. To men
who have fallen out of the running
in one line of life and are unable to
procure employment in any other, the
recruiting-sergeant may appear as a
saviour; but only, we may be sure,
when the position has become inevit-
able after a brave struggle to secure
a livelihood by other means than the
accceptance of a service entailing
deprivation of liberty.

Simple, honest rustics, labouring
men of bucolic origin who have drifted
to the great urban centres in search
of work, town-bred toilers and artisans,
all of them men whose only prospect
it has been to fight through the battle

of life in the sweat of their brows, but
who have approached perilously near
to want through nothing but lack of
employment, such men are to be found
with every batch of recruits arriving
at a military depot. That many
thoughtless youths are unable to with-
stand the attraction of a showy dress
and the pomp and circumstance of
military life will be readily granted.
But it may be argued that in neither
of these cases do we obtain genuine
volunteers ; that they are in one case
driven, and in the other lured to a
service which should more properly
stand upon its merits as a line of
employment offering material advan-
tages and prospects to those prepared
to adopt it. From this position it is
an easy stage to an assertion that the
word voluntary is altogether mis-
applied in connection with our system
of enlistment. The answer, of course,
must be that even in these cases the
men are volunteers in the truest sense,
inasmuch as they offer their services
spontaneously; but that these two
categories do not, as popularly sup-
posed, cover the whole ground of
recruiting influence. Occasionally, it
may be, men seek the army as a sanc-
tuary, as a refuge in the seclusion of
which they may hope to elude the
most vigilant pursuit, and hide in
safety until the storm which threat-
ened to overwhelm them has passed.
Domestic strife, and family differences
of all kinds, are also important factors
in the supply of recruits ; and a salve
for blighted affections is not infre-
quently sought and found in the
wandering life of a soldier. Again,
there are many cases of loss of position
and means which throw upon the
world men who have not been trained
to a handicraft or taught to labour,
men who cannot dig and who would
rather be hanged than beg ; volunteers
are furnished by all such causes.
These instances are mentioned only

474

The Man in the Ranks.

as causes springing from chance occur-
rences. It is not urged that they
account for any large proportion of a
year's recruits, or that we are entirely
dependent upon such precarious
sources of supply; these extraordinary
reasons for enlistment could be multi-
plied many times, no doubt, but the
influences at work to provide us with
a standing army are surely not
all ascribable to the romantic and
pathetic incidents and accidents of life.

What is to be said, for instance,
in favour of military service as an
employment promising some small
measure of success in life, and how
many of the great body of recruits
shown in the PRELIMINARY RETURN
OF THE BRITISH ARMY have con-
sidered their prospects from that
point of view ?

It is certain that we have reached
a stage in the history of the British
army when the conditions of enlist-
ment must be seriously reconsidered ;
and it will depend very largely upon
the answer to the foregoing question
whether the occasion can be met by
modifying the existing regulations,
or will demand drastic reform. If
military service offers nothing but
an immediate competence, or tem-
porary relief from pressing ills, the
supply of recruits must continue to
depend upon sources which cannot be
expected to yield the best material,
either in quantity or quality. On
the other hand, when those who enlist
are actuated by the laudable desire of
securing a position equal or superior
to any they could hope to attain in
civil life, when they can regard the
service as one affording scope for the
exercise of talent and ability, or for
the display of those attributes of
character which would go far to com-
mand success in any other line of
life, then, indeed, we may trust to
a constant supply of recruits to be
regulated solely by the nation's needs.

What, then, is the present position
of the matter ] We know, of course,
that, as the case stands to-day, many
men enlist with a direct view to
advancement in the service. There
are those, for instance, who join with
the avowed intention of obtaining
the commissions which they failed to
secure by the usual course ; but these
men are usually supported by family
influence and their colonel's foreknow-
ledge of the object with which they
have joined the ranks, and the regu-
lations afford every facility for the
attainment of their desire. To follow
up this modern feature of recruiting
it would be necessary to go into the
whole question of promotion from the
ranks, a subject, certainly, that has a
direct bearing upon the matter of this
paper, but one which cannot now be
exhaustively dealt with. It will be
sufficient to state here that the pro-
vision of any number of such com-
missions would not affect recruiting
for the subordinate ranks to any
appreciable extent. The supply of
officers is one question : to keep the
ranks filled is another ; and the sim-
plicity of the first does not afford a
solution to the latter.

The doubtful point at present is
whether the service offers greater,
or even equal, advantages to those
afforded by other avocations to re-
spectable, intelligent, fairly well edu-
cated men who depend upon merit
alone for success. It would be the
wisdom of fools to suppose that twenty-
eight thousand men are to be attracted
each year by the military fashion-plates
strung to the railings of the National
Gallery, St. Martin's disused burial-
ground, and other conspicuous places
where recruiting-sergeants congregate.
Our military strength may be main-
tained by chance, but in these days
of universal education we must look
to other chances -than the vanity of
the individual ; until the Service can

The Man in the Hanks.

475

be accepted as a career in which young
men of good class may hope to do as
well as those engaged in other pursuits,
the supply of recruits will, and must,
remain a matter of grand uncer-
tainty.

One great drawback to recruiting
undoubtedly is that a career in the
ranks cannot now be adopted as the
profession of a life-time. If the Service
be not widely known for the advan-
tages it offers, it is certainly familiar
to the many as a line of life which
leads to nothing but loss of social
position. The step taken by the man
who enlists to-day is, in one sense, as
irrevocable as it would have been in
the old days when men joined for
unlimited service ; he falls out of the
running in civil life and his subsequent
career will be sensibly affected by that
fact. Of no other man can it be so
truly said as of the soldier that he
knows not his future ; his period of
service in the ranks may be short,
but his future will furnish confirma-
tion of the saying, "Once start a
being out of the usual course of
existence and many and strange will
be his adventures ere he once more
be allowed to regain the common
stream and be permitted to float
down in silent tranquility to the grave
common to all." The difficult point
to determine in the case of the soldier
is the exact period when he will be
allowed to regain the common stream ;
it certainly does not necessarily syn-
chronise with his discharge from the
army.

So long as that blot remains on our
system of recruiting the maintenance
of a proper numerical strength will
depend upon chance ; the supply of
recruits will be extremely irregular,
varying with the conditions of trade
and a man's prospects of obtaining
a livelihood elsewhere than in the
military service of his country ; and
the old problem of how to popularise

an unpopular service will remain
unsolved.

The efficiency of an army as a whole
must depend to a great extent upon
the rapidity with which gaps can be
filled. The fighting-machine may be
highly efficient so far as the capabili-
ties that result from training are
concerned, but the foundation upon
which it is reared must be a plentiful
supply of recruits.

What is the present position ? A
few years ago an Under Secretary of
State for War had to confess in the
House of Commons, when dealing
with the question of recruiting for
additional battalions of the Guards,
that the difficulty of procuring recruits
had been increased and intensified by
the mere chance that the Jubilee
celebrations of that year of grace
in which he was speaking provided
temporary employment to the classes
from which the supply is generally
drawn. Has the position so far im-
proved that we can with confidence
propose in the Army Estimates for
the current year to add battalions
and batteries to an army never yet
freed from that difficulty of procuring
recruits in anything like constantly
sufficient numbers ? Not, surely, if
we still rely on the belief, or rest in
the hope, that the chances arising
from romance, sentiment, and want
will continue propitious.

Now and again we hear an opinion
expressed, with great hesitancy it is
true, that the one remedy for a
paucity of recruits is conscription.
One can understand and appreciate
the hesitation of those who would
express this conviction; it is very
disturbing, and scares the man in the
street even more than do the reported
failures of generals in the field. It
trenches somewhat on the liberty of
the subject, and he \vould be a bold
man in a British crowd who would
not pause and reflect before giving

476

The Man in the Hanks.

utterance to the distasteful word.
There is a semblance of resorting to
extremes in any suggestions favouring
conscription, and in this matter the
British public is inclined to discern
virtue in half-measures. Admitting
that it becomes more clearly evident
every year that the opportunities for
securing comfortable subsistence in
civil life and, underlying and over-
reaching all, the spread of education,
render it imperative that something
should be done to relieve the diffi-
culty of procuring recruits, even so
the country is not at present pre-
pared to calmly consider, much less
to entertain, any proposals for uni-
versal conscription. In seeking a
.solution of the difficulty therefore,
we must have regard for the happy
mean, and remodel our existing sys-
tem by cutting away objectionable
features and providing addititional
inducements to desirable young men
to join.

Before any steps can be taken to
this end, however, it must be fully
recognised that the recruiting-market
is in direct competition with all other
avenues of employment. We live in
an age of competition, and in the
matter of securing a livelihood we
are all Ishmaelites, the one to the
other, by force of present circum-
stances. A proper appreciation of
this feature of the case points to the
necessity for improving the social
position of the soldier, and ensuring
that he shall not be hampered on
return to a civil career, or be made
to suffer in after years for having
devoted the best part of his life to
the service of his country. There is
no occasion to talk of " a clean
sweep " or to have recourse to an
entirely new, possibly dangerous, and,
from a national point of view, un-
questionably disagreeable system. The
British army, we must all allow, has
not done badly in less exacting times

on the prop of recruiting by chance,
and the old stick may be permitted
to stand as still serviceable ; to the
shelter afforded by enlistment must
be added a prospect of continuous
employment, not necessarily in the
army, and a position in life equal to
any to be secured in other pursuits
by men of ordinary ability and good
character. By these means we may
hope to stave off conscription ; in this
direction lies one possible solution of
the recruiting-difficulty.

Proposals are abroad for a substan-
tial increase of our land-forces, and
if we are not to be satisfied with the
mere addition of cadres to existing
battalions we must realise that we
can cling no longer in fancied security
to a system which has lagged behind
the requirements of the time. And
now is the moment to make an effort
to remedy the faults of that system.
THE BATTLE OP DORKING, and all the
vast crop of literature which has
sprung from that seed, may have
served to educate the public in the
past, but to-day the British Public
stands in no need of tutoring in a
matter of such vital importance to
the Empire as the efficiency of its
army ; the campaign in South Africa
has illustrated and emphasised our
needs, and the country is prepared to
profit by the lessons it has taught us.

Those who have advocated an in-
crease in the soldier's pay as the only
panacea for the recruiting difficulty
which invariably follows the transi-
tion from a state of war to one of
peace, will learn with something of
a shock that Mr. Brodrick does not
propose to increase it. " I have my-
self," he said, " the gravest doubts
whether any increased pay we could
give, unless we gave something like
double, would really bring in a dif-
ferent stamp of recruit." It is pos-
sible that Mr. Brodrick will have to
reconsider his determination before his

The Man in the Banks.

477

six new army-corps are established.
Yet an increase, and even a substan-
tial increase, of pay is by no means
the only solution of the problem ; and
among other things must be included
the position assigned to the soldier
in our unwritten code of social classi-
fication. The now almost universal
adoption of the title esquire would
seem to have elevated the general
populace of these islands to a social
height from which the ex-soldier
stands out as a nonentity. It need
not be a matter of doubt that this
condition of service, of becoming one
of a class apart, often operates as a
deterrent to desirable young men who
would otherwise take the step to
which they are prompted by inclina-
tion, of enlisting with the single view
and intention of becoming soldiers by
profession. It may even be accepted
without question that many, who are
already soldiers at heart, succeed in
restraining their desire for a military
career for fear of losing caste, and of
being classed for the remainder of
their days in a position below that
they already occupy in civil life.

Society has been described as "the
intercourse of persons on a footing
of equality, real or apparent." This
severely qualified definition very accur-
ately describes the section of military
society to be found in the barrack-
room. In any large batch of recruits
arriving at a military depot are to be
found representatives of many and
various sections of civil society, from
low, through all the varying degrees
of respectability and gentility, to high.
From a close consideration of the per-
sonnel of our army it would appear
that we must now have reached the
condition of perfection so pithily de-
scribed by the Duke of Wellington :
" We must compose our army of sol-
diers drawn from all classes of the
population of the country; from the
good and middling, as well in rank as

in education, as from the bad ; and not
as other nations, and we in particular
do, from the bad only." Clearly we
have made most satisfactory progress
in the direction desiderated by the
Great Duke in the interval between
the Peninsular and the South African
campaigns, and it is necessary that
we should give full recognition to
that fact.

From the date of enlistment all
soldiers are placed on a footing of
equality. Their positions in civil
society, real or apparent, are lost to
them ; men of all classes, of the good
and middling, as well in rank as in
education, are clothed, fed, housed,
and in every respect treated as a class
apart, — as soldiers. They are stripped
of all outward and visible signs of
social degree ; their very individuality
is lost in uniforms of a precise pattern
and colour ; they are required to per-
form the same duties, and are in every
respect reduced to one dead level.
And the question may be asked, — is
a proper appreciation accorded to the
position of a soldier viewed from this
stand-point? That question may well
be put now when the nation is about
to remodel the composition and increase
the strength of its military forces ;
because if we hope to persuade a
larger proportion of the populace of
these islands to accept this distasteful
condition, it will be necessary to con-
vince them that it is not a process of
levelling down.

A higher standard of education
and, let us hope, of morals also,
obtains in this day, and the only
resemblance that the majority of our
soldiers bear to the brave men of old
is to be found in inherited courage
and a coat of a particular colour.
That coat, probably, has more to do
with the degree of estimation in which
the wearer is held by his brother of
more sombre attire than aught else.
In the building days of the British

478

The Man in the Ranks.

Empire it could, no doubt, be said
with truth that the ranks of the army
were composed of the dregs of society,
the sweepings of prisons, the scum of
the gutters, of the vicious and dan-
gerous; in short, of those unwilling
or unable to contribute in any form
to the common good of society. There
is no end to the opprobrious terms in
which the wearers of the Sovereign's
uniform have been referred to in the
past, and it has done nothing to
enhance the attractions that military
life offers to the respectable youth of
the country. The moral character
and intellectual attainments of the
soldier to-day differ so widely from
those that obtained in the Duke of
Wellington's time, that all recollection
of the abusive epithets used to charac-
terise those who donned the most
honourable garb that men can wear
might be dismissed as a matter per-
taining to ancient military history,
were it not that some of the reproach
formerly applied to a class has clung
to the uniform by which it was dis-
tinguished.

Evidence of this fact has, from
time to time, been afforded by cases
brought in local courts to determine
the right of soldiers in uniform to
any part of a house of entertainment
or refreshment to which their civil
brethren would claim admission with-
out producing guarantee of high social
standing. The one stipulation, ability
to pay, deemed sufficient in the case
of the civilian, would not apply to the
soldier, unless and until he divested
himself of his coat and other insignia
of the most honourable profession in
which a man can engage.

Again, the very fact that it has
been found necessary to invoke the
aid of special legislation to prevent
the use, or, rather, the degrading
misuse, of uniforms for purposes of
advertisement tends to prove that the
distinctive dress of a soldier is not

invariably accepted as a manifest
token of patriotism entitled to uni-
versal respect. With regard to this
matter of dress, one is disposed to
wonder how far these slights to the
cloth will account for the privilege of
wearing mufti being held in esteem
by military men, and even to question
the wisdom of permitting that privi-
lege to stand at all. The occasional
appearance of a British officer in the
uniform of his profession would im-
part a little brightness and a welcome
variety to the dull streets of our
towns ; and it would not be absurd
to argue that the civilian, labouring
under a misapprehension as to the
real attributes of rankers in red, may
draw his own inferences and conclu-
sions from the fact that the uniform
of an officer is seldom seen outside the
barrack-gate. The levelling effect of
uniform is unquestionable, but in
these days the red coat should not be
held to mark the man of inferior
degree ; when recruits are drawn from
all classes, the process of levelling for
the vicious and bad has an upward
tendency, and it cannot be said that
one loses by association with his
equals or his betters. We must needs
level up until the Sovereign's uniform
becomes a passport to good society
and commands the esteem and warm-
hearted regard of all.

The character of the individual
soldier is estimated for military pur-
poses from a minute investigation of
a defaulter-sheet in which his slightest
shortcomings are recorded, so that the
trifling faults and failings of bygone
days may be brought against him on
any occasion that he forgets to clean
his buttons. A glance at a daily
paper will suffice to convince us that
many who claim higher social stand-
ing, and who certainly enjoy greater
opportunities and inducements to lead
the higher life, have need to look to
their buttons, and should congratulate

The Man in the Ranks.

479

themselves on their immunity from
tell-tale records of previous, and pro-
bably forgotten, lapses from perfect
rectitude. A civilian has not access
to any data that will furnish the
means of a just comparison of the
soldier's general conduct with his
own beyond that afforded by the
bearing of soldiers in the streets,
and that does not afford sufficient
basis upon which to construct an
opinion. The study of a single speci-
men of a species does not always
lead to a perfect knowledge of a
genus. From the ill-behaved or the
riotous in the street we must appeal
to their comrades in barracks; other-
wise a community will be condemned
on the misconduct of an individual,
and the man who is a disgrace to
his regiment may be too readily mis-
taken for a genuine representative of
his corps.

The comparative darkness in which
the soldier's life has hitherto been
enshrouded, mainly owing to his
segregation, must be held to be
injurious to the Service. A better
knowledge among all classes of the
conditions of life in the ranks would
stimulate recruiting, and go far to un-
dermine that unjust prejudice against
the life which, until quite recently,
found expression in the phrase gone
for a soldier, as corresponding to the
more emphatic declaration gone to the
dogs. It would probably surprise
many, even in this day, to hear that
opportunities for the cultivation of
the intellectual and moral attributes
and virtues are provided the soldier,
as well as rations and a red tunic ;
that physical ability and skill at
arms are not acquired at the expense
of character and morality. We may
admit that some very rough char-
acters find their way to a military
depot, but when considering them as
trained soldiers we must allow for
the improvement effected by the

application of discipline, by education
and lessons in self-respect. A belief
that the ranks are made up of
worthless characters with whom it
would be dangerous for respectable
young fellows of the middle class,
say, to associate, or of drones who
have accepted a military career as a
last resort when their presence in
the busy hive of civil life could no
longer be tolerated, still exists in
spite of the many improvements and
ameliorations which have been made
in the soldier's position during recent
years. That erroneous impression
must be eradicated before such an
influx of recruits from the good and
middling classes occurs as will per-
mit the belief that the majority are
drawn from those sources. The dis-
semination of accurate particulars
relating to the interior economy of
military establishments, and of de-
tailed information concerning the
daily life and duties of the soldier,
would afford a useful basis for com-
parison with other occupations. How
many eligible young men, it may be
asked, are lost to the army because
the Service is not placed before them
as a desirable avenue of employ-
ment, but is merely left open to
them as a kind of haven to be
sought only when all other means
of obtaining a livelihood fail ?

It must be admitted that soldiers
could themselves do much to obtain
a proper regard and respect for their
order by carefully guarding their con-
duct when temporarily relieved from
the full strictness of regimental con-
trol. One drunken, slovenly man
brings instant discredit upon his own
corps in particular and upon the
Service generally ; and well-conducted
men whose sincere desire it may be
to uphold and ensure the good reputa-
tion of their profession suffer in the
esteem of their civil brethren in conse-
quence. Every member of a corps or

480

The Man in the Banks.

battery could do something towards
securing and preserving that respect
for the Service which good soldiers
have always at heart by endeavour-
ing to restrain their more reckless
comrades.

But while admitting that soldiers
may, in the past, have given cause for
the poor opinion that has prevailed
regarding the morale of military men
as a class, it must be pointed out
that improvements in the conditions
of service have raised the standard of
conduct, and it is to be hoped that the
reforms which we are now promised
will tend to advance the interests of
the Service in that respect. It is not
so much a dislike for military life
that prevents young men of a superior
class offering themselves, as a dread of
transfer to civil life with a knowledge
of the popular, though absurd, notion
that one who has served in the ranks

must of necessity be classed as inferior
in every respect to those who have
made no break between the school and
the office. That he will have fallen
out of the running to some extent
cannot be denied, but it should be the
duty of those in whose interests he has
served to endeavour to minimise that
evil, so that honourable service should
not be the direct cause of failure in
life.

The British soldier is at this
moment the subject of popular atten-
tion, and his business a matter of
concern to all persons and parties :
but the danger is that with the
removal of the cause for his popularity
the interest in him will flag, and that
more attention will be given to bureau-
cratic reforms than to improvements
in the conditions of Service affecting
the rank and file.

ONE WHO HAS SERVED.

X

AP

4

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